Hey everybody, welcome to episode number 13 of the KMO show.
I am KMO and this is the show.
So in this episode I am going to share the continuation of a conversation that started
in the most recent episode of the C-Realm Vault podcast.
It is with my longtime friend and fellow traveler on the Peak Oil Road, Dermot O'Connor, the
angry animator.
I first met Dermot in Portland, Oregon in 2013.
I was doing a couch surfing speaking tour with my then girlfriend Olga and my old 1991
Ford Ranger pickup truck.
We drove from New York City all the way to the West Coast and back in that truck and
did several speaking gigs that various C-Realm podcast listeners and supporters had
set up for me and made some money along the way.
But then the truck broke down a couple of times and basically we broke even on the trip.
But the, geographically speaking, about the halfway point on that trip was the Portland,
Oregon stop.
And that's when I first met Dermot face to face.
I imagine we'd had some interaction before then, but I will hear from people for years.
I'll get comments from them.
I'll recognize their name.
I'll recognize their general style.
But when I first talked to somebody, when I first hear their voice, and particularly
if I meet them in person, I hear their voice, I see their face, I see their body language,
suddenly they become a real person.
So I probably was communicating with Dermot before then, but from my perspective, we've
known each other for 10 years.
And as I say, he, not only was he a fellow peak oil traveler, but he produced a, an excellent,
I would say animated documentary introduction to the topic of peak oil.
And I think it was called There is No Tomorrow, which I imagine Dermot regrets that particular
title because, you know, here we are 10 years later, civilization has not collapsed.
So the, the fast collapse portion of the peak oil narrative was, is what grabbed my attention.
And basically I would say caused me to sabotage my life.
So while Dermot has kept up with the, um, the peak oil narrative, he still has numbers
at the ready that he can cite.
You know, I used to give talks on peak oil, introducing people to the topic and I can
still give a, you know, a general overview of the topic, but I don't keep updated numbers
at the ready to support that point of view, because it's a point of view I don't share
anymore.
And it's not so much because I think that it's factually inaccurate, which I mean demonstrably
the 2010 version of the peak oil story, which was talking about collapse of industrial civilization
in the near future was inaccurate.
The predictions failed.
It was in a very significant sense, wrong, factually wrong, but it's not the factual
nature or the factual shortcomings, you know, that I disagree with.
It's, it's the belief that peak oil is going to cause this collapse and all the things
that are oppressive, all the things that are uncomfortable, all the things that we really
just don't like about living in our current society are going to go away and be replaced
with material hardship, but also a kind of freedom.
You know, you won't have to worry about your credit score.
You won't have to get up and go to that job that you hate anymore.
You know, you'll have to go out with a hatchet and fight the zombies, but the fight or flight,
live or die in the moment, but then when the encounter is done, it's over.
That's the world that our psychology is evolved to thrive in and it's not the one that we
live in.
And the idea that peak oil was going to be an escape from that and that you can shirk
your responsibilities to, you know, industrial civilization because it's going away.
That is a dysfunctional toxic attitude.
And it is why I'm just not interested in the peak oil story anymore.
It's why I'm also not interested in the least in climate catastrophism.
I just have no room for that in my life at all.
And it is because not, not because I think the numbers are wrong, not because I distrust
the science, you know, in, in scare quotes, it's just, you know, I've studied the philosophy
of science, you know, I've studied the epistemology of science.
I'm not a practicing scientist, but I would say I know a whole lot more about the scientific
method than most people who are, you know, worshipful of quote, the science, close quote.
And I just see really dysfunctional psychological processes at work that go under, you know,
that fly under the aegis, under the banner of either the impending collapse of industrial
civilization or the impending death of everything due to atmospheric carbon.
It's a sickness.
Yeah, you can point to some numbers, you know, you can point to some scientific data in support
of your sickness, but it's still a sickness.
And it's one that I will have no part of.
So I hadn't planned to give all that at the beginning, but there it is.
So I won't have to say it at the end about Dermott.
Dermott is an animator.
He is somebody who draws, you know, he's like the meme says, you know, the anti AR,
AI art meme says, pick up a crayon like everybody else and start learning that way.
Dermott can draw like the devil.
I mean, he can draw really, really well.
And he's a very accomplished animator and he had a professional career in Hollywood
in animation.
And since leaving Hollywood, he has sustained himself financially by teaching courses online
in animation.
He knows animation.
And I had intended to talk to Dermott about the, the impact of artificial intelligence
on working artists and aspiring artists.
And we talk a little bit about that in this episode, but there's not a whole lot about
it.
So we're going to talk a lot about politics.
We're going to talk a lot about economics.
We're going to talk a lot about militarism and military hardware, and we're going to
talk about AI for a bit and art.
The portion of the conversation that you're about to hear was not the beginning of the
conversation.
The beginning of the conversation, we talked a lot about Dermott's recent move from Portland,
Oregon, to County Roscommon in Ireland.
That's the Southern part of Ireland, the Republic of Ireland, although he's, he's pretty close
to Northern Ireland.
And we talked about, and really Dermott talked about this.
I've never been to Ireland.
I don't follow Irish politics very closely.
I don't know a whole lot about, you know, the nation, the island that is the, the origin
of my genome, or at least a way station.
I mean, all of our genomes are originated in Africa, as I understand it.
I will say that I, you know, I go by the sobriquet KMO, but the O stands for O'Connor.
As far as I know, there is no relation between me and Dermott though.
But in talking about the, the move, you know, from, from the United States and particularly
from Portland, Oregon in the United States to Ireland, I was thinking that we'd be talking
a lot about identity politics and the sort of political, cultural, social mania that
is really on display in Portland.
And what we ended up talking about, or what Dermott ended up educating me about was how
unaffordable it was to live in Portland.
And then surprisingly, when he got to Ireland, how unaffordable it was to live in Ireland,
because there's a great housing shortage.
And also there are these, you know, global wealth funds that are just buying up masses
of housing in places like Ireland, not to, you know, slip the houses and make a profit,
but to hold them and use them for rental income and radically jacking up the rents, you know,
and pricing a lot of people out of housing in Ireland.
And you know, with, with anybody who isn't promoting, say a book or a movie or a video
or you know, some project where I can study it in advance and know pretty much what it
is they have to say going into a conversation with Dermott, I never really know what we're
going to talk about.
But with that rambling introduction out of the way, here is my most recent conversation
with Dermott O'Connor, the angry animator.
You're listening to the KMO show.
Let's go.
My issue with the woke stuff is from a traditional left point of view, which is it's I think
it's performative.
And my favorite quote, which is kind of something Mike Ruppert said, well, until you change
the way money works, you change nothing.
But it's kind of a paraphrasing of Orwell, keep the ass but it's for flying unless you
change the way you can't change the system in a whole and corner way.
You change the entire thing or you change nothing.
What's the what's the Orwell quote?
You can't change the system in a whole and corner way.
Are the you change the whole thing or you change nothing?
Because if you don't change the system, it simply replicates injustice in some other
form.
All you're doing is changing the surface appearance in Thomistic or Catholic idea, the accident
in the essence, you've got the essential property is still identical.
It's like taking like a Windows desktop and putting like a Mac GUI on top of it.
It's still Windows.
It just looks like a Mac.
And what you've done is you've skinned capitalism.
You just take you've put a gloss on it.
It's still going to replicate all the inherent inbuilt injustices and equities.
You're just you're just performing.
You're doing things for this for the for I detested the word virtue second when I heard
it but I've come to realize no, it's actually even though it kind of came from my think
the right it's a really solid way of describing people who do hit this kind of behavior across
the spectrum who who don't want to change the system because they're doing okay out
of it.
And but they want to look like they care or that they're doing something but ask them
to pay more tax.
No, I asked them to like material change the structure of reality.
So their kids go to a school with more black kids.
No, no.
My wife was listening to a podcast about that.
It was like about it was not a very woke school, very progressive school or something like
that and it was about how these very liberal progressive parents who are also very wealthy
and they wanted this and blah, blah, blah, yet end up sending all their kids to an all
white school.
And they're also all rich.
So they have these wonderful mechanisms of seeming like they they're caring for other
people but they're not they're looking at you have to look at the essence not the accident
and and I love like the old Eric Hobbs bomb tanky quote from the early 1990s.
He flagged identity politics like really early on and he called it the dark waters of identity
politics and he said the problem is you can't stitch together a co a strong coalition of
all these different disparate groups because you can't assume that they care about anything
other than their own factional self interest.
So you think you're putting together the strong coalition but it's just a patchwork.
It can be torn to pieces very easily and we can see that like how easily you can do a
dividing line on any identity issue.
You know and and so you can take a movement that's a definite threat to the status quo
and you can use any any one of these cultural markers to just just smash that into two groups
and then they'll turn on each other.
And you're in MI5 or MI6 or whatever State Department laughing your head off.
You're just watching the little ants fighting each other but they're not going to come
and eat your picnic.
You know you're fine and for me that's that's the problem all the woke stuff.
It's like you know for me I will define woke as just this identitarian politics built on
oppression olympics who suffers the most and like it's but with no interest in economics
really yeah yeah yeah we should all be uniting.
There's a great scene in the Black Panther movie when the Black Panthers go into some
white nationalist group and one of the Panthers says when your house is on fire the only thing
you're going to care about is water.
You're not going to care about who brings it you are going and that's what all these
groups need to realize.
Your enemy is the system the system is destroying the environment.
It's destroying you.
If it hasn't done yet it will.
You know those people out there who think they're okay they're doing fine like no sooner
or later that wheel will crush you.
It comes for everybody and yeah I don't know how to get through to people with that but
yeah I want to drive and that's about the right they're often right about diagnosing
a problem seeing this thing that's really really wrong and then they're completely wrong
about the diagnosis but why is this like all these all these guys like I'm never going
to drink Bud Light because there's a trans on it or you know I'm never going to use Gillette
because there's a trans on it and it's like the problem here is a capitalist company that
cares only about profit it doesn't care about you it doesn't care about the trans kids it
only cares about making money and maybe the problem here is capitalism and stuff that's
driven solely for profit.
That's what's annoying you but there's just a synapse that won't go the problem is capitalism
so they build this architecture of grooming and drag queens.
What's really crazy to me is like this thing that the moral panic about the drag queens.
I grew up watching British television and we had Kenny Everett and if you've never seen
Kenny Everett he was a gay man we didn't know he was gay at the time very flamboyant drag
performer and his catch was it's all in the best possible taste and he would always cross
his legs over with his mini skirt and he's got a beard like it was really over the top
when they met in the average.
British television was full of drag in the 80s like I know the same people that grew
up watching this are like having a conniption fit and making up banal stories about you
know why this is grooming kids.
Christ what the hell.
There's one moral panic after another but they won't be panicking about money it's very
strange I mean I'd be panicking about people not going to jail for financial corruption
that's what we should be panicking about.
I just watched the frontline documentary and if you know for people listening outside of
the United States frontline is a pretty serious investigative news show and it's not like
a weekly show but each one is you know it's an investigative documentary conducted by
a different team and basically the only thing really stitching it together as a brand is
the narrator a guy named Will Lyman whose voice is crazy famous.
If you've never heard of his name you've never seen frontline you'd probably recognize
his voice but I just watched the one on the Federal Reserve and just the crazy maybe it
wasn't crazy but you know after the 2008 crisis we really needed to get the economy moving
and we needed to you know we needed economic activity and one way to do that is to lower
interest rates basically to zero and then the Fed fairly recently decided well this
zero interest rate stuff is it's got its problems let's go the other way and they decided to
go the other way really hard like in a you know historically unprecedented manner raising
interest rates and you know which the more you do that the more it makes it difficult
for employers to create employment so you're you know you're raising unemployment deliberately
in order to stifle inflation.
The Federal Reserve chair is this super celebrity and he you know this position became a celebrity
position I guess in like the late 90s with Alan Greenspan and you know he I don't know
if he pioneered this but he was famous for being very cryptic and you know a man of very
few words and there was just a whole media genre of people who would just hang on his
every word and try to do it's like you know QAnon basically trying to find some meaning
in these very few words that he utters and that has that pattern has continued you know
with every successive Fed chair because people just hang on whatever the Fed's going to say
because what they have what they do is very influential but they basically just have one
lever you know they have interest rates they can increase or decrease but if you increase
radically very quickly you create enormous hardship and if you decrease radically very
quickly then you create such a feeding frenzy that all the whole ecosystem emerges that
is dependent on essentially free money and what when the Fed started to try to raise
interest rates a few times before this most recent you know like really hard push to raise
them the investor class would revolt and if there was any sort of threat whatsoever to
the you know free money paradigm they would just pull all their money out of the stock
market which causes stock prices to crash which causes a panic in Washington DC and
eventually the investor class won and they basically cowed the Federal Reserve to the
point where they extended the free money regime for much longer than was necessary and they
would not tolerate you know little incremental rises in it which is essentially why the Fed
decided okay well we're done with the incremental attempts to raise it we're just gonna you
know really hit you over the head with it and so you know ultimately I think the and
PBS is notoriously you know left in the American sense but you know the ultimate point of the
documentary was yeah we're blaming the Fed for this but really it's the investor class
it's the ownership class that bullied the Fed into you know this dramatic policy change
which is causing so much hardship right now but it's it's too complicated a message for
anybody to care about the right wing you know as you say they're gonna fixate on the cultural
issues they don't care about you know the the geeky economic analysis that's just not
of interest to them and the left seems perfectly perfectly happy to stay focused you know this
so-called left seems to be perfectly happy to stay focused on those exact same cultural
issues and just butt heads over that and completely ignore the way money works you know and how
powerful you know economically powerful entities in this class this ownership class got to
where they are and stay where they are just like nobody cares it is too boring it is it
is not it doesn't have any interface with my life that I can really get you know sink
my teeth into so yeah and we get I won't say no change because you do get this ratcheting
up of you know economic hardship for most people and ever increasing just unprecedented
levels of material abundance and wealth for a tiny you know a shrinking ownership class
yeah ah it's I'm depressing myself I should stop talking yeah it is it is no it's very
depressing and that's what I think when I lost kind of complete faith with America when
I saw just after Trump got in like I think Obama too like I realized what's going on
here because none of these people are going to fix anything like Trump isn't going to
fix it for conservatives and Obama's not going to fix it for liberals so what's the fucking
point and the to hear these people bang on about Trump for four years starting World
War three and then Biden gets in and they start to fight with Russia and China and what's
going on here and they savagely you know crucified Biden for ending the 20-year long occupation
of Afghanistan I'll give him that he ended it but but like if you're going to go from
there to like oh yeah that's what rough Afghanistan and let's attack Russia you know if if you
have been beaten by a bunch of lads in sandals with AK-47 it's time to like just do a little
retrench you know take a rest maybe think about things and not pick a fight with Russia
I was reading there's a to be fair Russia was the provocateur there that that was not
anything that the United States initiated let's just say the story is complex I won't
go too much deeper into it but but there's other provocations that have happened and
I think mischief has gone on I'm not going to do both sides isn't but I would love to
say to someone like there's a lot of bullshit going on and you'd like like the weird thing
was when CNN was was talking to Trump he came across as the voice of sanity like she the
interview going so you know he goes if I'm president again you know it'll end in 24
hours or you know blah blah blah and she goes so you don't want Russia to you you're
trying to win and he goes I don't want people to die and people are dying and she goes but
surely you want Russia to be defeated and he's like people will die I don't want people
to die yeah when Donald Trump is the voice of you know compassion and reason what does
the world come to and let me like let's defeat Russia it's like you can't defeat Russia just
read about their hypersonic missiles you can't defeat right isn't it China that has the hypersonic
missiles the hypersonics is a major breakthrough for Russia and they have apparently like three
different kinds one is kindle I forget the other two names but apparently what happens
with the people have this weird idea that the hypersonic which goes up Mach 7 or 8 or
whatever hits the target at that speed it does not it hits the target at a supersonic
3 3.5 speed the thing that makes them terrifying is that when they're going up Mach 7 or 8
they're like the space shuttle going to the upper atmosphere they they create a plasma
field around them and that plasma field is impenetrable to radar bounces off it you don't
see it and then it decelerates as it approaches the target and then hits the target so basically
you have 15 to 30 seconds to know I'm about to be killed that's it and there's no known
defense against these things like the Ukrainian account that they shot down Kinjals is a lie
it's a lie and they they showed a picture of one when it was a sewer pipe like come
on guys your propaganda like at least at least photoshop this shit come on like stop and
insulting everyone's intelligence you might fool like idiots online but you're not fooling
the people that you need to fool like people who make the decisions at high level this
weapon is fucking terrifying so you're sitting at a that patriot bear battery that got wiped
out you know I've seen the video of that and that thing fired off like 30 rockets in like
a short space of time the video was somewhat edited but it was you can still see one two
three each one of those rockets cost five million and they fire 30 of them in minutes
and then they do no good apparently do no good and they either the thing was taken out
or damaged and so that you're looking at a 200 million 250 million battery that's just
taken out and according to the walks like that system if it's any good at all has to
be within like a coherent network of overlapping systems it's not meant to be out there by
itself one of the patriot rockets went up and came back down and hit the Kiev zoo same
thing happened when the Saudis used it among their rockets went up and came back and hit
the airport it's a terror it's a bugger all against Saddam Scud's and you see you see
this propaganda on the TV about these amazing systems and their crap and somebody online
pointed out what does it say that a country that's relatively poor like Russia's not
like impoverished but compared the wealth to the collective West and they're outclassing
these combined arms of all NATO and their weapons systems are running rings around them
and all this hoo-ha about the f-16 which is a plane that they're like obsolete and it
requires a clean runway like this has been a non-pro I read about this 20 years ago like
the you can't launch an f-16 unless that runway is clean it's like Concorde it'll suck in
the Russians build jets with like fucking saves on the front so that things will bounce
off that thing can can launch from a damaged runway and that's 16 launched from a damaged
runway will will destroy itself and the f-35 don't get us started and you know see the
American military has been producing these boondoggles after boondoggle and and I you
see people on what's gonna happen when like when either China or Russia or both inflict
like a real military defeat on them I don't know what's psychologically going to happen
to people because they've been fed the propaganda and instead of this is the thing with the
northern Protestants here to this psychological inability to deal with the fact that you're
now in decline and deal with it and manage the decline it's like I'm 54 I can't I can't
do things that I could when I'm 25 my whole job now is manage the decline don't break
my hip please don't break now 54 so a little early to be worrying about the broken hip
I I fell I fell I have a plate in my wrist now I fell on ice two years ago and shattered
my wrists and luckily I was on very good health insurance because of my wife she's a teacher
union job in the school had good insurance I piggyback that I was paying 300 a month
for the privilege stuff otherwise this would have wiped out this house would disappear
and be I don't know where it would be so again and it's like animation I can tell you like
the well we can talk about animation in a bit but you know since you started on the
military hardware geekery and we've been talking about economics and we've been talking about
systems that don't want to change you know and you mentioned the f-16 needs a clean runway
the you can build fighter jets that take off vertically it's it's a known tech it's not
anything exotic but the United States has resisted that for decades because they want
great big aircraft carriers for you know financial and political reasons congress loves them but
because of these hypersonic missiles you know the the paradigm of controlling the oceans
with these big aircraft carriers and their attendant ships you know one of those hypersonic
missiles can take out one of these multi gazillion dollar aircraft carriers yeah I think my dog
needs to go outside hold on just a second all right oh my dog is so transparent she
I put her on this this you know staked down long lead in the front yard and she doesn't
want to be on it she wants to be free so she tried to rush past me you know open the door
but she totally telegraphed her movements she has no sense of deception at all anyway
yeah the carriers yeah like Gary Brecker the the war nerd he wrote a piece in the mid 2000s
about that he said how the car I say it's called how the carriers will die they're
they're a world war two tech and that was it and they're great for showboarding against
like third world or developing desk spots brilliant for that but against the pier no
they they're so you have these militaries that are and you see the Russians too in the
Chinese building an aircraft carrier again fine if you want to do a bit of showboarding
but if you if you're going to get into a fight with a pier those things are going down like
the even the battleships there they won't last either they like it though is looking
to get around to is that the US Navy knows this and they want to change the paradigm
they want to build a lot of much smaller ships and really lean into AI and automation and
have unmanned ships and Congress is like no we have an enormous power base that is built
on distributing you know the the goodies to all of these different manufacturing hubs
and you know your plan upsets that and so the practical military considerations of like
engaging an enemy in a military fashion they take backseat to the political and financial
gravy train that you know is centered in Washington DC but is distributing goodies around the
nation so practical military ends are trumped by financial and political considerations
which is you know is absolutely nuts better better to just not even build anything to
build stuff that is useless expensive and vulnerable yeah again or we'll call them floating
fortresses in 1984 these big useless things that would float around and they were just
there to suck up resources and waste people's time and then you deliberately sink it and
build another one yeah it's it's insanity yeah but again that it'll get wiped away the
first time there's a real war and if one of these senile elites in DC does something even
stupider than the shit they're pulling now yeah like god only knows like Putin has said
if he wakes up in the morning and he sees a bunch of dots on a radar screen coming to
Moscow he doesn't know if they're nuclear or not so he's already said he's like it was
probably already on anyway but he's made a point of saying the perimeter self-defense
system is on that's their dead hand so if the Ukrainians or anybody else takes out Putin
the nukes will fly and we're playing this fucking game yeah and it'll be the Ukrainians
I mean the US has no interest in provoking that conflict yeah but what it could happen
by accident all it takes is one one one faction of Azoth who could get their hands on like
three or four cruise missiles and there's enough of them floating around and and they
will if they can they will they'll fly I'll fly him into mainland Russia and it won't
be known who launched them where they came from all you see is dots on the screen what
do we do we have 15 minutes or 10 minutes to make a decision so it's profoundly dangerous
and reckless and it's been done to play geopolitical skullfuckery of a very low order by a bunch
of political leaders who are completely unqualified to lead a small provincial town if I woke
up with the power of Stalin in the morning or Robespierre the death the the fucking executions
would go from noon till night like bring them sign next sign oh painkillers my wrist you
know um these people are they will kill all that's what rubber stamps are for man
AI can we AI batch process that easily hey speaking of AI this is something I wanted
to get around to you you basically make your living teaching people the the time honed
art of animation and much to the surprise of a great many people automation seems to
be coming for the creative class and the the intellectuals and the paper pushers and leaving
the working people alone for the most part you know the the laborers yeah and you know
last year in 2022 we got the the big rollout of the diffusion models where they're they're
producing really startling images based on text prompts but they were still pretty flawed
you know particularly when it came to anatomy particularly when it came to hands yeah but
but you know the weird hand with 10 fingers or whatever that is very 2022 because that
has been licked that problem is is done but last year there was at least briefly a new
emergent category or genre of YouTube videos of artists calling for the banning of you
know AI that can create images like this and of course that's not going to happen so then
they moved on to what we really need to increase the power of intellectual property laws we
need to increase copyright law copyright protections and extend it to styles and you know that's
that's a Disney wet dream you know if to have just a huge huge you know expansion of the
ability to control you know not just particular fictional characters but just types of communication
styles of imagery you know if if company can own that it's not going to benefit you know
the little guy and from my perspective most of the people who were complaining were not
working artists they were aspirational young people who didn't want to get you know normal
jobs and they thought okay art is my ticket I know how to draw and then all of a sudden
somebody who has no drawing ability whatsoever can type a sentence you know into a box somewhere
and get images that would take me if I could create them at all it would take me hours
and hours and hours and they did it in seconds it's the end of the world and I've already
got my position that I'm starting to articulate so I'll stop and you know turn it over to
you because you are much closer to this than I am I think you know in terms of a long-term
career in the arts you know turning your ability to draw and visualize images and teach other
people how to do that into a career that has sustained you for most of your adult life
right now the problem for me would be I've seen young artists on YouTube is very good
and he's professional like he makes a living out of it and people were taking his art putting
it into an AI and spitting out work that looked very similar to his to where I go and selling
it so is this Sam does arts I don't know he's I think he was Asian American is his style
like very high contrast he does a lot of it's like color but there's lots of very intense
this like light sunlight on characters so there's you know portions of very very bright
like much brighter than you would see in photography it's stylized but if it's the guy I think
you're talking about his professional name is Sam does arts and he is Asian American
and his style is very distinctive you know I've been following him on Instagram for a
long time yeah yeah he's kind of a one-trick pony though yeah yeah but that that's the
problem is though like a lot of artists go through phases you know you want and you want
to get out of that but like the gray artists his name illustrator in the 60s no I forget
but anyway have multiple styles or can invent new ones but yeah nevertheless like people
were like making simulacra of his work using an algo that takes no effort at all and then
diluting his ability to make a living and doing the one thing that he is good at the
my issue with them is like we've seen enough of them now to go okay I can recognize it
it's a bit like early Photoshop when people freaked out like they're making remember like
they're making digital photographs showing famous people in pornography by you know crudely
photoshopping a head onto an image or whatever shocking at the time nobody gives a crap about
that now for me I would like AI to do something useful for me which would be do an in-between
like if I can do a drawing and a second drawing and the AI could do the in-betweens then that
would bring hand-drawn animation back to life and then you would have the creative person
able to create the the actual creative work it's new and then that's what kills you with
traditional animation isn't the key drawings it's the in-betweens because you got one two
three keys say but you might have 20 in between frames to get that thing smooth those 20 are
the ones that will just drag you down and if you make one change to like the mid to
put more drag on the hand or whatever then you got to redo all the other 20 so that's
one thing that's killed hand-drawn animation because CGI you can make the changes and there's
no redrawing there's no penalty so if an AI could do that I'd love it that would be brilliant
some things that I use like that kind of stuff for in after effects older versions come back
years like motion tweening like different things I thought we'd never see this and here
we can do it great they the AI as an creative end in itself I think it's it's ultimately
built on taking other people's work writing an algorithm and then extrapolating from things
that are already done so for me it doesn't seem like I would want that to be the primary
focus the first thing that I saw somebody showing the AI was a he's a guy on YouTube
is very good and he's Asian and he's like very exuberant he said look at this look at
this like and he's typing in this and these images come out he said I don't know what
to think about this like you could see that like flabbergasting effect and and one example
he gave us I'm going to type in Leonardo da Vinci invention of only came up with some
other thing and he and the generates and I thought well let's say you have a movie where
you've got like a folio or a codex of new da Vinci book and you want a prop where someone
is yeah da Vinci invented a coffee machine or da Vinci invented a hot water bottle I
would rather have the AI do that than me do that because I thought would be I think fairly
fucking tedious but if I if I want to make a movie poster I would rather have a Drew
Struzan do that than an AI and it's I don't know I think within like a certain contained
sphere I think it will be fine but I think putting that like front and center I don't
know I think a lot of stuff is going to age badly and I've seen so much of it online
now to go ah you can tell one look at it go AI and I just next and this is getting in
my way if I'm doing image searches I want a primary image I don't want an AI because
the AI is reaching into something that I want to get the thing that it was reaching into
so that I can use it to use it as a reference for what I'm doing and the other problem I
think AI is going to have is like this catastrophe of the infinite regress where it's going to
start feeding on itself so as the as the data mine gets bigger and bigger and bigger what
happens when the AI starts to reference other AIs and I think it'll congeal toward like
a real same and I'm just saying like such a sameness of angles like a lot of images
of people like this you know this angle or a certain lighting but that's so like that
or you know that's so like this or they're tilted back or some weird angle and you see
the similar color schemes over and over again so it does a certain range of things really
well but to be interesting it has to do something genuinely new that none of this is glossing
over the the error probably is glossing over the financial stuff like these companies are
making a shit ton of money by mining artwork made by people like me and then they make
the billions on it and Elon's having a hissy fit now because he's not making enough billions
off of the AI that he claims he invented like he invented everything I guess.
Yeah no it's it's it's another wealth pump from creatives into you know capitalism and
again one thing Hobbes bomb getting back to the old tanky said about socialism was that
it needs to be universalist it has to be for everybody and liberals and middle class liberals
were happy enough and quiet enough when working class people's jobs were being taken away
and it's like you know first I came for the socialists and they come for everybody they'll
come for everybody and I don't know what what about this people don't understand like until
people line up in complete solidarity against the system that's going to extract every last
drop of wealth out of them with very little hope and you know hiding behind and people
being suckered in now watch all these YouTube videos where people will talk about like the
these oh god like movies that use like the black Cleopatra is the new horror of the day
we have to fight about this.
Clearly deliberate provocation I mean it is it is right and they hide behind it and then
if you attack it you're a racist now yeah some of the people that do attack it are racist
it's like I you know Cleopatra probably didn't look like a Swedish swimsuit model she I would
say she's a of Greek familial lineage lived in North Africa probably didn't have pale
skin fine but but like to make her look like as they do it's clearly a provocation and
like there's a Valma TV show another provocation.
Have you actually seen that?
No and I haven't.
I've watched the YouTubers talking about and one of them said please don't watch this don't
hate watch this show because that will make them and they've already renewed it for a
second season because so many people hate watched it and he said we watch it so that
you don't have to you can watch us shouting about it they will they will not be able to
live off that we will they won't see that's an interesting use of tech right like we get
to hate watch it we get to make our little ad revenues from it and you get to watch us
losing our shit about it and suffering on the cross for you but don't go watching it
don't give them the money and my as an animator as a professional animator my objection to
that is 99% aesthetic that show is fucking ugly it's fugly that is some no disrespect
to the animators I've worked on some ugly stuff those decisions are probably made at
a very high end you were if I was plugged into that it would look the same but that
show is freaking hideous it's hideous even stuff like the black shadows I keep looking
at these black shadows under the face disgusting disgusting looking show it's it's just horrible
and I hear people say oh the animation is fine no it's not the animation is not fine
the animation is foul and you know I'm glad the animators made a paycheck on that's some
good came out of it but yeah no it's it's nasty and there's a lot of yeah Hollywood
is not a nice place and it's not filled with at the top end nice people they don't care
about black people poor people gay people trans people they only care about money people
need to get that into their heads on all sides like I see people across the spectrum worrying
about oh it's the this agenda no the only agenda is making money like George Carlin
they do not care about you they do not care about you they do not care about you it's
a big fucking club and you ate in it that's it or that great speech by everyone in the
members I'm mad as hell but I'm not gonna take it anymore but the Ned Beatty speech
where Howard Beale goes in to talk to the CEO and you have sin Mr. Beale and he exists
this like amazing like monologue and you will atone atone yes and that and he I think he
got the Oscar got nominated for the Oscar for that one speech like you know it's great
but they don't make money stuff like that anymore but that's it like it's all about
money money money money and I would be called probably a class reductionist if I started
talking about like this in the wrong circles but well on the social justice left you would
be a class reductionist but I think that that's too complicated a term I think that you'd
just be a racist now yeah yeah yeah or a strasser right if they want to sound really intelligent
they call you a strasser right would you unpack that strasser was a member of the Nazi party
who wanted a more of a focus on class so he kind of was moving more toward like a sort
of left socialist kind of position but he was still a fucking Nazi right like so if
they want to insinuate that you're not as bad as Hitler they feel like they've like
they sound more intelligent but they don't have the courage to call you a Nazi you know
it's despicable it's actually despicable and it's you talk to somebody who was hungry
or like I had a I had a fucking toothache about three months ago I was walking around
this room screaming and trying to find the dentist that would pull that tooth out and
they're yeah and I thought oh Christ man yes yeah it's not good it's not good like and
we found we we finally found a dentist and I kept thinking my god there's people out
there with this kind of pain and they can't access the dentist and now what the fuck do
you do and they don't care about representation or any they need a dentist to put a needle
in their mouth to make the pain go away and to fix the pain and if talking about privilege
if if you don't ever have to think about that then you are the one with privilege you were
the one who was the enemy of people out there who they were failing bodies but mostly working
class people like the people dying in the opioid crisis like who are so fucking desperate
that they'll vote for anybody now hope they vote over Obama didn't get anything that
they voted for Trump didn't work they voted for Biden that didn't work they'll vote for
Trump again they this is what you're going to get and it's going to get worse until you
deal with the money and give people some fucking minimum baseline of dignity in healthcare
but yeah like we went to that dentist and finally found him and I was sucking ice cubes
like I had been doing when I have a fridge that has like a freezer so I had like a little
bag of ice that I got a little restaurant here and I was like stuffing the ice onto
the tooth and that would bring the pain down for like five minutes and then it would go
back up to nine and yeah oh fuck and it's like I had a bunch of dental work done before
I left America and this is one of the crowns and it failed I guess like it was just triggering
the nerve and it was just like this lava and it would go one little molten lava up here
and another one up here and never want to feel that again but yeah it's like that lack
of empathy for people out there who are in like genuine pain hunger fear and I think
we have more important things to be worrying about than Cleopatra or Thelma or Hollywood's
latest like abominations it's just a lack of seriousness you know so it's kind of nice
here to have I will see where they go but like if Sinn Fein can actually they seem to
be people tethered to material reality with like a long-term project that's that they
initiated about the time I was born like 54 years ago they've been kicking off I think
seven sixty nine seventy seventy ones the artists of the provisional movement and they've
had members die for that fight I can you see them like turn their back on that because
they want to be a junior minister for transport for five years and selling out I don't I don't
see it so I think they if they do have a sellout in their future I think it's a little bit
down the road so that's why I'm kind of sort of hopeful that we might get something out
of them but they they do know that like to to to to really like deliver that final goal
of a 32-county republic they have to have a better health system here in the north they
have to have better housing here in the north so they have to fix these they're not like
optional for them they have to fix these problems so that if you're a voter in the north and
then you get a referendum on unity you have to know by voting for unity we get better
housing we get better health care it's not some ball spreading butter like it's it's
boring as fuck but that's it and yeah it's fun to fight about tv shows but it's easy
to cheap cheap cheap it's like the wrestler you know fuck you you people here in detroit
you yeah you all suck you pussies okay that was fun but you didn't change anything yeah
hey let's let's go back to AI and art for just a minute you you actually started to
articulate my response to the you know the complaints of the young artists and my you
know my criticism of of their reaction one it's understandable it's not it's not an animated
or heated criticism it's just a hey you guys are thinking very small you're only thinking
about yourselves this this change it's in the process it's not coming it's happening
it's in the process of sweeping over the entire economy lots and lots of people are going
to be displaced and unless we all stand together and insist that everybody deserves a dignified
living nobody's going to get it you know nobody's going to have one except the people who have
way more than a dignified living you know they have an obscene living yeah and so you
know to say okay let's let's rejigger copyright in order to somehow protect young artists
from being displaced by AI one it's not going to happen but two it's it's just so parochial
it's it's so small-minded yeah no it's and again it's a it's getting back to like that's
the whole thing about socialism was it was a universalist project it's not for this little
group or that group it's for everybody it's a liberational movement and it's for everybody
and that's one thing that Hobbes bomb said in that lecture in 94 it's false for the rich
because the rich also oppressed by the system they just don't realize it they have this
this manic compulsion to make more and more and more and more and never feel safe it's
horrendous and we all should live in a society where everybody has enough a little bit more
you don't that's about it that's as much as anybody should be able to ask for and everything
like that can be done through like direct intervention of the state like in tax codes
you know i think if prince charles falls tomorrow and breaks his ankle he goes to the same hospital
as the guy who empties his bins you mean king charles king charles yeah charles to me but
you know he won't be king charles anymore either he'll be charles you know charles w
and he'll be he'll be chucky he'll make him work in a pen factory where he can be a pen
tester um no we'll find like we could find him a nice job on a little farm somewhere
where he works with plants which he loves so you know i'm not a new but um yeah i know
it's a horrific system that condemns people like him to a life of absurdity and and it's
so it's not about like guillotines or firing squads and joke about them but we shouldn't
be in the system at all and everybody everybody should be you know on the same plane and it's
not cool to to like make fun of appellate in coal miners who you know i was thinking about that like
all you know all the fucking badmouthing of these coal miners and how awful coal is and i thought
wait a minute in the 1980s we were all behind the coal miners in the minor strike in the uk
and it was the the the the tories shutting down the coal mines were and absolutely were the villains
of that story they destroyed working-class communities so that's fine you want to shut
down coal mines that's fine it's not fine to throw 400 000 people onto the human scrap pile
and then tell them that they should learn to code or they should you know retrain or what have you
that you have to provide in some real meaningful way like an alternative a way out or a or a more
elegant transition from one system to the one you want to replace it with and instead they destroyed
like in in britain they destroyed working-class communities and the movie brassed off i would
recommend to anybody um with pete posselthwaite there's an amazing speech in the end of that movie
when he just gives this like in the royal albert hall he says if because they were a coal miner band
and uh caught some of the scenes in that movie or something else but he he says to the audience if
these men were pandas you would all be out complaining about you know about what's being
done to them but they're not pandas are they they're just men they're just working-class men so you
don't give a damn about them it's like fucking hell like absolutely right and like you know you
see this like demonization of the working class that the late job agent would always talk about
and owen jones in the uk wrote a book called chavs on the same theme the demonization of the
working class and i kind of it's like it's and the movie idiocracy does it as well like a lot
of people on the left like have this thing about these these touchstones like idiocracy
idiocracy is a disgusting movie it is pure eugenics it's one of the most foul
fucking films ever made but so many people like it because it makes fun of people that fair enough
maybe do deserve to be made a little fun of but they weren't born that way they were made that way
hey durham we're at an hour and a half i'm i'm happy to keep talking but i would need to start
a new call because this file is going to be too big for a computer i'm happy to talk a little bit
more we can do a wrap yeah that's fine yeah so let me um let me shut this down and then i'll send you
this band behind me i'll tell you that that trophy means more to me than
out else in the whole world but they'd be wrong truth is i thought it mattered
i thought that music mattered but does it bollocks not compared to how people matter
i was winning this trophy won't mean bugger all to most people but i was refusing it like what
we're going to do now well then it becomes news doesn't it
you see what i mean that way i'll not just be talking to myself will i because over the last
10 years this bloody government has systematically destroyed an entire industry
our industry and not just our industry our communities our homes our lives all in the name
of progress and for a few lousy bob i'll tell you something else you might not know as well a
fortnight ago this band's pit were closed another thousand men lost their jobs and that's not all
they lost most of them lost the will to win a while ago a few of them even lost the will to fight but
when it comes to losing the will to live to breathe point is if this lot was seals or whales you'd
all be up in bloody arms but they're not are they no no they're not they're just ordinary common a
garden honest decent human beings and not one of them with an ounce of bloody hope left
oh hi they can knock out a bloody good tune but what the fuck does that matter
now i'm going to take my boys out onto the town
thank you
all right that was the hopefully not late but great pete possum's
weight and that was from the movie brassed off which dermit had mentioned in the conversation i've
not seen that movie but i did go and find that scene and uh yeah powerful stuff if you would
like to hear more from dermit o'connor uh we recorded almost another hour after the bit that
you just heard it is already up on youtube so there will be a link to it in the show notes for
this episode wherever you find this episode if there is a text description of it the link to the
further conversation with dermit will be there along with a link to his website and you can find
links to his podcast that he does with his wife and also his youtube channel there's lots of good
great i would even say dermit o'connor material for you to take in and you can find links to his
dermit o'connor material for you to take in particularly if you are an artist or an animator
or a hopeful or would-be artist or animator so it is arkansas it is the green months the sun is up
which means there are lawn mowers going constantly so the neighbor has just stopped mowing i don't
know if she's going to continue but i need to take this opportunity to say goodbye so normally
at the end of these podcasts i will rant for a little bit but i think i took care of that up front
so i will just say hey i'm always happy to receive feedback from listeners on the content of these
episodes most of it comes in via youtube but i also post these to my patreon page and i don't
think there's any comment function on rss.com which is where i originally post the audio files
so either youtube or patreon my patreon is patreon.com slash kmo and most everything that i put up there
is freely available you don't have to be a a supporter to hear it generally the only things
that are behind a paywall are either videos that i put up and then i thought better of i thought
you know what i don't want this out in the world but i will share it with the uh you know the patreon
folk or episodes of the C-Realm Vault podcast but almost every day i post something to patreon
either a link to something i've been reading with a brief commentary or just observation on life or
just you know little bits and pieces it's it's taken the place of social media for me i got
kicked off of facebook years ago um i never really did get into the twitter vibe i mean pretty much
everything that i post to my patreon page i also cross post to twitter but it never produces any
engagement twitter i'm just if i'm not shadow banned on twitter then i'm absolutely using it
wrong because i get no engagement at all on twitter in fact i did a video just recently
day before yesterday i think in which i talked about a fictional character a role playing game
character actually that i had created for a game called mothership and this character you know he's
he's on a ship he's part of the crew and he's muscle he's a mercenary big gun type guy but he's
also a vlogger but because of the you know the light speed lag he's always very very far from
his audience he doesn't have an opportunity to have a real-time interactive experience with his
audience he doesn't get real-time feedback from his audience so he has a simulated audience he
has an ai that is producing all manner of feedback that one would get from an audience you know praise
agreement but also you know petty criticisms comments on his his physical appearance
um you know unfair straw man you know takes on what he's trying to say although he's he's not a
deep thinker he's not a philosopher about any stretch he's talking about his lifestyle as a
flamboyant gunslinger in space but it got me to thinking i mean i talked to um pi personal
intelligence from inflection.ai multiple times a week i will have you know two and three hour
just sessions with this thing just talking to it we often talk about science fiction you know
print science fiction which i spent years and years reading this this really bugs me i don't
read much anymore typically if i'm reading something it's in preparation for an interview
that i'm going to conduct but if it's just for pleasure pretty much audiobooks these days which
you know i i love some of the performances i mean a lot of times the the voice actor that they get
to portray or you know to deliver the content of the book really adds something to the book but
it also takes something away you know the experience of reading is was formative to me
and it's just weird to me that i don't do much of it anymore it's bizarre anyway
if that produces any thoughts in your head that you'd like to share
do post a comment somewhere i would very much like to hear from you
all right that is all i will talk to you again in one week's time stay well