Is AI Replacing Hollywood? Larry Wilson Reveals Why Storytelling Still Wins "Part 1"

Is artificial intelligence about to transform Hollywood forever?

In this thought-provoking episode of How to Talk to Humans, communication expert Larry Wilson explores the explosive rise of AI-generated filmmaking after watching the groundbreaking short film Pomegranate. He explains why this technological breakthrough could forever change the movie industry—but why one uniquely human skill will become even more valuable.

Discover why communication, storytelling, and the ability to connect with people remain essential in a world increasingly shaped by artificial intelligence.

In this episode:

•  Is Hollywood really becoming obsolete? 
•  The rise of AI-generated films 
•  Why storytelling still matters 
•  How communication skills will become even more valuable 
•  What AI can—and can't—replace 
•  Why great stories drive business and success 

Whether you're a filmmaker, entrepreneur, content creator, communicator, or simply curious about the future of AI, this episode offers an insightful perspective on one of the biggest technological shifts of our time. 

#ArtificialIntelligence #AI #Hollywood #Storytelling #Communication #Filmmaking #FutureOfWork #Leadership #WilsonMethod #HowToTalkToHumans

Hosted by Larry Wilson
Produced by: Verbal Ninja Productions
Producer: R. Scott Edwards
Sponsored by: The Wilson Method

**Check out NEW upgraded website with FREE offer!!
Visit: https://theWilsonMethod.com 

Try Larry's "5 Day Challenge" via his web site.

Link: TheWilsonMethod.com

Transcript

Larry Wilson 0:00

Hi, this is Larry Wilson, and this is How to Talk to Humans. This is the podcast that shows you how to improve your communication skills. Are you looking to get a better job? Are you looking to find a relationship? Are you trying to do things in your life that have frustrated you and eluded you so far? I can show you so easily how to change that. Now, I can only do it with humans. If you're looking to deal with vampires and zombies extraterrestrial, this is not the joke. But if you're really looking to improve your communication skills, I can show you what I've learned in 40 years in the show business working with the biggest celebrities and superstars in the world. And their secrets are unbelievable. What I'm going to be teaching you during the course of this podcast every week are tools that you can use to communicate toward success. This is a monumentous day. It really is. Today officially marks the demise of Hollywood. Now I know some of you saying, oh no, no, we'll see. Why is this important? Well, it isn't really important, except as it has to do with AI. Because you've heard me talk many times here on this training about AI and the impact that it has. Yeah. Why do I say it's the demise of Hollywood? Well, because last night my son was so excited. He said, You've got to see this, you've got to see this. And he showed me a video online that had just been released yesterday. And it was about 30 minutes. It's sort of a, well, sort of a science fiction-y short. This actually will be an amusing time capsule when people see this far into the future. It was called Pomegranate, and basically the short film is about it must be sometime in the future, and there's all sorts of hints of a dystopian future. And a man who seems to have some kind of artificial parts to him. Some of this is now made explicitly clear, but he's going to plug him into some kind of machine that uh simulates experiences in the customer's brain. And pomegranate is a safe word if he's in a situation that's too scary or stressful. If he says pomegranate, then it will stop whatever the download is that's happening in his brain and return him to consciousness. Suffice to say, what I saw made it instantly apparent to me that Hollywood is done. The entire Hollywood system, the entire concept of huge studios and multi, multi-million dollar paydays for actors, and all the associated people who work in the films, uh costume design and costume fabrication and set design and set fabrication and uh camera operators and directors of lighting and makeup and hair, everything. And of course, actors, everything. They're obsolete now. The film that I saw, Pomegranate, no one in it is real. They're all creations of AI. Now, I I hasten to point out, in case someone jumps to see that immediately, I hope you do. It's fantastic. It's it's it's revolutionary. It's an incredible thing to see. The voices are real actors. And I don't know why that is. Whether it's too difficult at this point. If it is too difficult, give it about three weeks and I bet they'll have it solved. It's moving so fast. I looked at um, and now I've forgotten the name. Oh, I feel terrible. Zach is his first name, the writer-director of Pomegranate, but you'll know his name very soon. I'm very certain. I saw some of his earlier work, and by earlier I mean like a month ago. And the difference between a month ago and last night was astronomical. So all this technology is moving at light speed. It's it's moving at an incredible pace. And and uh, you know, please don't misunderstand me. Uh pomegranate is not some brilliant uh uh script. It's good, but it's not brilliant or earth-shaking or you know, Shakespearean. I think uh this writer-director wanted to showcase some of the things that he can do, and they are extraordinary. I won't give any of it away, you'll be able to see, but almost any, almost any visual you can imagine with humans in it. Of course, they aren't real humans, they're artificially created, but they sure look human. And there's close-ups on them where they seem to have muscles under their skin moving, where some little tiny movements, it it's incredible. And there's pirates on the ocean and sea monsters, and uh well, you'll just have to see it's incredible. And I think in many ways, this writer director wanted to show that there's nothing that his studio cannot produce. And I shouldn't know the name of his studio, I've forgotten that as well. I'm sorry, I should have written that down. But I guess I just feel like, oh, you'll know in the next week, you'll hear all about this. And why? Why is this so important to us? Well, because the one thing, besides the voices for the actors, but the one thing that clearly was not AI was the story. And you've heard me say here before, talking about AI, saying my beef with it, of course, was that people were starting to worship it as if it were some sort of entity or god. It is not, it is simply a very powerful and efficient machine. And it can do things faster than we can do them. And so the challenge in many ways becomes your communication skills with AI. Uh, I do not have an inside track on this, I do on communication skills, but I don't on this film, Pomegranate. I don't know anything about this guy. My guess is he must be very young. And he's very talented. He has got some great stuff going on. There's some very clever stuff, very, very clever stuff. But the story seems to be organic, not virtual or artificial. The story seems to be one he wrote himself, and like I say, uh don't don't go into it expecting Shakespeare. It's not Shakespeare, but it's solid, it's very solid, and it has a point it wants to make about technology. And I I personally feel that um I I feel that whether the director writer is conscious of it or not, a lot of his choices were influenced by how he feels about presenting this new technology to the world and how resistant people are to it, and how unfamiliar it is, how how it's just unknown territory. And so people are sometimes resistant to that. They're you know, it's a little frightening. Uh, to me, it was mind-blowing. And I thought, wow, this is this is revolutionary. My wife, who was watching with us, when it was done, she just said, This is like seeing men walking on the moon. I had to agree, yeah. Yeah. And I said, It feels like how cowboys must have felt when they saw the very first automobile. Like, here's this horseless carriage that can run all day faster than a horse. I mean, imagine what that must have done to their brain. And then my son, I think, came up with the most apt analogy. He said, It's like a samurai who draws his sword and sees the very first gun he's ever seen, and is thinking, What is this? And then someone fires the gun, and I'm imagining, I don't know, but I could imagine a dying samurai thinking, there is no honor in this. Probably right, probably isn't any honor in that, but definitely revolutionary. That's seriously what it felt like. That I just saw the entire studio system in Hollywood, the last hundred years, the advent of motion pictures going from uh simple one-reelers in black and white, and then having you know, cards saying what the dialogue was supposed to be, and then actually having sound in the movie with voices and music, and how mind-blowing that must have been. And then in the 50s, color suddenly coming in, and 3D, and you know, all of it. I mean, all of it mind-blowing. But now it's all history. Now, some of you are saying, hey, man, I was gonna go see uh The Odyssey this weekend at a movie theater. Are you telling me they're closed? No, of course not. As with any time that some revolutionary, I was gonna use the word teleportation, I mean, might be a little strong, but paradigm-changing technological breakthrough happens, like the motor car, like men walking on the moon, like the first gun a master swordsman ever sees, never heard of it. Suddenly, someone who's not even close enough to touch with his sword is able to fire a projectile and kill him. I mean, that just it's mind-boggling. It it it defies the ability to imagine, it just defies. That's what I saw last night. But as always with those kinds of things, it will be a gradual process. When talkies appeared in movies and sound, there were still silent pictures for many years, and they made money uh when color came in. There were still films in black and white, you know. The first one I think of most notoriously in well, now I don't know the exact year. I want to say 1959 or 1960, uh, Alfred Hitchcock's uh psycho is shot in black and white. And the studio was very reluctant to do that because everyone was shooting everything in color. And I think Hitchcock, Hitchcock's always struck me as a master strategist and and diplomat, I think. So the story that I've heard is that Hitchcock told the studios, oh, because of the nature of the story and there's blood and stuff, in color it might be too much, might be too shocking in color. And they went, oh, oh, but I'm told, and Hitchcock had said in interviews, no, the reason was he had a very limited budget. They had enough to shoot 28 days, I think, which is not very long. And you know, this is ancient history. This is back in the days when the studio system ruled the roost, and you didn't get 250 million dollars to just shoot miles and miles of film and do whatever you wanted. Film was expensive, and I guess Hitchcock's idea was color film was so much more expensive to purchase, so much more expensive to develop, so much more expensive to print a work print to start editing that by shooting black and white, he was able to extend his shooting schedule, I think, by four or five days, which seemed like a huge amount of time then. Uh, but the point is, technological changes don't happen in the blink of an eye, they take time. But this guy who made pomegranate has announced, I don't know if it's true or not, but he's announced a feature-length film that will be released October 30th of this year, 2026, in theaters. I don't know if he's hoping to do that. I don't know if they're already in production on it. I I don't know anything about it, but I would not bet against it. If he really has a feature-length film in theaters October 30th, my prediction here is it is going to be a monster. It's gonna be gigantic. God, it's gonna be huge, huge. Now, again, some of you're saying, this is all well and good, Larry, but you're saying I can still go to the movies this weekend in a theater. Yes, of course. I'm telling you because of two important factors. Because one, it looks like this is wholly dependent on your ability to communicate with AI. Now that doesn't mean it has to be spoken, could be. I'm not an expert in technology. I know some people do that. Maybe it's all typing, maybe it's all uh on the keyboard. I'm not sure. But the limited exposure I've had to AI and the experts who I've spoken with have said, oh yeah. They they, for those of you who may not have experimented, yes, they call these prompts when you're prompting the machine to do something. The prompt might be a question, how do you blah blah blah? That's considered a prompt. Or it may be more like you would think of a prompt where you're telling it to do something. Paint the sky in the background of the scene this color blue, or uh you'll see stuff uh your mind won't believe, but you might be saying, I want raindrops falling on the pavement, and when they hit the ground, I want them to bounce up about four or five inches off the ground. So the clarity and specificity of your prompts have a direct correlation with the output of AI. I realize some of you are saying, to hell with AI, I want to know part of it. That's all right. I mean, uh I totally understand that feeling. I'm sure there's a lot of people who want to know part of those newfangled horseless carriages. I'm sure there were. And in fact, I actually feel like I've read historical uh records of certain people saying, Oh yeah, uh those uh you know, newfangled automobiles, uh they're incredibly dangerous. Uh everyone who drives one at some point uh gets killed because of the way they run. I mean, it this is the story is there's nothing new under the sun. The technology may be new, but we, the people, the humans, we remain the same. I I referenced the Odyssey before. I haven't seen it yet. I'm very anxious to see it. I think Christopher Nolan is a great filmmaker, and so whether I like it or hate it, I know it would be good filmmaking. I mean, he but the Odyssey is 3,000 years old. This classic piece of literature, it's actually a poem, a vast sprawling, huge poem, 3,000 years old. So it was incredibly old. It was ancient and perhaps by some people forgotten at the time Jesus Christ was born. Does this give you some perspective? Uh it's old, it's very old, but it's a great story if you don't know it. It's the basis of so many stories you've seen on film and TV. And I'm telling you this, without having seen Christopher Nolan's version yet, you know, uh, those of you who may not be as familiar with the Odyssey, it's been made hundreds of times. There, I don't know the exact number of films that have been made of it that are, I mean, directly, not influenced by or inspired by. I mean, directly supposed to be, there must be dozens of them, but inspired by. The story of the Odyssey is this warrior, Odysseus, goes off to fight in the Trojan Wars, leads his men. Uh, ultimately, I guess the most famous uh historians, of course, know much more detail than I do here. But the most famous thing we probably know about is the Trojan horse, a way to sneak into the enemy's enclave by presenting something that looks like a gift from the gods, a gigantic horse made of wood. But inside are all these enemy soldiers. So once it's pulled into the camp of the enemy, at night when everyone's asleep, they come out and decimate them. So uh that I think maybe everyone knows, because that term Trojan horse is even used in uh internet and digital stuff, where something that looks favorable and like a pleasant gift actually conceals something like malware, like it's uh it's not good. So this story, he goes and fights in the Trojan War, and then he the the Odyssey is the story of him trying to get home to his beautiful wife, Helen of Troy, the most beautiful woman in the world. Hard to imagine, but she must be because that's what Homer says about her. How great is that? 3,000 years ago, guy's writing this story and says, Oh, yeah, it's not just that his wife is good looking, she's the most beautiful woman in the world. I would hasten all people listening to this to make a note of that, because that's really Great storytelling. Now, I'm I'm making a big deal about this and this breakthrough in digital AI produced filmmaking because all of you will not be affected by this. I mean, you might be affected indirectly. You might go to see a movie or this. But people who are afraid of losing their job, if your communication skills are above average, you'll be fine. Because that's foundational for interacting with this new technology, this AI. It's how well you can communicate. And storytelling is what we do. I wonder if everyone understands. I've spoken of it before. This shouldn't be a surprise to you. It shouldn't be a sudden revelation. But storytelling is essential to commerce, to business. It's what we do. I I know people who uh don't subscribe to this, who feel like, well, uh I my goods that I create or services I provide, uh, they're really good. So I just have to do them and people see they're really good. And then those people uh may make a fine living, they may make great income, but they're always frustrated because somebody whose goods or services that are identical to the ones they offer is making three, four, five times as much money. They're doing so much more business, and and maybe the goods and services aren't even as good as the ones that the person who I'm referring to feels I do a great thing. I shouldn't have to tell a story, I should just be able to say, look, this is what I do. Yes, maybe you should be able to, but it's not the way humans work. And for those of you who are late to the party, communication is human. You know, sometimes I get so involved that time just slips away. There's so much here I want to share with you, but I don't want to take up more of your life. So we're gonna continue the second part of this next week, and it only gets better. This has been Larry Wilson. I want to thank you for spending this time with me, and I hope you found this information useful. If you're looking for more, you can find it at thewilsonmethod.com. There's a ton of stuff there. In fact, if you want, you can even speak to me because I'm human. Send me an email at info at wilsonmethod.com because I read every single one. I hope that you'll join us next week in this continuing journey. And you'll be with me for the next episode of How to Talk to Human.