The MOOD Podcast

The Photographer Who Puts Humanity on Trial: Nick Brandt on Sentience, Power, and Responsibility.

• Matt Jacob

Share episode

British photographer and environmental storyteller Nick Brandt joins the show for a raw, expansive conversation on art, climate collapse, sentience, and the role of photography in an age defined by distraction and decline. Across projects such as Inherit the Dust, This Empty World, The Day May Break, and his latest chapter The Echo of Our Voices, Brandt builds constructed realities that merge portraiture, environmental narrative, and human resilience. This conversation moves through philosophy, ethics, creative fear, the collapse of attention, and the emotional cost of a lifetime spent documenting loss.

We discuss:

  • Nick's core philosophy.
  • Why the project 'The Day May Break' exists.
  • How historical worldviews shaped modern cruelty.
  • Climate change as human injustice.
  • The tension between beauty and devastation.
  • The conceptual and emotional logic behind 'The Echo of Our Voices'.
  • The collapsing photobook and print ecosystem.
  • AI as an existential threat.
  • Why Nick refuses to create purely for audiences.
  • The impact of social media on photography as a whole.
  • Medium format film vs digital.
  • Advice for emerging photographers.


Follow Nick and his incredible work:
Website: www.nickbrandt.com
Instagram: @nickbrandtphotography

This episode is sponsored by Strata Editions - use discount code 'MOOD' for 10% discount on their store - visit strata-editions.com to shop and see their collections.

_____________________________________

Message me, leave a comment and join in the conversation!

Thank you for listening and for being a part of this incredible community. You can also watch this episode on my YouTube channel (link below) where I also share insights, photography tips and behind-the-scenes content on my channel as well as my social media, so make sure to follow me on Instagram, Twitter, Threads and TikTok or check out my website for my complete portfolio of work.

YouTube:
www.youtube.com/@mattyj_ay

Learn with me
https://mattjacobphotography.com/voice-alchemy

My Newsletter
https://mattjacobphotography.com/newsletter

Website:
www.mattjacobphotography.com

Socials:
IG | X | TikTok | Threads | YouTube | @mattyj_ay

Matt Jacob :

Welcome to the Mood Podcast, uncovering the art of conversation through the lens of photography and creativity one frame at a time. I'm your host, Matt Jacob. Thank you for joining me in today's episode. And this one is actually an audio-only version, but I have the honor of speaking with Nick Brent, a British photographer and environmental storyteller whose monumental works confront humanity's fractured relationship with our natural world. Through series like Inherit the Dust, This Empty World, and his latest one, The Day May Break, Nick fuses portraiture and environmental narrative, portraying people and animals sharing the same space in a world irrevocably changed by climate crisis. His work is both cinematic and deeply human, speaking to this quiet resilience that survives amidst devastation. Nick is to be hugely applauded for his unwitting tenure as one of this space's most impactful spokespeople when it comes to important topics that we really should sit up and take notice of. And he does it through such a beautiful and intentional way with his camera. In my conversation with him, we talk about the role of art in the age of collapse, the ethics of empathy, how photography can serve as both witness and warning, the fine line between activism and art, and the spiritual exhaustion of witnessing so much loss. We explore how empathy functions as rebellion, how beauty can still exist inside devastation, and what it truly means to make pictures that hold grief without necessarily surrendering to it. A conversation, if you were, about fragility, resistance, and the power of bearing witness. For those watching on YouTube, we will overlay some of Nick's incredible work on the screen for you to view as you listen. So here he is, Nick Brandt. Thanks.

Nick Brandt:

I want to start go on, sorry, go ahead. Yes. I think that's a delay. Go ago, okay. Right. Not a delay, me just interrupting. I was just going to say this is going to be an interesting experiment because I am sitting on the floor in the closet in my house. And I've never done this, but because my wife's an actress and she does ADR, audio dialogue replacement, uh, in the closet, because it's the only carpeted room in the house, I thought I would uh experiment with doing a podcast with you sitting on the floor in the closet and see if I can not become soporific in the process.

Matt Jacob :

What a what a great use of words as we start the start of the episode. And um, yeah, I mean, for for for those listening, we're we're audio only, and that I think the audio um having that just isolated, which by the way, the audio quality is great, but yes, just to yeah, just to explain to the audience like why is he sitting in the in the closet with a carpet?

Nick Brandt:

Because it damps down the sound so you don't have that kind of nasty echo in a large room. So that's the reason why I'm in here.

Matt Jacob :

So if anyone's listening, they can picture Nick sat in the corner of his his closet speaking into uh into a microphone. Um hey, look, it's so great to have you. It's a privilege to have you, actually. Such a wonderful photographer. I'm a I'm a big fan and um been trying to kind of have the patience to ask you to come on for a while. So um really appreciate your time. And we're we'll just um we're just gonna there's there's too much, right? You you've been doing this successfully for way too long for for my little podcast.

Nick Brandt:

Too long. Oh, have I been doing it too long? Is it time for me to fail abyssimally?

Matt Jacob :

You're too you're too good and you've got too too big a body of work. Um, but I I wanted to jump in with something uh, you know, in my research of putting some of these questions together, there was a there was a saying that I think you created, and I can't remember exactly where I read it or saw it, but it went like this the day may break and the earth may shatter, or the day may break and the dawn still comes. Humanity's choice, our choice. What does that line mean to you now? I kind of have an understanding of when you wrote that, but can you explain how the kind of the sentiment behind that and where where you see that line meaning to you now?

Nick Brandt:

So um, for those who don't know, the day may break is the title of an ongoing global series um that is to do with the way that humans and animals have been impacted by environmental degradation, destruction, and climate change. And The Day May Break and the Earth May Shatter, that when one views what is happening on our planet from a pessimistic point of view, it's all pretty bleak. The earth may shatter. Or the day may break and the dawn still come, there's the there's this great quote that I always reference pessimism of the intellect, optimism of the will. Pessimism of the intellect, optimism of the will. So intellectually, you look around at what's happening to the world, and it's hard not to be profoundly pessimistic. But the idea of just giving up is untenable. One has to do what one can to mitigate the damage, and therein lies optimism of the will that um we continue to have some kind of hope, cliched word, but necessary, that through will we can mitigate the damage.

Matt Jacob :

Interesting. What wh where did this come from for you? Where did this philosophy desire to instill that optimism in people with a balance of you know realism? Where did this all start with you in in a photographic perspective?

Nick Brandt:

Um in a photographic perspective, do you mean with a camera? I mean, was this was this a a How did I how did I how did I apply that philosophy? I mean, this has basically always been my philosophy from the very beginning. I just it was just kind of really well articulated by that by that quote, which was popularized by this Italian philosopher Antonio Gramsky. Um, pessimism of the intellect, optimism of the will. And then The Day May Break um was the just the title that seemed to fit that in this series that I began in 2020. But I have always seen uh in everything I've done, there's the destruction and what are we who basically, those of us who give a fk, gonna do about it.

Matt Jacob :

With photography, where did you did you have this purpose and this intent behind what you wanted to do with a camera before you picked up a camera? Was this something that you'd thought about all your life and then the camera came along?

Nick Brandt:

It's something that I had thought about all my life. And I went on a 15-year detour that we won't talk about for too long, uh, directing, trying to tell stories related to environmental destruction through fictional stories and the whole nightmarish process of trying to get those funded, financed, the total frustration of that. And then one day being in East Africa and realizing that I felt there was a way to take photographs of animals as sentient creatures, no different from us, and that it was portraiture of animals as if it was Irving Penn or Richard Averden taking a portrait of a human being in a studio, and I just happened to be doing it in the wild. Um, and that was the early work. But it wasn't, it wasn't um that work wasn't direct enough in addressing what I see going on in the world. And so I moved on um to a different kind of work, which has now taken us through to this series, The Day May Break. There you go. That was a very deliberately um disingenuous way on my part of just jumping across 15 years to get us to the part of work, the part of my work I want to talk about. I think it's great.

Matt Jacob :

We're gonna talk about it. Um why why do you I mean I battle with this all the time, but you've been doing this, you know, if you've been immersed in this, I guess, overarching project for so many years, and you've seen firsthand the effects of urbanization, human impact, greed, power, and everything, uh as well as just the lack of education in some of these more indigenous areas, um, lack of funding, you know, all of this stuff we can talk about. But I think at the a lot of the heart of it, certainly in the West, is the unwillingness to treat animals as sentient beings or to really accept the impact that we as humans can have on nature, can have on animals, can have on everything around us, living with them rather than living against them or on them, right? So uh why do you think that is? What what are we missing here? We always I always feel like the likes of you and me and and people who care about animals and care about nature are always in the minority. What are we what are we missing? Why do people don't don't uh don't understand this?

Nick Brandt:

Uh so so I just want to kind of pick up on a couple of things, which you mentioned us in the West, and my discomfort with these kind of industrialized worlds and the West, and you know, the fact that the West is comes from a line that was drawn by the British and you know, back when. Um and then also the sort of lack of care in indigenous, and it's not the case, it's a l in humanity as a whole. And let's just be clear that it's n the lack of regard for animal life is not just to do within the natural world, but in factory farming, in how what people eat. And I just wish that animals spoke human. Uh because if animals spoke human, the abuse and I'm again I'm talking about across all ways in which humans encounter alive and dead animals. Um and if animals spoke human, just what a different better world it would be. That for me, you know, you go back to René Descartes, who this a deplorable French philosopher who in the 17th century, or was it 18th, um basically said that animals are emotionless machines, which to anybody who owns, owns, who looks after a dog, for example, knows absolutely unequivocally that that dog is not an emotionless machine. But that way of thinking, that philosophy, quotation marks, of animals being emotionless machines became predominant thinking for centuries and allowed, enabled um abuse without conscious conscience. Um and again, any person who lives with a dog sees that's just nonsense. And so for me, whether it's uh every time you eat an animal that was bred in a factory farm, you're engaged in the torment, torture, and misery of an animal for the sake of a few s seconds of sensory pleasure on the nerve endings of your tongue. Now, you've probably just got a bunch of listeners going, oh for f' sake, don't give me a fing lecture, you vegan, pious person. But I'm simply talking about the pain being inflicted and the So it goes beyond just one set of rules for animals in the wild, and another set of rules for animals for food production.

Matt Jacob :

So I don't know if I've really answered your question because I've kind of taken it in a different direction, but I kind of just want to I think that's an important point to to understand and and thank you for for that. I I think this is part of the whole issue, as far as I see, is it's it's down to education. You have people, you know, it's like the ivory tusks, you know, a lot of the that ship, you know let's let's take China, for example, and they they use a lot of the the tusks that get poached, um, as you can you can attest to. But a lot of the population in China didn't really know that how these this these tusks and this ivory were were were taken, right? Or were gotten. So it's just like this. And I've been to China many times, and there is a no country countries aren't that different from each other, but China's a great example because they're just so indoctrinated with a specific kind of regime of education that they're not exposed to the the ways and the wonders of the world, certainly of the natural world. And I think that's evident in how they they treat animals and how they they you know use these animal products, which just is is upstream of everything else that that we we find and that we have we have difficulty with.

Nick Brandt:

Yeah, but I mean I would also I I could throw accusations at America with the giant factory farms here. Yes, you know, because again, we you've got to be for me, like I said, there you've got to have apply equal rules to both wild and to all animals, to all sentient creatures. And that's why, again, if you take China, that's why organizations like WildAid are so amazing, because they are making have made significant inroads into people understanding that um how tusks how ivory is got from elephants and how rhino horns were you know just for the just for this powdered uh you know, keratin that comes from a rhino horn that they think is going to be some kind of ridiculous aphrodisiac, or um shark fins, that these sharks have, you know, their fins cut off and the f the sharks, while still alive, are thrown back into the ocean and drown because they no longer have their fins. But you go around the Mediterranean, and everywhere I look at on every restaurant I see octopus. And you think about the and I'm gonna come back to this intelligence of octopus and that people are just eating octopus without thinking about this incredible intelligence these octopus have. But I'm now about to contradict myself by saying intelligence should have nothing to do with it, just sentience should. In other words, you wouldn't give precedence to the life of Einstein over an autistic child. Just because Einstein is more intelligent than an autistic child, he doesn't have any more right to life. They both do. And so, and who are we to decide what creature is intelligent anyway, even if you took that route, because you don't know. There's in there's intellectual intelligence and there's instinctual intelligence. And you and I, we are a complete doofus on the planes. We are not apply able to apply our intelligence like a lion can, who has less intellectual intelligence, but sure as hell has more instinctual intelligence. So that's why at the end of it all, I keep coming back to if a creature is sentient, and as we go, as time passes, scientists so unsurprisingly discover, oh gee, look at the intelligence of an octopus, look at the intelligence of a crow. It's like, yeah. Like that's that's not to me, it's not rocket science. You just have to observe and you see it. And but intelligence at the end of the day shouldn't be about it's about feelings. So, and that's before, by the way, we know we've been talking about the animals, we haven't even started talking about human beings and the um injustices that I also now address in the you know in in the work with climate change. But anyway, that's to answer that, I think.

Matt Jacob :

We're gonna we're gonna we're gonna get on to kind of the the the the effects on humans for sure, because a lot of your work does cover that. And um I'm really fascinated to hear about it. But but before we we go on to that, a couple of couple of other things on on this point. Um I'm glad you brought that up. I I say that to I say exactly that to people all the time when I see animals mistreated or uh and and think, well, you're you're you're deciding on how you treat another being based on their intelligence. You know, I I hear that all the time. Well, they're just stupid, they don't mean anything. They're you know, we're above them basically in the chain, right? It's like, well, if you if exactly as you said, if you follow that rule in just humans, then you'd be killing a a a load of stupid people.

Nick Brandt:

Or autist somebody who's autistic over over somebody who's a sort of notionally, notionally more intelligent quotation marks, like a scientist. And nobody that I know or you know, or any of the listeners know, is going to go, yeah, let's kill the autistic one and keep the scientist. I mean, no.

Matt Jacob :

But some fascists might, but yeah. Um the uh why photography, Nick? Why why not politics? Why not other forms of activism activism?

Nick Brandt:

I actually started as a photographer. Uh I was a I was a I started as a painter, and then I was also taking photographs, and then I had, as I said, this unfortunate 15 year detour into film because of my love of music. But photography I realized was the medium with which I could best best I th I thought I could best express um my feelings about environmental injustice. Because if you were to it really for me comes down to the thing that I most motivates me is injustice. And I have focused on environmental injustice just because I have, because I've always been obsessed with the environment. Um, but that's been the reason and the ability with photography, and you've probably read me say this when you were looking at stuff, the ability of photography to create what you want, how you want, when you want. That you just can go do it. And after the total um years-long frustration of waiting for financing for filmmaking, which is becoming more democratized through digital, which is great. Um, but then you've still got to find distribution. Um the um that ability to create what you how you want, what you want, when you want, with photography was for me completely liberating.

Matt Jacob :

Tell me why this, why your style, I mean, I think this the style at which you shoot your animal portraits, your human portraits, you know, coupled with these really, really powerful and moving and atmospheric environments and juxtapositions, that they're not just images, right? They're they're messages and they're calls to action. Do you ever worry kind of like the the focusing on aestheticizing loss or damage or or stories risks, kind of like romanticizing it, you know, with this beauty in terms of numbing the message?

Nick Brandt:

Matt, let me ask you, I'm gonna throw that question back at you because you asked it. Um what made you ask that question?

Matt Jacob :

Um, I think because I speak to many kind of photojournalists, and they feel like the the message is the most important thing, right? Or getting that capturing the moment of a moment in history, right, is the most important thing. Me on the other side, I think I look at photographs. Photographs that speak to me first are the the aesthetically beautiful ones that kind of that draw me in, and then it's layers upon layers uh in terms of the message or the series or the book or whatever it might be. So there's there's different kinds of methods there, and I wanted to understand why you chose certainly like the camera that you shoot, the way you set up, the your process of waiting.

Nick Brandt:

Well, I'm not no, but that's I'm not waiting days and months. That's that's the early work. So, you know, that's something from 15.

Matt Jacob :

Oh, setting up a specific aesthetic frame.

Nick Brandt:

So I'm not consciously trying to make a beautiful image ever. I am if you look at The Day May Break, the first two chapters are black and white, and I use fog, fog machines to create this sense of the world as we knew it rapidly disappearing from view. And I'm waiting for the sun to go away to shoot in cloud because I like the more somber, melancholic aesthetic of soft light. It just so happens along the way that the combination of fog and soft light and black and white creates an aesthetically, not notionally, everybody's opinion, beautiful image. Then on chapter three, where I'm going underwater, again, well, it's underwater, so it's going to have a certain innate sense of beauty, especially because again, I'm using a 12 by 12 silk on the surface of the water to block the sunlight because I don't like the way sunlight kind of just sort of creates dark shadows with when you can't see the eyes. It's just becomes distraction. And then chapter four, which is in sunlight, uh with in the desert of Jordan with the Syrian refugee families. Well, so that again is black and white, which automatically, by its definition, lends a certain aesthetic quality. And there are the shapes of the mountains in the background that then blend into the people. So there you again sort of start to get an aesthetic unavoidably. Now, you said something when I asked you the question, which you said also for you, if it has an aesthetic beauty, it helps, can help draw you in. Um, and that is you okay, let's look at talk about you know Salgado, Salgado's early work, the extraordinary photographs of the thousands of gold miners climbing up the ladders. Those are extr or his photographs in Kuwait of the during the Kuwaiti War with the exploding oil. So those are aesthetically beautiful images, but they're also images of destruction. Now, the other thing to is that I am not photographing trauma or suffering in the moment. Um a photojournalist might be photographing war or as I say, trauma in the moment. I'm photographing those people and in the first two chapters, animals, in a state of being post the most extreme dramatic part of the trauma they have had in their lives. And when you look at the body of work, what what I actually realized only kind of recently, bizarrely, sometimes you're really slow-witted not picking up shit about your own own work. And I realized, I think it was something, I was doing an interview, and somebody said, Oh, the foot everybody, all everybody and all the animals in your photographs are so calm. And I thought, oh yeah, that's right. Everybody and everybody and every animal is really calm. And why is that? And if you were to just kind of delve into my brain for a moment, in terms of a therapist or whatever, I would say I am probably trying to impose, not impose, uh, I'm probably trying to find a sense of calm within the chaos that it's actually um almost therapeutic for me to photograph this sense of calmness in a world that is increasingly chaotic.

Matt Jacob :

With that calmness, do you think you're trying to maybe subconsciously or consciously instill that part of hope in in the images? Does that even come into it?

Nick Brandt:

No, I think I mean look, you you you should judge that more than me. Um but um the mere fact that everybody every animal and every person in those photographs have survived, mere fact I'm able to take photographs of them because they are alive in and of itself to me means there is hope and possibility. While you're alive, there is hope and possibility. And so chapter four of the Echo of Our Voices, which is the most it still has this melancholic quality, but these you see the photographs with the all the Syrian refugees who are continuous in a permanent state of displacement from both war and now climate change, but the their connection, their resilience, their strength, holding hands, the connectivity through those families with all of them holding hands and these human islands. Um there you see even more so a sense of hope and possibility. I'm always a bit wary of using the word hope because it's become such a clear cliche, and it's strange that we all default to that one word. Um but there it is.

Matt Jacob :

Yeah, I think there's um to answer your original question when you started to answer that back to me. I think I think hope is sometimes a little bit futile without some form of understanding and even action. But I think for me, when I look at your images, and I've I think I've looked at all of them, um, but well, not all of them, all of the public ones. There is this feeling of, and I don't want to say sadness, maybe solemnity, because it's so beautifully constructed, but it's real. I know what you're showing me is real. Whether it's a kind of almost not fictional reality, that's a that's a contradiction, but there's I know it's not, you're not doing this journalistic method, whether it's kind of this real moment and it's this tragedy or it's something that's pulling at my heartstrings immediately. It's making me think and it's making me curious, and it's making me more aware of what's going on with potentially stories that I don't know enough about. So I think there's this there's this sadness almost that caused me to feel more and to be more aware. So I think that's so wonderfully done, whether that's your initial intent or not. Um, tell me about what your purpose is with it, certainly with the day may break, and we're gonna kind of break it down a little bit in in the in the chapters, and I want you to explain those chapters, but what is this kind of intent with these this series? Um, is it awareness? Is it education? Is it action? Is it poetry? Is it a service to the subjects? What is it?

Nick Brandt:

So I have always created for myself. I'm just obsessed with something in a moment, and I follow that obsession, which the overriding, as I said, the overriding subject is always environmental injustice. And if along the way people are affected, and it raises some kind of awareness or enlightenment or dialogue about these people or these animals, then great. But I'm not I'm not consciously um I had there was this phrase that I kind of got used to years ago, art meets activism. And it's a bit too simplistic. Um it's a bit too pigeonholy. I really hate labels and pigeonholes. Um and it's kind of a bit it's more complex than that because I'm not setting out with the goal of an activist. I'm setting out to just express my feelings, my frustration, my anger, my despair, my hope. And maybe you'll respond. And that's just what it comes down to. But I'm not gonna go, okay, I need to have people feel this way, and I'm going to find a way of doing that in a photograph. I'm not. I just I'm just I'm not I'm not I'm not thinking, uh I just it just doesn't enter my brain. I'm when I'm photographing, it's just tunnel vision of how to do justice to the subjects that I'm photographing. And so, for example, in chapter four, um, we would have 40 family members every week. And I would just sort of, I kind of, I'm very experimental with how I photograph. I never quite know. I've just got this really sort of very rough concept, and then I need to experiment every day, and just I called it, I called it a kind of photographic jazz, where you've got your um musical notes that might be the humans, might be the animals, the combinations too, and you're trying to find a photographic melody as the stuff unfolds in front of your camera. And sometimes it happens, usually it doesn't happen, usually it's a total failure. So, for example, in that in that series, The Echo of Our Voices, I think I did about 400 setups, and like 45 made the made my cut. Um, so that's a one in ten ratio. But that's part of the process. That's the process of trying, trying again, fail, fail again, fail better. You know, the famous Samuel Beckett um lines. Um, trying to fail better. So um, but I I went off track there. But what I was originally going to talk about was I would have, oh, I didn't have that they asked, and I was happy to show the Syrian families the photographs I took through my viewfinder at the end of each session, so that they could see that I was photographing them in a way that hopefully was respectful and did them justice. And as the most complimentary things I always hear at the end of each of those shoots, because we interview certain people at the end, is thank you for seeing me, thank you for hearing.

Matt Jacob :

Very interesting for me, actually, given that I've seen what you have done with these books, or at least kind of the the message you're trying to send, certainly with your early work, but I've seen obviously read a lot of articles with your latest chapter, Echo of Our Voices, about you know what it's for and what you hope to for people to really take, sit up and take notice of the message. So it's really interesting for me to really hear you create from within and your own interests and curiosity, which I think all of us artists should do, knowing that that's a source of authenticity. And if you're gonna do it from something of your own interest and own desire, then only good things will will really come of that work, one hopes. But once that work is all done and your book is published and we've got it out there wonderful, do you feel like then there's an obligation to spread that message and kind of do kind of the PR rounds of it or at least kind of get it out there into the world because it does have a strong message behind it?

Nick Brandt:

Um, yes, absolutely. I mean, I will say that I have to just point out that the so yeah, I became a photographer to make prints. Um that is I I if if if my work just exists existed as digital JPEGs on phone screens, I would prefer to stack shelves in a supermarket. Um I can't tell whether a photograph that I take has worth in my eyes until I see a print of it. I know I sound like I've gone off on a digression, but I kind of haven't because I'm getting to um my point, which is you mentioned books. Now, books are barely bought anymore. It's very depressing. Um, people think a scroll on their, and I can't say phone without putting the word f ⁇ ing in front, their f ⁇ ing phones is sufficient. And it's not. And for visually complex horizontal work, um, and I'm sure you've experienced this in your photography, um, it's just totally annihilated on a phone. Um and with especially with work like The Echo of Our Voices, it's all about the expressions on the people's faces and and and which are microscopic on a phone. So for me, the part of the process after the work is released that I am by far and away most excited by are exhibitions, institutional exhibitions, where people can see the work as the work should be seen in large prints. And there I see how moved and affect emotionally affected people can be. Um, seeing people with tears rolling down their faces, and you're not going to get that looking on a damn phone. And then books, it's like I said, it's just print runs have just plummeted. You talk, you you mentioned before we started about your book that you hope to do next year, and just be prepared to be incredibly disappointed with how few people will kind of give a f about your book. And it's just wow, the beauty of the physical object and getting that I I like when I see a photographer's work, whose work I really like, and they've got a book, I buy it. And I love having it and going through the pages. But talk about minority. Like this is not even like um vinyl, where people uh still collect and listen to music on vinyl records, where there's still a sizable the percentage of people who actually buy photographic books. Now, obviously, um many people don't have the money to buy a photographic book, and I understand that. So then you think, okay, well, hopefully they can go to an exhibition, but then you've got to live in a, you know, a reasonably big cosmopolitan city, usually in Europe or America. So then what's the the next fallback? Well, looking on a computer screen, um where you can zoom in on the website, the the photographer's website. But again, well, not everybody has a computer. So then we're down to okay, we're back to the fucking phone. And uh everyone has a phone. And everybody has a phone, but um it's this and it's this and this applies to all creators in this ever more distractable world where it's just a swipe through and through and through, and and I don't care how old I sound, um, but it is a really it's not a good way to. View creating, view creation of any kind. Films, you know, little clips of music, photographs. God help the sculptors who need the work to be seen in a three-dimensional form. God help the painters whose work is so much about the texture of the paint. So yeah, I get quite gloomy about that, as you can, as you can tell.

Matt Jacob :

Look, I think this is I I want to I want to double-click on this subject because it's really close to my heart as well. And and I I want to be that that intellectual pessimist. But I'm worried about the future of photography. And it sounds like you are a little bit as well. I mean, AI is one thing.

Nick Brandt:

Well, that's that's the well, no, but Matt, I mean, you know, you did a podcast on it, and AI, to me, in so many ways is uh is you know apocalyptic. But for creators, sure, as a filmmaker, you can create visions that you were denied because of cost. It's again democratizing. But for photographers, um, you all I mean, you already will have seen like the trouble and time and expense I go to photographing people underwater, photographing people in the desert, photographing people next to animals. Everything is shot for real. And now, and and and every time I have an exhibition, every time, you know, people will say, oh, it's AI. It's done in Photoshop, or it's it's a it's AI. And I am so, I would again, I'd go, I'd go in stack shelves in a supermarket again rather than go that route. Because for me, the magic, if there is any to be found, comes from the surprises that occur in real life that I don't have the imagination to come up with. And of course, everybody in these photographs is a real person. Uh, and the animals are real. So there's their stories, there's their histories. But it is incredibly depressing when now just I think AI is going to wipe out increasingly the ability for of creators to stand out, to make a living. And yes, I do believe in the worth of the effort to find that creation and to go through all the struggles. So yeah, that's that was a big that was a big AI that was an AI sigh at the end of that.

Matt Jacob :

I feel it. I feel your pain. I mean, I th I still think there is I gotta throw the cliche word hope out there, but the the the the real Yeah, I'm putting my my fingers up in vertical marks, but the the real photographers who have the real process and go through the real creation side of photography and photograph real people and real things and real processes, I think that will still have a really valuable place.

Nick Brandt:

I hope so. I hope so. But I mean we are talking, yeah. But we there are a majority who just don't care. And they're not they're not interested. And and you are already seeing the value of creativity devalued. Um and I would, you know, you when you take that into music, which I really feel for musicians with, you know, these wretched Spotify AI generated music. And did you see that? Um I saw this thing from a musician with the new Spotify contract. And I think Spotify is evil in the way that it takes advantage of musicians, but that you, when you sign the contract with Spotify, that you are allowing them to take your music and use it as a source of generation, AI generation. And this actually, I didn't even talk about this in relation to AI, and I want to, is how profoundly unethical I find that AI scrapes the internet for other people's ideas, and those creators get nothing in return. I mean, you know, this is obvious. This is stating the obvious, but it's too often not talked about. And so every time you're using AI to create an image, ever anybody who's listening, you are you're part of that taking advantage of people who have spent you know sweated blood to create real images, real life-based images.

Matt Jacob :

With no with no permission from us, right? With no permission from the that's the that's the that's the that's the problem. Let's go back to echo the voices and talk about the real creation side of it. Tell us like the these pedestals that you know we're we're gonna obviously share some of the photos and put um put people into in touch with your website and the and the book, etc.

Nick Brandt:

But by the way, I'm being I'm being I've just realized you'd why you wanted to change subject because uh the last 15 minutes, maybe the whole podcast, I've been a real downer. I mean, with every with every answer.

Matt Jacob :

The the sad thing is I agree with you on everything.

Nick Brandt:

I'm getting more and more bleak. It's like, no, there's no hope for the future of photography, and no AI is gonna rip us.

Matt Jacob :

Yeah, yeah.

Nick Brandt:

So so you would like, I just realized, oh shit, I'm really kind of and it's probably because I'm sitting on the floor. This is what I was afraid of, Matt, is I'm again sitting on the floor in the in the in the closet, and so my body posture is just getting me more and more into a slump, a physical and mental slump.

Matt Jacob :

Well, I we wouldn't know, but I apologize if I'm helping you get into that slump. Let's tell me, um, we don't have much longer, I promise. But we we tell me about we we don't have time to obviously go through all your books and all the chapters. I I think highly encourage people to go and check these out for themselves because it's not just the images, it's the it's the way you talk about it, it's the way you write about it, it's the stories behind behind what you're shooting that people really need to to take note of. But your most recent chapter, Echo The Voices, did that seem to be a little bit of a shift for you, certainly, in the with the way the the aesthetics of it, the way you shot it. Tell tell us about the process, tell us about the kind of the this motif of these pedestals and these people, you know, standing on top of these these structures and what that means and give us an overview.

Nick Brandt:

So, talking of being a miserable, I realized in the first three chapters that even I was getting a bit uh like too miserableist in how I felt, not in how the world was perceiving, but I wanted to kind of embrace human connection more with this with this chapter. And again, like I said, it comes out of just how I'm feeling in at the moment when I go into a next body of work. So um I had photographed underwater, um, you know, sort of a pre-apocalyptic vision of rising sea levels with sink rise, chapter three. And it was just seemed the most natural progression in the world to go to a place that is one of the most water-scarce places on the planet, um, the deserts of Jordan. And in the process of that, in the process of each, with each project, I get researchers to go out in the weeks before I arrive to meet people who have been impacted by climate change and to sort of in a way kind of like potentially cast so that when I arrive, I then so I spent a couple of weeks traveling around Jordan, meeting people whose lives have been impacted by climate change, and discovering these Syrians who have already are already refugees from war in Syria and now are perpetually displaced, as I said, from climate change. They have to go, they have to move multiple times a year to where there has been sufficient rainfall for them to find agricultural work as a result of enough water for crops to grow. And I saw such a strength and resilience and unity in these families that this concept that I already had of putting them uh up on these pedestals, and I'll talk about that. Um, which so as I say, I wanted the pe uh the families to feel like they were united, resilient within this harsh world, this harsh, desiccated landscape. And so the boxes, these boxes that were covered in sand became these sort of pedestals, these that statues. And typically through history, we have seen politicians and generals elevated on pedestals and f that because I can't think of many politicians or generals I'd want to put up on a pedestal. Whereas these extraordinary people whose voices are never heard, who sh have been dealt such harsh, harsh blows in life and continue to and through it all are so strong that they should be, they deserve to be seen and heard. They should be the ones who are up on a pedestal. And then, as I said, you've got, as you see in the photographs, there they are united through the connection of hands being held. Um Yeah, I think have I do I stop talking there? I think. Did I answer? Did I answer the did I answer the question? You started about pedestals and I went off on one of my usual long tangents. Um I sometimes you know, you know, you know how Trump Trump, of course, we can't go uh how long? It's 55 minutes and 44 seconds. We haven't mentioned it. We haven't mentioned it. So okay. This is the Trumbum. You know how he talks about when he goes off on his rambly, completely incoherent answers, he says he's doing the weave, and which is a kind of an excuse for the fact that he's like can't hold together a single coherent train of thought. And I have done my own version in numerous answers of weaving to eventually get back to the possibly an answer to the question you asked three minutes earlier. Um, hopefully with marginally more coherence than Trump. Thank you. The end. Carry on.

Matt Jacob :

I love it. I'm loving this conversation, it's great. Yeah, I miss honestly, like I miss the British sense of humor. I I don't get much of it here, and there's a lot I can leave uh in the UK that I don't really fit. But I miss pubs and I miss the British sense of humour. It's a unique sense of humor, so thank you for indulging me with that.

Nick Brandt:

I I think it's I think it's the um self-deprecation. It's just this kind of rush to put yourself down before somebody else does. Um and I got bullied at school, and I think that partly contributed it to it. I'm also Jewish, so it's a double whammy, and the Jewish kind of DNA is to also kind of neurotically put yourself down. Um I got out of England, Britain as fast as I could. I couldn't wait to escape. Being a bit of a depressive person, I found the the kind of negativity and sort of a Britain just I I would have just got sucked under too much. And moving to California, the sunshine and the more positive attitude, even if people were basically saying yes when they meant no, even if there was a certain fakeness, the possibility of yes keeps you going. And the sunshine keeps you going. Um so the the the irony is that I love photographing in shitty northern cloud, northern European cloudy skies, but I photograph in anywhere I'm not I'm not interested in photographing in the UK or America, where I've lived. And that's you know, and then we get into that whole conversation. See, I'm off on a, I'm off on a, and he's off on another pancake.

Matt Jacob :

I want to go there. I want to go, I know where you're going. I want you to go there.

Nick Brandt:

Yeah, which is of course the idea that you should photograph in the places that you know. And well, I left the UK when I was 23 and I have no intention of ever returning. And I'm leaving America because I'm so repulsed by what has become of it. So, like, why don't I I'm not really in, I don't want to photograph in a place I'm repulsed by, and I don't want to photograph in the place I left. So I'm photographing the human condition. And so for me, it's when I'm whether I'm photographing in as you go through the chapters of Today May Break, Kenya, Zimbabwe, Bolivia, Fiji, Syrian families in Jordan. It's the human condition. And so it's that's the unifying thing.

Matt Jacob :

But why why if you had to photograph in the US under the same pretense, what would you what would you what would you photograph? Because climate change affects us all, displacement affects us all, animal cruelty is affects us all.

Nick Brandt:

Oh yeah, of course. So oh listen, we we've yeah, we've been hammered by wildfires where I live. We in 2018, the place was absolutely hammered. I there is two things. There is a social safety net, generally speaking, uh, in wealthy countries. Um that means that if it all goes to shit, in theory, there's some semblance of a social safety net to fall back on. Secondly, and this is the unifying one of the unifying things about the people and the places I photographed through those chapters, they are all amongst those vulnerable people who are the least responsible for climate change. They live in countries and live lives where their carbon emissions are minute. And whereas in America and Australia, Canada, Europe, um certain countries in the Middle East, um the uh the carbon emissions are huge. And so I I kind of I keep thinking, oh I should sort of try, but I'm not. I need to be I need to have that compulsion. I keep coming back to you need to feel I need to feel compelled to create the next whatever body of work is. And I just I don't feel it. I don't emotionally I don't get it photographing here or UK.

Matt Jacob :

And that's really important, right? You've gotta you've gotta feel that that pull and you've gotta feel that emotional connection to what you want to shoot. Otherwise it's not gonna be the work that you you want to put out there.

Nick Brandt:

So I I think so. I mean, let me ask you, Matt. I mean, you're you know, you're not photographing in the UK. And do do anybody have you had people say to you, well, what you know, why are you not shooting like where you came from?

Matt Jacob :

Indirectly, yes. Have people saying, well, you're kind of romanticizing a struggling indigenous population, or you're taking advantage of them, and of course, none of that's true. Um, maybe it uh there's some byproduct of that, but I I know my process, I know how I interact with these people, I know what I give them. But um yeah, I think through that they they're kind of saying to me, Well, why why don't you fucking just shoot in your own country with your own people?

Nick Brandt:

Um L but let me just say something there, which is the only people in my mind that matter, the only people whose opinions matter to me are the people I photographed and the people in the country in which I photographed. And that has always been, as I said, thank you for seeing us, thank you for hearing us. And the the novelists who write about chapter I ask a novelist, like chapters one and four, um from the countries to write about because they know the people from those countries better than I do, obviously. Uh I'm just trying to capture a human condition. And they there is always that um embracing I just gotta tell you one quick story, which is a for a friend of mine in London, his daughter studies photography at the London College of Printing. And she told me, this is like a couple of years ago, that the students were most of the students were so terrified of photographing something that that was outside of their you know domain that they ended up just photographing themselves. So they're just photographing themselves, which you cannot be create out of. There's two kinds of fear. You can't create if you are fearful of what other people will think of you. Just you have to be fearless in that regard. There's another kind of fear which I ascribe to, which is I don't like creating on autopilot. I wanna um create not knowing how the f I'm gonna do it. And so, like at the end of chap during chapter two, yeah, towards the end of it, I was starting to feel, ah, I've already done this fog thing, and I'm starting to kind of know how to do it, and I wanna freak myself. Out again, because with the freaking out of how am I going to pull this off, I find that a catalyst to a new creativity. So then, guy, okay, how am I going to photograph people underwater where it looks like the most normal thing in the world, where you don't have float hair and floaty dresses, and people just look like they're sitting there having their portrait taken online just happens to be underwater. And how am I going to photograph these human islands in in the middle of the desert and the way that it connects with the mountains? And um, and how am I going to do it in sunlight when I've never wanted to shoot in sunlight? And the answer to that question was after two weeks of being frightened of the sunlight, going, oh, just embrace it. Just embrace it. Stop running away from it. Embrace it. It's about climate change. Well, what do you have with climate change? Baking sun. So why are you? Yes, it's more beautiful aesthetically in cloud because it's more melancholy, like I said, but this is about you go in the rainy season for the cloud, but it's sunny every day. Well, embrace it. And like I have always found I could go through probably any photograph and describe to you how the photograph ended up being a usable photograph because of a problem I encountered along the way. In other words, the problem made the photograph, and I again quotation marks better because I don't like using good, better, best. It's like it's all subjective. But in my opinion, the photograph was better because of something that was a problem. And instead of running away from it, you eventually go, f it, I'm just gonna work with this problem.

Matt Jacob :

Fascinating. Very, very, very interesting. I won't um I can't leave without my audience knowing what you shoot on. So you're still Pentac 67, medium format film.

Nick Brandt:

No, I wish, I wish. So I used to shoot on Pentac67, and then the last project was I did with medium format film was Mamir R Z R Z 672 for Inherit the Dust, which we didn't talk about at all. And over the years, I had so many technical f ups that I didn't know until the film was processed. And on Inherit the Dust, I was neurotically sending back the 120 medium format roles to from Kenya to a lab that I always used in London to hand process to make sure everything was fine. Every two weeks, I'd send it back with somebody on a on a plane. And um everything looked fine, all properly processed. I'd see scans of the contact sheets and go, great, great, great, great. Then I got home and I started scanning the negatives and had a rush of blood to my head like nothing else, which was that in two out of the three Mamiya bodies, the mirror was faulty and was vibrating the negatives as it the mirror came up. And when you're shooting at a 30th of a second, that vibration can be enough to show in the vibration of the actual negative. And the images were stitched together to form panoramas and post. I do kind of, you know, consecutive frames that would be posted again in this like giant sort of you know 12 by 24 um centimeter, you know, cumulative neg. And I couldn't, I had to go back and reshoot all over again. And it cost me a fortune. Let me just say the second reshoot, the reshoot was quotation mark, better. So it cost me a fortune, but the end result was better. Um but it kind of scared me off. And I so I went into medium format digital, and with the first two chapters, and there was a series called This Empty World, which we haven't talked about as well, which had to be digital by its very nature. But then on The Day May Break, chapters one and two, with the fog, when you're using fog machines on location, every single frame with every single shift in the breeze, obviously the fog is changing. And it you'll get a blob of it that suddenly covers somebody's face. And you don't necessarily see it in that moment. And then if you got back home and you process and you go, Oh shit, the perfect frame, there's a big blob of smoke, fog over the animal's face or the person's face, or whatever. Oh, if only I'd known, I'd have shot some more frames. So I that was absolutely had to be digital, and going underwater had to be digital. And then by that point, when you're spending thousands of dollars a day shooting, like in the desert with the Echo Bow Voices, I was housing 40 Syrian family members because what they were all they came from all over Jordan, and I would bring them down, put them in this uh camp hotel where the crew were, and I would be paying for you know, 60 people a day and uh and their lodging and their food and the transportation, and just so that I could experiment that photographic jazz thing I mentioned earlier, that experimentation um and that costs money, and when you're spending that amount of money to not know for sure what you've got is an exercise in potential chop my head off and I'm gonna boil it for fing up. So shooting medium format digital, I miss the six-seven format because it's not about definition for me, it's about the field of vision. And the larger the field of vision, the more I love it. So in an ideal world, I would shoot eight by ten playglass, and failing that, four by five, and failing that, six by seven. And if I could, I would go back to the six by seven film in a heartbeat, but it would need to be a project where I'm not spending vast amounts of money in the creation of that work. So right now I use I need a camera to turn me on. And I thought when I went to digital, oh shit, how the hell am I going to find a camera that turns me on? And I found the Fujifilm GFX 100. And even though it has an electronic viewfinder, the reason I'm turned on by that camera is because of one thing, which is it has a rotating eyepiece viewfinder. And so I can still, I will not look at a screen, not interested, and I will not look through a viewfinder. You can't, and the viewers can't see me, you know. I'm looking through a viewfinder at eye level. I'd love the for me to be turned on by what I'm doing, I need to be looking down into the equivalent of the ground glass. So the elect basically the electronic ground glass. And that's what that eyepiece viewfinder, rotating viewfinder, provides me.

Matt Jacob :

I didn't know the GFX had had those. That's good.

Nick Brandt:

Yeah, it's a$569 accessory. So there you go. We did actually have one tech geek out at the end of the at the end of the podcast.

Matt Jacob :

I kind of have to put it in. So um No, no, no.

Nick Brandt:

I'm happy to I'm happy to talk about that, you know. I'll tell you. So like, yeah, anyway, go on. No, go on. Tell me. Well, if we talk about that, so um talking of photojournalists, so I was absolutely adamant all the years I photographed that I only use prime lenses. Like to me, Zoom was I was I was such a fing purist. Like, oh no, no, no, no. I only, I only shoot on a prime lens. And then I uh Brent Stern, the photojournalist who's a great photographer, he was up at my house looking at Prince, and he I was saying, you know, next project, and he said, Oh yeah, I've got that camera. Why don't you get a zoom? And I went, a zoom? I'm not getting a zoom. And then I thought, okay, fine, it I'll just buy this 45 to 100, which is the equivalent of 35 to 80 kind of thing. And uh I'm just gonna have it to set up and then I'm gonna just switch to my pro my prime to do the real, the real photograph. So I stuck the 45 to 100 on on day one of the day may break, and it never came off for all four, you know, for all four chapters. Because, of course, as any, you know, sentient other photographer knows, it enables you in that spontaneous moment to just get the perfect frame instead of losing the moment because you've got up and stepped back eight inches, which is how I'd always worked through the rest of my photographic career. So I can be very stuck in my ways and like, dude, there's a there's another way. Get a zoom.

Matt Jacob :

I think as photographers, we have to be less stuck in our ways than ever before. I mean, things are moving so fast. We touched upon obviously AI, which I don't want to go into again. We touched on social media, which I'm bored of talking about. Um, what I what I am aware of though is that we have to be malleable, we have to be flexible. If, you know, a leaving, parting gift for our audience, if you can, what type of advice would you give to young photographers or young wannabe photographers wanting to do this for a living?

Nick Brandt:

I've already I've already said it, which is create for yourself. Do not create for others. Because if you create for others and it doesn't work out, you're gonna be really fed off because you didn't even create something that was what you really cared about. So create for yourself. And if it doesn't work out, well, at least you did what you wanted to do. And you know what? On the next project or the next tomorrow, you may it you may get the response that you hope for whilst also being true to yourself.

Matt Jacob :

Does the the caveat being creating for yourself doesn't necessarily mean trying to get as many likes and follows on social media? Oh, yeah.

Nick Brandt:

Um, so yeah, I mean it is f oh brother. Um and I thought you said we weren't going to talk about social media, which for me.

Matt Jacob :

I know, but I wanted to define what you meant by create for yourself. It doesn't mean what getting validation, it means creating for something that's inside that you that is that is that that inspired and like this applies to obviously any creative field.

Nick Brandt:

As a musician, as a as a everything, anything and everything that's creative. I mean, it's to me stating the obvious. And sometimes you think you're being you're not compromising, and then you look back and you go, oh, I actually was compromising. I didn't even realize at the time. And I did it as a filmmaker, um, which I'm not going to talk about. Um, but just the mere act of going out. You know, there are friends I have who have been artists from the day they left college. And they have struggled financially, but they have stayed true to themselves and they have had a lifetime of work. Meanwhile, I uh for example, because I wanted to make movies and I just would sort of practice my craft in other more commercial forms, I wasn't doing that. So that's what I'm an example of, oh, I was compromising. However, I will also say, of course, that everybody has to make a living. And it's better to make a living in some tangential way connected to your craft that you are most obsessed by. So as a filmmaker, you're directing commercials or you're directing music videos or whatever, and you still can go on to become this, create these incredible pieces of art as a filmmaker. Um social media, it's it seems that we are all reduced to becoming a spotty, unpopular teenage version of ourselves, by which I mean we become like 15 again, worrying about, oh God, nobody, nobody likes me. And we all do it, it doesn't matter how successful you are, like you end up doing that. And it's again very frustrating because for me, all my visually complex work is totally ruined on a phone. And in like in just take print print sales of the deck, Echo of Our Voices, by far and away, it's actually almost sold out, is a photograph called the Cave. The Cave has an aspect ratio of 3.41 to 1. It is a panoramic of 28 Syrian families all connected in this cave looking out across the desert, like a long photographic frieze. And that photograph has only sold when people have seen the physical print at art fairs and in exhibition. And on a phone screen, it's a ridic it's ridiculous. You can barely, it's like ants. You don't even know they're people. But I obstinately I do actually, Matt, there is you know, I do worry, um, does it matter that we're now at one minute and twenty one hour and twenty minutes? Okay. I do worry, and I'm curious for your opinion, um, that people's work conscious, subconsciously or consciously, is going to or is already changing to be more phone friendly. By which I mean it's vertical and it's closer.

Matt Jacob :

100%. But that that that's been that's been going on for 10 years. People, you know, when Instagram came out, because it was kind of like the leading photographic social media platform, and it went from square, you know, it started in square, then it went to um four by five or whatever, I don't even know what fing ratios they are at the moment that are conducive to the algorithm and to fears. But yeah, totally. I know photographers here. I speak to photographers and have done on my podcast as well as just being in the community, like they will create in the moment, in camera, specifically for what it looks like on Instagram.

Nick Brandt:

So depressing. And when you actually see, like, say people come up to my house where we have a the sun sets into the ocean at the moment, and you'll see like this our eyes are landscape, our field of vision, it is landscape. And when you look out to a landscape, it's landscape, and I see everybody taking photographs vertically, which is like I just want to rip the phone out of their hands, go, no, no, it's actually a better photograph if you go horizontally. I know it won't look as good on your wretched Instagram feed, but and it's it's so it's very I kind of have to be stubbornly true to myself to go, nope, this is the way that it should be seen in this, you know, and it in that regard, in that photograph, for example, it paid off. But it was it took people seeing the prints for it to work. If it was just on a phone, it would be like, you know. Yeah.

Matt Jacob :

I have faith in the I have faith in the the physical presence of or proximity of people with prints. Maybe not so much in the book world. I think that's going to become a real cottage industry, but I still see I st if anything, an up-to-I mean, if film has has grown, people still want that kind of the tangible nature of photographs. I still see it with art generally. Um, so I'm I'm hopeful of that. I agree with you on the kind of the photo book side. And when you see these, and I'm looking at print on my wall now, it just it gives if done well, it gives me goosebumps and I connect with it, and I'm really interested in it. And I want it, I want it. Give me, gimme, gimme, gimme. You just don't get that.

Nick Brandt:

And right, and also it's how you print, what you print on. And I see so many photographs that I think thought, oh, they look great on a backlit computer screen. I actually don't use, I don't look at Instagram on my phone. I go onto the desk. I'm one of two, I'm two in the two percent demographic that looks at Instagram on a computer. Um, but then I go and see photographs in person, and a lot of them like, oh, that doesn't work at all. But there are photographs that you can't see on a backlit computer screen, how beautiful they are in print form. They may be printed on rice paper, they may be printed, they may be platinum prints, they may be collodion, plate collodion, and they are wondrous in person, um, the physical object. But again, I we I know we need to be cognizant of where as well of like that this wretched thing is a democratizing platform. This I'm I'm holding up viewers. I'm holding a listen, listen, this I'm holding up my phone right now.

Matt Jacob :

He's he's in his closet holding a phone, crouched in the corner. Um, yeah, but it's a it's a we talk talk about it's just the dichotomy and this this real difficult um balance we find with wanting to grow an audience in a good way, in an ethical and responsible way. Certainly, as photographers with messages and stories, we want to kind of reach people, but then we don't want to kind of dilute our artistic integrity or kind of just you know go the other end, the other side of the fence and just create for that with a byproduct of of maybe something else. So it's a it's a difficult one. And I understand how how certainly youngsters. I mean, you and I, we remember when there was no internet. We remember when there was dial-up. We remember then there was landline phones. Oh, the phones ring. Who's this calling at 7 p.m.?

Nick Brandt:

You know, it's like and and rust to sound like a very, very old f. Um, I just want to say that um I'm so grateful that I grew up without the internet. I am so grateful I grew up without social media. I do not envy kids subjected to the anxiety of social media. We grew up just in a way, oh we were in my death. In my day, we grew up just running around climbing trees and falling out of them. And hooray for that.

Matt Jacob :

Well, um, Nick, your voice is one of few that should be listened to, and we need more of this. Would it be this one or ridiculous pompous British accent that we still have? I love it. Um, thank you so much for taking the time. Uh we didn't even touch on all of your other books and all your projects. You've just done too much amazing work for us to fit into one small conversation. So thank you for everything. Thank you for being such a wonderful artist, spokesman. And and we didn't even talk about the foundation that you set up, but I'm gonna link all this in the in the description and I'm gonna encourage people to to go there, check it all out. Um, but yeah.

Nick Brandt:

And that's that's assuming that anybody is still listening at the hour and 28-minute mark. I mean, really, it's just do you know they could have watched an entire film in this time.

Matt Jacob :

On a personal note, like do it, doing podcasts, and you've probably spoken to other podcast hosts about this. It's difficult, you know, to get people to just listen to important conversations. And the reason I started this was because I wanted to have long-form conversations. And I I heard this from I think it was Sam Harris or another commentator's. Like, when did long form conversation become a thing? It's just conversation. Now we have to label like anything past five minutes as a long form conversation. It was just a conversation. Um, so getting people to listen to conversations uh is just so is just so difficult. So you you joke, but like getting people past the two-minute mark.

Nick Brandt:

Which is why I was so neurotic about like, okay, am I gonna I'll give you an interesting enough answer to make people continue to listen? And then of course you get into this really depressing part, and it's just oh now they'll zone out. Um and miss and miss and miss the the the um the new swear words, the fun swear words from Matt towards the end. Are you gonna keep that in? Are you gonna get that keep the C-word in?

Matt Jacob :

We might have to, we might have to take the C word out. I don't think I've ever kept that in before, but I I which is ironic because I use it every day. Of course.

Nick Brandt:

Because because of course, in in Britain, unlike America, we use it much more uh liberally.

Matt Jacob :

Yeah, I use it more with my friends. I never really call anyone a c in, you know, with animosity. Never.

Nick Brandt:

No, no, no. Oh, and even that is basically it's just like as a as a kind of jokey, jokey thing. Yeah.

Matt Jacob :

Alivi to a wonderful evening on West Coast. Thank you so much. Um I hope we can do this again because there's so much more to talk about. I have touched barely any of my notes. So um, yeah, thank you for being such a wonderful host and great collaborator in this. And um, yeah, speak to you again hopefully next year, maybe.

Nick Brandt:

Sure, I'd be glad to.

Head Shot

Matt Jacob

Host