Nothing But Anarchy

Eps. #91 The Urgency of Experimenting with AI, Tiktok Sensation Reesa Teesa, Social Media, Kevin Durant and Embracing Failure Without Excuses

• Chad Sanders • Season 1 • Episode 90

Share episode

As rain patters against the ground in Prospect Park, we record our first episode of Nothing But Anarchy outside. Keep an ear out for the birds chirping as Chad delves into the urgency to experiment with AI, The Breakfast Club and Reesa Teesa, Kevin Durant and embracing failure without excuses.

Tune in Tuesdays and Thursdays at 12PM ET to watch the show live on Youtube. Follow @chadsand on Instagram and subscribe to the Nothing But Anarchy Youtube channel for full interviews and more anarchy!

Executive Produced by: Chad Sanders
Produced by: Morgan Williams

Speaker 1:

This is like a field trip. All right, welcome to another Anarchy. We are in Prospect Park. We just spent 30 minutes trying to get the shot right because this is our first time doing the show outside in the elements. We didn't mean to do the show in the elements, but it is. I don't know what the word is for this. This disgust-o little trickle of sky piss is coming down on my head. Nobody's here in the park except us pretty much. There's been a few strollers walking by, but we're going to do the show. So Morgan said she put on the docket Top thing. Top item is explain what this experiment is.

Speaker 1:

So there's a few things going on here. One is we do the show every single time from the Brooklyn podcasting studio, which is a very nice studio, but I want to offer to the audience like more visually than what we can get from the same studio backdrop every single time we do the show. So I called Morgan. We talked about this briefly in our last episode. But I called Morgan and I was like hey, can we do the show from some new locations? Can we be outside? Can we go in Prospect Park? I'm actually impressed that we did Prospect Park as the first one, so that's pretty good. I had envisioned more of like a sunny, beautiful, sunshining day and instead what we got was this but like, I actually think this was in the plan because if there were a bunch of people out here like lounging and stuff, I would probably feel a little bit self-conscious about doing the show out here. So, anyway, blah, blah, blah, we are artists and we wanted to do it and make it look beautiful, so I'm going to jump right in. I am getting rain sprayed right in the face, don't care, I'm going to do this. So the first thing on the docket today, let me look and I brought my scroll because no phones, because that would take away from the beauty here but ironically, what I want to talk about is artificial intelligence.

Speaker 1:

We talked about artificial intelligence in the last episode, but today I have actually spent I would say I've probably spent 20 hours in the last five days tinkering with AI, specifically tinkering with text to video tools for AI, like AI generator tools, and as I was going through it, I had some thoughts. I had some thoughts and I had some feelings and I was like all right, when we do the show, I want to talk about how I feel and how I think some of you all feel about AI, and I'm going to talk to a very specific oh, there's a really cute dog coming. I'm going to speak to a very specific type of person as I talk about AI here. Oh, my God, it's a puppy. So, oh, my God, wow, so cute, okay. So here's the thing I understand and relate to the resistance and the reluctance to embrace artificial intelligence, especially and particularly AI tools that are used to make video. Okay, hello, hi, baby, hi, booger, you're so precious. Okay, bye, let me get into this. Let me get into that, all right. So here's the thing I relate to. Here's what I'm trying to say Fuck, let me say it, god, let me say it. Okay, please, god, all right.

Speaker 1:

I relate to and understand the resistance that some people feel to embrace, use, understand, learn about, tinker with the AI tools that are being rolled out right now, specifically the ones that are like text to visual generators. I'm talking about there's. In the last four or five days, I've probably spent 20 hours experimenting with maybe 15 of these different tools, just to see what I, as somebody who used to work at Google and now makes art for a living, I feel like almost the perfect guinea pig to go see what I can get out of these tools, to go see if I can get something that's actually good out of these tools. But before I even speak to what I was able to get out of the tools, what I want to say is I relate so strongly to the people who feel resistance to use these things, and I want to talk to a particular swath of the people in that group.

Speaker 1:

So there are some people who feel a resistance to these tools because they think that they are going to make the art world and the art industries worse. Okay, they think that they're going to take humanity out of art, take singularity out of art. There's people who are like this is going to ruin art, like we're going to have computers and robots and geeks and tech nerds sitting behind keyboards making the movies, making the music, making the images, making like every single visual that you see on socials. There are people who feel that way. I understand that fear and I don't think it is an unbased fear. I do think this is going to change art, especially massively consumed art. But I want to speak to a different subset of people. There's some overlap here, but I want to talk to a very specific set of the people who are resisting AI, and that is the people who are resisting because they are intimidated by the idea of having to work with a new tool. Okay, I'm going to say again, I want to speak specifically to the people who are intimidated by having to experiment with a new technology to stay in the art game, or to even get in the art game if you're not really in it yet. And I want to speak to that group of people, because one that is the group of people that I have been a part of. Like that is the group of people that I have allegiance to, that I belong to. I'm just going to be super honest about this. It reminds me of coding.

Speaker 1:

When I worked in tech, I was intimidated by the idea of coding. I looked at the industry itself, which was extremely white, which was extremely sort of gate kept by the money that it took to learn how to use the tools, by the people who are in charge of the tools, by the people who taught each other tools, by bro culture, by Reddit culture, by GitHub culture. I was intimidated by all of that, like I didn't, I didn't think I belonged in that, and so I kept myself out of it altogether. I paid people to make stuff that I could have learned how to make myself, and it cost money and I paid for that later. But in addition to that, like anytime, you have spent as much time as, for instance I'll speak for myself like me or my friends learning and practicing and trying to screen right, to make things, to produce, to direct, to go outside with a camera and do what we're doing right now, and then you see something that's coming that can allegedly make that all easier and more streamlined and more simple, but also belongs to someone that has the money to finance it.

Speaker 1:

That's scary. It feels like you're being pushed out and I relate to that. It's intimidating and the idea of then being up against all these newcomers, some of whom have more information about these tools, who have already been more native to these tools, who have already experimented with them, who have more time on their hands to just mess around with them all day Like it feels like an uphill climb that you're never going to be able to compete with. It feels like something you're never actually going to have solid footing in and it's intimidating. I relate. I'm saying I relate to it, but this is all I want to say. It's happening, it's urgent, it is going down right now in front of us, and you're not too late to get involved and learn how to use these tools.

Speaker 1:

They are basic as fuck right now. They're so simple, they're honestly, they're trash, like the stuff that comes out on the other end. When you do all this tinkering and messing with the scripts and changing the templates and using your little tokens that you get to make five generations a day or whatever. What comes out on the other end looks incredibly dystopian. It looks so different than the few that come out that we see and we all talk about because they look so real. Most of this stuff comes out looking like some ridiculous computer made video game. That doesn't. It doesn't even make sense. It's not even coherent. The images, the coloring is so off, the fingers are messed up, the faces don't make sense. But their tools are learning. I played with these tools like six months ago and they were so different than they are even now. They're so much better now but they're still so clunky and so blocky and so basic that anybody I could get a 10 year old to mess around with them and figure out how to get out what they want from them.

Speaker 1:

And this is the time, I think, right now, where experts on this shit are going to be determined. And I just don't like. I just want anybody who feels intimidated by these things like I have been intimidated by them to know you still have this moment, this exact moment to jump in mess with this stuff and be one of those people who's in front of this, instead of one of the people who gets left behind on this. So I'm coming here with a few tools that I have played with that I think anybody can pick up and mess around with and get something out of. Those are deep brain video, flicky, fliki and then, of course, chat GPT. Like, just spend 10 minutes today. Just go, just think to yourself OK, I want to create an image or a video of X.

Speaker 1:

Go, sit down with one of these things and just spend like 10 minutes while you're on the subway, while you're, while you're waiting for somebody outside, while you're waiting for your kids who are at school, while you're waiting for your dinner to cook, like, just while you're doing nothing, sitting on your ass watching TV. Just spend 10 minutes messing with this and I promise you will see that this is not a black box. This is simple. Right now, this is like this this is a the sky is falling moment. You still have this moment to get your hands dirty, get your feet wet with AI.

Speaker 1:

The train hasn't left the station yet, so if you're one of the ones look, if you're one of the ones is like I'm not fucking with that. That's going to ruin art. I don't even want to get near it. What a privilege to feel that way. Don't do it. If you're somebody who does this for a living or wants to do this for a living, if you're one of those people that's like oh, art is so precious and the robots are going to ruin art, and you know it's not going to ruin art, you know it's not going to have humanity in it and whatever, whatever, I'm not going near this. Blah, blah, blah. What a privilege for you. You probably make a living doing something else and you don't have to deal with this. That's fine. Please go sit over there to the people who do this for a living or want to do this for a living, but feel intimidated by what it's going to take to learn these tools. I'm trying to tell you you still have this moment to put your hands in it and figure it out. It is not that complex. The tools are clunky and basic, and if you do it now, six months from now, you will not have missed the train. I know I'm like. I know who am I being like. I don't even know who's the person that goes outside and just yells at the clouds. That's what I feel like right now.

Speaker 1:

I'm standing in the rain to tell you this, but this is Chad Sanders reporting live on the urgency of experimenting with AI. There's nothing but anarchy. My notes are soaking wet so I didn't get to use them. Please, let's go to the tunnel, morgan, before we get pneumonia. Look at the birds. They're so cute. They're getting worms, all right, ok. So we just moved from the middle of the field over there, where the puppy found us, to underneath this arch, and we're going to do segment two over here. So, ressa Tessa, this is going to be an extremely internetty segment, so prepare yourselves.

Speaker 1:

Morgan sent me a clip from the Shade Room today and it was like a carousel that had some of the interactions that are happening not in person but over, I guess, media waves between Ressa Tessa and Charlemagne the God. All right so and I don't want to spend that much time talking about, actually, to be honest, either, one of these people, because this is a topic that makes me squeamish, because it feels like a part of the corner of the internet that I do not want to be a part of, but here it is. I don't know how she would describe herself, but she is. I guess I can say she's a fat black woman. I think I'm supposed to and allowed to say that she is a recent internet sensation because of her viral. Well, the way she looks is relevant to this, so that's why I mentioned it, because it's coming, it's going to come up. She is a recent viral TikTok sensation because she did a series of TikToks like 50 or so of them which Morgan watched much of it, not all of it, but basically it was. I think it was called who Did I Marry who the fuck did I marry? And it is her, in so many words, telling the story of being bamboozled by a guy that she married, lied about his whole situation. I have not watched it. I don't even think that that my not watching it is relevant to what I'm going to say about this.

Speaker 1:

Now, there is a person who goes by a pseudonym, I'm sorry. Well, yeah, a pseudonym, a nickname Charlemagne the God, who is a radio host here in New York City and has a giant platform called the Breakfast Club. The Breakfast Club is basically like, I think, as big as a media entity can get without that media entity ever being accepted by white people and earning any sort of quote, unquote, prestige, value in Hollywood. I think that is as big as you can get without having any sort of like actual crossover, and I spend way too much time thinking about and watching the Breakfast Club, trying to understand how they were able to get to that size of platform. I mean, I've watched it happen. I was kind of there in the beginning 12 years ago when they had their first like viral moment with Ray J, just like watching how this thing has it blown up and expanded to such enormous heights while never actually crossing over. I don't know if that's been intentional by the Breakfast Club. I don't know if that says something about race and media. I don't actually understand what's going on there, but I pay close attention to it.

Speaker 1:

The host, the main host of the show, the big celebrity host of the show, is Charlemagne the God. This is review for like 95% of the people that listen to this. But just let me get through this because there are some others here. He I think he would describe himself this way like he's kind of an asshole, that's like his whole, that's his whole thing. And he goes on the Breakfast Club and he says about this woman. He calls her I believe he called her a big back, which is his way of referencing a fat person, and he said the point that he makes in this thing is that she was bamboozled because she's a big back Jesus and big back people want to believe somebody will love them, so they go with whatever. Somebody will tell them about why they love them. Pretty mean.

Speaker 1:

In one of these clips that I watched today that Morgan sent me, I see her on Tamron Hall Shout out to Tamron and she is telling Tamron that, amongst when I went and googled her, like she's everywhere right now, like she's doing all kinds of interviews Her audience has exploded. She's on Tamron Hall giving this emotional recount of how Charlemagne's comments hurt her feelings and the crowd is giving her a lot of oh and a lot of like. You know they're, they're, they're going with it, they're connecting with it and she's saying of everything that I have heard or seen of people talking about me since this viral moment, this is the one that hurt me the most, and I would have to guess that that's because the Breakfast Club is a really big part of black culture. I just got it. I mean, it just is what it is. There's no way around it. It is a huge platform in black culture, and so I think seeing the bully on that platform choose and point her out specifically as somebody to dig into made her feel away, made her feel sad. Frankly, made her feel hurt and triggered and self conscious.

Speaker 1:

I don't think I'm going to say what you guys think I'm going to say here. I think I don't. If what you are expecting me to say here is, like Charlemagne is bad and he shouldn't be saying those mean things about people, I think that's kind of obvious. So what I actually want to say here is a little bit different from that, and it's something that is relevant to me in my real life right now. As promised, I have begun the exercise, the, the, the, the journey of going through all of my comments on Instagram and responding to as many as I possibly can. In doing so, I have been surprised that 95% of what's going on there is mostly just like dialogue between people on the subject matter. Some people asking questions, some people giving long paragraphs of spiel on their point of view, etc. Etc. Etc. Maybe 5% of what's there is people in short, quippy, not even very clever ways, trying to just be mean to me.

Speaker 1:

Today I saw one it was on the one about, like mixed race couples. Whatever it was this guy, it literally his whole comment was you got problems. So I was like OK, thanks for the feedback. There was another guy who said On my Jay-Z take, which was about Jay-Z being a little bit nervous and fumbling the ball when he tried to go say his thing about Beyonce at the Grammys. The guy says something along the lines of like easy for you to say with your tiny platform and something like if you had a bigger platform, you would relate to this. And despite the discrepancies between where I'm at on this and where that guy was at, it hurt my feelings a little bit. I was like, oh, he's trying to make me feel small and it hurts when somebody tries to make you feel small. Another person called me Millie Vanilli, which I just thought was very funny and a dude that I know from college said that about me like six years ago and I thought it was funny and I still think it's funny and I do kind of look like Millie Vanilli. So I say that to say people get their shit off here. We know that. But this is, this is my thing, right, this is my thing about the whole thing. I there's such an echo in here. I feel so big.

Speaker 1:

I think that we have a social disorder which is it needs a name. I don't know what the name would be, but we think that there is a detachment between us as who we are and like as we actually are, and the ways that we use our voices and where they show up in different dimensions. Ok, I, as myself, like, if I write something in a book, if I write it in a screenplay, if I write it on Twitter, if I write it on, if I speak it on Instagram, morgan, you can hold me to this. This, the person stands on all of that. You will not take me to task on something that was written or said somewhere, somewhere, and my response to be yeah, but I just meant that on the internet.

Speaker 1:

Like, if I say it, I really mean it, I don't mean to bend my fingers to write something down that doesn't actually represent who I am and how I feel, and that means and I'm in like this is a difficulty with the job. If it hurts my mom's feelings, guess what? Me and my mom are going to have to talk about it. If it makes my sister mad, we're going to have to figure it out. If it makes somebody want to beat me up, I got to deal with that later. Like we don't, we're not avatars. We don't have avatars. If you publish it, I believe you, and not even necessarily that I believe you, but I believe that that represents you. That's what you meant to go into the world as you.

Speaker 1:

So for Resta Tessa, she chose Truly, like she chose, to shoot her shot at fame by telling this story. When we put a TikTok up, when we put a reel up, it is all of our combined ambition, unless you put it on that friends and family joint, or whatever that little thing is called, where you can only only like close friends can see it. We can splice it up a bunch of different ways and pretend, but every single time we press enter to shoot something off into the social sphere, there's a little bit or a big bit of you. That is a hope and a prayer, that that is going to go viral and it's going to change your life and when that happens, you and your voice and your story and all these other things that go with it, they go into the internet now and that's where there are people like Charlemagne the God waiting to have you as a Thanksgiving turkey. And you don't like. This is. This is now. I want to stop my feet because, more like Morgan said, I do like I do like.

Speaker 1:

Once you press publish on everything, on anything, you don't get to control what then happens to your thing. You guys, you keep posting photos of your kids. We are allowed to say your kids are ugly, we are, you are you're. It doesn't. This is. If we don't separate all these different industries and all these different mediums, they all belong to the same thing, which is this is the publishing industry.

Speaker 1:

Once you put something out into the world, it belongs to all of us. We can do whatever we want with it. That includes your image. That includes your story where you tell us that your partner stole from you. You know what I mean. Like you wanted to tell your story and get some verb behind it and have people celebrate it and see themselves in it, and you got all of that. You're sitting with Tamron Hall right now. You don't also then get to cut out the side of this entire thing which is people poking at it and being assholes and being mean, because that is part and parcel. It doesn't work with one without the other. So the thing that I wanna underscore here is it's a lesson to me, I think it's a lesson to everybody, I think it's something that I feel strong conviction about, which is what you publish. Publishing isn't just a book, it's not just a song, it's not a poem. What you publish is anything that you put out into public that has your name on it and your image next to it. You're responsible for it, and if somebody takes you to responsibility on it, there's nobody else to help you. Like, it is just so Okay.

Speaker 1:

So the NBA playoffs are about six weeks away. There are about 20 games remaining in the regular season, and something interesting is happening in the Western Conference, which is that there is a strong chance that we will end up with, as the four teams in the play and tournament, the Lakers, the Warriors, the Suns and the Mavericks, which would be a star power for the play-in for the one game, sort of like one game elimination play-in tournament that I bet the NBA never in their wildest dreams could imagine would be so marketable. So that would be Braun, anthony Davis, steph Curry, dre Montgomery, clay Thompson, kevin Durant, devin Booker, bradley Beal, luca Donchich, kyrie Irving, all playing for two playoff spots which would honestly just be like dessert for any sort of NBA fan, like, no matter how big or small. And as that approaches and as I think about that one game elimination thing, I've been thinking about sports arguments and sports takes lately regarding players and how they are remembered historically. Kevin Durant, when Kevin Durant comes up and, to a lesser extent, other guys, lebron being one of them but like Kevin Durant comes up and he's, in my opinion, a litmus test for how people look at their own lives. And that's what sports is. It is a backdrop, it's a pass back or a mirror for us to see ourselves. It's a story. Ultimately, like every season is a story playing out in front of us, and stories are where we're supposed to see ourselves. So Kevin Durant is a litmus test to me, because Kevin Durant is, as I see him, one of the three to five most gifted basketball players of all time and he has only, in 17 years, two rings I'm sorry, yeah, two rings and one MVP to show for it.

Speaker 1:

And when arguments around Kevin Durant come up, there are, generally speaking, two sides to the argument. There's the side for Kevin Durant, which says Kevin Durant never got what he needed in terms of the right environment to be one of the guys who wins four, five, six championships. He never had the right set of teammates who were healthy when it mattered most. He never had the right sort of coaching and organization behind him that could keep him in contention Year over year over year. Some people will say his body filled him or his teammates' bodies filled him. These are and, as you can tell, I'm struggling with the arguments for because I'm on the other side of this. The other side of this is, if Kevin Durant I've been watching Kevin Durant play basketball since I was in person in Maryland, since I was 14. And if Kevin Durant finishes his NBA career with just two NBA championships, that feels to me like a colossal disappointment, just for the talent that he has and regardless of the factors of his teammates' health and being on the right squads and what he was up against, and the LeBron James Heat and the Warriors and all these other things that come up. That's a failure, in my opinion.

Speaker 1:

Why I think this is a litmus test for how people see their own lives is that thing in us that makes us want to explain a way. Every failure, in my opinion, is very haunting. It's like a voice that you have to live with all the time, and it's one that almost characterizes your own life as a failure the more you speak to that voice. There are Dozens and dozens and dozens of failures in front of every single one of us. Right Like jobs will fail, career ventures will fail, marriages will fail, we will fail our children in different ways, we will fail ourselves by not trying at certain things.

Speaker 1:

But the voice that tells you that the reason why you fail is circumstantial, it's about the environment, it's about not having the right budget, it's about not having the right people behind you, it's about not having somebody next to you who could have kept the fuel and the thing going, or not having the right teammates, or whatever, whatever it is, in my opinion, a very dangerous voice. It's a voice that takes you out of the present. It's a voice that takes you out of yourself.

Speaker 1:

Where I deal with that voice in particular is telling myself damn, like Chad, why haven't you, why haven't you sold a movie that's been made yet? Why hasn't your shit blown up to the point where you're printing money at this point? Why do you not have the biggest whatever, whatever in whatever whatever? And every second that I spend talking to that voice and excusing away like everything that I'm doing is, in my opinion, like a rejection of everything that's great in my life right now, and that's a waste of my time and that's a waste of everybody's time, and I think that's a waste of time when we talk about people like Kevin Durant. So that's it. Okay, we did this in the rain, we're outside and we'll see you guys on Thursday at noon in the warmth of the Brooklyn Podcasting Studio. Goodbye.

People on this episode

Head Shot

Chad Sanders

Host