Eiichiro Oda is a relentlessly obsessive creative genius who has devoted nearly every waking hour of his adult life to building one of the most extraordinary fictional universes ever imagined.
I think that I was always the kid who was getting sent to the principal's office for like having too many opinions and it feels like as an adult it's paying off, you know, like I was like a little producer in training.
It's not like she has her value system, which kind of clashes with what she finds. She's like a Tabula Rasa at the beginning, and she's quite childlike and very open. And so it's not just the way, the very restricted way in which she actually reads the world that appealed to me. I wanted some of that childlike freshness and openness and naivety to survive all the way through the text in her.
I've always found that the things that I want to run away from making work about are the things that I most need to make work about or the things that are actually going to be interesting to explore.
I got five people in the room and they're unified through one song. Or you have this great composition, an outline. Now it's time for me to create a different palette and paint it differently.
Had I known what I was doing, I wouldn't have written that line. I would have found a way to make it rhyme. It was only years later that I became aware of what a songwriter was even supposed to do. I was really just a kid who was kind of writing from the hip and the heart.
And I need you more than want you. And I want you for all time. And the first thing I thought of when I read it is false rhyme. That's a false rhyme. That's the biggest, that's the most biggest, awfulest, dumbest, most obvious false rhyme in history. And night after night, at performance after performance, person after person comes up to me. Until now, I'm talking about 100,000 people have walked up to me and said, you know the greatest line you ever wrote? I need you more than want you and I want you for all time.
We've never lacked for ideas in marketing we've been constrained by resources you only have so much budget so much time so many people with AI as sort of an accelerant every idea fear that you have suddenly becomes possible.
Writers, designers, actors, coders, musicians, thinkers — they're all worried about being replaced by machines. But what if the A.I.s are actually here to help?
I feel like I spent the first decade of my career trying to seem normal and trying to seem palatable and trying to seem like I wasn't too much or too weird or too specific. And I think that the things about myself that I tried to hide are the things that now I'm trying to put at the center of the work.
I think the goal is to find things that feel anti-algorithm — stories and characters that couldn't have been generated by a machine trying to please everyone. And weirdly, I think that's what connects with people the most, because audiences can feel the difference between something that was made to be consumed and something that was made because someone was burning to make it.
I think that somewhere along the way I internalized an idea that the goal was to sand off all the strangeness until you become a surface that lots of people can project onto. And what I found is that the more I did that, the more I disappeared, and the more I leaned into specificity and strangeness, the more people seemed to connect.
Everyone had an expression of their fear that they had wanted to show. And you can't ignore your blackness when you're writing a horror story. It's like black horror serves a purpose in that it provides a place for people to through writing it, creating it, shooting it, directing it, or taking it in to kind of process this elemental human thing that we all deal with, which is fear.
I had thought I was going to write about this elderly gent living out his later years in this college and it was supposed to be a friendship that he forms with a young Indian woman student. And then I sat down to write the story and for some reason there appeared on my typewriter the words when he woke up that morning he was dead. I thought where'd that come from?
I decided I needed a piece of media with a woman who's been underestimated by men for 50 years and a woman who spent 50 years telling them they're wrong.
I'm never in awe of another actor, because it's all the same business. Some actors are fine actors. I'm not quite fine actors, good actors. I'm never in awe of anyone in our profession. I'm in awe of musicians or painters.
AI takes everything to the average and people aren't interested in reading average or average doesn't grab your heart. It's something that's an outlier that you haven't seen before that resonates with you. The value is judgment, perspective, taste.
AI is essentially looking at patterns and trying to guess what the next word should be. And such that it's a regression to the mean. AI takes everything to the average and people aren't interested in reading average or average doesn't grab your heart. It's something that's an outlier that you haven't seen before that resonates with you.
I think I've had the feeling both times after my children's death, that words often fall short. And falling short doesn't mean not succeeding. Falling short doesn't mean failing. But when I started a new project, I would like a subject that words naturally fall short. So music is that choice.
I feel strongly that we are spirits having a physical experience. And I think it's just helpful for me to sort of locate how much I think a character is in conversation with his creator.
When we lose that power to imagine ourselves into the being of another creature another human or in fact a caterpillar uh we we lose the capacity for empathy and that's the thing that's going to destroy us in the future if we let it.
You go to these places and you think no one is ever going to be able to meet you there. Then you write a story and suddenly hundreds of thousands if not millions of people are meeting you there.
An expert thinks he knows it all, but he's also rather inhibited by his experience, his knowledge, and he finds it difficult to steer off the well-known path. Whereas if you have a lack of experience, but huge curiosity, and you approach your new challenge with naivety, I think it's sort of easier for you as an inexperienced designer to come up with something different and to follow a different path.
it became a joke in our house because my husband is an engineer and he loves music, but it's not his field. And every morning at breakfast, I would tell him, oh my God, you must listen to this. Do you know this woman, la, la, la, la, la. And then he was like, wow, so interesting this. And I was like that for, I think, almost a year.
David's help and input was always to expand what I'd started and just more to think about more colors, more ideas, more suggestions about how to really deepen and enrich the character, the scene, the moment, whatever it might call for.
I didn't have the skillset, I didn't have the knowledge. Well, David Lynch had left the series during the second season. And he was the sensibility behind the show. So with him gone, there were new writers. And you felt as like the person whose point of view we most often see, and as someone who was very close to Lynch, that you should be an anchor and you should help keep the ship afloat.
I think that I wish more people knew that criticism was also a kind of an act of sustained attention, right? Which is like kind of radical in this moment where we're being asked to divide our attention and to scroll, right, endlessly, right? the the idea of spending time with a painting or a book or a song and really considering what elements of it you favor, what elements of it you might not agree with, what elements are rubbing you the wrong way — it's such a gift and I think that's like actually an act of love.
I was just following my intuition, just following my nose, so to speak. And this guy's voice was fantastic. And it was full of melodic content, and it was full of meaning. And so I began working with it because I sensed that there was going to be a lot happening there.
I've been really open about my mental struggles. And thank God we're all talking about it now. And it's not swept under the rug. But yeah, it took me a really long time to sort of navigate how to not sink further into darkness when it hits, and how to know that it's not a forever thing, and to be able to sometimes be quiet or sometimes to write songs to it.
I think we're more custodians of the culture, right? We're here to facilitate conversation about the things that we enjoy. We're here to make connections between um cultural objects or cultural productions. Um we're not here to tell you what to do. We're here to sort of like push you to think, which seems to be an unpopular thing these days.
I was working as a waitress, but I was also doing a little bit of session work. I was finally getting some work as a session singer... I crashed the audition. I said, hi, Michael, into a video. I said, I just moved here six months ago as a school teacher. And then I sang a song by Denise Williams called Free. And I'm going to be free. And I got called back and we went from there.
Coke or Red Bull or whoever, they cannot make comedy at the level that we make. It doesn't matter if they have $100 million cuz comedy isn't about spending money. It's about building something that you need a unique machine to do it with. And especially in giant companies with all the approvals and bureaucracy, comedy is not designed to survive that, right?
AI really wants every sentence to be the most important sentence. It's like there's no like thinking ahead to to the um to like to the end of the essay or something. It's just trying to make every sentence sound impressive, which makes it very tiring to read.
In music, we learn that being in harmony with the world doesn't mean everyone is singing the same note at the same time. It's about embracing the dissonance and following the heart to home. We learn that being in time with the world doesn't have to mean stepping into line.
Daffy was an interesting character, I think, because he would rush in and fear to tread at the same time. And he also could be fawning and overbearing at the same time. And I think that happens with very many of us when we, sometimes in the reverse, when we go in to talk to the boss and ask for a raise, we're overbearing, when we get inside, we're fawning. But Daffy is both at the same time.
I think that I was really ignoring my personal relationship with the cello. I think I was using the cello as a tool, trying to extract all the good that I could from it in a way that would make an impact for other people. But I wasn't really considering what does this sound, what does this practice mean for me?
If you turn to children's fiction, you can, I think, find what endures of us when all our adult compromises and poses are stripped away. You can, I think, find the very meat of the human heart.
I think that I was really ignoring my personal relationship with the cello. I think I was using the cello as a tool, trying to extract all the good that I could from it in a way that would make an impact for other people. But I wasn't really considering, what does this sound, what does this practice mean for me?
Looking back, I think that I was really ignoring my personal relationship with the cello. I think I was using the cello as a tool, trying to extract all the good that I could from it in a way that would make an impact for other people. But I wasn't really considering, what does this sound, what does this practice mean for me?
At the age of 44, 45, when many pop stars are being thrown into the oldies bin, he was still able to create very vital, very new, very important music that was opening up minds and hearts and ears around the world.
Today's models can grind through calculations, combine known techniques, and search enormous spaces, but still struggle with intuition, theory building, identifying the right questions, and developing the kind of big-picture understanding that drives much of mathematical progress.
Imagination is like a muscle. The more you use it, the stronger it becomes. But if you don't use it, it gets weaker and your body will rely on something else to do it for you.
For me, funny and sad go together kind of like chocolate and peanut butter. They enhance one another and for me the saddest books are the ones that have wit and humor because I think through humor you get those flashes of what makes life glorious and mysterious.
I think one of the most difficult things for an independent designer is creating your signature language. Like, what is that signature identity that someone can recognize without even seeing a logo?
2mo ago
Underscored — save the words that stop you in your tracks.
