The Hollywood No: Why Honest Feedback Is the Rarest Thing in Show Business with Chris Barkley

Episode Summary

Product teams spend tons of energy planning — and almost none of the planning survives contact with the market.

Greg Ceccarelli (CPO, Spec Story / former CPO, Pluralsight) has a phrase for it: "cut twice, measure once." Get things out into the world. Most decisions are reversible. The market will teach you more in a quarter than a year of planning ever will.

Greg and I got into: — Why AI flipped the "longest pole in the tent" from engineering to decision-making — How Spec Story is trying to close the gap between "we decided this a Zoom ago" and actually building it — Why $5/hour might be a better pricing model than anything seat-based — And why truly authentic content can’t ever be automated.

Guest

Chris Barkley - Producer and member of the Producers Guild of America, board president of the Nashville Film Festival, and co-founder of FictionKit, a film development company, and Bonsai Creative, which connects advertisers with creators. Chris has produced three feature films in worldwide distribution, co-hosts the Make It Podcast, and serves on the boards of Columbia State and Nashville Public Radio.

Show Notes

What does it actually take to break into show business? Chris Barkley has produced three feature films, reads scripts for The Black List, and votes on film of the year for the Producers Guild — which means he sits on the side of the table where the answer is usually no. Chris and host Tom Noser dig into why that no is almost never honest, what separates the one or two great scripts Chris has read in fifteen years from the other five hundred, and why age matters less for actors than the people telling you it's too late. Plus: the police-uniform test for whether a performance is real, why the industry is hungrier for content than it has ever been, and the uncomfortable truth that the clip you saw go viral was paid for.

In this episode, Chris and Tom discuss:

The Hollywood no — Why nobody tells an artist their work is bad, how that kindness costs people years, and the difference between a professional note and unprofessional honesty

How spec scripts actually sell — Work for hire and what a writer gives up, The Black List and Franklin Leonard's reclaiming of a poisoned word, and Scott Myers' free catalogue of every spec deal since 1991

Good versus great — Why Chris has read one or two great scripts in fifteen years out of roughly five hundred, why most fall apart in the first twenty pages, and why typos get read as character

Structure versus character — What has to happen by page two, page ten, and the end of Act One, and whether Syd Field's architecture still holds up

Write what you know — but know something — The advice the late Nashville songwriter Wayne Perry gave Chris at twenty-one, and what it means for anyone stuck at their desk

What makes a performance land — Code-switching in Huckleberry Finn and James, the friend Chris trusts to be exactly who he is, and the police-uniform test for authenticity

Abundance, not scarcity — Why creative envy misreads the market, what vertical micro-dramas and casting at internet scale have changed, and what fewer buyers actually threatens

Making it versus selling it — Why virality is purchased, how clip farms manufacture the appearance of consensus, and why you shouldn't quit until you've exhausted the marketing half of the job

Transcript

Tom: [00:00:00] What do you tell people who want to make something great and are making themselves crazy trying? How do you break into show business? And is Jim's way of talking in Huckleberry Finn an act? These are some of the questions I asked Chris Barkley, a member of the Producers Guild of America, the board president of the Nashville Film Festival, a podcast host, and co-founder of Bonsai Creative, which connects advertisers with creators, and Fiction Kit, a film development company. Chris's own podcast, the Make It Podcast, has over 300,000 subscribers. He's produced three feature films, serves on the boards of Columbia State and Nashville Public Radio, and takes time to teach us about show business and media on this episode of the Fortune's Path Podcast.

Tom: [00:00:52] Chris, thank you so much for coming. It is really nice to see you again. We've been catching up and keep saying that we're gonna have a podcast, and now we're gonna have one. So what do they call it? A busman's holiday for you, since you're in the podcast business?

Chris: [00:01:09] Yeah, it's kind of doing the same thing we've been doing, but just on the record.

Tom: On the record, exactly.

Chris: You have to tell me, by the way, about this space we're in. This is the basement we're in?

Tom: [00:01:19] This is the basement studio. Yeah, this is a lot of fun. So my son Joe, who's our middle child, grew up down here. He had his friends come over and they'd play video games in the space just behind you, and then over your shoulder is where Joe slept. And I have a sister-in-law who's got four kids and lives in Maine. When we bought this house, she said, you want your house to be the house that the kids come to to hang out, because then you get to meet all of your kids' friends and you have a little bit of control about what they're doing. And so she said, you need to fix a space for them, fix your basement up. We took her advice. It was great advice. And now it is the international headquarters of Fortune's Path. So anyway, I'm glad you like this place.

Chris: [00:02:09] I do. It's very eclectic and it's a good reflection of you, I think.

Tom: [00:02:18] Well, the spiders in the corners.

Chris: [00:02:19] There's something to look at in every corner. I think that's really great. And I agree, it was great advice. Because sometimes these things in families, they work out organically, right? Where you grow up, you have two siblings, let's say one of them decides to be a lifelong bachelor, the other one has three divorces, and then you end up being the place where Thanksgiving is because you're the only relationship. You're the sibling that has the stable house, quote unquote. You're the sibling that ends up with the space to do all the things.

Tom: Where were you in the birth order?

Chris: I'm the baby.

Tom: [00:03:04] Me too. So you have a sister and a brother?

Chris: [00:03:07] I have two sisters. I kind of grew up in an even household, but it was maybe leaning towards a matriarchy a little bit with my mom. So I always say I grew up with women, because the only other guy in my life was my dad.

Tom: [00:03:26] I have two older brothers, and my mom used to just get totally overwhelmed. She would be like, there's just so many men around here. And so yeah, I grew up with men and with a mother who was like, I'm tired of men.

Chris: [00:03:47] I can imagine. It gets harder the other way around. Like, all guys. My best friend growing up had four brothers, I think, and it was just his mom for the most part. There was a stepdad there, but there were a lot of guys, a lot of holes in the wall. You have a house full of guys, you're gonna have a bunch of broken drywall, a bunch of broken furniture.

Tom: [00:04:13] We all kept it inside. My brother says we had dysfunction, but it was quiet dysfunction.

Chris: [00:04:21] Yeah. And you survived too, as the youngest.

Tom: [00:04:27] No, not really, not at all. I cannot claim that. I got along really well with my middle brother when we were in high school, and I idolized him. I thought he was the coolest guy in the world. And my older brother, there was enough distance between us in years — it seems like nothing now, but at the time there was enough distance that I was just too small. And so we were never as close as I was to my middle brother. But now we all get along fine. They both live in New Jersey near my dad, and I'm down here in the boonies. So if you grew up in Jersey, Tennessee is like, what?

Chris: [00:05:13] Right. I used to drive through New Jersey back in our HealthStream days. I wouldn't call it the boonies, but they don't call it the Garden State for no reason. I mean, most of that drive until you get towards New York is just trees.

Tom: [00:05:37] So anyway, I appreciate you coming on, and I do want to talk about the entertainment business. My daughter wants to be in the entertainment business. She lives in Los Angeles and she's been out there a while. And it's really, really hard going. So do people ask you like, hey, how do I get into this business?

Chris: [00:06:06] Yeah, all the time. I think your daughter, first of all, did the right thing and the courageous thing by being where the industry is. Being present where the business is happening is eighty percent of it. It's that whole "did you show up" thing. So first of all, kudos, because it takes a lot of courage to move out to a place and just go for it. What she's experiencing there is a ton of competition and a ton of Hollywood nos, which is frustrating, because it's a type of dishonesty.

Tom: [00:06:44] Yeah, I want to talk about that a little bit. People tell her like, oh, you're awesome, we love you, we think you're fantastic. And I feel like, well, then hire me, pay me. So is that what you mean by the Hollywood no?

Chris: [00:06:59] Yes, that's exactly right. No one's gonna tell you you're terrible because they don't want to destroy you. Artists are very sensitive people. I'm a sensitive person, right? There's a way to say no to somebody in the entertainment business where they feel encouraged to continue on, hopefully, and you don't create an enemy. You could create an enemy a lot faster in entertainment than you can in business, because in business, it's what you signed up for. You signed up for the competition and the rough times. And in entertainment, when someone tells you your script is awful and you should stop writing, that's very personal.

Tom: [00:07:50] It's funny. Years ago I wrote a script and I somehow — I don't remember how — found a guy who I guess was an agent in music. And I asked him to read the script, and the feedback I got from him was, well, I read about the first six pages and I didn't give a shit about any of the characters. And I shared that feedback with a friend of mine who was a professional songwriter, and his response was, that's not professional feedback. And I think both were right. The feedback I got was accurate about — I just hadn't hooked anybody in the beginning of the script. But I think my friend's feedback, that that isn't someone you want to work with because that isn't professional, was also accurate.

Chris: [00:08:43] I agree with your friend. So what you got was unprofessional honesty.

Tom: [00:08:45] Yeah.

Chris: [00:08:47] Right. And there is a way to do that that's a lot softer, and that's what people tend to do, and that's kind of what we call the Hollywood note. But just to put this in context — I co-founded a company called Fiction Kit, the film development company, co-founded Bonsai Creative, which is an advertising and media company where we take advertisers and creators and try to make a match. I've done three feature films, they're all in worldwide distribution, a bunch of short films, got one coming out soon. I'm the president of the Nashville Film Festival board. And not to mention the co-host of my own podcast, the Make It Podcast, which is about independent filmmaking through the lens of producers — I'm a Producers Guild producer, a PGA producer, as well. So with that context, we're able to help independent filmmakers see the world from the eyes of those who would produce their project or finance their project.

Tom: [00:09:53] So if I'm making a movie, am I thinking about someone who might produce it? Am I saying, how can I attract a producer to this project?

Chris: [00:10:04] If you're just screenwriting, I think that is your goal. Your goal is to have a script that is so good that producers want to then spend their time — because it's a marriage, right? They want to spend the next three years finding money to make this thing and putting a team together to make this thing that you're gonna make. Because at the end of the day, if you're a writer, these are works for hire. So you would get paid, and then that work would belong to the producing team and to the LLC that's created around that film. That's what a working writer is. It's someone who's writing and then handing off those rights in full to someone who's gonna make it. And if you're a known writer, if you're a successful, tenured writer, then any deal is possible through entertainment law. So you can keep yourself in the mix, keep yourself in the back end. There might be bonuses, et cetera.

Tom: [00:11:15] But people who are just in their basement writing scripts, they're selling a spec script. They're hoping somebody gives them fifty grand for their spec script.

Chris: [00:11:26] Yeah, and hoping maybe for a lot more than that. There's a guy named Scott Myers who's — I think he might just be at Scott Myers on X, the artist formerly known as Twitter. And he just did this massive project where he studied and researched every spec script sold from 1991 to today. And this is free, he's just giving it away. This is an incredible resource to a writer. If you haven't done this, you should go get it. And I think he's working with Franklin Leonard at The Black List. And The Black List is sort of the place where spec scripts are found, frankly, in the industry. I'm a Black List reader. The writer will upload their script, and if you make the quote unquote black list — which is this great thing that Franklin did, because we know that blacklisting is negative, and he just flipped the paradigm. If you're on the Black List, you're great. Your movie's probably gonna get made.

Tom: [00:12:32] That's pretty cool. We've got a guest in the studio. It's little Alice the dog.

Chris: [00:12:41] Little Alice the dog. I love little Alice. And little Alice also loves me.

Tom: [00:12:45] Alice is now licking Chris's elbow. So is the Black List for artists of color, or is it just for anybody that has a great script?

Chris: [00:13:03] Yeah, it's for anybody. And basically you're uploading your script for producers from around the world who have proven that they have the ability to make something, right? So you can't just decide you want to be a Black List reader. They've proven they have an interest and can make something and are reading scripts. You're going straight to the horse's mouth, so to speak. And it's a good barometer. It's a good way to test, am I doing something remarkable? Because I do think it's so competitive that a good script might not get you there. It needs to be great. It needs to be like top two percent great. And being here in Nashville, I've read one or two great scripts in fifteen years.

Tom: [00:14:11] Yeah.

Chris: [00:14:12] They're hard to write. And there's been one or two — I can name them. They can fit in my hand. And we're talking about, you know, five hundred scripts, right? Most of them do fall apart in the first twenty pages. And the whole thing is, any grammatical error and — I mean, by the time you get to the third one, it's over. Not because what you wrote isn't good, but because there's a sense of like, how you do one thing is how you do everything. And if you're gonna send this out and you haven't even spelled words correctly multiple times in the first twenty pages, or ten pages if you get lucky, people will stop reading. And I think the format matters too, where you want something to happen that turns the story around on page two. And this might have been what happened with your script, about the caring, the giving a shit about the characters. Okay, page two, something needs to happen. Page ten, something needs to happen. And then at the end of Act One, usually around page twenty-eight to thirty, something needs to happen that gets you into Act Two.

Tom: [00:15:35] It's funny, I've heard — it used to not be that way. The script I wrote is, I don't know, thirty years old. And back then somebody gave me a book called Syd Field's Screenplay.

Chris: Famous, yep. Very famous.

Tom: And so Syd says, you've got your three acts, plot point at the end of Act One, plot point at the end of Act Two, some kind of a grabber on the first page or two. So he talks a lot about the structure stuff that you were talking about. So a couple of years ago I was at a preseason baseball game, spring training, and I ran across a guy who teaches screenwriting at, I think, USC. And I mentioned Syd Field and he's like, ah, no way. Nobody does it that way anymore. He says everything is character-driven now. So it's all about who is this individual and what drives them. And so it feels like, you know, like anything, there's contradictory advice.

Tom: [00:16:55] And so when you're saying it has to be great — I personally find it's hard to do something that's great if I'm doing it for someone else. Now, that's assuming I've ever done anything that's great, and it's not really up to me to judge that. But it's hard for me to work if I'm doing something for somebody else. It's hard for me to write. And so what do you tell people who are struggling to be like, I want to do something that's great, I want to do something that people recognize as being great, and I'm making myself crazy?

Chris: [00:17:23] Which job? Just writing, or any job in film?

Tom: [00:17:26] I'll go with writing, because I know just a teeny bit about that.

Chris: [00:17:33] In terms of writing, I go back to some advice I got from the late Wayne Perry, who worked for BMI Zomba here in Nashville for years and was a songwriter for years, and I kind of interned under him twenty, twenty-five years ago now. And he was awesome. He had a house where his family was way outside of town, and then he had an apartment right on Music Row that he spent most of his time in. And he was kind of known for Brooks and Dunn and Lorrie Morgan. And then he made a ton of money having a few tracks, or at least one track, on the Backstreet Boys album that sold ten million copies. Which is an incredible deal, because at the time — I think the music industry's changed since then — but at the time I think you got seventy-five thousand dollars for every million that were sold as a writer, plus your royalty that you would get, which was like eight or nine cents per play if it was in prime time, and then like one or two cents a play if it was during the day or whatever. And then BMI and ASCAP and all these other places would sort of track that for you and pay you.

Chris: [00:18:53] And maybe that's the way it still is, but I know it's a lot about sync licensing now. But that just changed his life. And anyway, I got to spend a lot of time with Wayne, and he said he wrote his best songs when he was on the streets, like homeless. Didn't have a place to stay, had no name, was struggling, but he was out every night. And that you'll be a better writer if you just go live a little bit more. And at the time I was pretty young-minded. I think I was probably twenty-one, and maybe younger. And he was trying to tell me, hey, you need to go experience some stuff. The way you write is — not only was it amateur writing, but it was writing that showed that I didn't know what the score was. Basically, you think you know what the score is, but you don't know anything, because you've done nothing, really. And so it was his interesting way of saying, write what you know, but then to write what you know, you have to know something.

Chris: [00:20:00] And so what I would tell a writer that's struggling — this is the scenic route, by the way — I'd tell them to go out and meet people and go out and do things that push them past their comfort zone. A lot of writers are introverts. Why don't you go force yourself to be extroverted out in the world? Have some conversations, observe a Karen in a coffee shop, go into the neighborhood where you look different, walk around a little bit, get in conversations, people-watch. Whatever you need to do, travel. Make your life rich in experiences so that you can take those experiences and extrapolate on them in fiction writing.

Tom: [00:20:53] So what do you say to an actor? Because all the actors who I see were actors when they were six. And Mary Frances is thirty-one. And I worry about — is thirty-one ancient for an actor? It just feels like you're not supposed to have done anything to be an actor.

Chris: [00:21:19] It's a bit of a double standard, right? Thirty-one could be old for a woman, but not for a man. There's lots of stories of men making it in their forties, from Samuel L. Jackson and Morgan Freeman to George Clooney. But the latest version of that is Glen Powell, who people love, but he's been around forever, and now he's a giant star either knocking on forty or is forty now. And it's funny, you turn forty and you're like, I feel the same as I did when I was twenty. Your brain hasn't changed, you haven't changed, but your body has changed. And people are noticing things about you that you're not noticing about yourself. And you're like, what is this? I remember when I thought forty was old, but now it's just normal. Forty's no longer old. We just make it right for ourselves. And soon fifty's not gonna be old.

Tom: And I blew past that one.

Chris: And at some point — I'll have to ask some folks — but like, you get to eighty and you're like, eighty's not old.

Tom: [00:22:28] Ninety's old. Now ninety, that's old. Eighty's not old. My mother-in-law, who's gonna be ninety-eight in November —

Chris: Congrats.

Tom: Thank you. Years ago she said, I could do everything at eighty that I could do at sixty. And that is certainly not the case at ninety-seven, soon to be ninety-eight — that she could do everything now that she used to be able to do even two years ago or a year ago. But anyway, back to: what do you say to an actor?

Chris: [00:22:59] To an actor, going beyond sort of the age thing — because I think age is only a factor when the talent maybe isn't fully there. So I think if you can act, you're gonna be okay. And to me, all the actors that I've worked with and known, from Kate Upton to Christine Woods to Mike Vogel — it all comes down to work and study. And I know a few acting coaches. The whole thing is you're trying to work on this craft. And does it help to observe people and to do the thing I just said? Yes, it helps, because you get to see how people really are versus your version of how they are. We've all seen someone do, or heard someone do, a really bad Southern accent. And it's like, okay, you've never spent a day here. It's very, very clear. Or you weren't listening.

Chris: [00:24:20] And that's really true of writers, right? A writer will fall apart in dialogue, and usually too verbose in the dialogue, if they haven't really heard that conversation in real life or just don't know the context. It goes back to Wayne Perry talking to me as a twenty-something, where it's like, you can't write about having a family and losing a kid. You have no idea what that emotion is. You haven't done it. So some of that comes out, unfortunately. It's embarrassing when it does.

Chris: [00:25:10] I'm thinking about — Justin Timberlake did an album, the FutureSex album. It was a great album, one of his best albums. But at the very end of that album he had a song where he was saying, hey, don't smoke crack. And it was the most ridiculous song to anybody who grew up modestly like I did, around people who were actually using and selling drugs, in some cases. And it's like, oh man, just tell me you've never lived this without telling me you've never lived this. It was the afternoon special of R&B songs. It was really bad. So we can do this as writers, and then we can do this as actors, when we don't have a good template to start from.

Tom: [00:26:01] Yeah, it's funny.

Chris: [00:26:02] So it's really about transforming yourself into this character.

Tom: In that transformation.

Chris: In that transformation, yeah.

Tom: [00:26:14] That's really interesting. So think about honesty in art. Now, if I'm playing a character, it's not literally true, because it's a character, but — I haven't acted, but I guess you're trying to promote some sense of truth that people look at and go, oh yeah, that resonates. But there's all kinds of ways people go at that. Like one of them is just very, oh, that's like other things I've seen on TV. And there's a ton of things to me that feel like, oh, this is — within a movie or a TV show or whatever, this seems like a movie or a TV show. I hate that kind of art, and there's tons and tons of it. To me, The Pitt is that. There's nothing real about The Pitt. It's a frickin' TV show.

Chris: [00:27:15] And that must be maddening for you, because it keeps winning all these awards.

Tom: [00:27:18] It keeps winning all these awards? Now, I have to confess, I've seen about two minutes of The Pitt. And it was enough to make me never want to see another second of it.

Chris: [00:27:33] I will just warn you, it has many, many, many fans.

Tom: [00:27:39] It does. My wife Anna is one of them. Who just absolutely loves it. But to me it's just — anyway, I don't have to get into it.

Chris: [00:27:46] I think about, when you say that, I think about Heath Ledger's Joker. And I noticed that basically anytime someone took on the role of a villain, or especially a sort of psychotic villain, they were just doing a facsimile of Heath's Joker. And I mean, what an homage to him, right? What a flattering thing. But at the same time, yeah, it can be frustrating to see — oh, you're just doing the Joker, but now your character's a person in a suit or something.

Tom: [00:28:24] Right. But that sort of contradiction — so your friend who told you go live so you can write songs —

Chris: [00:28:33] Yeah, I was interning for him.

Tom: [00:28:41] I love the advice, but it's also like, well, I'm translating what I have into something that's fake. You know, like I'm reading Huck Finn again.

Chris: Oh good. Did you read James? Did we talk about James? Do the audiobook with Dominic Hoffman doing the narration. You won't regret it.

Tom: [00:29:07] Okay. Well, I have to ask you about — so James is told from the point of view of Jim in Huck Finn. And is James's speech in Huck Finn an act? So he's like, oh, this is how I need to sound when I talk to a white man.

Chris: [00:29:27] Yeah, he code-switches back and forth all the time, with what we call code-switching, where you act one way in front of one group and another in front of another. And I think there's a good amount of people who genuinely disrespect that and say that's bullshit, you shouldn't do that. And it's funny, growing up biracial, where your dad's white and your mom's black and you're growing up modestly, you're around a huge diversity of people in this generally small space. I just call that survival. It's not code-switching, it's survival. I can think of many times that that saved me. And it was very useful to me. And I wasn't doing it to manipulate anyone, I was doing it to survive the situation. So I guess it just depends on how you use it.

Chris: [00:30:35] Now, you talk about bringing this real thing into this fake world, and it reminds me of — I have this friend, I won't say his name. If he's listening, he'll know it's him. He's a guy who would flirt with your girlfriend right in front of you. That's a friend. He's a guy who would do that to your wife. He's a guy who, if tempted, might steal from you, let's say money or anything. And people would say, well, how do you deal with that kind of personality? How do you remain such good friends? And I'm like, because I trust him to be him.

Tom: Interesting.

Chris: I don't trust him. I trust him to be himself. So I never put him in situations where he has to fight himself, because he's losing the battle to himself. I never left a girl in a room with him. Why would I do that?

Tom: [00:31:38] That would be like — I know who he is.

Chris: [00:31:40] Yeah, that would be unfair in a lot of ways. I would never leave an open wallet with hundreds sticking out of it right in front of him for an hour. I know who that guy is. I know what he's battling, I know what he's going through. Why do that? So I think in writing, yes, you're doing something similar to that. You don't need to think of it as taking something real and turning it into something fake. You need to think of it as, I'm trusting this to be what it is. So then it's not fake. It's just, this is what I believe this to be.

Chris: [00:32:40] Which is a type of lie — so I get what you're saying. It's like you're kind of lying, you're kind of making things up. But if I want you to believe it, if I want you to trust in who I am — not trust me, but trust in who I am — how do I do that with confidence and make it as real as possible so that you can't tell the difference, so that becomes a ruse almost for you as the viewer, or in real life? Like if I dressed up as a police officer and you ran up to me asking for help, and I said, hey man, I'm not a cop, I'm just dressed like one, you'd be really confused.

Tom: Yes I would.

Chris: [00:33:20] Right. But there would be something in your subconscious, if I wasn't doing that well, that would trigger you to say, that's just a guy in a police uniform, that's not a real cop. You would know it before you even said it, before you walked up to me. There's a reason we know that someone dressed as a ghoul isn't one. We understand when it's real and when it's not. There's just a certain weight to any performance that I think you have to do. So that's what I'm saying. There are ways for me to dress up like a police officer that would fool you. And there's ways for me to dress up as one that would trigger something in you to say, no, this isn't real.

Tom: [00:33:59] Right. And that's what irritated me so much about those few moments of The Pitt that I watched. It was just like, this is so unbelievably stupid.

Chris: Yeah, it didn't pass your sniff test.

Tom: No, it was from the very beginning. It was like, okay, this is a TV show, I don't need to watch any more of it.

Chris: [00:34:21] Now, to be fair, you've lived a life in healthcare. So you kind of — well, that tells you what I'm saying as well, which is that every viewer has an idea. This is the danger of stereotyping in media as well. I hate the show black-ish. I know people love that show. I hate it because it's blackface to me, because I grew up with black people and I know what that's like. And what they're presenting is a blackface version of being black. And it was incredibly popular, because that was a lot of white people's view of what a black person is and what a black family's like. And what a black family wants, what they desire, what their hopes and dreams were. And whatever you think about Bill Cosby, okay, but that was a lot more close to what we aspire to be.

Tom: [00:35:11] This kind of goes to the idea of like, well, what even is race? Or if somebody says, I'm colorblind, I don't even see race. Or like the Supreme Court saying there really is no such thing as racism anymore.

Chris: [00:35:31] Well, that's interesting.

Tom: [00:35:43] I think that there's this idea that any law which advances one race over another is a racist law. And so the law has to take this position of, well, we can't make any distinctions between races, because that's obviously racist. And so that wipes your hands of any kind of responsibility for a lot of institutions which have been written into law that favor one race over another. So you're saying, oh, we don't want to do that anymore, so we're gonna do nothing to make up for our centuries of doing this. We're just gonna flip a switch. You know, the thing about if you ask two people to run a race and one of them has a weight in his leg and the other guy starts a hundred yards ahead of him and doesn't. That's not a fair race. And so the Supreme Court has said, you're right, it's not fair. And if we do anything about it, that wouldn't be fair either.

Chris: [00:36:56] Right. It's the anti-DEI argument. Well, no — the race metaphor, right? Like so one person can just see over the fence because he's tall. The next person, you need to bring him a box that they can stand on so they can also see over the fence, to watch the baseball game. And that's sort of the enduring image of DEI when it was at its height right after George Floyd. And to that end, I don't see anything necessarily wrong with that, if it's being done by the community and there's a genuine sense of like, all of our problems sort of lie within ourselves. Shouldn't you want to help that person see the game? Why do you need a court to pass a law that says this person must have an apple box to stand on, and it'll come at these people outside your community's expense? That's where the rub is.

Tom: [00:38:12] Well, and that's the sort of zero-sum game view of it. Like, oh, if we have officers in the military who are women or minorities, they're obviously taking positions from qualified white men, seems to be the secretary's point of view. And it's an absurd point of view. Anyway, there are zero-sum games, but the reality is most of them aren't.

Chris: [00:38:49] But even going back to entertainment, one of the things that a lot of creatives deal with is this sort of almost involuntary jealousy and envy of someone who is successful, because they're like, well, that was my chance. And they don't understand how abundant it is. I don't think the industry's ever been more insatiable and needy for good content, to the point where they're actually taking average stuff now. How many average shows are there on Netflix? Three or four hundred now? They're almost commoditized. They're designed to be in your life for one or two seasons, and then we'll find the next thing that's just kind of okay and we'll keep you occupied and keep your attention for a little bit, hopefully, and we'll move on to the next thing.

Tom: [00:39:40] So are you not concerned about the shrinking of the amount of content being created? There's the Paramount-Warner merger and concern that it's gonna cut down on the amount of content that's out there.

Chris: [00:39:56] Oh, it's always concerning when you have fewer buyers. You want more buyers. That's the whole point of antitrust. But the idea that there's less content being made just isn't true. I think there's more than ever. And it's coming in different places. So Kevin Hart's doing vertical now. I don't love the medium.

Tom: What does that mean?

Chris: These are like short video novellas for your phone, designed for TikTok. TikTok has an entire section where you can just watch a library of these micro — they're called micro-dramas — back to back to back. There's a company called Galatea who, I think, ultimately will use AI to write all these scripts. They do nationwide casting calls. So discoverability is easier than ever in terms of being an actor in one of these things, if you want to act in one of these things.

Tom: [00:41:20] That was the dog, for those at home. I thought she fell, actually.

Chris: [00:41:30] But that's different, right? Because before, you had to go show up at an audition. Now you just do it over your machine, a taped read or whatever. But it's still a producer picking you to get that tape. Well, now with Galatea, they're saying no, this is an open call, and because of the internet we can take fifteen thousand auditions. And they can find you in the middle of Kansas. So instead of you going and finding the job, that job is finding you. And they have all these YA books, and then they get upvoted — Wattpad does this as well — these get upvoted, and then those become the stories they turn into vertical micro-dramas. And it's become, sort of overnight, a billion-dollar industry where you're now gonna see established actors and producers and directors start to do these things.

Tom: And cinematographers.

Chris: [00:42:30] Yes. And it's just not a medium for me. I like the format the way it is now. There's just something gorgeous about it. And I don't want these throwaway micro overnight scripts. But if the thing is to pay your bills doing the thing you love, then who am I to judge? Not just that, but it's out there. I just think there's a ton of content being made. Like, sit your kids down and try to watch a movie today and see if they can do it without looking at their phone.

Tom: Anna doesn't do it without looking at her phone.

Chris: I feel like the guy at the end of Brave New World. It's just me. I'm the only one left not on soma, and I can watch a movie from beginning to end without touching my phone.

Tom: [00:43:13] Just be careful, he killed himself.

Chris [00:43:20] Yeah, that's true. We just peered into our future too. That's right.

Tom: [00:43:29] But you're optimistic. You feel like actually now is a good time to be an artist.

Chris: [00:43:29] It really is, because I think there's a fright right now and fear about it taking jobs. But in the long run, should it not kill us first, it will create more creatives. Because access to that creativity — I mean, look what we're doing today. We're doing a recording with a laptop, an audio interface, and two mics. My dad, when I was a kid, ran a studio at his job, and it was a multi-million dollar thing. It had to be. There was no way to do this. This wasn't a thing. We couldn't do this. You'd need to be sitting in a studio like you were Charlie Rose.

Tom: [00:44:27] We could do it, but I'll tell you what's really hard, is attracting an audience. I wrote and published a couple of books, and it's not hard to get a book published if you pay somebody to publish it, but it's really, really hard to sell a book. And that part I have no idea how to crack. So the finding of the audience, to me, feels very, very difficult. But you've grown your audience. Your broadcast has grown.

Chris: [00:44:59] Yes. We're on YouTube — that was a big decision for a lot of different reasons. We just crossed three hundred thousand subscribers two weeks ago. Targeting half a million by the end of twenty-seven. If we can get there. We do a hundred and twenty thousand downloads a month. But what's funny is, by large podcast standards, that's still just a baby show. It's like doing nothing. But when you're not famous and you're just doing it from the ground up — and look, I've done three feature films, none of them have been hits. Anytime I talk to anyone about them, it's always new to them. That'll tell you a lot. And they're not bad, it's just that they're indie films. They didn't have wide distribution. So to me, we're super proud of that because of where we had to start. And again, that zero-sum thing we talked about — that means all the creators around you want you to win, or don't want you to win.

Tom: [00:46:13] That's right.

Chris: [00:46:14] Even making the films, we'd say, hey, will you support our film and buy it on Blu-ray, buy it on DVD? Of course, of course we will. Yeah, they're not gonna do it. They want to put that money into their thing, the thing they're doing. And so you can never be an emperor in your own town. You kind of have to go outside to find the audience. And I would say find the people who support you the most in town — that can be a heartbreaking process when you find out that the person closest to you doesn't really care too much about what you're doing. But then after that, go outside, because you will find an audience outside your own locality. You will find people who are interested in and value your voice and your POV, especially if you're getting better and better.

Chris: [00:47:20] And what you're looking to create is sort of a parasocial relationship with these people, so they know what to expect every time you publish something. And that takes a long, long, long time and a lot of trial and error. And right now the podcasting business is bifurcated between people who think a podcast is an audio piece of content and people who will say a podcast can be on video and that's equally as valuable or more. And those two worlds really do not connect. People who listen to you on audio do not watch your video. And people who watch on video do not listen on audio. And then the business is bifurcated in the exact same way. Advertisers value a listen as more intentional than a view. And I think that's directionally correct. But we also know that in marketing, text plus audio plus video is an order of magnitude more engaging than text or audio alone. So there's this dance you have to dance to build an audience, and it takes a minute.

Tom: [00:48:24] Well, there's something I try to keep in mind, which is that making something and selling it are two totally different occupations.

Chris: One hundred percent.

Tom: And that actually applies outside of the arts. So software, for instance. If I'm so inclined, I can write a software program in my basement or wherever, but good luck getting anybody to buy it. That doesn't mean I wrote a crappy piece of software. So it sort of goes back to your Hollywood no thing about — it's hard to get an honest opinion from someone about what's wrong with this, what would make this better. But there's also, as the creator — I'll speak for myself — I reach a point where I'm like, I'm tired of it, or I don't know how to make it any better, or I'm just ready to call it done. I typically don't reach a point where I'm like, that's exactly what I wanted, because most of the time I don't have any idea what I want. I'm not that deliberate. But I can reach a point where I'm like, well, it's done.

Tom: [00:49:50] So it's the honesty of asking yourself that question, is this really done? But there are also people who think they're very good artists who are actually not good at all. And should I envy them, in the sense of like, they seem very enthusiastic and very energized by their stuff, even if what they do is just not good at all? Or do you like to wise them up and go, well, your sense of your quality and the world's sense of your quality are very different? It's an awkward place to be wrapping up, but what's your point of view on that? If you get somebody who's like, man, I'm awesome, and you look at their stuff and you're like, no, you're pretty terrible.

Chris: [00:50:43] Yeah. Well, I think about something we learned from Bobby Frist, which is insight into action. Insight into action, right? So how do you get insight? Well, it turns out, just like a lot of things he's said to me over the years, there's layers of this, you could go down a rabbit hole. Turns out one does not just get honest insight easily or for free. You have to do some things to actually get the truth. Because if you flip your paradigm around, how difficult is it to tell someone honestly they're not as good as they think they are? You might just choose the easy route and actually choose peace in your life and say, you know what, keep going, brother. Keep going, just don't quit.

Chris: [00:51:30] And there are those moments where — if we take it back to us being creative, or building software, or selling something — I think I would have stopped a long time ago if I didn't get inside the business of it and find out that everything that we see is driven by dollars. The clip you saw on the internet going viral isn't going viral because people shared it and liked it. It's going viral because someone put thirty thousand dollars behind it. And if you listen to all these guys in the manosphere, like, why did we get hit with that? Well, we got hit with that because some of them had a little money from doing something else. And then what they do is they create a clip farm. And what that is, is they'll pay twenty to thirty to forty people to create real accounts, and the entire account will be devoted to sharing clips from that creator. Even Drake does this, actually, the rapper. And so what you get is a sense that everybody's sharing this. I saw this on five, six different social media networks. You're trying to fool the algorithm to boost it.

Chris: [00:52:50] So that's one. Don't quit because no one's catching on to your thing. Maybe try to apply some dollars to it. Or try to apply some human labor to it. Get some humans involved in what you're doing. And that's a real sales trick right there. Okay, can I afford you? Okay, great. Can I not? Okay, how do I get you to do it anyway? What can I offer that compensates you to do this thing in the short term, and then we'll see if we have something. And we'll see if people catch on. And I think so many things in media are like that. The things that we see are well planned, well marketed, influencer marketed, clipped out, dollar-driven events. And I vote on the PGA for film of the year, and there are films that are the best film I've ever seen, and no one's heard of them because they don't have the money to let the world know that they exist. So I'd say don't quit until you've tried and exhausted the sales and marketing part of this job, which can feel a little empty, but it just comes with it. It's just the business model that works, that we can repeat.

Chris: [00:54:20] And I think in terms of letting someone be delusional, I think the question really is, how much do you care about that person? Because can someone alert them to that who doesn't care about them? Hopefully. Hopefully they get a person who's just gonna be honest and unprofessional, like we said at the top of the conversation. And it doesn't have to be you. You don't have to be the asshole. You don't have to come in and say, hey, you should really stop doing that. Because then that puts you in a position of being the arbiter of good taste. Like, oh, so Tom knows what good art is. I got it. And then all it's gonna do is create an unnecessary division between you and that person. But if you don't care about them, if you're not close to them, I think you can still find a professional way to say, here's what works and here's what doesn't work. We do that with our apparel. We'll send it to people and say, hey, what works and what didn't work. You'd be surprised how hard it is for people to tell us what didn't work. We're asking you. Tell me what didn't work. And they still won't tell you. They don't want the discomfort of letting you down.

Tom: [00:55:47] Well, Chris, I'm gonna have to have you back, because we touched on a lot of stuff. And I learned something about the entertainment business, which I appreciate. I know more than I did at the beginning of the hour. But I want to talk about some of the other things we brought up. Anyway, it was great seeing you again.

Chris: [00:56:08] Yeah. Here's to round two. I love this space, I love what you're doing. And my favorite part of any month is having a conversation with you. So I appreciate it.

Tom: [00:56:28] The Fortune's Path Podcast is a production of Fortune's Path. We help service and technology businesses address the root causes that prevent rapid growth. Find your genius with Fortune's Path. Special thanks to Chris Barkley for being our guest. Music and editing of the Fortune's Path Podcast are by my son Ted Noser. Look for the Fortune's Path Podcast from Advantage Books on fortunespath.com. I'm Tom Noser. Thanks for listening, and I hope we meet along Fortune's Path.