Tim Ferriss with Brandon Sanderson
Really enjoying this interview and the insights Brandon shares here. Around the 57 minute mark he is discussing how he approaches writing and figuring characters out, and he talks about writing 300k words of a novel and then deciding the personality of a character was wrong in it.
I feel this as I'm working on a rewrite of a novel I wrote (granted it's 100k-ish in words in the original form) and I'm starting from scratch porting over characters and some plot, but in writing that first version I wasn't thrilled with it. I kept thinking, "this feels like half a story" and as it turns out - it is. Now, I don't think the next version will be twice as long, but I really learned a lot about the story by writing it out. So now I am going at it again.
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Colbert is brilliant
I really enjoy this interview and Colbert has a lot of great nuggets in it.
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Ted Danson & Bill Hader interview
Really enjoyed this interview podcast this morning. Just a lovely conversation between two charming people.
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Ryan & Hugh have such amazing chemistry
They're such a treasure as a dynamic between two men.
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Interview with Michael Hudner
It's a great overall interview, discussing the financial journey he went on, but also hitting some very hard emotional beats from his life.
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David Bowie answers Proust's survey
What is your idea of perfect happiness?
Reading.
What is your most marked characteristic?
Getting a word in edgewise.
What do you consider your greatest achievement?
Discovering morning.
What is your greatest fear?
Converting kilometers to miles.
What historical figure do you most identify with?
Santa Claus.
Which living person do you most admire?
Elvis.
Who are your heroes in real life?
The consumer.
What is the trait you most deplore in yourself?
While in New York, tolerance. Outside New York, intolerance.
What is the trait you most deplore in others?
Talent.
What is your favorite journey?
The road of artistic excess.
What do you consider the most overrated virtue?
Sympathy and originality.
Which word or phrases do you most overuse?
“Chthonic,” “miasma.”
What is your greatest regret?
That I never wore bellbottoms.
What is your current state of mind?
Pregnant.
If you could change one thing about your family, what would it be?
My fear of them (wife and son excluded).
What is your most treasured possession?
A photograph held together by cellophane tape of Little Richard that I bought in 1958, and a pressed and dried chrysanthemum picked on my honeymoon in Kyoto.
What do you regard as the lowest depth of misery?
Living in fear.
Where would you like to live?
Northeast Bali or south Java.
What is your favorite occupation?
Squishing paint on a senseless canvas.
What is the quality you most like in a man?
The ability to return books.
What is the quality you most like in a woman?
The ability to burp on command.
What are your favorite names?
Sears & Roebuck.
What is your motto?
“What” is my motto.
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"The Paris Review - Document: The Symbolism Survey"
In 1963, a sixteen-year-old San Diego high school student named Bruce McAllister sent a four-question mimeographed survey to 150 well-known authors of literary, commercial, and science fiction. Did they consciously plant symbols in their work? he asked. Who noticed symbols appearing from their subconscious, and who saw them arrive in their text, unbidden, created in the minds of their readers? When this happened, did the authors mind?
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Interview with Janelle Monae
I just said this about Jonathan Majors, but Janelle Monae also has the distinguishing feature that I will go see whatever she is in. I've enjoyed her music since Metropolis and I've seen almost all of her movies. I haven't seen Moonlight yet, but knowing she is in it is a positive mark for me.
One of my dreams is to write, direct, star in, and create the soundtrack to a big sci-fi thing.
Oh yes, please. Hollywood, throw money at her. Let her make whatever she wants.
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Dick Cavett interviews Orson Welles (1970)
I greatly enjoyed this interview. The two of them have wonderful chemistry and a willingness to embrace each other's silliness at times.
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A good interview with Charles Kenny
Bold in below quotes is the question carried over from the link. My only edit to a quote below was to elide portions.
In a case like climate change, we see sort of a fascinating “stuff” and “nonstuff” problem, where we need to do the engineering and we need to get people to enable the conditions for that engineering work to happen fast enough and then put it in place. Pandemics are another case like that.
So take pandemics. You can see the last three years in sort of two different ways. One is of immense human progress, driven by human cooperation. So when I got my first Pfizer shot, we were talking about a vaccine that was developed more rapidly than any vaccine in history. It was developed in an effort that involved the world. So you had the Hungarian scientists working in the United States who did some of the underlying research. And in Emma Rene, you had the children of Turkish refugees in Germany who actually developed the vaccine. You had the Greek [immigrant] who moved to America and ran the company that produced it. In my case, you had the Vietnamese woman who actually stuck the injection into my arm, now living in the United States: global cooperation at its best. It was a sign of what we can accomplish.
[...]
When you look at the state of the progress movement today or the state of the fight against climate change or the state of the fight against pandemics, where do you see us falling, on that narrow line between too much doom and too much satisfaction?
With climate, I feel that the doom has won out. You mentioned a while ago that you were looking for a book for your child on climate change that wasn’t all doom and you couldn’t find one. And I think that does reflect sort of the general discourse on climate in a really disappointing way.
[...]
What would you say to skepticism of progress that’s coming from people feeling like promises were made about the future that the future didn’t live up to, that progress hasn’t delivered on its promises?
[...]
I’m a bit of a skeptic about happiness literature. I don’t think that we ought to be maximizing subjective well-being on a scale of 1 to 10 as a sole public policy aim. But I do think the subjective well-being literature points you in a bit of a direction. [Subjective well-being] has been flatlining in many countries around the world, many rich countries around the world, over the last 10, in some cases, 20, 30, 40 years — it depends what question you ask, but there’s good reasons to think we’re not seeing a massive increase in happiness.
And so, you know, if people thought that what material progress was going to deliver was sort of human perfection, they’re right to be disappointed, I guess I would say. I think they were naive to expect that to begin with, but that’s easy to say after the fact.
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Jon Stewart interviews George Carlin
I have begun falling down the rabbit hole of old interviews on YouTube, hearing from great minds from over the years. This conversation is no exception.
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A two hour interview with a Holocaust Survivor
Found via this tweet that ended up in my timeline, this is an important and fascinating two hour interview with Joseph Mandelbaum, who survived multiple concentration camps.
[{embed}]https://twitter.com/RyanFMandelbaum/status/1486729613074067464\[{/embed}]
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The business of being a Youtuber with MKBHD
The Verge interviews YouTuber Marques Brownlee, you can choose to listen or read the transcript. While there is no juicy revelation, it's a good overview of his team and how the channel works, as well as some hints of things in the works.
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