Lex Fridman: uncertainty

Transcript context

…I can, yeah, but for now, I felt like if I really want… The story’s telling me now what it is. I didn’t know I was going to make a genesis story. I wanted to do the Road Warrior guy, but the Road Warrior, he lost his family. So really, to propel him to become a guy who has guitar case full of weapons, he has to lose everything. So he needs a ghost. So this is a genesis story of a character. Well, look, Bruce Wayne lost his parents. You could say, well, does the parents have to die? Well, no, but it’s not going to propel him, it’s not going to drive him like that thing. So it’s just coming to me. So this is my other trick and this is the main thing you got to learn about, if you take any way, this isn’t me doing it. I totally believe it, because when you start doing this, you go, “Where are these answers coming from? I’m asking the right question, but how come the answers just keep coming like this?” I believe, because I do so many different jobs, I’ve learned this over the years. When I was in 2002, I was like, “How is it that I’m the production designer, the composer,” which I don’t even know how to read or write music, and I’m writing orchestral score and I’m doing the editing and I’m doing the cinematography. I haven’t been trained for any of these. I never went to school for these specifically. Must be something about creativity. So I went on Amazon, it’s 2002. I look up creative books. Anything that has creativity in the title, I just ordered it. And I’ve got a bunch of books on creativity, and I was reading them through. One of them was really speaking to me. “Yeah, that’s it.” That’s the process. And then it says gels and mediums, and I’m like, “Oh, this is a book specifically about painting,” but it applies to music, editing, cinematography, writing, it’s all the same. So that’s when I realized that creativity is 90% of any of those jobs. The technical part of setting up the cameras, of writing a script in format or reading or writing music, that’s 10% of that. How many musicians don’t read or write music and they’re fantastic? It’s because 90% what they do is creative. Now I believe that that same person, even if they only do music, could literally jump from job to job creatively and do a superior job than most technicians. And there’s also something to say there about the learning the technical aspects of an art. You collide with the experts. What happens is, I’ve experienced this a lot with using cameras and so on. I don’t know shit about cameras and you roll in and then there’s all the experts almost talking down to you and telling you how things are supposed to be. Everything is wrong. I talked to somebody about soundproofing a room and they said, they gave me prices that are insane and the amount of effort is insane and the geometry- Well, yeah, they’re selling you something.…

Stored transcript either side of the excerpt. The highlighted words are the published quote; the surrounding text is unedited source, never generated.