NOLA Film Scene with Tj & Plaideau
A podcast about acting, filmmaking, and the improv scene in New Orleans.
NOLA Film Scene with Tj & Plaideau
James DuMont: From Self Tape to Set
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What if you could transform your acting career by mastering your unique superpowers? This episode of NOLA Film Scene features the extraordinary James DuMont, who takes us through the pivotal moments of his extensive acting journey. From the mentorship of industry legends like Tim Phillips and Larry Moss to the pragmatic application of the Meisner technique, James shares the invaluable lessons he's learned along the way. By drawing on personal stories and career-defining transitions, you'll gain deep insights into how preparation and authenticity can lead to impressive performances in both theater and film.
Follow us on IG @nolafilmscene, @kodaksbykojack, and @tjsebastianofficial. Check out our 48 Hour Film Project short film Waiting for Gateaux: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=z5pFvn4cd1U
Welcome back to NOLA Film Scene. We're back with part two of our interview with James DeMont.
Speaker 2:Hello, welcome to NOLA Film Scene with TJ and Plato. I'm TJ. And, as always, I'm Plato.
Speaker 1:Yeah, I quote you pretty regularly about the audition being the job. In fact, I did a post the other day that I got to do the job. I've been fortunate enough to have a few auditions this week and I really do feel that. I feel that that's the chance to express myself. I'm getting to showcase what I'm learning to do and I'm wondering from you you studied with Tim Phillips. Was he your first teacher, or did you study besides theater stuff? Did you study film and television acting before that, when you were younger?
Speaker 3:Yeah, I think in the theater world I studied with a woman named Deborah Hedwall who went to the Neighborhood Playhouse, who studied with Sanford Meisner. I studied with Gina Barnett who studied with Sanford Meisner. I got to do the last summer before he passed away to work with Sanford Meisner in Beckwee, which is he had a place in the Virgin Islands. I was able to kind of study with him. I got right from the master. Most of my training is Meisner trained from, most of my training is Meisner trained from. I stayed with Debra Hedwall. She moved to Los Angeles and I studied with her for a bit and then both my friends, wayne Duvall, who's mostly known from the Coen Brothers films, and Richard Schiff, who you mostly know from West Wing. They both studied with Tim Phillips in New York and then Tim was moving to Los Angeles. My shift in training went from theater trained and studying with Meisner teachers to working with Tim Phillips who was mostly audition. He's an audition specialist even to this day.
Speaker 3:So, those who are listening, if you do not have Tim Phillips book called Audition for your Career, not the Job, get it immediately. It will change your entire way in which that you work as an actor, not just on auditions, but when you get the job, or when you're doing the play or when you're doing the movie or television show, the things that you learn of script analysis and understanding the basics of writers and directors, taking these words on a page and turning them into a visual story comes from Tim. I didn't know who he was, but both Richard Schiff and Wayne Duvall were like dude jump run with this guy. He'll change your whole life and career and he has, lucky for me. I lived in a place in LA and he had a studio that he was sharing with Larry Moss. Now Larry Moss is somebody that I heard about for many, many years. He has a wonderful book called Intent to Live. These books are companion books, so they're great books.
Speaker 3:I say to everybody start with Tim in terms of auditions and then you really want to fine tune your acting work. Then go to Intent to Live. Tim wrote his book and I helped him write his book in response to Larry Moss's book of clear and specific intentions, that we human beings don't do anything without an intention, whether it's deeply subconscious or overtly conscious, and I call these books they're one-two punch. I know there's other books out there and I've read most of them. I'm not a big fan of Chubbuck.
Speaker 3:I think all that stuff is unnecessary. I'm not a big method guy. I like immediacy and I like immediacy through human behavior. And when it comes to auditions, the most immediate thing that you need to do is that you have 24 to 48 hours to take you don't know anything to figuring out who the human being is. Get it in your body, document it and send it off. So I need to find quicker, immediate ways and even from Tim's book to the way in which that I now teach, in the last eight years I've found an even more expedient way. So I say Tim Phil's books like the Bible, but I got the 10 commandments and even with the 10 commandments I got some shortcuts. You know what I shortcuts?
Speaker 3:The idea is that trying to find quick and expedient ways, because the way an actor moves forward in our career now is these short one-person movies of that character. It's basically six weeks of rehearsal in six hours, or 24 hours, or 48, or 72 hours. You have this limited amount of time to get into the body and the soul of this character, shoot it, document it, send it off. Then you got to clear the slate. You know it's almost like as I was using the analogy the old days of the Etch-A-Sketch you do like a little sketch on the thing and then you just kind of shake it up and then you got a flat screen or you'd have one where you do like a little pencil thing and then you lift it up and it clears away. An actor needs to kind of do that in the 21st century is to be able to don't think about, worry about how long it's going to be, or are we going to take off work, or who they're picking and what they're looking for. Stay away from all of that. That's a death of a career is to put any focus and attention on trying to please or figure out or strategize the selection process.
Speaker 3:Bryan Cranston said and I got to work with Brian. We knew each other before this. We were on the same committee together in the television academy while he was doing Malcolm in the Middle. We had the same agent. We talked about that process. But Brian Cranston would say the minute I stopped doing the audition for them and said this is what I'm going to show you, what I would like to do with this role. His entire career changed and that was Malcolm in the Middle where he had done a slew of these pilots and they hated him. They didn't go anywhere and he's like. You know what? He called up our agent at the time, a guy named Denny Sevier, no-transcript doing this guy his father. And there you go, lo and behold his career kicked off from there, breaking Bad. So point being is that the nature of the 21st century actor what I'm seeing is the quickest, most immediate way that you're moving forward is you have to show and you have to prove your work. That's the thing I like about self-tapes right now.
Speaker 3:It used to be very secluded and entitled and elitist in the sense that if you didn't go to Yale or you didn't go to Juilliard or you didn't go to NYU, you weren't going to be signed by these particular agencies. That was the way it was. So no matter where you came from, no matter what you did, there was a pedigree of where you came from or who you studied with, gave you representation which gave you access, immediate, quick access to the most powerful people in the business. So one would think they had to go to school. One would think they had to go to Yale or Juilliard. So if you didn't go to those schools and you didn't look like the people and you were of a different color or of a different background or a different economic situation or didn't have the money to study. You're out, you're not in it. Now, what's been amazing is you have an agent or representation or you're on actor's access and you have the ability to shoot an audition and you throw it into the pool with other people who are represented and they get to pick it by what makes sense, like what's the best for the role.
Speaker 3:During this whole thing of of people responding from COVID, there was one particular actress who's from a well-known film and television family who was bitching and moaning and complaining why she's not booking, because she used to book in the room. She's like I can't book On these self-tapes, I'm not able to compete, and I was like well, let's dissect this a little bit. You're already from a famous, well-known Hollywood family, so therefore you were probably represented by a very predominant, important agency, maybe even the agency that your family's been in. So there used to be live auditions and then maybe they see 30 or 40 people in an eight-hour day. You were one of those 30 or 40 people which left a whole bunch of other people out on the street. So now what happens is, instead of seeing those 30 or 40 people, which left a whole bunch of other people out on the street, so now what happens is, instead of seeing the 30 or 40 people, they can see three or 500 people who look different, who may not be at that agency, who may be young or in school.
Speaker 3:So there's a great equalizer to having to prove your work. It doesn't matter where you went to school, it doesn't matter who your family was, it doesn't matter who your agency is. If someone is making a decision about your self-tape on the other side and you can make enough of an impression on that person, all of those things don't matter. And so there's a little bit of a pushback of those who are white, privileged and entitled, or have been for a period of time, are now competing with multi-ethnicities all over the world. I know actors from Australia and Canada and from London that will work as local hires in Atlanta, new York, los Angeles. So when you put that self-tape in there, you're not just competing in that particular region, you're competing internationally. So therefore, if one wants to be able to move forward in advance, it's through every single self-tape that you do.
Speaker 3:Each one is an impression of which I still believe and hopefully at some point they'll rectify this is that casting directors should be acknowledged in the Oscars. There is incredible art in curation Now. They're not artists, but they know good art when they see it and they know how to put all those great artists in one gallery or one movie. Those directors rely on those casting directors to have a different idea and vision and see the new talent that's there.
Speaker 3:I always say to everybody, every single time that you do a self-tape audition, you have an opportunity to make an impression and put your stamp on it, put your art. No one can do the Jackson Pollock the way Jackson Pollock can. And my manager of 27 years would say your self-tape audition should be as individual as your thumbprint. No one else should be able to do that self-tape like you. So I always say don't leave yourself out of the self-tape. And that means you guys have an entire rich life of experience loves, losses, heartbreaks, joys. You have a life experience that no one else can duplicate. Now you may have similarities we call the human universals throughout, but no one can tell your life story like you.
Speaker 3:Now, when I'm doing career blueprints with people, you're clear and specific about what are the 10 to 30 things that make you different, especially why you Can you mine those things, those great qualities of hard work, dedication, optimism. Do those come through in your self-tapes? Do they come through in your pictures, in your resume, in the people you study? Are they in your reels that you may create from scratch, or self-tapes? The idea is that there's so many people vying for that one opportunity. Everybody thinks they want to try to create something different, to stand out, and most of the time they're doing things that stand out for the wrong reasons, when you already realize you're enough as you are and that if you really hone your superpowers of what you have to offer the world and you try to find the collaborators that you want to work with and you know the characters that exist on film or television that you're capable of playing and there's actors' careers that you can emulate on and off camera, that's a plan. A dream without a plan is just a dream, which is a mirage, which becomes a fantasy, which means you're chasing something without ever knowing what any of those goals are in sight.
Speaker 3:The way in which that I work when I'm coaching people is I do my best to try to identify and help them to identify what are their superpowers. Why you? Why should anybody pick you? Why should I watch your audition? Why should I watch a second take if you're not going to do anything interesting or different or provocative that makes sense and supported by the material in the first 10 to 30 seconds of your, why should I watch it again? Make it worth my while. If I've called you in for the audition, I'm already giving you the job, asking you to show me what you're going to do.
Speaker 3:And oftentimes things like the breakdown destroy actors because they say there's this thing of the logic of oh well, if I just do what they say, well, this guy's angry. So then the audition starts angry. It's angry in the middle, it's angry at the end. It's one note Everybody's going to do that. And it's interesting because I have actors who have 50, 100 movies under their belt that I coach.
Speaker 3:People have been series regulars, worked with Oscar winners, emmy Golden, and then I have people that are just starting out, brand spanking new. I have a 70-year-old judge from Massachusetts. You give her dialogue, she can knock out dialogue, but she's new to the game. Game, or now she's not. She's been with me for like three years. But Judith can do anything.
Speaker 3:I feel like everybody deserves a shot and if I can get people to identify the things about them that make them different, especially unique, and they can bring those to the one to two pages or the one to two lines in a character, in one to three minutes or in a self-tape, then they're going to do fine. The thing that I enjoy about working with TJ is TJ knows who he is. He doesn't have questions about where he came from and his life experience. All I have to do is to keep reminding him how much of a rich life experience he has and how much some of the human universals in his own life are within this character. And, as Robert Duvall says, all the characters are Robert Duvall, but he's bending himself to the given circumstances of the scene, of the character, of the situation of that time period.
Speaker 3:So it's still you, but it's you in this creative circumstance and you bend and mold yourself to it. You know, as Shakespeare said, to hold us to a mirror, to nature, so you need to know who you are. You know Aristotle said the key to all knowledge is to know thyself, so you need to know who the fuck you are, and oftentimes we're in a world where we're allowing other people to tell us who we are right, we're allowing likes or followers, or our degree or how much money we have or the cars we drive or the clothes we wear. We put our identity in our sense of self. We allow other people to decide that I've never seen that work out for people who really want to tell stories, because it's got to come from here. You can't be putting that focus outside of yourself.
Speaker 3:So, for me, I'm not a therapist, I'm not an acting teacher. I'm a working actor that teaches other working actors. And my definition of a working actor is anybody looking to be a storyteller, no matter what level, no matter where you came from, you're a working actor. It's not a result oriented thing. That's. Another big mistake is because you have to be working in order to call yourself where it's bullshit, it's a false narrative. So for me, I feel like my 40 years experience well over 200 times being on set now with gemstones, on my third season now and I'm first time I've done 17 episodes of the same show, same character never, never happened in my entire life. So every single time that I get a script and every single time that I'm bringing Chad to the table. It's fresh, it's new, it's a new opportunity for me to expand and to grow. I've left you, I've rendered these two gentlemen silent. The hush falls over the crowd.
Speaker 2:They're like wow dude Wow, wow, that's some deep stuff. Yeah, dude, my brain is leaking out of my ears. Thumbprint, but that's excellent.
Speaker 3:Look when he said that to me. I got it because I mean, I've been self-taping for 15 years. You know, fuck, covid, the post-COVID self-tape, that's a new game. I've been self-taping for 15 years and had well over a million dollars. Buyers Club was a self-tape. Jurassic World self-tape without even a callback. Dallas Buyers I had to have a callback for that.
Speaker 3:Righteous Gemstones three seasons later, 17 episodes, three seasons going on, season four self-tape I go down self-tape, self-tape, self-tape, self-tape, self-tape, self. Now there's been live bookings blue bloods live. So I got those two. But the point is the majority of my career has been defined in the last 15 years by self-tapes because I was living in Los Angeles until I moved to New Orleans and working in both markets. And even now I live here and I work in New York. I work in Boston, just got the first offer I've had in four years for a movie in Boston and I'm being checked and availed for something in New York at the same time. So it's like and I'm being checked and availed for something in New York Same time. So it's like whew, that's a self-tape. I did in July an hour before they called the strike. Deadline was midnight. You got it in at 11 o'clock in July in New York. Yeah, I remember that. Yep, I remember that that audition is that's the one that's being pushed up to network as we speak.
Speaker 3:You make enough of an impression in your audition that even two strikes and six months later it still holds up. That's the kind of thumbprint impression you want to make. But it doesn't happen overnight. It comes from trial and error. The way in which that I teach is I have two classes, I have a lunch crunch, which is basically like going to the on-camera gym, and I give people. There's eight scenes. This month we have eight scenes. You pick one scene, you shoot it and upload as a self-tape. Give me two takes or show me two different videos. You can upload your regular self-tapes and then we watch playback. We watch and learn from notes and adjustments. What are some of the opportunities that you missed? What are the things that were on the page? What are some of the eyelines that you can kind of work on and master? Did you really take these words and create a visual world on the other side? Did you paint the pictures or what? All the things that are, all the nouns that are on the page?
Speaker 1:Bringing the nouns to life.
Speaker 3:Or did you just memorize lines and you're truthful and you're grounded? Did you really lift this story from the page to the frame? Because the director has to do that. It's just words on a page. He has to turn a visual story within a frame and people and words and background and all lighting and all that other stuff. So we're part of that collaboration. So the Wednesday Lunch Crunch is really about fine tuning and mastering your self-tapes through repetition, through doing it over and over again. A lot of my students from COVID 500, 700 self-tapes in the last three years. I haven't done that many but they have. And so coming out of COVID they book Don't Look Up opposite Jennifer Lawrence and Timothee Chalamet in an Oscar-nominated film. Then he went on to a Super Bowl commercial. Then he went on to a supporting lead of working opposite Ben Foster and that guy was an extra four years ago, it's possible, but he was in class two, three times a week.
Speaker 3:A lot of people want the success and success is fleeting and temporary. Not a lot of people are striving for excellence and that requires 20 minutes a day, 365 days a year and by the end of the year. If you put in 20 minutes a day towards what you're doing. You're 90% better at whatever you're doing than anybody in the entire world, but yet we get busy and distracted. You know Instagram and all this bullshit. Everybody says they want to do it, but do they put in the time? And if you put in the time, no deposit, no return. You put it in, you're going to get it back. Now it may take a while, like for me. I've lost millions of dollars in jobs and been fired and made missteps along the way, but now, 40 years later, I'm getting some remuneration from these. Network residuals kept me alive during this strike, not streaming, and it was between classes and things I was able to survive.
Speaker 3:And then, when it comes to the core labs, what we do on Wednesdays is core labs are fundamentals, on-camera fundamentals. Core one is learning how to script an analysis, making sure you don't miss anything on the page. You miss something on the page first, 10 to 30 seconds. They've put off your audition and your audition's done. So all that time memorizing, taking off time, childcare, driving, all that effort that you put in and you miss something that's right there in front of you it's over before it started. So I take that core one very seriously. Being a good detective, like a CSI crime scene. So once you figure out how to find and look for what's there, then we get to core two work, which is we take the material, we read it together as a group, we break down the whole script in core one.
Speaker 3:Core two is I pull four scenes from the movie which we'll do this next month and we'll break those scenes down, understanding the framework, the structure of the scene, the beginning, the middle, the end. Where's the first moment, where's the through line of the scene, where's the turn of the scene or the events of the scene. And then, when we get to core three, which is what we did last week, it's focusing on eye lines who are you looking at, what are you seeing, who are you talking to, when and why. And then last week, which is really learning how to create visual pictures and images on the other side of this camera. And you can't do those things if you don't know what's on the page, you don't understand the framework of the scene and you don't know who you're looking at. So each one is a building block that gets you to the point, and oftentimes the people that have been doing a little bit of hybrid between coming into certain cores and then going into lunch crunch, this one-two punch.
Speaker 3:People grow super fast because they're learning things about the fundamentals and then they want to be able to apply them to real auditions in their daily life. If they're not getting those, I provide those for them. So the things that they're watching and learning they can then apply to auditions in class. And if you can do it here, you're going to get to do it there. And if you do the work in your self tape and show them what you're going to do, you're going to get on set. But if you can't figure out who you're looking to, when and why, and you don't know how to work this frame, I don't believe that they're going to be confident that you can work that frame. You know, if you can't do it here, you underprepare, you underperform. If you overprepare to the point where you know everybody's lines, you know what you're going to say. There's no surprises, there's no ahas, uh-ohs, oh, shits or what the fucks the scene is so tight that it doesn't seem human at all.
Speaker 3:You're just memorizing words and you don't know what the fuck you're talking about. Like that's over prepared. You have to find this like happy medium between being present and discovering and realizing. I don't know what I'm going to say next. I don't know what you're going to say next. I don't know where the scene goes. I know I started here and then this thing has to happen and then I finish here in order for the story to move forward.
Speaker 3:There are so many components to this that I feel like craft is king. You're not going to out-fame someone. You're not going to out-nepotism in terms of the relationship. You're not going to out-cue them in terms of their visibility and their likeness or known factor. You can out-craft anybody. So for me, I take craft as seriously as a surgeon does. I try to get better.
Speaker 3:Each audition I share from my experience In Lunch Crunch. I show myself tapes in there. I did that actually just this last week. I even showed myself tape in my core lab as an example of I practice what I preach. These are not just theories or ideas.
Speaker 3:You don't have to be in class for 12 weeks the six-week bullshit classes. No, you come in, you drop in, you drop out, you get what you need and you leave, because I'm not trying to keep someone from just working. I want you to come in, learn something and then get out of here and go apply it to a real self-tape. I don't need to rope you in and make you sick or confused, like a lot of hack teachers do, of trying to rope you into the six-week program or the eight-week program, the 12-week and then breadcrumb knowledge and breadcrumb information in order to fill a class, to line your pocketbooks. I can't do that. I just can't. It's not a great business model, but I don't give a fuck. I got to be able to sleep at night. Everybody knows when I'm in class, just like in this interview. I give you everything I got. I'm not holding back information, knowledge or experience. What's the point of it? It's not valuable if I can't share it. Right, right, I can keep all these things to myself and nobody would know and nobody would grow and nobody would learn from it. So for me, it's like your purpose and mission becomes really, really crystal clear when you go. My job is to hold this tour, a meal to nature. My job is to show you who I am, why I'm here and what I have to say. And when I leave here they're like, wow, man, the world was a better place because that dude was here. I learned a lot from him, or he changed my life, or the impact that I have on people is pretty deep.
Speaker 3:Tj knows my assistant Earl. He said it before he was living up in New Bedford, massachusetts. In the last two and a half years he's been down in New Orleans being an actor. Friends have died by opiate addiction, suicide and at a certain point he turns. He's like man, had you not encouraged me to come down here and pursue my dream, I'd probably be dead. I'd probably be like my friends. And when you realize the responsibility of that which I take seriously and it scares me sometimes when I've had one of my students move from California to here and it's been very difficult to be alone and not around friends and not have a job or a car at first, but if I really see that there's something here for somebody and there's really an opportunity, they say the biggest regret of the dying is I didn't take more risks, I didn't take more chances, I didn't pursue things that I knew in my heart would bring me happiness and joy. So as best I can I try to, within reason, be as encouraging as possible and be honest as possible. There's no guarantees of any of this and I said that to Earl too. I was like there's no guarantees. But in short order, you know, he gets down here, he gets an agent, he gets headshots, he's on NCIS New Orleans. He went from being a mailman and doing background in Boston to being on a multi-billion dollar franchise. It's like dude and Earl's, like it can happen to him, it can happen to anybody Local paper's, like mailman, is on NCIS New Orleans. So it's like I try to instill in everybody.
Speaker 3:I really believe that every single person has immense eternal possibility and I think when you kind of come from that point of view, it's prejudice goes away, hatred goes away. We all have the same molecules. If we start to acknowledge more each other's possibility unlimited, unfettered, eternal I mean beyond physical, lifetime possibility I think the world would be a lot better place. I think the whole point is of the meek and the ignorant and the narrow-minded are purposely pointing out how different we are from each other in order for them to rule and to overcome and oppress. And once you identify that, you realize that this is the ideas that America is lost or is a problem. You're putting that wedge against other Americans in order for you to rule. I've seen this. Anybody who studies history this is and watch what people do. I always say the most fundamental human truth is people are what they do, not what they say.
Speaker 3:And, as you found out today, I'm pretty good with some words, but I back all that shit up with action. Right, yeah, I walk the walk and talk the talk. So I feel like sometimes you could look at scripts and be focused on just what the narrative is, just what the person's actions are. I did that today with a client and it was like he didn't have a lot of lines that I go, yeah, but you, you started here and at the end of the thing, this person tried to get something from you and you said, fuck off.
Speaker 3:And then you got on and it's like I got to take this call. And then you leave and you take a call. So what do you do? Who are you? It's a power scene. They try to get you to convince you of something you didn't bend and then you, you're the guy. That is the most powerful dude, the person's trying to extract your power and they don't win. And what do you do in the end? You go fuck off. I'm going to take this call because this phone call is more important than what you're doing. Sometimes the scene is not any more complicated than that. It's a love scene or a power scene. I'm sure you have some questions, or I've answered so many that you go.
Speaker 2:Oh, I'm spent my brain has been sucked dry and I can't top that with any questions.
Speaker 3:TJ will tell you welcome to any of my core labs or lunch crunch. It's supposed to be a workout Like you're supposed to get worked out. That's fabulous. Those grooves in your brain are supposed to change.
Speaker 1:They did, and that's a good segue for the name of your website.
Speaker 3:Yes, which is on camera workoutscom. You can follow us on Instagram at on camera workouts plural on camera workouts. Also myself as James Dumont on Instagram. I post up auditions in there, in fact, this last thing that I'm doing candy cane lanes number one worldwide on Amazon, by the way two weeks in a row I have my self-tape up there for Candy Cane Lane and my self-tapes, and then the scenes I do the audition is the job. What you do there gets you on set.
Speaker 3:That's the ways in which people can kind of find me. You know my Facebook page is James Dumont's On Camera Workouts, on Zoom, which is the longest Facebook name page ever, and there's about 1,200 people on there. That's really our for community to communicate to people. So people are asking about headshots or they're asking about lighting or mics, or they're looking for a reader to do self-tapes with. That's a great Facebook page on there, but I think I've maxed out 5,000 on friends on each of those, so I guess I could turn it into a business account. I just don't.
Speaker 3:Most of Instagram is my main focus these days, but Facebook is where most of my clients kind of came from and I started to use this app Clubhouse up to a certain point, until they now, because it's a free app that they're providing for you. Any of the content that you record on there, they own. So I kind of have a little issue with that, because I've laying down a lot of information and knowledge. That's a no. Yeah, that's a no. That's a hard no for me. Yeah, so there's a little opt-in. I'm like I'm not opting into that. So it was a great tool for introducing new people to me. Yeah, but I realized I was doing Q&As, like I'm doing with you guys, and there's like just nuggets of knowledge and information and sound bites and I don't think I should be giving you that for free just because you're providing the platform. Right, yeah, that's just me. Or there's another component in there where they can actually take some of your stuff and create an AI version of it without your consent.
Speaker 2:Oh no, no, no. Yeah, that's a hard, no Hard pass Screw AI. But we cannot get into that. We'll have to have you back for that.
Speaker 3:My only thing with I want to say with AI, and the suggestion I made during the strike, is that the shareholders of all these companies should just replace their CEOs two to 300 to $400 million salaries with AI.
Speaker 1:Yeah, there's a whiskey company that did that.
Speaker 3:Just replace them with AI, because if it really is about money and it really wasn't it's really about power and it's really about eyes and it's about the algorithms. A CEO does not need to be a human being. Save yourself the $200 to $300 million and replace these CEO salaries. Put those salaries into the creatives, into the storytellers that make the money for you. So switch that money from one person making $400,000, whereas 11,000 writers were asking for the same $400,000 of one CEO. So just replace that. That's just the way to do it. I don't believe a CEO requires human beings. If it really comes down to legal issues or likes or eyes or algorithms, it doesn't require a human being. Storytellers require human beings. That's right. Human beings to watch other stories about human beings, great AIs that's a different thing.
Speaker 2:Exactly, my only thing on that, exactly.
Speaker 3:Yeah.
Speaker 2:Okay, james, that's a lot. It's wonderful information, but now we're ready, we're going to hit record and we're going to start. Okay, great Thanks, I'm kidding.
Speaker 3:We got it all. Oh, I know.
Speaker 2:Yeah, I saw the red button. We had to learn to watch the red button. We had a couple of failures, but I can't thank you enough for being on the episode. It's been great meeting you and I'm going to have to go put my brain back in my head while I think about all the stuff you said. There you go, awesome.
Speaker 3:Thank you very much for coming on. Good deal.
