Leo's Blog: Infinite Insights — Page 55

This is why George Lucas is a genius and Kathleen Kennedy is a hack:

You can't "hold on to the spirit that started all this" because spirit is dynamic and original, not a cookie-cutter corporate agenda for maximizing profits.

It's like Kathleen Kennedy took a majestic wild elephant, locked it in a cage in a zoo, started milking it and selling that milk for $50/bottle until the elephant dropped dead. Then she and Disney started selling tickets to see a taxidermy of the elephant's corpse for $100/ticket.

Corporate types don't understand how to make art.

Ironically, Lucas sold Star Wars to these soulless corporate ghouls.

Here's an interesting moral question for you: Imagine you were the creator of Star Wars. Eventually you turned 70 and had to retire. What would you do with the franchise? Sell to a giant corporation or just let it die, which entails laying off 1000s of your friends and employees and never giving your fans any more Star Wars content?

Now that's a moral dilemma! Now you see the Dark Side.

May the Force be with you.

P.S. George Lucas is a man of heart. He stopped making films for 10 years after Star Wars just so he could raise his children. Imagine one of those Disney corporate ghouls doing that.

P.P.S. When I was in my early 20's I studied and modeled George Lucas' creative independence, designing my life so that no corporation had any control over my creative and artistic output. Because I could not allow such soulless ghouls to corrupt my art with their devilry.

This is one of the most disgusting things I've ever seen:

Abolish the monarchy just for this.

Have you ever wondered why Hollywood and most filmmakers are overwhelmingly progressive in their worldview and politics?

Contemplate it.

I suggest that there's a deep reason behind it, which is this: in order to make great films, and great art, one's mind has be open to more perspectives — and to respect and tolerate more perspectives. Otherwise your films and art will be lame and not thought-provoking.

Back in my college days, in a philosophy class, we were assigned to read an article by Steven Spielberg about his approach to filmmaking, where he talked about how he liked to show reality from various characters' points of view, leading to a sort of perspectival relativity. And ultimately not telling the audience which view is right. For example, to show how the world looks through the eyes of a Nazi. The Nazi obviously does not see himself as evil, and it makes for a much more interesting and artistic film if the writer, director, and actor are able to humanize the Nazi so the audience can empathize and see the world from the Nazi's perspective. This is much more interesting and intellectually stimulating than depicting the Nazi as an evil monster. This also requires more cognitive ability to achieve because you have to step outside your view that Nazis are all evil monsters and look at the world through their eyes. Your mind has to be flexible enough to imagine how a Nazi sees himself as a hero, not a villain. But this is not obvious nor easy for most minds to do. There's a tendency to say to yourself, "Yes, we can pretend that Nazi's saw themselves as heroes but they were in fact villains!"

As obvious as all this might seem to you, there was a fundamentalist Christian guy in my class who refused to agree with this article because he was so stuck on there being an objective good vs evil, right vs wrong. So, for him, a Nazi must be depicted as evil because he is in fact evil and that's all there is to the story. When I heard this, I was blown away. How can someone think there is only one right way to see the world? But the conservative mind really struggles with relativity and perspectivalism. To this Christian college guy, the notion that you can have two perspectives of Nazis, one in which Nazis are bad and one in which Nazis are good, without either perspective being objectively right or wrong, simply did not compute!

Consider that to make great films and great art it's important to have a mind which is comfortable with the relativity of perspectives. This is one reason why artists need to be very openminded. Because exploring new perspectives is more interesting than beating someone over the head with one "right" perspective. A film that moralizes and demonizes Nazis is just not interesting or intellectual stimulating compared to a film that humanizes Nazis. It takes quite a bit of mental flexibility to be able to write, direct, and even act out a Nazi without turning him into a cartoon caricature monster. The conservative mind tends to get stuck in moralizing and demonizing, thereby missing out on the delicious complexity of life. This delicious complexity is what makes for great art. If art was morally black & white, it wouldn't be true to life. In real life moral issues are frustratingly complicated and multi-perspectival. Just look at the Gaza-Israel situation. It's a moral clusterfuck, not a battle of good vs evil. Although, of course, a more conservative mind will tend to see it as a simple battle of good vs evil, further compounding the problem.

Imagine if you were a serious method actor, like Daniel Day-Lewis. When Daniel Day-Lewis took on the role of playing Abraham Lincoln, he told Steven Spielberg that he needed 1 year to prepare for the role, to get into character. So Spielberg gave him 1 year. By the time they started shooting, Daniel Day-Lewis WAS Lincoln. Now imagine doing that with a Nazi. Imagine how you would have to think to enter the mind-frame of a Nazi. That's not as easy as it seems. If you were to seriously attempt this you would have to spend months studying how real Nazis think, to the point where you might start to agree with some of their ideas. Which takes you into dangerous territory. It's no longer just "acting". Your mind is genuinely expanding into new territory, nevermind whether this territory is good or bad for you. My point is that a liberal mind will have an easier time of this than a conservative mind. And at the end of that process you will be a changed person — which is exactly what the conservative mind fears!

Note: This is obviously a generalization. I am not saying that great actors cannot be conservative. James Woods is a great actor and a batshit MAGA conservative. So be careful not to over-generalize here. Openmindedness and multi-perspectival thinking is just one of the factors for good filmmaking, not the only factor. So be careful not to do a simplistic reduction here.

Note: Even though liberals have a higher capacity for perspectival and relativistic thinking, they are not perfect at it. They still struggle with it because getting stuck in ones own perspective is such a sticky trap.

Note: Many Hollywood films these days are bad art. That's because they lack this kind of nuance, maturity, and verisimilitude. Superhero films are especially guilty of this because they cater to children. Morally complex and delicious films are rare these days as Hollywood has been corrupted by capitalism. This also makes it easier for writers, directors, and actors, since they don't need so much mental nuance to make their living. It takes 3x more mental labor to craft a morally complex, multi-perspectival story than a one-sided, black & white one. Which is why most stories found in Hollywood these days are such juvenile trash they are not worth watching. CGI spectacle has supplanted nuanced story.

I found the following video interesting and related to this topic:

It's interesting that, for example, I've seen conservatives who are Star Wars fans but don't realize that all of Star Wars is Luke — a social justice warrior — fighting against right-wing authoritarianism and fascism — literally Nazi "stormtroopers". Luke is basically Antifa. But when a conservative watches Star Wars he thinks the Empire represents leftist progressive neo-Marxist feminists and BLM. Some conservatives are so dense that they believe Nazis were left-wing socialists!

Guys like Alex Jones, Andrew Tate, Donald Trump, Elon Musk, Kanye West, Steve Bannon, Aleksandr Dugin, etc. think that they are Luke Skywalker fighting the Empire. When really they are Palpatine overthrowing the Republic. They just lack the self-awareness to see that.

Note: I'm exaggerating a bit. I'm not saying these people are evil in any objective sense. The whole notion of evil is relativistic. But it requires an advanced mind to grok that. And when your mind is able to relativize evil you can make much more interesting stories and films.

Note: Don't use any of this to demonize conservatives. That's not the point here. Be nuanced.

I started experimenting with ChatGPT to see what it's capable of. I've just started using version 3.5 and it's been very impressive so far. I tested it for truthfulness by asking it questions about God, infinity, mystical stuff, psychedelics, book suggestions, strange loops, Stalin, Hitler, politics, corruption, insanity, and video games. All the answers I got were factually accurate, nuanced, and high-quality — better than you would get from most educated humans.

I have been trying to see how I could leverage ChatGPT to improve my philosophical contemplations and my work. I'm still testing that out.

Here's a little example of what I asked it to do for me:

(click image to enlarge)

The coolest thing about it is that you can ask it to generate totally unique, new content — not just scraped stuff of the web. Like the poem above. I was able to get it to generate totally original examples of strange loops for me, stuff that is not found anywhere on the internet. This is potentially extremely valuable. This is what makes it different than just Google search. Also, what I like about it is there is no commercial crap clogging it up, unlike modern-day Google results.

ChatGPT is quite impressive. And I haven't even tried version 4.0 yet, which is supposed to be much better, with real-time access to the internet.

You can use ChatGPT for free for yourself at that link. It merely requires signing up with your email for free. You get unlimited access to ChatGPT 3.5. ChatGPT 4 costs $20/mo. Give it a try. This technology is truly revolutionary and it will soon become incorporated into all lines of work so you might as well get your feet wet.

As with life, the key to unlocking ChatGPT's power is asking high quality questions. The better your questions the more value you'll get out of it.

This interview is amazing.

Here's an interview with an eyewitness of the 1947 Roswell UFO crash.

The audio quality is bad, so you have to listen really closely. But it's worth it. Amazing story.

The Roswell incident involved the recovery of at least 2 separately crashed alien spacecraft and at least 3 alien bodies, one of which was alive. These craft were likely shot down by the US military or collided with each other. The aliens are 4ft tall with large head, large eyes, small mouth, small nose, no ears, and no hair. As the report goes, the town of Roswell ran out of dry ice because the military had to buy it all up to freeze the alien bodies.

Decide for yourself what is true.