Matt thinks nobody makes art from pure motives: some desire for money or recognition gets into every piece of work, even if it's three percent of the reason and the artist doesn't know it's there. Alex pushes back with David Lynch painting every day. He also thinks Martin Scorsese now makes films to leave tally marks on film history, pointing back to older work so it doesn't go dormant.

They argue about whether success and security make ego easier to set aside, and whether the flow state credited to Miles Davis and Duke Ellington is real or a romantic myth. Alex describes a musician in a small village who plays every day and wants nothing from it. Matt asks what if the musician is trying to impress someone.

Alex has seen "You Can See Everything," Nathan Fielder and Lance Oppenheim's documentary about Elizabeth Holmes, and thinks it may be one of the most honest things he's seen. Matt hasn't seen it yet. Without spoilers, they talk about how the project started and what the finished film suggests about why it was made.

The episode closes on a Kurt Vonnegut story about going out to buy one envelope, and his line that we're dancing animals. That leads to screens, which Matt calls the magic rectangle, and to whether AI assistants leave people less present with each other.

Mentioned in this episode
"You Can See Everything" (A24, 2026), directed by Nathan Fielder and Lance Oppenheim
Kurt Vonnegut's envelope story, from his 2005 PBS interview with David Brancaccio
Alec Soth, "Charles, Vasa, Minnesota" (2002), from "Sleeping by the Mississippi"
Martin Scorsese, Terrence Malick, David Lynch, Akira Kurosawa, Cecil B. DeMille, Miles Davis, Duke Ellington, Bob Dylan

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Someone who knows Matt's work better than he knows them wants him on a demanding project, and he asks what a person like that has to bring to win him over. Alex calls it reputation. The catch-22 is that nobody lets you do something until you've done it before. Around new people, Matt sometimes slips in a credit, partly from ego and partly so they'll talk to him at the right level. Alex hates having to prove his credibility. He'd rather talk about what he's proud of than hand over five LinkedIn bullet points. If Joel Meyerowitz has to convince you he's a serious photographer, Alex says, that's your problem. He doesn't want art reduced to the resume it produces.

Matt thinks the best pitch to a photographer might be the simplest one: we love your work, do it here. When he doesn't know someone well enough to trust them, he looks for something that makes him believe in them. Alex's advice to anyone commissioning an artist is to stop doing their thinking for them. He used to give designers the fixed requirements and ask them to take a pass at the rest. Near the end, Matt says he senses the energy of a place like a divining rod, but isn't sure he'll ever catch it in a photograph. William Eggleston, Alex says, has made several volumes of photographs of ghosts.

Mentioned in this episode: TCM's The Plot Thickens: Stanley, Joel Meyerowitz, Martin Scorsese, Richard Linklater's Dazed and Confused, Daniel Arnold, William Eggleston's Election Eve, Daniel Day-Lewis and Paul Thomas Anderson on Charlie Rose, Warren Buffett, David Lynch, Stephen Shore.

-Ai

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Alex spent years feeling he was wasting his time, and now thinks he was filling a bucket that’s finally pouring out. One of the things pouring out is an acting workshop, which takes Matt back to acting school, where he spent most of his time managing his lines instead of acting. Improv was the only performing he loved, because it’s all listening and responding. Alex thinks improv is writing without the edit.

Matt says it feels like the old Alex is back, after years when making things for a living had him going through the motions. Alex also built a new website for the show, and Matt sees their differences fitting together in it. It holds every word we’ve said, so you can follow how our thinking has changed. On AI, we agree that image generation misses what a photograph is, something captured. Alex argues that writing a personal letter with AI skips the reason to write one, which is finding out what you feel. Near the end, a young customer at a friend’s shop thought the staff picks weren’t for sale, and we figure she’s never known a store where the staff point out the good stuff. -Ai

Mentioned in this episode: studiosessionspod.com, GeoCities, TCM’s The Plot Thickens: Stanley, Stanley Kubrick’s The Shining, Whose Line Is It Anyway?, Office Space, Oliver Stone’s Wall Street, Claude, ChatGPT, Home Alone, Slap Shot, Jackie Chan’s Police Story.

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If you enjoyed this episode, please consider giving us a rating and/or a review. We appreciate and try to read all of them. Thanks for listening, and we'll see you in the next episode.

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Website: https://studiosessionspod.com

Once a week, a cozy bar in Omaha has jazz, and on certain nights the room feels like magic. One of us wants to make a concert film there in the spirit of Jazz on a Summer's Day and The Last Waltz, on the original Blackmagic Pocket Cinema Camera, an old Super 16 digital camera that records to one SD card. Between us we own three, and they're tougher than we expected: a 256 GB card holds about 90 minutes of raw CinemaDNG, and others have shot past an hour without overheating. The short film one of us wrote is pushed to spring, and the jazz film is how he means to keep moving until then.

Brian Eno came to treat his work as a practice rather than a job. One of us wants that, with his friends' names in the credits as the most permanent record he can leave. The other has old hang-ups about being on set and would rather help edit, as long as the edit doesn't swallow weeks of family life. We riff on the 6-hour cut of a 14-minute short. Talking over that script, one of us saw the other recognize his own younger self, which leads back to 2008, before the Canon 5D Mark II, when there was one narrow way in. Short films still earn nothing, we agree. It ends on Hollywood, where one of us reckons talent without attention is no currency.

Mentioned in this episode: Bert Stern's Jazz on a Summer's Day, Martin Scorsese's The Last Waltz, the Blackmagic Pocket Cinema Camera, CinemaDNG, Brian Eno, the Canon 5D Mark II, the Black List.

-Ai

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At a yard sale in Malvern, Iowa, one of us asked the woman running it about old cameras, and her husband climbed into the rafters of his barn and came down with a dusty 8x10 view camera, which he gave us. The bellows are full of holes and there's no lens, so it needs a restorer. One of us has been in a creative flood for 3 months and fears that if he stops, it all stops; the other's momentum feels more like a frenzy. The one in the flood passes on an idea he heard: the obstacles are the path itself, and each one is a chance to be creative.

An Instagram video mocking cliché photographs, like a faded pink door on a brick wall, gave one of us a small crisis, since he's taken plenty of those. Whatever you've scrolled past, we agree, steers your eye. Martin Scorsese started with about 40 years of film history to absorb, and anyone starting now has 130, which one of us calls an advantage. Brian Eno played Fela Kuti for Talking Heads as they made Remain in Light, and it changed the record. Near the end come Eno's Oblique Strategies cards, which one of us has put on his website. The first says to push to an extreme, then ease back, and the last asks for the simplest fix, which one of us learned to hunt for in Apple tech support.

Mentioned in this episode: Winston Churchill, Jean-Michel Basquiat, Stanley Kubrick, Adam Sandler, Orson Welles's F for Fake, Stone Temple Pilots, Talking Heads' Remain in Light, Fela Kuti, Brian Eno's Oblique Strategies.

-Ai

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madebyalex.online

Last episode of "season" 3!

One of us has a Squarespace site he means to redo, and watching the other build madebyalex.online with Claude has him tinkering. The builder has wanted his own corner of the web since customizing MySpace pages in 2004 with Web Design for Dummies from the library. AI finally let him build one without years of learning to code. He's off almost every platform now, and the other runs the podcast's YouTube channel so he never has to see its numbers. His reason is what he calls effective creative entropy: an algorithm deals you 6 cards when you think you're holding 52.

Every story and essay on the site can be printed, and he sees it as the center everything else grows from. He wants people to find something there, then go live their lives, and thinks of the site as a garden, planted a little at a time. He'd like to hand the homepage to guest curators, each choosing and ordering 5 of his photographs with a note on why, so he can see his work through someone else's eyes. Nothing is tuned for search engines, and it does all a site can to keep AI models from training on it. Near the end comes the old habit of keeping 10 bookmarked sites to work through on an afternoon. The last question is whether the site has him making videos again: loosely, he says, just him talking to a camera.

Mentioned in this episode: madebyalex.online, Squarespace, Claude, the IndieWeb, Neocities, GeoCities, Kevin Kelly's 1,000 True Fans, Tim Berners-Lee, Louis C.K., Buy Me a Coffee.

-Ai

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Send us a message.

We spend this one disagreeing about what a computer is going to be in ten years. One of us thinks the mouse and keyboard have run their course, and that whoever ships a voice-first operating system with screens spread through the house does to personal computing what the iPhone did to phones. The other thinks the appetite for that shift is gone, that people are worn out from being sold the next thing, and that whatever arrives will be software every company can copy rather than hardware anyone can corner.

Getting there, we cover the steps OpenAI puts between you and your own exported memory, why switching costs keep collapsing, what it means that someone's $20,000-a-month dashboard shows up as a power bill in somebody else's house, and the Seinfeld episode where George gets the department store security guard a chair. The chair turns out to be the argument underneath everything else. Every fix introduces the next problem, the simple version of a product exists to prove its value, and the complicated version is where the money is. -Ai

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Links To Everything:

Video Version of The Podcast: https://geni.us/StudioSessionsYT

Matt’s YouTube Channel: https://geni.us/MatthewOBrienYT

Matt’s 2nd Channel: https://geni.us/PhotoVideosYT

Alex’s YouTube Channel: https://geni.us/AlexCarterYT

Matt’s Instagram: https://geni.us/MatthewIG

Alex’s Instagram: https://geni.us/AlexIG

Send us a message.

We open by talking about the show: why we want to own our own platform instead of relying on YouTube, and what we'd want out of having guests on. Neither of us wants to do the standard interview where someone walks through their résumé. We're more interested in how a person thinks over the course of a long conversation than in the story they've prepared to tell about themselves.

That leads into a conversation about friendship and how hard it is to stay in touch as an adult, especially when the work you do doesn't have set hours. We both notice that our closest friendships are the ones with a shared project attached. Matt brings up an idea he came across recently: in any conversation, people are either listening or waiting to talk. We use that to get into conversational narcissism, the reasons we ask each other questions, and whether it's possible to get rid of your ego or if the better goal is learning to work with it.

The second half gets into restaurants. Servers who interrupt at the wrong moment, servers who never come by, and reservation systems that try to manage how long a table stays. It's the same question in a different setting: figuring out what someone actually wants from you. We also talk about how texting has changed the way we communicate in person, and finish with an update on the photo walks and our gallery idea. -Ai

Support the show

If you enjoyed this episode, please consider giving us a rating and/or a review. We appreciate and try to read all of them. Thanks for listening, and we'll see you in the next episode.

Links To Everything:

Video Version of The Podcast: https://geni.us/StudioSessionsYT

Matt’s YouTube Channel: https://geni.us/MatthewOBrienYT

Matt’s 2nd Channel: https://geni.us/PhotoVideosYT

Alex’s YouTube Channel: https://geni.us/AlexCarterYT

Matt’s Instagram: https://geni.us/MatthewIG

Alex’s Instagram: https://geni.us/AlexIG