Studio Sessions

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We spend this episode bouncing between a barn in Malvern, Iowa and the question of where creative work actually comes from. It opens with the story of an 8x10 view camera pulled down from a stranger's rafters and handed over for free, then moves into what's been driving a recent stretch of creative momentum: too many scripts, a short film, a software project, and the discovery that having several unrelated things going at once beats grinding on one.
From there we get into the harder question: how do you take a photograph, write a scene, or make anything that doesn't just repeat something you've already seen online. We talk about pink-door photo clichés, Kubrick's early films, Basquiat working with the radio and television on in the background, and why Adam Sandler's comedies read differently once you know where they came from. That turns into a longer argument about genre dissolving, the sheer volume of culture now available compared to a bassist learning ragtime off a handful of records in the 1980s, and whether that flood helps or drowns out a personal voice.
We close on the physical stuff: CRTs selling for triple what we paid for them, a customer building a VHS wall, and Brian Eno's Oblique Strategies cards as a way to get unstuck. There's also a detour into Apple tech-support logic and why the simplest fix is usually the right one to try first. -Ai
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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. 

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

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madebyalex.online
Last episode of "season" 3! We start with a Squarespace redesign that's been sitting untouched for over a year and end up on the case for building a site from scratch. Alex walks through his history with web design, from MySpace CSS to Adobe Portfolio to a few hundred dollars a year for templates that never did what he wanted, and what changed once LLMs made a custom build possible for someone who isn't a developer.
From there we get into the IndieWeb, Neocities, owning your distribution, and the thousand-true-fans idea. We talk about deleting Facebook, Reddit, and Twitter, why Instagram and YouTube stay on as the only two funnels for now, and what happens to your creative range when everything you encounter comes through a recommendation engine. That turns into effective creative entropy, a term Alex coins mid-conversation, and a deck-of-cards argument about the odds of getting to an original idea.
We finish on what's actually being built: print layouts for every story and essay, marginalia, contact sheets, a guest-curated gallery that rotates every couple of weeks, postcards and a newspaper at cost. Also what's left out on purpose. No SEO, no paid ads, no Google Analytics, no Google-hosted fonts, no metadata on the photos, and AI crawlers blocked. The site is a place to visit and leave, not a place to get stuck. -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

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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
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

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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

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We start with a chance encounter. A stop to photograph an old Dodge pickup and a chain-net basketball hoop turns into an afternoon inside a stranger's garage, looking at restored Mavericks and pulling vintage car t-shirts out of a rag drawer. From there we get into what a camera actually does when you carry one everywhere: it gives you a reason to stop, talk to people, and end up somewhere you never planned to be. We talk about portraiture, about the woman who cried handing over a Nirvana shirt she'd kept for twenty years, and why one photograph from a whole day spent with someone beats a hundred quick frames.
The second half turns on a prompt about quitting, and we land in different places on it. One of us reads walking away as evolution; the other keeps circling a line from Mad Men about only liking the beginning of things. That pulls us into screenwriting: the years of writing five pages a day in an LA apartment, imposter syndrome in studio meetings, a script that went out wide and didn't sell, and the decision to leave. We get into the difference between working and waiting, killing the small "bad problems" so there's room for the good ones, and whether you make art out of ego or out of a plainer need to communicate. -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