So... Alright - Writers block and refilling the tank

Episode Date: March 5, 2024

Geoff rambles on for a bit about being old and tired and how much harder it gets to bounce back as you age. Also, he tells a dog story. Sponsored by Raycon Go to http://buyraycon.com/alright to get 20% off your order, plus free shipping. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

This episode is brought to you by Peloton. Forget the pressure to be crushing your workout on day one. Just start moving with the Peloton Bike, Bike Plus, Tread, Row, Guide, or App. There are thousands of classes and over 50 Peloton instructors ready to support you from the beginning. Remember, doing something is everything. Rent the Peloton Bike or Bike Plus today at onepeloton.ca slash bike slash rentals. All access memberships separate. Terms apply. So, damn it. So I wanted to start this episode by saying good morning, everybody, because I'm recording this in the morning. And I'm feeling kind of jovial, but I can't because I have to start it with so.

So good morning, everybody that's listening to this right now. and I'm feeling kind of jovial, but I can't because I have to start it with so. So good morning, everybody that's listening to this right now. I typically do these podcasts where I relate a story from my past or, I don't know, something that's been itching at my brain a little bit. You know, like most recently, Witchfinder General, the band versus the movie versus the book. While I am in a good mood, I must also admit, I am feeling kind of empty. I don't know about y'all. I get this question a lot from people, which is like, how do you deal with writer's block, which is, you know, as a podcaster and a let's player, I don't know. I don't write as much like I'm not sitting down writing novels. So, but I guess like creative block would be, uh, how you would, I mean, I guess I do do a lot of, I don't know. I'm fucking rambling here. Anyway, how do

you deal with writer's block, creative block? And I, and to be honest with you, it's not something that I have to, I struggle with very often with very often uh if and when it does happen i'm fortunate enough that i i get to do a couple of different things and so if i hit a wall with i don't know something i'm trying to come up with for face an idea or something i can just switch gears and go work on so all right for a little while edit an episode of that or think of some ideas or maybe uh sit down and try to come up with a story to tell for anima or any of a million other things that i could be doing right and so on the rare occasions that it does happen it's i'm usually able to just divert my focus to something else and then by the time i've worked

through that uh or exhausted myself that way typically typically I'm able to return to the other thing in some measure. But the thing that I struggle with and that I'm discovering is getting, I think, a lot worse as I get older is instead of like writer's block, like writer's start. I just have trouble getting going sometimes. Like, writers start... I just have trouble getting going sometimes. And it's like, I know once I sit down and I... Like, I sit down in the case of this. I know once I sit down in front of the thing I do and force myself to get going, I usually can. But not always anymore. And that's been kind of new. And I think it's probably a sign of aging. I think it's just I'm noticing in general in my life, it takes a little bit longer to refill the tank physically and mentally and creatively for sure. And I guess I attribute that to age, right? I'm 48. I'm going on 49. I'm definitely getting up there. I still feel largely the same as I did when I was fucking 19. You know, I still ride bicycles almost every day and collect baseball cards and do all the same shit I did when I was a teenager. I don't really feel any different. I still love walking around the mall.

around the mall like i still feel very very young uh or immature maybe that's how i feel but i really don't feel that different than i did when i was young i just have more trouble getting going sometimes and i just i need longer breaks between stuff we used to god we used to you know we were running so hard in the first 10 15 15 years of Rooster Teeth. And I was thinking about this yesterday. I was on a bike ride. We used to do these hell weeks where, think about it like this. Like, we made content essentially 365 days a year. I think Achievement Hunter and Let's Play content came out seven days a week eventually.

And that was because you demanded it. We wanted to do it, and you demanded it. I'm not complaining. you demanded it. We wanted to do it and you demanded it. I'm not complaining. I loved it. You know, we were making somewhere between 14 and 16 videos a week between Let's Play and Achievement Hunter and we loved doing it.

It was the most rewarding thing in the world, but you would have these hell periods, we would call them hell weeks, where definitely at the end of the year when everybody wants to take a week for Thanksgiving and everybody wants two weeks for Christmas or New Year's, right? That's three weeks on a production company that makes 15 videos a week, and those videos typically edited down to 30 minutes to an hour, hour and 10 minutes. And so you're looking at probably about an hour and a half of recording. That's, you know, that's probably 20 to 22 hours of recording content a

week, which easy peasy, right? There's 40 hours in a week, although it doesn't break down that way. Believe me, and I'm sure you understand that. But where it becomes difficult is you, let's say you're going into Thanksgiving and you know everybody's going to take a week off, but the content doesn't stop. The audience isn't going to take a week off from watching, or in this case, listening. So you don't want to have a lapse in the content you release. And so you have to then find a way to record that 20-ish hours before you go on break. And so on a week, we're already recording 20-ish hours. So you have to portion it out.

You try to get as far enough ahead of it as you can. Upwards of like six, seven, eight weeks ahead of it, you start to try to pepper in additional recordings to kind of build up your coffers. And if you're doing things properly anyway, you always have like a war chest of like a break in case of emergency of a few videos. So there is some cushion there, but you've got to start working this stuff in. And then invariably what happens, as with all productions, if Achievement Hunter did 15 videos in a week, released 15 videos in a week, they probably recorded 17 because

two or three just aren't going to work out for whatever reason. probably recorded 17 because two or three just aren't going to work out for whatever reason, technical problems. The idea didn't manifest properly on, you know, on screen. It wasn't funny. It just wasn't particularly interesting. Like whatever myriad of reasons, usually technical problems, but whatever reason, there's usually two or three videos that just get swallowed up or lost in the week, but they still get recorded and they get edited. Right. That's another thing. Every every one of these videos, like if it takes recording 20 hours of content a week, people are editing 20 hours of content a week, which is incredibly labor intensive. And, you know, the support staff that helps run and keep this thing afloat is working just as hard if not harder than the on-screen talent at all times and they all ever all of us deserve a break right so you want to try to

start recording this stuff as early as possible to pepper it in but then it's like a delicate balance right because the audience can tell when you've pre-recorded something because it doesn't fit in thematically with the jokes or what you're talking about in the time especially with a production like what we were doing at Achievement Hunter and Let's Play that was very tied to whatever's happening in pop culture at the time. And so it's very of the moment, kind of like SNL is in that way. And so you have to try to work around that when you're recording to kind of protect and hide that. And it's just, man, it presented a lot of challenges. Where it really got rough,

though, is you, let's say you get that hell week for Thanksgiving taken care of. Then you come back to work ready to go first week of December, right? And you've got Christmas and New Year's at the end of the month, and you are immediately hitting the ground running, making all the content you need to make to stay current, but also trying to pepper in now probably 10 days to two weeks worth of content, which is another 40 to 50 hours of recorded content. And it really starts to stack and get difficult. And I say all that to say we used to hate doing those, but it was also kind of fun. It was a challenge. It was exciting to be able to do it. It was exciting to organize it and to plan it and to have to come up and front load all those ideas. And then to see it through felt like you, I've never run a marathon and I hope that if everything in my life goes properly,

I'll never have to. But if I did, I imagine it would feel, I would feel a similar sense of accomplishment from like running the, running that gauntlet, you know, of those hell weeks. running that gauntlet, you know, of those hell weeks. And in addition to that, you're dealing with a lot of different moving parts, right? Probably 12 to 15 employees, all who have cars that break down or refrigerators that stop working or that get a flu or sprain their ankle or have a kid that needs to go to the doctor or there's a million reasons why people can't come into work in that period of time too which also further exacerbates and complicates it uh as how as life goes right but so it's it was this crazy thing to go through you feel a tremendous sense of accomplishment after you're going through it and then you think like how do i recover from

this and when you're young you go i'll deal with that when i'm older i i'm bringing this all back around to say like now that i'm older it is really hard to recover from shit. And I didn't have anything last year, like what I just described, right? I'm doing three podcasts, which keep me pretty busy. They really do. And I wouldn't have thought they did. But the preparation for three podcasts is more, it was, it's funny, I was doing two there for a while, Anma and F*** Face. And that was, I recognized that I had spare cycles in my week and I had time that I could apply to something new. This is why I started this one.

The second you go from like 70% to 100%, you really feel that shift. It's wild how much just adding that one additional podcast in added to my workload in a good way. Like, I like it. I'm enjoying it. I'm enjoying this challenge. I'm happy to be talking to you or at you or with you right now. But anyway, this is all going to say I ramble today because I am a little empty and kind of out of juice and trying to tie this all up to say I just went through a wedding, I guess, in November, I guess. I know I went through a wedding. I'm saying, I guess it was

November. And then, so we had like Thanksgiving, wedding, Christmas, where I traveled to multiple cities and states to visit all family. And then back, it's taken me longer to recover from that than I would have thought even here we are in February you know I had to pre-record I had to pre-record somehow six episodes of so all right before it was all said and done and get them edited and turned in which was great and I had a lot I say I had a lot of fun doing it I did it I don't know how much fun I had at certain points but in addition to keeping facing and the rolling youmo rolling, you know, and then, you know, now we're recording all the video game footage, the Let's Plays for F*** Face and trying to record a ton of supplementals. And because we keep having all these fucking great ideas or our version of great ideas.

And then we've got the show doesn't do. There's just a bunch of stuff that had to be recorded and that is getting recorded again. And I'm starting to feel that what I felt in those earlier days, but I just, it just, I'm looking at myself and the tank is getting emptier and it's, that's what I'm struggling with now. I guess I'm struggling with how to fill it back up. I guess maybe it's just time and relaxation. I sat down yesterday. I have an easy week this week because I don't have to record face or I don't even like to say that I don't get to record the other podcast I do face it's my favorite thing on earth to do it's with my best friends in the world and we get to joke and laugh and it is the main like FaceTime I get with them every week I don don't, you know, I'm pretty reclusive.

And so I don't spend a lot of time with people outside of, uh, well, I don't spend a lot of time with people. So when I'm doing the podcast, it's like my focus time with my best friends and it's like therapy. I think we all have agreed. It's like therapy for us. So, uh, it's something that I desperately love to do and I'm not doing it this week, which is fine because absence makes the heart grow fonder. And I know I'll want to do it twice as bad when we get back together to do it next week. And so I've got a little bit of spare time this week, which I'm going to try to use on Saw Right. I'm just noticing that I woke up Sunday morning and I just felt drained. And then yesterday, I felt kind of drained. And I went for a bike ride. Well, first off, I went to my coffee

shop where I go to sit down and kind of come up with ideas. And I just had nothing. You know, I was just like, it's just like tumbleweeds in my brain. And so I thought, well, I'll switch gears and do the other thing. Went for an extra long bike ride, just getting lapped by the tumbleweeds on my bike. It was crazy. And so I'm just, and I was thinking about this and just what I ended up thinking about on my bike ride was just how kind of empty my coffers are right now and how I used to just kind of refill them with will and exuberance. And that doesn't seem to work anymore. And I don't know. So this is an ad that helps support this podcast. I don't know about you, but I like to get outside.

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Buyraycon.com slash all right. All right. It reminds me of, and I realize I'm saying this at 48 years old, and I'm just a little tired because I had a couple of, I had like a busy month or two, right? But I remember reading when Philip Roth, who, if you don't know who Philip Roth is, he's a American author who has written some really tremendous stuff. And I think he's probably considered one of the greatest living American writers and he retired probably fuck is he even alive

god I might have just lied to y'all hold on let's look up Phil Broth real fast uh yeah shit he's dead I fuck alright well I'm sad to hear that and he died in 2018 uh anyway he is this writer from New Jersey he wrote a book called The Plot Against America.

He wrote Exegost. He wrote The Human Stain. He wrote a book called, you should read it if you get a chance. He wrote a book called Portnoy's Complaint. It's a little dated because it's from the 60s and you might see it coming, but it's still funny. Oh, he wrote American Pastoral. Anyway, incredibly prolific writer. And now he's dead. I guess he died in 2018. So this is how old my references. I remember reading an article by him, which I guess it must have probably been like 2014

or 2015 now. It was a while back. And he was saying he was retiring from writing. He had been writing professionally his entire life. And he decided to throw in the towel, and he was done. And he said that he knew that if he pushed it, he could still write and that he could still do it.

But it was getting harder and harder to do it well. And he had to put so much more effort and energy and so much more of himself into the writing to make it anything that was worth reading, right? And he just had less to give. And as he was older, it was like he was trading. This is me adding my own impression to what he's saying here, but it's almost like he's saying, like, I've got this much life left. And if I'm using it to write, then it's taken away from me, right? At this point, like, that's how empty things are. And I wonder when I'll get to that point, because when I read that, I was like, oh, that really makes a lot of sense to me. It really,

I don't know, really clicked with me that there would be a point someday in my life when I have to make a decision, you know, between like, like is doing the thing that I love the pursuit, the career at some point, is it diminishing me more than it's filling me, you know? And I hope that I'm 30 years from that, probably, if not more. You know, I'm planning on living for, I don't know about y'all, but I'm planning on living for at least 150, 200 years if I can. I figure with the way technology's going, I'm on the cusp, right? Like, they say that there are people that have been, that are born on Earth right now that are going to live to 150 years old. And man, I know they mean like six month olds and 18 month olds and shit, but I wish I was, I hope I'm

included in that because I really, really like being alive. I think it's so much fun. It's so fucking cool to be alive and to get to do shit and learn shit and explore shit and experience shit and feel shit. And I just don't want to stop. Right. But I do wonder, like, at what point I just won't be able to do like there just won't be enough of me left to do what I do. You know, once again, I think this may may approach kind of modeling. I'm not upset or thinking that I'm running out of juice. I'm just noticing that I'm getting a little, that it takes a little bit more to recover as I get older. And I imagine that trend will continue. If you're like me and you're in your 40s,

have you noticed, or maybe even early 50s, have you noticed the slowdown? Have you noticed that it's just a little bit like, it takes a little bit longer to recover from exercise or when you really have to, you know, put some real hard mental thought into it for a couple of something for a couple of days. Do you do you notice feeling just a little more weary than you used to? Or is that just me? It it would suck to find out that I just have some sort of a weird disease that's sapping all my

strength. And but I suspect that that's not the case. Email me at jeff at ericsboss.com or eric at jeffsboss.com and share your commiserations with me or tell me how wrong I am. Anyway, I guess all that's just to say that I'm pretty tired and I was sitting down yesterday. Oh man, let me look at some of the notes.

I've been, I was, the stuff I was trying to get excited about to talk about, which is part of the problem with this podcast, right? You have to strike while the iron's hot with this stuff. When something's interesting to you, I need to do the episode and research it immediately because when I don't, or I put it on the back burner, I say, I'll go back and revisit that. When I eventually do, it's like, what? Like I had a whole, I was, I had a whole, here we go. How, here's a bunch of research on how far fish swim in their lifetime and how adventurous they are. Here's a little bit of research I did on Jakarta, the capital of Indonesia. It's, it's sinking into the ocean very, very slowly. It's got, I haven't read this in a while, but if memory serves,

it's got this interesting problem where it's too close to the water, so it floods, but also it was built on top of this ground that is sinking from the weight of all the construction. And so it's creating this doomsday scenario where the city is slowly sinking,

and I think a little bit faster every year and so to combat that indonesia has started construction on an entire new capital city a couple hundred miles away i believe it's a couple hundred miles away called nusa nusantara nusantara and i think they want to have it built by like 2050 or so and then they're just gonna fucking just pick up everybody in jakarta and move them over there, I guess. Maybe you'll have the option to stay in a diminished Jakarta. I don't know.

God damn. Now that I'm talking about it, that's kind of interesting to me. Again, it reminds me that Gus was telling me that Korea is doing something similar with Seoul. I believe they're building a new capital down the road that's more for like government administrative stuff. I gotta look into that. Let's see what other notes I have. Oh, yeah, Happy Jack. There was some dude in Key West I read about

called Happy Jack, but his life wasn't very happy, I think, or he'd have to look into that. I was going to do an episode on the 27 Club. I was going to talk about how they photoshopped Walt Disney's cigarette out of all of his photos and statues at Disneyland. You know what? When I was in the army in journalism school, this would have been 1995. So digital cameras were about to hit. I think we got our first digital cameras in the army in 96 and we got them pretty early. And so digital photography was happening. Photoshop was really starting to take off. And I remember there was this whole lecture we had in journalism school. I'm not crazy. I think they might've even had a guest come in to give this lecture, but maybe not. Anyway, it was all about how this newspaper in, I think, Indiana had in, I want to say, I apologize if I'm very wrong with all these specific facts, but the intent is, the gist is the same. And please understand that I'm drawing from a memory from 1994, I think. But there was a controversy in a newspaper, I think it was a Indiana paper, but it might not have been, where a soldier had come home from Vietnam, maybe, or maybe the Gulf War, actually,

it might have been more recent. And he was like hugging his wife and kid, and he had a cigarette dangling out of his hand. And the newspaper made the editorial decision to photograph it out. So it made, I don't know, for a more picturesque family photo, I guess, or a sweeter moment for some reason. Like, I guess the cigarette bothered him. And it created some kind of a stir. Like, there was like a bunch of, there was a bunch of criticisms about how they were editing reality and how that's not journalism, which I agree. And how and what of what a big deal it was. And I think it caused quite some controversy. And I think that there were probably apologies.

I don't know if anybody lost their job, but I remember being a whole lot of kerfuffle around them photoshopping out the cigarette from the soldier's hand while he was hugging his family. Well, the world has world has changed a lot since 1994, hasn't it? God damn. Now with AI, we just can't trust anything. Anything. I might be AI right now. I might be an AI prompt that Jeff typed in. I don't even know what the AI programs are.

Open AI? prompt that Jeff typed in. I don't even know what the AI programs are. Open AI typed into an open AI that it just spit this out. These might all be made up stories that a computer came up with. They're not, but you know. Oh, I wanted to do a whole episode on Dobie Gillis and the history of the beat generation. I do want to do that still. I wanted to do something about the three investigators, uh, necromantic worship. I think that's probably a band, Terry Fox. I think that's a recommendation from Andrew. So you see, I have all these prompts and when I sit down to do it, sometimes I can connect with them, but usually if it's too long, I can't and I just have to shelve it and

then come up with something new. Yesterday I couldn't do either. What was the last video game for each console? See, that's something I wrote down the other day. I should probably look into that. So I guess this is just an episode of random thoughts all centered around how the fact that as I get older, it just gets harder to recover from periods of intensity, I guess would be how I would say it. And I've actually had a lot of fun just kind of rambling today. What else have I been thinking about lately? How about a quick story about the new puppy? If you don't know, I got a new, or we got a puppy, an English Bulldog puppy. He's four months old. He's adorable. And we've been taking him to a doggy daycare facility, mostly because we had an English Bulldog, Henry, who was perfect in every way,

but he could be dog aggressive because he wasn't socialized around other dogs as much when he was younger. And so we want to make sure that the new puppy is properly socialized. So a couple days a week, I take him to go basically play with other dogs all day long and get attention. And I pulled up to the place yesterday to pick him up. And I went inside, and they seemed like they were having a day. Everybody seemed kind of scattered and flustered. And I don't know why. I was the only person in there. It didn't seem like they were slammed for business. But I went in and I said, Hey, I'm here to pick up my dog. And they go, okay, what's his name? Tell me the name. And they go, all right, he's a French

bulldog. And I go, he's absolutely not. He's an English bulldog. And they go, right. The English bulldog puppy. And I go, that's the one. And the girl goes to a guy and says, can you go get the English bulldog puppy? He's in this kennel or whatever it is. And the guy goes, sure thing. He goes away. Maybe 11 to 12 minutes later, like in a bizarrely long amount of time, he comes back out with an ancient geriatric French bulldog in my dog's harness. It swallows this poor French bulldog because my dog is at least eight pounds heavier than this thing like this dog looks like he weighs 20 maybe 15 pounds my dog weighs like probably

close to 30 at this point and uh and i go that's that's not my dog and the guy looks at me like i'm an idiot he's like what and i go that's a french bulldog that's not my dog we just had a fucking i didn't swear but i was like and the lady goes yeah that's no that's the french bulldog that's not my dog we just had a fucking i didn't swear but i was like and the lady goes yeah that's no that's the french bulldog get the english bulldog and he's like okay and then he disappeared lumbers off and uh and then like another like maybe 10 minutes they bring my dog out i was really starting to wonder if they lost my dog and then i asked for the you know like he he takes a little lunch with him today a little puppy lunch with him every day. He has a very special food that he eats for growing bulldogs. And they couldn't find the container to give it back to me, which is fine. But then he got home and he took just two absolute liquid shits immediately, which he doesn't do.

So now I'm half convinced they fed him the wrong food or they didn't feed him at all, but I think probably the wrong food. And so I don't think we're going to go back there. I think that's the decision I've made. Anyway, I'll be back next week with an actual subject other than just are you old and tired? And do you have trouble recovering

when you exhaust yourself? And hope you have a good week. All right.