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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

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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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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

Send us a message.

We start with a night at the movies and end up talking about why some art grabs you and some doesn't. What makes a theater different from a screen at home, why certain films only land years later, and how much of the experience is the room you're in versus the thing you're watching.

From there we get into horror and what it does that other genres can't, how a story changes once your own life catches up to it, and why unfinished work feels so exposed. Mostly it's the usual: two people following a thread about how art gets made and why it sticks. -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