Episode 15: "Interview with John de Lancie, Actor, Writer, and Director"
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Episode description:
In this episode I speak with John de Lancie, an actor, writer, and director with a wonderful and storied career, probably best known for his portrayal of the character Q on Star Trek: The Next Generation and several subsequent Star Trek properties.
We spoke about generative artificial intelligence, the Hollywood strikes, voice acting, the Kent State University shootings which he experienced, music, and last but not least, sailing!
Episode transcript:
SCOT: Hello, everyone, and welcome back to AI QuickBits: Snackable Artificial Intelligence Content for Everyone. My name is Scot Pansing, and earlier today I spoke with John de Lancie, an actor, writer, and director with a wonderful and storied career, probably best known for his portrayal of the character Q on Star Trek: The Next Generation and several subsequent Star Trek properties. We spoke about generative artificial intelligence, the Hollywood strikes, voice acting, the Kent State University shootings which he experienced, music, and last but not least, sailing.
John is such a warm human being, and I hope you enjoy this conversation as much as I did!
SCOT: All right, John. Well, thank you very much for speaking with me today.
JOHN: I'm delighted.
SCOT: All right. Well, right off the bat, I want to say I won't be getting very deep into Star Trek. There's plenty of material out there with you being interviewed about that show and that property, and mostly I'm afraid of getting roasted by the Trekkies. But I might ask you a question here or there.
The show is called “AI Quick Bits,” but I'm happy to discuss anything you want. As far as AI, I was saying earlier, as I've known you, you've always been into the latest technology. And many, many years ago, when Apple's Siri first came out, I remember you were definitely like, from day one, using Siri to play music for you and to be able to just interact the interface of the voice with your phone. I think you were very excited about it. Anyway, how do you feel about this latest artificial intelligence generative AI craze? I know you'd mentioned seeing ChatGPT. What are your first impressions?
JOHN: In looking into it a little bit, I was taken by what somebody, don't remember who it was, said it's a little like fire. You can cook food. Fire can cook your food for you, and fire can burn your house down. Certainly, from a medical point of view, I hear that things are going to be improved. I'm sure that there are many, many other businesses where having that type of information at your fingertips could be helpful.
From an acting point of view, I'm not so sure. The sheer fact that just a couple of days ago, I was listening to, of all things, Trump's indictment being read. And as somebody who reads and whose business it is to read out loud, I was commenting, remarking to myself about how well, oh, my God, this person is really good at this. And gee, I wish I had that skill, because clearly the indictment had come out just an hour or so before, and now I could hear it read to me and at the end of it, it said, AI.
And I feel like I have a good ear for that type of stuff. And I was completely taken aback, and it made me I'm amazed at how well it sounded, and I'm sort of sad about the fact that somebody's job was just taken away.
SCOT: Yeah. So you mean the inflection of the voice, it didn't sound like a computer.
JOHN: Yes. Up until now, one of the issues about the voice is that it always sounds like it's right on the word that is being said. But when you read out loud, you are leading the audience, you are moving through material. It's not like a sewing machine that is just bump, bump, bump just on the word. It's actually moving. And I was amazed at how natural, how the phrasing was, how everything about it was. I was completely taken.
SCOT: I think they're making really big strides with that, even to the point where the really sort of cheap or free tools that are accessible to anyone; they are remarkable. They have a little bit of.. you might hear a little inflection, like, oh, I can sort of tell that's a machine. But the tools that news outlets are using, or the more professional tools that are used in entertainment or news or for voiceovers or whatever in Hollywood, they must have access to something well beyond the $5 a month sort of consumer tools.
JOHN: But understand that's somebody's job.
SCOT: Absolutely.
JOHN: Yeah. And so that's distressing in the same way that I guess I don't know all this stuff, but let's say a factory worker who had been doing a particular job all of a sudden comes in one day to discover the robot is doing it.
SCOT: Yeah. I think voiceover is going to be one of the first or already is an immediately impacted area.
JOHN: A couple of years ago, I got involved, without going too far into it, with a company that wanted to use my voice and so that the person who, other than myself, could sound like me. And this was in a computer generated kind of game type of thing. I thought at first I was simply going to be saying things like, move out of the way, instructional type of stuff. The game's over, and it's just sounding like me.
And they could plug that in? No, we will train the machine so that it really does sound like you, and then the person could speak in their own voice, but it will sound like you.
SCOT: Right.
JOHN: Well, that's when I went, well, wait a minute. Remember that trial that took place about four or five years ago of the young lady who convinced her boyfriend over the phone to commit suicide?
SCOT: I don't remember that trial.
JOHN: Well, there was a trial about this. Okay, well, what if she let's say the man in this was a Star Trek fan and she could say in using her words, but she could sound like me, who plays a character on Star Trek. “Yeah. You know what? I think it's time for you to off yourself.”
SCOT: Wow.
JOHN: Yeah. So I said, what about that? Well, we don't know. So my concern about these things is that the people who invent these things are not malevolent.
“Isn't this fabulous? This is amazing, what can be done?” But downstream of that, I see a lot of bad actors.
SCOT: Yeah, bad actors. That's right.
JOHN: Right.
SCOT: And like you said, it's like fire, right? It's a tool. So, I mean, I'm sure the.. I'm not, I don't want to say I'm sure. I suspect that shortly after the telephone was invented and someone said, look, you can place a phone call to save someone's life and to get a doctor there. You can also say, I need you to take care of a guy, bust his kneecaps or kill so you can order a murder over the telephone.
JOHN: And we already have, apparently. I see in the news every once in a while, grandparents being scammed by supposedly their grandson calling and saying, I need money.
SCOT: I'm in jail. Don't tell mom, but I need you to wire me some money.
JOHN: Keep it a secret.
SCOT: Yeah. I mean, yes, they're the bad actors. That stuff will always happen. But I think especially sticking with voiceover, I mean, you're someone who.. you're very well known for many things, but also your voice. You've done a ton of voice acting, video games, all sorts of things. So I could imagine a world where that this is happening, that plenty of people will say, this is getting mature enough and disciplined enough to where, hey, I'm known for my voice. I'm going to license out my likeness and the system is mature enough to where they'll keep it locked down somewhat to where only with my permission and for certain forms of content, I'll get paid for them to use. Like, you would never have to walk into a sound booth, but someone could read. Or now, like you said, they just put in text and it's read as if it's you by the machine, and you would get compensated. And you would ideally have some comfort that your voice would not be used in any form of nefarious way. But I think that's a big if.
JOHN: Yeah, that's a big if. And also, listen, once it's digital, it's almost impossible to track it. It's out there.
SCOT: Well, that's the thing with bad actors. I mean, honestly, your voice is out there so much, let alone on this show right now, but someone could just scrape your voice from anything and put it into a model and then make a phone call as if they're you, and that can happen without anyone's permission, honestly, which is scary. Okay, we've already taken a deep dive into it. This is fantastic.
So I know that the strikes going on right now with the writers and actors, that AI is a part of it, and I know that.. I haven't read into it too much, but just the other day, I think there was some motion. The studios came forth and said, okay, we have some proposals that I think the unions are looking at, and I believe they did make some concessions around AI and some other things.
But a month or two ago, it was kind of the headline was they're telling us that they want to scan an actor, pay them for one day's work, and then just use their image and likeness into perpetuity without ever paying them. And that was a pretty big sticking point, I think.
JOHN: Well, think about it. Yeah, they were talking about that for atmosphere, for the extras. That is a profession in itself that has been around since the beginning of film. And people.. it's a skill and people are better at it or not as good at it and what have you. So it's important to have really good extras who really understand what they're doing and the atmosphere, understands what it's doing and all that type of stuff, to say to those people that we're going to scan you and use you. Now you've got crowds that are just.. you don't need the crowd anymore. That's the end of a profession. Yeah, I don't think anybody should feel good about that.
SCOT: There are some extras that say lines, but I think what you are.. just to drill into this a little bit, when I was growing up and the shows that I would watch, the main actors are, let's say, in a restaurant, and they're surrounded by other actors that know that I'm pretending to be in a restaurant, but I'm being 100% quiet. But we're doing business, we're moving our.. all of that, right?
JOHN: And you are being directed by the director who's saying, when you hear them talking a little loud and there's sort of an argument going on, every once in a while, make sure you take a look over it as if you're being disturbed by it and stuff like, I mean, they're acting, right? They're acting.
SCOT: And the issue I see, or the interesting thing I see with this is that with generative AI, I feel like a lot of the time, and this can be unfortunate, like you said, because it impacts a lot of people's work or jobs or livelihood, but sometimes the result is good enough in many people's eyes. So some people are going to say, look, maybe the quality of these background actors in the restaurant scene is not what it used to be, but hey, people are looking at the main actors. It's good enough. They sacrifice that to cut costs and all these things.
JOHN: Well, there it is, isn't it?
SCOT: Cut costs. That's right.
JOHN: Costs become everything. And if we are going to be doing a big slide into mediocrity, we really need to start thinking about it because it's certainly not the way I would want to go. And I don't think that people, when they think about it, they want to go that way either.
SCOT: I think what happens is a lot of people don't think about it and when it's maybe too late, all of a sudden they look around and go, what happened? Quality is low.
JOHN: I was with one of my sons and he was showing me this is whatever it is, ten months ago, right, what is it?
SCOT: ChatGPT.
JOHN: ChatGPT. And so he said, I just want you to look at this. So he said, let's use a little again, it was Star Trek, Q and Picard join forces to save somebody on a planet, something like that. And within moments, a script starts coming out. Well, that's astounding in itself. And I read about three or four pages of the script. There wasn't anything particularly fabulous about it, but it was very serviceable.
SCOT: Good enough, right?
JOHN: It was good enough, yeah, it was good enough. And it made me immediately get on a phone call with a friend of mine who's a writer and said, you need to look at this. The good news is, it's a little bit like having an assistant who doesn't say a word..
SCOT: Doesn't judge you.
JOHN: Doesn't judge you, and for which you'll go, oh, that idea on the top of page two, and that other idea on the top of the bottom of page three are two ideas that I could pull together. And now that makes me think, in other words, it's like having somebody is there who knows a little bit, or quite a bit about a subject and starts throwing out ideas and you go, oh, I like number two and number seven, I like those ideas. So in that respect, it's good. In the bad respect is that people it's somebody's job at stake.
And I don't have much faith in a population that's not going to simply go for good enough. Yeah, I believe that people are going to be attracted to good enough, because, guess what? Gee, we got a script, an acceptable shooting script, I don't know, whatever. It would have taken an hour.
SCOT: Yeah, of course, creatives don't like looking at.. many creatives don't like looking at a blank page. That's the most difficult part. But once the juices are flowing and they get past that blank page, right? And so if it can help in that respect, that can be a good thing.
JOHN: That could be a good thing.
SCOT: But you can see where the business side of it quickly goes to, well, then, can't you get this done in a fraction of the time? Let's pay you less.
JOHN: Right.
SCOT: And I'm not going to give you weeks or whatever amount of time.. I know you can use ChatGPT, and it doesn't need to be amazing, so let's go.. chop chop, and I'm going to pay you half as much, or whatever it might be.
JOHN: That's right.
SCOT: A lot of big questions here, and I know it's going to, it's for sure disrupting many industries, but this is a big one.
JOHN: Many industries. Now, I'm told that in the medical field, this might be helpful, although I asked a doctor about it. I mean, this is just testimonial who said, no, I played around with it. And some of the suggestions I wouldn't go with. I thought it was wrong. I don't know. One thing that I did hear, something else that I heard is that they are able to run.. being very vague here because I didn't really understand quite what was being said. But many molecular compounds that usually take, I guess, actually physically doing it and stuff like that were able to be run.
SCOT: Folding proteins.
JOHN: I think that's one of them, yes. So I go, oh, well, great, yeah, great. But taking somebody's life work and saying, I want to write a novel just like Charles Dickens would have written.. and it's weird.
SCOT: Yeah, it's strange. And there are people who know.. we speak about the trend towards mediocrity. I mean, there are people who literally say, I'm doing this now with all these tools, the way that ebooks and Amazon lets you self publish, there's a YouTube video where this guy's like, I know ChatGPT has a limited amount of output, but in one session you can set up at the beginning. Here are my characters, here's the three act structure. And eventually you say, now give me chapter one. And then that comes out. And then, okay, now give me chapter two. So it takes a little work, but we're talking about getting a probably.. I mean, it's subjective, but he'll have a novel or novella in a day. And then there it is on Amazon for a dollar as an ebook. And then the next day he's doing another one and another one and another one. And that's sort of.. some would say that's very much diluting the quality of literature.
JOHN: It's certainly not writing.
SCOT: Right.
JOHN: No, it's not writing. It's not writing.
SCOT: No. Even it might be at best editing and proofing. Right. And what's coming out of machine? And it's also questionable what the machine is drawing upon to do that. Depending, as we talked earlier and now you just mentioned, if you're saying in the style of so and so well, right there it's going to draw upon someone else's work.
JOHN: Exactly.
SCOT: And even if you don't say in the style of so and so, it's going to draw upon someone else's work. Yeah, with the medical stuff, to go back to that, I think there are.. like with brute computing force to find new combinations of molecules or protein folding. And that's certainly above my head, but I read about that a lot.
But as far as the day to day in a doctor's life, I see more of the lower level stuff. Like, I don't want my doctor bogged down with the paperwork or the data entry and all of like, there should be maybe if the doctor is talking to me, a speaker on that I've consented to, and then it's recording our conversation and then he doesn't have to maybe write notes up afterwards or sit there and type into the keyboard because it's all kind of flowing into his system. I could see that being a benefit.
But as far as actual medical advice, the way these things are progressing, you can ask ChatGPT or any of these generative AI tools.. because they're improving them.. the same prompt does not give the same output from day to day or week to week. So you can imagine.. I had a guest on the podcast just the other day who was like, you go to a doctor and say the same symptoms and say the exact same thing three days later and have the doctor respond to you in a different way? That's not what we want.
JOHN: Right.
SCOT: I wouldn't see it being like a replacement for doctors, but I do feel like in the medical industry or across many industries, these rudimentary tasks but again, to your point, it's someone's job, but I think there's some inevitable labor disruption. It's going to happen.
JOHN: It's happening.
SCOT: It's happening. That's right.
JOHN: It's happening.
JOHN: And that's why I was so attracted, as it were, as an explanation, which is, hey, it's like fire. Fire will cook and fire will burn your house down.
SCOT: The most powerful tools are dangerous.. power tools.. you don't put them in the hands of a four year old.
Well, with voice acting and to take maybe a bit of a turn from AI and technology here for a second, but I know you've done a lot of voice acting, but I am fascinated by your journey, your unexpected journey that came out of the My Little Pony: Friendship Is Magic series. And Bronies, do you want to talk just a little bit about that?
JOHN: Sure. I got a call from my agent saying, you have an offer to do a show, and it's [unintelligible noise].. that's what I heard.
SCOT: Like the trumpet in Peanuts.
JOHN: Whatever, and they'd like you to read it. Really? Right away. And I said, well, what is it? And he said, well, it's a cartoon for little girls, and would you read it to make sure that you feel it's okay? I said sure. So I read about two or three pages and I went, wow, this is actually pretty well written, and what could be objectionable to this? So I did. I said, sure, and then I went in and I did it. And I'm meeting all sorts of people in the sound booth or in the recording studio there, and I did it. And like most voiceovers, you work on it..you worked especially in my case, because I'm really dyslexic, so I have to really work on it and stuff like that. You work on it takes about an hour, an hour and a half to record, never to be thought of again.
SCOT: That's the end, right? You're finished.
JOHN: That was finished, yeah. So I went down to my computer three months later and I opened up my computer and in my email program are maybe about three or 400 emails, which I figured, oh, my God, I've been hacked, or whatever, and they all are saying, “MLP” and “My Little Pony.” And I called up to Marnie, my wife, and I said, what do you know about My Little Pony?
She said, well, it's a thing that you voiced about three months ago.
SCOT: Remember?!
JOHN: Yes, and it's a cartoon for little girls. I said, well, let me tell you something. These are not little girls that are writing me. And that evening, a friend of mine came over and I told him the story, and he was a producer who made documentaries, reality TV kind of documentaries, and he said, well, let's do a documentary. And I said, oh, my God, I'm not going to touch this with a ten foot pole. First of all, it's presumptuous. I've done one show, I don't know anything. I didn't even know the title of the show. So they're going to write and do a documentary on it?
And then I was up in Vancouver shooting, and some very well dressed, very well mannered young men came up to me and said, could you sign this? And I go, what is this? And he goes, well, this is My Little Pony. I go, wait a minute, why are you watching this? And they gave me some explanations, which I thought, oh, okay.
And I had a company with Leonard Nimoy called Alien Voices. And I used to talk to Leonard quite a bit about a know, obviously, I knew all the stuff that we generally know about Star Trek, but I could say to him, Leonard, you were on a failed television show back in, whatever, 1965 or whatever it was, and afterwards you're driving a taxi, and stuff like that. But then something took place, and that is people would begin to call him and say, we've got about 35 or 40 of us who would love if you could come to our house and talk about Star Trek, or we're going to have a get together in a restaurant and stuff like that.
So it was just at the beginning of this fan. Something was happening. Something was happening. Well, I felt that something was happening with these kids for My Little Pony.
So my friend wrote me and said, I think you ought to see this. And it was a thing on Fox News, which I'm not a fan of, okay? I've never been a fan of, but..
SCOT: They picked up a story.
JOHN: They picked up a story, and it was along the lines of “Bronies, the latest degradation,” all right?
SCOT: They put a negative spin on it.
JOHN: Very negative spin. “Bronies are a bunch of homosexuals who live at home on food stamps and disabilities so that they can watch cartoons in their parents basement.” And I went, you know, that is so wrong. It's just so wrong. So I called him back. And I said, okay, let's do this documentary, because these kids need some protection. If we can provide it, but who's going to pay for this documentary?
And he said, Well, I think we could do it for $60,000. And I said, oh, well, you know, Mike, 60 is not going to barely, barely. He said, I can bring in a lot of favors, and there's a thing called Kickstarter. It just happened this year, and if you could say a few words, we might be able to get $60,000. Well, I think we got I don't remember exactly.
SCOT: I looked it up yesterday, actually, it was the second most successful movie on Kickstarter or something, and well over $300,000.
JOHN: So I said, okay. Oh, my God.
SCOT: Looks like we're making this.
JOHN: It looks like we're making it. We need to go to Monte Carlo for a week and a half and just talk about the movie. No, I'm just kidding. I said, no, we need to see all of it up on the screen. And that's what we did. And we went to a convention in the Meadowlands in New Jersey there, and then sent a team to Israel, to Holland, to England, around the country, and we made a documentary, which I'm actually very proud.
SCOT: I mean, it's also a testament to I mean, the show obviously had good, the production of the show. It's not just I mean, that doesn't happen without a quality product, right?
JOHN: Lauren Faust was the head of it for a couple of years at least, and then it was taken over by other people who maintained all of that wonderful writing. They were cautionary tales, morality tales, from a secular point of view.
I remember one in which I don't know how many episodes I did, ten, maybe not even that eight, but one of the episodes was, I now have a friend, and I'm so happy, and that friend says, I'm going to invite one of my friends and it'll be the three of us. Well, I'm now very jealous. Okay. And I thought, isn't this interesting? I understand that this is for eight year olds, but I know an 80 year old who.. this is a message for, this is a message for a lot of people. I mean, I know an 80 year old who we just don't include at dinners with other people because we can't deal with it.
It's very strange that one thinks that you get over those things, but you don't. And it's really nice to have I thought that that was really wonderful that they had a program about that so that an eight year old could go, oh, wow, you know, that's true. I do have that kind of feeling, and let me look at that and stuff like that. So I'm a big fan of the show.
SCOT: Nice. Yeah, thank you for sharing that. And I would like to maybe stick with TV for a moment and maybe go back to Star Trek. I know you weren't in this particular episode of The Next Generation, but again, going back to AI, and this is a bit of an AI.. It's an AI podcast and technology. There was an episode called and I haven't seen this in over 30 years, so Trekkies, please be gentle with me, but it's called “Measure of a Man.” And Brent Spiner's character Data is sort of on trial saying, “Don't disassemble me.” And the themes in that show really touched.. I mean, workers' rights, slavery.. Did you see that episode?
JOHN: [nods no]
SCOT: Okay, that's one that I remember very.. I watched that show in the early 90s a bit, and that particular episode struck me. So anyone listening that might want to check that one out, that one was a pretty good artificial intelligence rights episode.
The other thing that I thought I would tell you that was just sort of a funny anecdote of mine, is that some friends of mine and I were watching this content in the early 90’s, and we were watching a movie called The Fisher King with Robin Williams and Jeff Bridges. And there's a scene where Jeff Bridges is in this limo with some television executives, and you're one of those executives.
And we were kind of like, wouldn't it be crazy if.. because at that time, it was around the same time as the show, you looked like Q in a suit, and this before I knew you. And so we were having these fun conspiracy theories, or just fun make believe theories that Q was playing on Earth and as a television executive for a couple of years. Anyway, I don't know if you find that funny a little bit.
JOHN: [laughs]
SCOT: [suspects it was forced] Thank you for laughing.
JOHN: Thank you for.. I'll tell you where it happens for Next Generation. I did six shows, right?
SCOT: Oh, yeah, that few?
JOHN: Well, that's my point. People will say to me, no, that's impossible. No, you were in the show where that happened. I go, no, actually I wasn't. Well, but you certainly were in the show where.. no, actually, I wasn't there. My character seems to have been placed in the imagination of people in many, many different episodes that I was not actually in.
SCOT: Or even in The Fisher King. They see somewhere like, oh, that could have been Q. That's funny.
JOHN: It's also called typecasting, I dare say.
SCOT: Well, it's good to be known.
JOHN: Well, you hit the nail on the head. The alternative is not so nice, right?
SCOT: Well, to wrap up a little bit with some personal details, I'll just ask you about.. I didn't realize as I was researching you the other day a little bit, that we have an Ohio connection. I'm from Dayton, which is the opposite side of the state from where Kent State University is, but I didn't know you went to Kent State and you were even there during the shootings in 1970. Were you protesting? Or were you kind of hanging out?
JOHN: No, I mean, I was there.
SCOT: There?
JOHN: Yeah.
SCOT: Oh, there. Okay.
JOHN: Yeah. And ended up going to Washington to protest afterwards. And here's something that never would happen, that doesn't happen anymore. I'm walking around in the protest in Washington and I'm thinking to myself, gosh, I'm just a drop in the bucket here. I'm going to go and look up my senator and I'm going to go to his house and I'm going to tell him I was there, and I can explain to you exactly what took place and you probably don't know.
Well, I mean, I went to a phone book and looked up Senator Young's name and his address and it was in there in the phone book. Yeah, unheard of.
SCOT: Right.
JOHN: Went to his house, he let me in.
SCOT: He let you in?
JOHN: He let me in. I sat down, talked with him, he said, what can I offer you, young man? I said, well, how about a bourbon on the rocks?
SCOT: And he said, I'm a politician, let's go.
JOHN: And he said, I want you to tell this story to Robert Kennedy.
SCOT: Wow.
JOHN: Yeah. He said, except you can't go dress that way. So he gave me a white shirt.
SCOT: Wow.
JOHN: Yeah.
SCOT: What.. another era to show up on the stoop of a politician. These days, they know, like with Nancy Pelosi, what happened. I mean, they're thinking attacker or I mean, jeez.
JOHN: And I went there and I spoke with him and he said, I want you to go out on the floor of the Senate and say a few words. I did, and then afterwards he said, well, that was great. And I said, Well, I think I need to now go and speak to Nixon. And he goes, well, I don't know if that will happen, but I can get you into the White House. So I got into the White House. I was with another young man and he told this told our story, as it were, to the people in the White House.
SCOT: Wow. Well, I'm glad I asked you about that. I didn't know that it would take that turn. That's incredible.
My other question for you about your life is that your father, John Delancey Sr. was the principal oboist of the Philadelphia Orchestra from 1954 to 1977. At least that's what Wikipedia says. And I just wanted to ask you, he seems to have been a big influence. I also read that you've directed many symphonic plays and an opera. Can you talk about growing up with someone that's that well established, or at that high level of musicianship?
JOHN: Yeah, well, my entry into music was at a really high level of artistry. So yes, he was the solo oboe player for the Philadelphia Orchestra, which meant that I heard by the time I was 18 and left home, I had heard hundreds and hundreds of concerts at the Academy of Music. He also ended up in ‘77 I guess it was.. I didn't know what those dates were, but he then ended up becoming the director of the Curtis Institute of Music.
SCOT: Oh, wow.
JOHN: I got involved in Narrating for symphony orchestras. I started out here with the LA Phil and then the New York Philharmonic and Chicago and Cleveland and what is it? The one in Australia? The Sydney Opera House. I directed a number of operas. I then created what I called symphonic plays, which were an opportunity for an audience to come and understand, let's say, the life of Mahler or Prokofiev. So I would have actors, sometimes dancers, certainly singers on stage. I would have an entire orchestra as well. I did the children's concerts for the LA Phil for three or four years. So I guess I have somewhat of a career as well in that.. I just did a rewrite of Grieg's Peer Gynt.
I was on tour a couple of months ago with Stravinsky's L'Histoire du Soldat, where I went to eight different cities with the Curtis Institute, met some wonderful people. And I'm developing a show, actually, right after our lunch today.
SCOT: Oh, nice.
JOHN: I'm going to get on the phone and we're developing a new show for a Star Trek inspired music. So I continue working in that area.
SCOT: Very cool. We can end it with some controversial AI and music discussion briefly, that I could just tell you that this generative AI has already come into the music space. We hear a lot about it with pop music, but I've also read that, for example, they've sit people in a room and say something like, we've discovered there's an undiscovered piece of Mozart music that's going to be played for you today. And these are musicologists. Or I'm not sure, but it's very believable. Even though a computer has, quote, generated in the style of Mozart or something. Create music.
JOHN: Well, that's been done for a long time, okay? So that doesn't strike me as being particularly New Age.. people, pianists or what have you.. you could say, well, could you create a thing for me and make it sound like Mozart?
SCOT: But it's not. He didn't write it, but it okay.
JOHN: So I'm not surprised. I'm not surprised.
SCOT: I mean, if a musician or a composer has a style, then they're repeating certain techniques or structures or chord progressions or whatever.
JOHN: And especially with music, because music is so mathematical. So all of.. know I'm not a musician, but the way in which Mozart constructed those I guess it's eight notes as opposed to Bach for him, as opposed to Brahms and what have you, those styles are understood.
SCOT: Okay, that makes sense. All right, well, we can end it there. I really appreciate your time. I know that we did discuss a little bit of AI a little bit, but I really enjoyed talking about just technology also in general and a little bit of your career and My Little Pony, and also the trip to the Senator's house and to the White House. Very interesting.
JOHN: Sailing, you didn't talk about..
SCOT: We didn't talk about sailing! Do you have anything? Yeah, okay, would you like to talk about sailing? And also any future projects also that you're like? What would you like to end on here?
JOHN: Well, sailing was something that was really meaningful to me. The first book in which I read was Mysterious Island. I said before that I had problems reading and so I was maybe about twelve when I read that book. It was a tremendously influential book. I just wanted to be like those guys, they knew things.
We seem to be now in a world of opinions where you actually don't need to know much of anything, but you could have a big mouth and a lot of opinions, but these were guys who actually knew things, the characters in this play. So that informed me a great deal. And there's something about sailing, I just was out sailing this weekend.
There's something about sailing which is very refreshing, and that is that it doesn't operate in the world of opinions and it operates in being thoughtful and in being prepared and being careful and yet at the same time risky, because what you're doing, you are just a few feet from a watery death if things don't work out. I like all of that.
And so I was very fortunate in being able I have my own boat and I sailed my own boat to the Marquesas and to the Tuamotus and to Tahiti and then back with some friends and that was great. And I still sail, so I love that.
One of the things.. the person who I went out with this weekend, he said, oh my gosh, sailing is so different in terms of your mindset. And I said yes. One of the nicest things about it is it insists that you be outside of your head, not in your head. Being in my head is not the nicest place to be, but you are always out of your head, you're always going, well, what if that happened? And what if that happened? Look what's going there and what's going on? So I love that feeling.
SCOT: And when friends go with you sailing, do you put them to work? I mean, are they helping to do.. or are they having a Mai Tai on the deck?
JOHN: Yeah, no, there's no Mai Tai on the deck. The least agreeable person to have on a sailboat is the person who is completely oblivious to what's going on. They become a liability, quite frankly. Yeah, so you encourage them in the nicest way. I'm not taking people out to sail to beat up on them, but I'm like, you see this and well, that's connected to that. And when this happens, then there and let me show you about stuff like that.
So I don't want.. let's say something were to happen to me. Honestly, let's say something were to happen to me. Well, could that person get this boat back?
SCOT: Right. They need to know something.
JOHN: They just can't be oblivious.
SCOT: So you can't just take anyone. You have to take people that know a bit about it.
JOHN: No, actually, the young man who I sailed from Rio Tea 50 days all the way back to Los Angeles had never sailed before.
SCOT: Oh, wow.
JOHN: So I can teach people so it isn't that you have to know something, but you have to be curious. You have to want to be involved. You have to participate.
SCOT: Got it. No Mai Tais on the deck. Like you said, everyone's pitching in, and..
JOHN: There's not much to do.
SCOT: I know very little about sailing, if not nothing. So how many feet long is the boat? Or how many people can fit on the boat?
JOHN: Well, a lot of people can fit on the boat. It's 50 foot.
SCOT: Okay, that sounds large.
JOHN: But one person can sail the boat.
SCOT: Okay.
JOHN: But it's always nice to have two people, and here, hold this, what's going on here? We're doing this and that.
SCOT: That sounds fun. All right.
SCOT: Maybe I'll ask..
JOHN: I’ll take you sailing
SCOT: You could tell I was leading that a little bit! Maybe he'll invite me.
JOHN: Here's the big question. Do you get seasick?
SCOT: No.
JOHN: Perfect.
SCOT: Yeah, no, I usually am okay.
JOHN: Okay, perfect.
SCOT: Unless it's, like, super.. I got seasick one time on the what is it, like a hovercraft or something else towards Catalina? And it was a big really smack.
JOHN: Probably you were also smelling diesel fuel, probably. Diesel fumes.
SCOT: Yeah, it was like sitting on an airplane inside. I mean, it was very like it was a lot of people, and a lot of people actually were getting sick.
JOHN: They were getting sick. Well, then you were smelling that, too.
SCOT: But that's the only time, and I've been on boats many times. Well, thank you, John. It was a pleasure speaking with you. And thank you for your time.
JOHN: I really appreciate it chatting with you, too.
SCOT: Okay, I'm going to hit the little button now. Bye!