093 – Dance Parties, Networking, and Storytelling with Brandon Gries
September 5, 2024
Have you ever wondered about the true authenticity behind “world’s best” claims? This week on the Let’s Backflip Show Happy Hour, join Ryan Freng and special guest Brandon Gries as they kick off with a 30-second dance party and a hilarious discussion inspired by the movie Elf. We dive into Brandon’s unique listening habits and how they mirror his stress levels, offering a fun glimpse into his mental state through his music and podcast choices. Plus, you won’t want to miss the story behind the “world’s best” coffee gifted to Brandon, sparking a conversation that’s both amusing and thought-provoking.
Our journey continues with a reflective look at our experiences on the film festival circuit with “Bare Metal.” We share the ups and downs, from the initial blow of not making it into the Bloomberg Film Festival to the triumphs that followed. Along the way, we touch on the importance of storytelling in digital infrastructure, recounting how our film has become a teaching tool at UC Berkeley and the challenges of managing public links to comply with festival rules. This segment is a treasure trove of insights for anyone navigating the complex world of film festivals and digital storytelling.
Wrapping up, we explore the fascinating process of modernizing classic tales like “A Christmas Carol” for today’s audience. Discover how we reimagined Scrooge to be more relatable, drawing parallels to modern figures and delving into moral ambiguities. We also discuss the emotional impact of storytelling, the importance of identity-based habits, and maintaining a balanced lifestyle. From philosophical musings to practical advice, this episode is a rich tapestry of creative collaboration, community engagement, and the power of meaningful connections. Join us for an episode filled with laughter, reflection, and inspiration.
Topics in This Episode
- (00:00:06) Coffee Talk and Flow State
- (00:06:05) Film Festival Reflections
- (00:09:00) Digital Storytelling and Film Education.
- (00:12:59) Collaborative Creativity and Networking
- (00:25:36) Community Salons and Hybrid Meetings
- (00:30:53) Modern Retelling of a Christmas Carol
- (00:41:21) Redemption and Moral Ambiguity
- (00:46:23) Emotional Impact in Storytelling
- (00:57:10) Identity-Based Habit Formation
- (01:09:55) Revisiting Childhood Curiosity and Vulnerability
- (01:17:01) Creative Collaboration and Development
Links
- Bare Metal – https://youtu.be/Al04ho-saMU?si=JHqImwVsYSE77ulx
- Get to Know Nate Bargatze in Seven Jokes – https://youtu.be/37H2OkU2XVE?si=yjfYZ8VowPAmwNhb
- The Power of Habit by Charles Duhigg – https://www.amazon.com/Power-Habit-What-Life-Business/dp/081298160X
Transcript
Ryan Freng:
Hello, are we live? Are we live? Hello, and welcome back to the let’s Backflip show happy hour. That’s what it’s called. I’m Ryan Fring, co-creative director here at Backflip, and John is missing. He happened to be out sick. We’re going to get him in on one of these, I promise. For you at home who are looking for my red-haired friend, he will be here, but today I’m hanging with Brandon. I’ve been holding everything in. In our conversation we start to get into a topic. I’m like let’s save it for the stream. We’re about to go live. How are you doing? I’m doing well. How are you? I’m great. Like we were saying earlier, it’s good to have you in again. I have a present for me.
Brandon Gries:
I had a present for you, but I think you were the best recipient possible for this.
Ryan Freng:
All right and we’re like, let’s just do this on air. It could be terrible, this experience. I don’t Like I could be terrible, I mean.
Brandon Gries:
Probably yes. This is here. Just push 40 seconds dance party. You know you need this.
Ryan Freng:
And you have to follow it Like you have to just move. This is how we start off every podcast. Let’s see if I can blossom.
Brandon Gries:
I love it, we’re doing it, ashley. Yeah, yeah, ashley. So every time you have something that goes well in your office, you know, oh, I love it. Where’d you get it, ashley? Yeah, yeah, ashley. So every time you have something that goes well in your office, you know, oh, I love it. Like you know, some people have like gong. We have the gong, you have the gong.
Ryan Freng:
I would love to do a dance party though. Yeah, make all of us awkwardly. Come out and do it. This is for you, yeah.
Brandon Gries:
I love your life, all right.
Ryan Freng:
You don’t drink coffee. I was going to give this to you. This is going to be the present, but then you just told me you don’t drink coffee. Does your wife?
Brandon Gries:
Neither one of us drinks coffee, but we need coffee for all the other people in our life.
Ryan Freng:
Okay, so this is the best cup of coffee in the world. This is JBC coffees. They just got coffee review best cup of coffee. You know this past competition, so this is crazy. It went off the shelves, we worked with them and I was like, hey, I’d love to give these to our employees, and Luke doesn’t drink coffee either, so I have an extra one. Oh great, so All right, yeah.
Brandon Gries:
I’ll take it. Thank you. This will help us be good hosts.
Ryan Freng:
Best cup of coffee in the world.
Brandon Gries:
That’s right, we will tell that to everybody who comes over. And immediately, I Immediately I think of a scene in Elf. You know where he, okay, so the first time that he gets into New York City, right, and he goes to just some sort of greasy spoon. But they have, you know, like, the neon lit sign in the front entrance that says World’s Best Cup of Coffee. He pops in the door and he’s like congratulations, he’s so proud for them. And then he leaves. And then later on, when he takes, you know the elf character on a first date, he takes her blindfolded to this same place. He sits her down Like there’s all this buildup, she’s so charming, he puts it in front of her. Yeah, and you know, she’s like, and he’s like what do you think? And she’s like tastes like a crappy cup of coffee. Anyways, she’s like tastes like a crappy cup of coffee.
Ryan Freng:
Anyways, it’s world best though. World’s best cup of coffee. Truth in advertising except you can do that.
Brandon Gries:
Uh-huh.
Ryan Freng:
Yeah.
Brandon Gries:
Yeah Well, I always pay attention to in like the advertisements where they only compare themselves to their own products. You know, like this is the fastest Apple processor. You know this is the fastest processor relative to any other processor we have ever made. So if, like, all your products are terrible right and this is the best right, it’s a little bit better. It’s the least bad thing we’ve ever made yeah, right, but they, you.
Ryan Freng:
But then you just wait until the news outlet it’s like revolutionary. And then you’re like that’s right, revolutionary rolling stones. And you’re like what, what does rolling stones know about technology? I don’t know, listen to them, uh. So I was asking you earlier and I was like what does Rolling Stones know about technology? I don’t know, listen to them. So I was asking you earlier and I was like wait, wait, we’re going to go live. Joe Rogan, I like to listen to him. He’s actually got Aaron Rodgers on right now. Oh really, which is really fun. But you said you don’t have the attention span.
Brandon Gries:
Attention span for podcasts in general.
Brandon Gries:
So it’s really interesting to like as we’re on a podcast, Watch my sense of how much psychic space I’ve got available. So if I’m not listening to anything, anything of any stripe or variety, I’m clearly in a pretty stressed out state. This is like a thing of self-awareness. So then, if I’m able to listen to music, all right, I’m making a little bit headway. But if I can’t, you know if I’ve made it, then from music up to audio books, okay. Now I’m in a little bit more and I’m not saying this is like your day, this is like over a longer term trend, oh okay, so it’s more macro.
Brandon Gries:
Macro about. Like, what’s the trend line over the course of this past month? Did I? How much was I? Just I couldn’t listen to anything. How much was it that I was listening to only music? If I have made it up to podcasts, that means that I’m almost in like a sort of zen state of nirvana, right?
Ryan Freng:
that I’ve. I’ve made it. Just your mind is very state. Your mind is too busy, like it’s too busy about stuff id or things going on.
Brandon Gries:
Yeah, it was really weird that, like during the, the, so I listened to a lot of audiobooks, but during the pandemic, when you would have thought I would have had the most time possible to do that, I listened to hardly anything oh really yeah, yeah.
Ryan Freng:
So I think that you know like because of being stressed or because the whole state, yeah, like whatever.
Brandon Gries:
Just you know, things were just not in order, like you just weren’t in. I was never in a flow state about anything. So, like, what I’m saying is that if I’ve made it up to podcasts, I’m in a flow state and I’ve made it through all these other.
Ryan Freng:
So how do we get you there daily? I don’t know what’s like your routine. You have a routine.
Brandon Gries:
I’ve been trying to build back some routine. So, like you know, if we take the last several years even like our 2022 together, so you know, I had this sort of like very serial kind of career trajectory which was already starting to fray. And then in 2022, I’m like I need to throw the whole thing out and go and do these breakout things which I do in 2022, which kind of turned anything with routine upside down, first of all and it was also coming after the pandemic- so 2023?
Ryan Freng:
so there was no no routine already.
Brandon Gries:
Yeah, it was like, yeah, so this year, this year is going to be the best year yet. I feel like I, like I look to 2019. 2019 was the most if we’re talking about routine and structure, etc. That was sort of our last kind of high watermark, our our last uh, you peak in this mountain range of my life, so I think 2024, we’ve made it to through a Valley into, uh, you know, some next, yeah, and you’re coming back to the summit, coming back to a new summit. Nice, you know, but it’s only just the next summit, right, like then, there’s always some next Valley to go through, yeah.
Ryan Freng:
No, looking forward to this year. Yeah, so we reproduced Bare Metal together a couple years ago and I don’t know, you probably still get emails from film festivals, right? Yeah, what’s that been like? Because occasionally there’s one I’m like, oh, I wonder. But also I’m kind of like I feel like you move on to the next thing. How long do you capitalize on something that you’ve created?
Brandon Gries:
and then, when you move on and create the next thing, so you know, we might be done with the film but the film’s not done with us in the case of that particular film. So the film festival thing if we think about, like the chapters this thing went through, is that we did the project specifically for one particular film festival that was the Bloomberg Film Festival and then it didn’t get selected for that one, but I stubbornly it was in that competition, it was in the competition but it didn’t get short. I went to the, I went to the festival. It didn’t get shortlisted but we made an impression because all of the all of the judges told me about the film, you know.
Brandon Gries:
so they remembered it right, like so it had, it had, uh, made an impression um but I I refused to let that be the end of the story for me, and so then that’s why the other film festivals happen. I think that if it had gotten selected by that particular film festival, maybe all the other film festival submissions might not have happened, because it was sort of like a reaction to not being selected by the one and the last film festival made its determination here just a couple of weeks ago. Yeah, so now what’s been happening is folks who are in the data center space. They’re like, ah man, I’ve been really struggling to try to share a link out about the film, I can’t find it, etc. So for some of the film festivals, namely the newport beach film festival, almost it almost got disqualified because there was the public link, that’s right. When I called you and I was like, oh, we got to pull the link down, we got to hide it. We got to hide it right, because the film festivals, they, don’t want any publicly viewable links for stuff.
Ryan Freng:
Right, which also at some point you’re like what level of film festival are you Like come?
Brandon Gries:
on Right and like if this was my only thing that I was worried about, you know, I probably would be a lot more, have a lot more opinions about it. But it’s like, okay, I just I can’t, this can’t be the biggest thing I’m worrying about, so I’m just like, fine, I’ll just comply with whatever it is you need and yeah, it’s my other day job.
Brandon Gries:
Move on with my day job, stuff. But now people are like, oh, you know, we got to figure out where we’re going to park this film. So right now the infrastructure masons is considering hey, we parked this on our website. Um, I’ve, I’m now, uh, I’ve been in contact with a woman at the university of california, berkeley. She’s a professor in the film school there. They’re using the film. I think I told you about this a few months ago that, yeah, she was. Yeah, yeah, she apparently this week is showing a film in her class as a teaching tool.
Ryan Freng:
Interesting yeah, and in what way?
Brandon Gries:
I’m asking her for more details about that. So it’s because what she’s doing is focused on this. You know digital infrastructure in particular and the importance of you know the storytelling around this part of the economy. You know kind of a lot of the same themes.
Ryan Freng:
She’s probably like here’s how difficult it is Watch. This is the best that we have and it’s pretty good, but it’s still very difficult to understand.
Brandon Gries:
That’s the gist of it. See, you didn’t need any explanation. You got it, it’s true. Yeah, she said you know there’s other things that people have created or done, but it’s not either it’s not accurate or it’s not informative, or it’s not compelling. So we were accurate, informative and compelling. So, like you know, connected on an emotional level. You know there’s a lot of useful information packed in there. She said nothing about how fast paced it was. So you know, yeah, our mind must move at a mile a minute.
Ryan Freng:
Right, right, somebody, somebody with those skills and somebody who’s thinking about this space probably can handle the content a little bit better than your average person, but yeah.
Brandon Gries:
So I mean so staying on this for a second, this same person.
Brandon Gries:
I talked to her about a couple of other threads that I’m trying to work on, one of which is a more expanded documentary series. She said, well, maybe I turn that into a project with my class, you know, like, maybe she puts together some learning objectives and maybe dispatches them. You know, I characterize it as a think of like a dirty jobs for the Internet. I characterize it as think of like a dirty jobs for the internet, so that she might be interested in building more of like a learning objectives program around this idea. It sounds fun, chop that together so that, anyways, there’s, there’s things like that where the films have enough time to, I think, gestate for folks, that the audience that it may be really connected with are now starting to come forward with a little bit more of like an itch of like how do I, how do I get more mileage out of this? How do we, how do we build on this together? But it took it took a year of it just kind of like gestating for folks um, yeah, it was.
Ryan Freng:
It was a. It was a grand effort as well. You know just the people that we were able to connect with and talk to and share it with, so it needed perpetual optimists like you to to help make it a reality.
Ryan Freng:
Right, that sort of yes and sure ethos yeah, we were just talking about that earlier today. Yeah, yeah, it’s so helpful when you’re ideating to not shut somebody down and when you’re trying to accomplish and get something finished, there’s so many roadblocks you could throw up or even to start an endeavor. It takes the right kind of crazy we talked about. We kind of bring you up as an example of the right in a good way, the right kind of crazy to Like we talked about. Like, uh, we, we kind of bring you up as an example of like the right in this in a good way, the right kind of crazy to make something happen. Like you have to be, like, you know, despite how hard it’s going to be and despite what it’s going to cost and despite this and despite that, I want to do it and it’s important and I think it’ll be useful and to stick with that through the whole process, especially when it’s like no, or come over here and then get shut down and then you get some yeses and you know it’s such a roller coaster, like without emotional fortitude again and a little bit of crazy thinking yeah, sure I can make this happen. It doesn’t happen. So I love it too. Can we cut to his angle? Like in his he’s just going. You see, a little bit of the crazy it’s coming out. It’s definitely there. Yeah, it’s just right below.
Ryan Freng:
But that’s the only the only chance we have at doing creative work and making films and stuff, because some people have commoditized it. Um, like blumhouse, um, maybe even 824, they’ve just gotten effective at making horror films or kind of you know. Uh, they’ve settled on aesthetic. It’s so like aesthetic and a style and like Blumhouse is like there’s three things there’s a cast, location and special effects that you can pick too, and by doing that they can keep their budgets under 5 million at the time that I read the article, and they can produce multiple of those. And then you just need to hit on one of those and you can make 40 million, right, you know, which isn’t big in the box office, but for one of those films is huge and that films the rest of the production and you know you kind of spread out your investments, is what it is.
Ryan Freng:
So there’s a commoditization to it, which is really great, but for a lot of us we don’t stumble upon that or have that opportunity. So everything is our baby. Yeah, to some extent. And yeah, it’s like it’s a weird space. Because then you know the question is like when you kill the baby, like when? When do you stop, when you move on? You know you can certainly always keep the door open, but you know, emotionally, when you take that energy and put it into a new project, that was a lot of the challenge that I was faced with last year, because so we, so we did this thing.
Brandon Gries:
You know, we were on, we were, we were on offense in 2022. And then comes 2023, and there were a whole bunch of folks that were like super excited about things and I was like great, uh, we can we work on something together? And most of what I got was cheerleaders, but nobody who was really interested to actually dig into a thing, and I kept holding out hope, you know, in a variety of different you know things that I was trying to pull strings on. And just, there’s a lot of people who they’re support. They’re like emotionally supportive, they’re like that sounds great, but like the stuff with film and other things, like it is that it’s a collaborative art.
Brandon Gries:
It’s not a thing that you do alone. So, like in terms of the you know when, when you kill the baby, like this thing is like, is this a thing that other people want to do with me? This is not a thing. There’s none of these things where you can. I couldn’t have made that film alone. Even if I had all of everybody’s collective skills, it would have been impossible for one person to do alone. Oh yeah, it was there’s. The only way that that project existed was as a collaborative effort, and so, anyways, I’m hoping that I’ve teased out a couple of folks who actually might be interested to. You know, get in the messy middle with kind of some of these things and you’d actually do something yeah, that is.
Ryan Freng:
I mean, that’s that’s the key skill right there, like that’s the golden ticket.
Ryan Freng:
If you can figure that out, then you can uh, multiply that and do, do, do it multiple times or do it with different projects, because we’re also working in the indigenous space, um, with an indigenous uh agency indigenous agency and we’ve done a lot of great work over like the last five, five years coming up, which is crazy, um, but there’s so much desire for good content indigenous, authentic content and there’s a lot of creators out there and there’s a lot of people with money who want to invest in these projects, whether it’s tribes or tribal corporations, business, business investments, wanting to not just be well, we have uh, gambling or we have the casino, and we also want to do other business ventures that you know are kind of across the spectrum.
Ryan Freng:
So the arts are another place, but it’s it’s that exact same thing of a lot of enthusiasm and even people in places that can make decisions with like, yeah, yeah, yeah, we want to be involved, and it’s really hard to be like, okay, can we get some development funds, you know, like aside from all the development we’ve already done, like to to really get somewhere and really make something that’s impactful. Like we got to pay people. You know we don’t want every, we don’t want 30 people to add into this project. Just be like hey, everyone do stuff for free and maybe something will happen. Like, so it’s kind of that that whatever that golden ticket is, that’s what we’re searching for there too.
Brandon Gries:
Yeah, there were a lot of people with the project that we worked on together, the people who did end up going to bat for the film.
Brandon Gries:
It took a lot of courage on their parts, because what was also interesting to learn about in the year afterwards is how much political capital it costs them inside of each of their organizations.
Brandon Gries:
Oh really, oh yeah, but it would, but for them it was all worth it, right like they got. They had to, you know, do some sort of you know, smoothing things out with their pr group, because it really was. That pr team felt like that was their domain and somebody else was getting involved with it, or um person, you know, was within their sort of discretionary spend for it. But they didn’t actually go through all the conventional you know approvals et cetera. And then it turned out being fine in the end, but it was sort of like, well, but next time, you know that sort of thing. But they none of them had any regrets about getting involved with the project. Oh, that’s good. You know the other thing it is amazing about the project that we pulled off together that, if you think about the number of organizations that were involved with that project and the fact that there has not been any public comments or issues with that film in any way.
Ryan Freng:
Shape form is pretty astonishing.
Brandon Gries:
It’s a little surreal, it’s very it’s like that none of those, nobody is trying to distance themselves from it. Yeah, it’s, it’s really quite. We should really take stock of having been able to have achieved that. That’s like we’re talking about. You know, a dozen of the largest Fortune 500 companies, all with very sensitive public images. We didn’t mess any of it up for any of them.
Ryan Freng:
That’s true. Yeah, because, just off the top of my head, google and Microsoft and there wasn’t a lot of hand-holding, nope, I think there was review from their parties.
Brandon Gries:
And they still okayed it. They didn’t.
Ryan Freng:
Yeah, I was going to say maybe feedback, but I can’t even remember anything specifically.
Brandon Gries:
A couple of folks said no, we don’t have authorization to allow you to use our logo or something like that. But of course it’s a small detail.
Ryan Freng:
Yeah, yeah, schmoogle and Microsoft, that’s right yeah.
Brandon Gries:
Yeah, but I think that just taking stock of sort of like no news being good news, yeah.
Ryan Freng:
Oh, 100%. Well, because the loudest, the people who are the loudest are those detractors or those who speak out against something. Yeah, the fact that we haven’t heard anything or seen anything, yeah, is fantastic. And for those who are wondering, this is the bare metal short film we did for the Bloomberg Film Contest, which you can see. Probably you can’t see. We took it down. We took it down, but we can work on fixing that problem. We can work on fixing that problem. Yeah, we’ll get it up. We’ll maybe send it out, or I don’t know how. I don’t know how our digital marketing works. What do I do? I look like I’m a creative director here. I don, it’s somebody else’s problem. These are small details, I know. Yeah, somebody writing this down is anybody in chat? Uh, check it out. So, yeah, we’ll post. Post more about that, yeah, yeah, um, you had you’d said, uh, you started having people over just on wednesday nights. Oh, yeah, just just to hang out. What? Uh? What’s that about?
Brandon Gries:
well, you know, like um getting older and we we’ve not been blessed to have kids, and so there’s a lot of things that you you miss out on in life when you there’s a lot of things that we do as communities that are driven by, like you know, you got to take your kids to practice absolutely right and that’s how you end up, or the kind of the school, cetera.
Brandon Gries:
So we have to come up with other creative solutions. The guy that I worked for for a long time he had been doing it at his house for I was telling Lucas earlier I would guess probably close to 20 years Thursday night’s taco night, so it was always the same food too. Pretty simple, Right. Just put some ground beef in the crock pot one day take a few things out of the fridge Right.
Ryan Freng:
Simple, just put some ground beef in the crock pot when they’re taking a few things out of the fridge Right?
Brandon Gries:
Everyone can portion out whatever they want and come and go as they please, right, like it’s a very informal thing, it’s not a everybody’s not arriving and leaving at the same time. You just kind of have people drifting in and out of your house, you know, throughout the throughout the afternoon and evening. I think that it probably was born out of when he did a lot of youth sports coaching for his kids and I think that at some point, the idea of being able to have your kids bring their friends over oh yeah.
Brandon Gries:
Probably was a starting off point and you know, if you’re the youth sport coach hosting something that’s for like the whole team or whatever, it probably was born out of something organically like that. And then there was enough kids that lived within walking distance probably, that it kind of had some staying power. And then he lost his son in a motorcycle accident when he was in his early 20s. It keeps staying power with this is is all my own, just theorizing, by the way is, um, yeah, it’s a way to keep kind of the living memory of your, your son, alive by having all those same folks from the neighborhood had relationships with them, whatever, just you know, keep kind of showing up and hanging out for a little while. So you lost your son, but you didn’t lose your son’s community. So anyways, it’s worked out well for him over the long run.
Brandon Gries:
And then I think another thing that kind of influenced it, like the idea of you can sustain meetups for a long time. So another great thing that came out of our project together. So it went into the Omaha Film Festival, which is where I’m from. So that was very special to me. So I went into the Omaha.
Brandon Gries:
Film Festival, which is where I’m from. So that was very special to me. And just in the process of being there that week I was thinking about I know that out in LA there’s this Nebraska group. I knew that. I’d heard about it before. I don’t know why I knew about it or heard about it before, but there’s like a little group of folks out in LA that are all from Nebraska and, yeah, they get together. They’ve got a little little community. So there’s a guy, he’s from Nowheresville, nebraska, goes to the University of Nebraska at Lincoln graduates in the early nineties, moves out to California. He’s worked for several of the major studios in producer, executive, whatever, all these varieties of various capacities. So early on when he was out there, he, um, he didn’t. He feel alone.
Brandon Gries:
Right, like you’re not, you don’t feel a sense of home oh yeah, so or fish out of water, yeah and so like when he was just even in sort of the entry-level roles that maybe he organically had run into somebody who turned out to be from nebraska and he, that kind stood out to him, made kind of an impression on him. So then he started this little meetup thing in the in the early nineties and for the last now 35 years every month, the second Monday of every month, they do a meetup out in LA and it’s like a dozen some odd people, um, that all get together for this, and then because of the pandemic, so I I sent him an email. I didn’t know about the monthly meetups, I just knew that how did you know about him or how? So I knew. So I don’t remember why I first knew about the community at all, um, but I knew about it in the back of my mind, um. So then I reached out to him because the film had also been selected for the Beverly Hills Film Festival.
Brandon Gries:
So the thing that compelled me to write the email is, like it’s March, I’m at the Omaha Film Festival and I know that in like a month and a half’s time the film is going to be showing out in LA. So I’m like I’m already having this feeling of being at home, being at the Omaha Film Festival. I’m already having this feeling of being at home being at the Omaha Film Festival. Maybe I can transplant that feeling of being at home with. Maybe there’s some folks, this thing of other folks from Nebraska. Maybe they would be super excited to know that you know somebody who’s from Nebraska made a film been selected by the Barry Higgins Film Festival, whatever.
Brandon Gries:
So that’s the thing that compelled me to write the email. None of that ended up happening. You know, I didn’t get an email response in time, whatever the time span that we’re talking about that over. Nothing happened in that time span, but because of the pandemic. So this used to be like they just get together, they call them salons, so it’s the Nebraska Coast Connect monthly salon is what they do. So they made it like a coffee house, uh-huh. And then they everybody-.
Ryan Freng:
Like you flipped each other’s toenails, or no, no, no, like a Version of salon here.
Brandon Gries:
No, this is like old French salon, like where you would go and talk about ideas. Oh yeah, I’m not familiar with that. Oh yeah, so like-.
Ryan Freng:
The original version.
Brandon Gries:
Yeah, yeah. So like the idea of like, so the French salons where all French intellectuals would get together. It’s basically you go to the coffee house and this is where all ideas would get talked about. Sure, so you talk about the ideas of the day. It philosophizes whatever.
Ryan Freng:
Yeah, it’s like the Inklings like Token and CS Lewis and some other people like would go get beer. Yeah right.
Brandon Gries:
So in France these were called the salons Right. So that’s the meaning of it here.
Ryan Freng:
You know very, you know, bougie right, la calling these yeah, we love French cinema, we love French culture. That’s right, we salon.
Brandon Gries:
That’s right, that’s right. So that’s the idea. So you know they just go to a coffee house, right? This is like meet up in the evening on a monday night, um, people will talk about what they’re working on, what they can offer the community, maybe what they need from the community, um, etc. And then the second half of the programming is always like a one-on-one chat with, again, somebody who is from nebraska and they’re talking about, um, kind of like how they’ve made their career, like their story, so you’re able to listen to someone else’s lived experience, the idea that maybe you can take something away from it that would be meaningful to you. So it was all like an in-person only thing.
Brandon Gries:
But then the pandemic happens and this group wasn’t just going to fold, that’s not what he wanted to do, so they went virtual for it and now, post-pandemic, they’ve held on to a hybrid, to where they go, to the coffee house, but then they still have a Zoom meeting. So what it allowed me this past year is I were able to join these Zoom meetings every month, which is actually pretty brutal on a Monday night because it starts at 10 pm for me and goes to 1 am. Yeah, so talk about routine. Yeah, basically once a month I throw myself off, you know, and have to like build myself back the rest of the week, sure, um? So this has been great.
Brandon Gries:
This past month they’re, uh, they had a very unusual development because he got a lifetime achievement award from the university of nebraska at lincoln for kind of some of this work that he’s, that he’s done this community that he’s fostered. So then they had a in-person meetup at the university of nebraska at lincoln sometime last fall or late summer. So I I drove out to uh lincoln for it. So I got, I had like an in-person version of the meeting. It wasn’t in la, yeah and uh, and then, very excitedly, I’m going, I’m flying out to la next week because they’re going to do a special meeting on tuesday night instead of monday night.
Brandon Gries:
They had to move to tuesday night because the um any of the potential directors who were, you know, going to be nominated for an oscar, are being interviewed by some publication on monday night. So there was a question as to whether we were going to be able to do this event on Monday night or if we’d have to move it to Tuesday night. So everybody just went with the safe bet and did it on Tuesday night, turns out, since the person I’m going to mention to you didn’t get nominated for a Best Director award. We in theory could have done it on Monday night, but we’re doing it on Tuesday, so we’re going to do it. There will be a special private screening of the holdovers, oh yeah, and Alexander Payne will be there because he’s from Omaha.
Ryan Freng:
He is Okay, he went to my same house.
Brandon Gries:
Is he an official part of the group then? Yeah, he actually has shown up in the past.
Ryan Freng:
It is not sure.
Brandon Gries:
He’s not been very actively involved.
Ryan Freng:
But yeah, he’s Understandable, he’s got things to do and got filmed at the high school in my hometown.
Brandon Gries:
That’s right, yeah, yeah. So he came over to his alma mater, the Catholic high school, where I was, yeah, yeah, and I got to sit at his feet, you know, and listen to him talk about what he was up to. Yeah, so it’ll. That’s pretty cool. Well, and while we were doing I don’t know if you remember me mentioning this while we were doing our project together, but I, we were doing I don’t know if you remember me mentioning this while we were doing our our project together but I had, you know, I had so many things that I wanted to do with that film that we didn’t get to do with that film. One of them was getting him involved, oh, you know. So I had actually been heavily reaching out to, you know, I’d asked you about, uh, you know, the imdb pro, like his agent contact, and I reached out to the high school, etc. But none of that materialized. That materialized. We also weren’t able to get Leonardo DiCaprio narrating.
Ryan Freng:
I mean, I feel like that was close, though it felt like somebody knew him and worked with him.
Brandon Gries:
I made an earnest request in a meeting with somebody who could get in touch with him. Yeah, so we got close, but we were going for the moon. We were going for the moon with that project, yeah. So it’s very fulfilling for me in the context of our project to get to have this capstone moment next week.
Ryan Freng:
So that’ll be great, yeah, yeah. So is that you’re going down for that, or do you have a double duty? You also do another work. Oh well, because you always kind of do that.
Brandon Gries:
Yeah, right now, because of our, our project, this in this past year I have insinuated myself into um kind of a with a silica producing no in the in the film thing. So there’s a, there’s a film being made by a couple out and down in Texas, um, that I learned about last year. That, uh, I was able to, you know, put some funding to. Then there’s another project that’s currently in development. It’s not finished yet and I’ve been, you know, volunteering myself to try to fundraise for their film. Oh nice, so I’ve got these two other projects that you know I got myself attached to in some way, shape or form. And then there’s now, because of the Bloomberg event that I went to out in LA back in 22,. There were people that I met up with there, that I kept relationships going with. So I actually have meetings with three different producers while I’m going out there before the, before the screening happened.
Ryan Freng:
This is your skill, this is your, your charism, your talent, the, the, the connector.
Brandon Gries:
Yeah, so we’ll, we’ll see. We’ll see One of the guys that I’m going to, one of the people I’m going to meet with. I’m going to talk to him about this thing that’s happening with UC Berkeley and we’ll see if maybe I can get him interested enough. That I think, because I think I need a little bit more support than my hopes and dreams to actually cement this as a maybe a thing at the school. There you see me, yeah, but I want to keep you posted about what it is, because we made this happen together. So if there’s a way to get you involved, I want to keep that in mind.
Ryan Freng:
Yeah, as we continue to take over the world and get connected to people, I’m more and more kind of learning how how it gets done. You know how Netflix things kind of get done and at this point I’m kind of in the place of we need to figure out how to produce something and then you distribute you. You sell the distribution through Netflix is what you would do and that’s kind of the way that they seem to go.
Brandon Gries:
You know they don’t let’s get to work on it.
Ryan Freng:
Let’s do it. I mean, we’ll just start right now. Okay, yeah, uh, the, the, the whole, asking them to fund. You know, fund something. I think what we’ve seen and you know the research that we’ve done and the people we’ve talked to it’s like, yeah, you know they do some of that, but you’re going to get, you know, like, um, uh, what are the brothers from um Stranger Things? You’re going to get um Duffer, yeah, duffer, um. You’re going to get like 20 no’s. You know you’re going to get no, no, no, no, no, no, no. And then finally, you’ll get a yes, um, and if you can manage something like that and stick with it you know that’s how films get made People stick with it.
Ryan Freng:
But the other way is okay, figure out your internal costs, like what would it take for us to travel and produce and connect, like you can connect? We need some kind of kitty to get us everywhere. And then, after we do that, you know, edit it and be like, all right, well, this is a project that is worth this. Who wants to distribute this project? You, and be like, all right, well, this is a project that is worth this. Who wants to distribute this project? You know, and I think that’s really the way to go. Starts now. So I told you.
Brandon Gries:
We’re doing it All right. Well, I got an idea for you already.
Ryan Freng:
All right. Is it different than the bare metal like?
Brandon Gries:
series. Yeah, this is totally different. This was my creative project over the winter. You, you know, this is me doing things I am not qualified for, don’t know what I’m doing, um yes, nobody really does. Let’s be honest I’m uh, I’m currently in the process of writing a screenplay for a modified like a modern retelling of christian scarrow oh yes, what’s unique about it?
Ryan Freng:
what, uh, what sets your story apart? Because we just had, um, what’s the one with ryan reynolds? Uh, here in this spirited, we said that one.
Brandon Gries:
All right, so a couple key couple key elements. First of all, scrooge is not old. Scrooge is younger in this story, either our age, or maybe he’s allowed to be slightly older, but not not by much. He’s, he’s a young Scrooge. Second of all, our Tim character is a much more important character in the story and instead of it being sort of like a character that you pity in the story, it’s much more the emotional heart, much more of the moral arc of the story is fueled by um, by that character, um, and it is updated to. So it’s in the us and if you’re going to map this to, you’re still going to hold on to the concepts around wealth disparity, um, and you want to keep something that feels maybe more intimate, smaller town it’s set in jackson, wyoming why jackson?
Brandon Gries:
so it is the that is the most. Uh, the wealth disparity is more severe in jackson than any other part in the united states.
Brandon Gries:
Oh really, even water, lake vegas or lna, or yeah yeah, because that’s where, like, if you’ve got more money than god, that’s, that’s where you I mean beautiful out there. Oh, yeah, right, um, I think there’s even a line by kevin costner in yellowstone where he’s like, uh, like people would give up all the money in the world because he’s talking about the, the ranch that they have up there. That he’s like, yeah, this is the thing that people would give up all the money in the world to have. You know, it’s this sort of that.
Brandon Gries:
So all the like the um, like the fed, does an annual retreat up to jackson, like it is this epicenter for where all of the like, these massive and wealthy enclaves, and then, at the same time, like you can, you can talk to, you know, folks that you’re connected to in the tribal world, like you think of all of those, all the stories of um, all the worst stories of the american west, you know, like that’s sort of the heartland of those things too. So, anyways, it’s just, it’s this intensely and it’s such a dramatic like, it’s such a cinematic backdrop too, um and there’s a lot of other.
Ryan Freng:
Does it still still have the magical spiritual elements to it with our ghosts? Oh, absolutely yeah, so so still traditional in that sense. Oh absolutely.
Brandon Gries:
Yeah, no, it’s still the same, fundamentally the same structure, just were with a sound equalizer. We’re just going to turn up certain levels more than maybe, more than maybe other levels in the story, just in terms of the amount of screen time or, um, the number of lines like it’s um. So there was the 2019 version of the christmas carol that was done by the bbc. There was a three, it was three episode and then it was picked up by fx okay and, uh, it was.
Brandon Gries:
It was still set in london, but you know, now it’s this three hour long thing. It was not any of the same script, so it was all different dialogue, same story, but different, but different dialogue, sure, um, and most of the critics said it was just it was too depressing. You know cause it was like making, yeah, it was just too depressing, so, but I think that there was an effort of like you need to appeal to modern audiences in terms of way you know, ways that storytelling happens, like it was like if you took Peaky blinders or you took Sons of Anarchy or whatever, and you took that sort of emotional space, sure, and then you parked it on top of a Christmas carol and that’s what you got. Sure.
Ryan Freng:
Well, I mean it’s a tall order, because how do you do anything better than Mickey’s Christmas carol?
Brandon Gries:
Well, then you do the Muppet ones. I would be much more.
Ryan Freng:
That’s my wife’s favorite.
Brandon Gries:
That is really what the yardstick is. How do you do it better than the Muppets? This is this would be more appealing to kind of like rattling the cage of the adult audience, so it still would be suitable for all viewers. It’s not like an edgy thing, but in terms of so what I have found is that so I go to a christmas carol at least every other year, you know in a performance, because most years I’ll either go to the nutcracker or a christmas carol, one or the other we got to get you coming.
Ryan Freng:
A little matchstick girl. That’s my, my girl’s uh, ballet studio posada. It’s another. Uh, how’s it? Hans christian anderson? An unfinished story. No, no, it’s um, not the tin soldier. No, who’s the other author? Um, I’ll figure it out in a second um, an unfinished story. So they kind of write the ending, but they use traditional ballet music and do a lot of stuff. So, yeah, you have the Nutcracker with the Madison Ballet and then Central Midwest Ballet does Little Matchstick Girl, which is pretty charming. We’ll get you going on that Excellent.
Brandon Gries:
Tell me all about it, I’ll show up.
Ryan Freng:
Yeah, yeah. So one of the questions that I hear when we’re talking about creative concepts or pitches like that is like why you, why do you need to tell this story?
Brandon Gries:
so I think it’s the same reason that, um, you know, I had to make bare metal where it’s like there’s, there’s a set of us who, um, we’ve kind of grown up between these two worlds of like sort of the mark zuckerberg, you know, is only a year younger than me. Okay, right, so like the whole, uh, like collective consciousness that we were brought, it’s really like millennials are running the world now and and generating all the content right.
Ryan Freng:
So like yeah, so like that.
Brandon Gries:
I lived through that same thing, so I can very authentically talk about sort of what I was exposed to. And then what we’re observing culturally is that I feel like even amid that, there’s a lot of people who took the wrong lessons. So, like I saw the same, I saw the same lesson and some people their interpretation of those lessons, they took the wrong conclusion from it. So I can, I feel like I am the demographic that I can say with authenticity like well, here was the lesson and the the real issue. Because this is the heart of what the story is like. Usually we think of scrooge is more evil than marley. Right, like that’s the whole set of like marley was bad, marley gets to scrooge and he’s like man, you’re so much worse, like your chain is so much longer, yeah, and in spirit it is like you’re an unredeemable, irredeemable, yeah yeah, so in this case, our, our situation is is that marley we can allow to be conventionally evil, a character who’s evil and knows he’s evil?
Brandon Gries:
because I feel like that’s sort of the convention that we we foist onto scrooge is that he’s evil and he’s he’s terrible, he knows he’s terrible, like he accepts yeah, he accepts that he’s not by that, right, yeah, that’s that’s the thing that we do with them. But I feel like the importance of the story that needs to be told in terms of making it relevant today is that there are so many people, especially even in our generation, who took the wrong lesson, who think that they’re still making good choices, but it turns out that they’re actually terrible. Like, so they’re unaware of how awful they are. Like that’s that’s, that’s a bold, that’s the real problem. That’s the real problem with scrooge in this story is that he thinks he’s good but he’s actually evil, right, you know which is, which is even worse than being evil and knowing you’re evil, that that sounds really hard because people don’t like that.
Ryan Freng:
You know it’s like your truth, your truth, my truth. There’s no underlying objective truth, there’s no underlying objective morality. It’s my morality and your morality. And whatever makes you happy is good. And you know, obviously, as a functioning adult, we realize, you know, and successful in our careers. You realize, yeah, that doesn’t work. Like just bring it down to the base level of like what if my truth is like I’m gonna smack you in the face whenever I see you, but you can’t say anything about it or you can’t judge me because that’s my truth. Like that’s dumb, but that is how people, you know some people live their lives. So I buy into this. Yeah, I think it’s a bitter pill to swallow.
Brandon Gries:
I think that you can look at the US political climate and you can realize that people feel like something is missing, like they know that whatever it is doesn’t feel right, and so you would tell the story by showing story by showing, not saying right like it’s more in how you design the set pieces, it’s more in how you just set up a situation and you’re gonna just have people be present with him, sort of our character, kind of presenting all the good that he’s doing in the world, but then you’re present with it in a very something that feels very just, mundane and relatable and the audience sitting with like the yeah, this kind of sucks, right.
Brandon Gries:
But and I think that enough of us have now accumulated like the thing is that the thing that will make this work is that we’re experiencing, over the last several years, what’s come to be referred to as the tech lash right, that we we had put the sort of hero syndrome onto all these Silicon Valley companies. They were going to create utopia, you know, etc. They were going to save the world. They were, you know, they were, they were night and people suck.
Brandon Gries:
Right, yeah. So now Elon Musk is crazy. There’s a Silicon Valley consortium that’s, you know, working on, that’s bought up a bunch of land in Silicon Valley and is making some sort of walled off city. You know we’ve got company town.
Brandon Gries:
I haven’t heard of that We’ve got like company town things happening. There’s a lot of things where you’re like, oh, the more things change, the more they stay the same is the more they stay the same. So right now is the moment to connect with audiences that way. And if you were going to model our scrooge on anybody, you take him and you model him on sam bankman freed. So sam bankman freed. The guy ftx, he just got like life in prison, right. So he’s this big outspoken person about effective altruism and like I got to keep making money so that I can give more money away. But you know, underneath it, collectively, the us is like no, you’re just a fraud, right. So if you use that as sort of your like uh, lightning rod of like this is what you’re building a character around, is that sort of uh, current kind of cultural vibration, that’s what you build on for a scrooge here so, yeah, there’s something, there’s something unique there too, because you could have a scrooge that someone could empathize with.
Ryan Freng:
That’s right, right and so, and like my wife has hated like maleficent the movie because she’s like maleficent as the cartoon character, as the story, like maleficent means evil. Yeah, like she shouldn’t be humanized. However maleficent the movie, yeah, as a story and as a characterizing characterization of somebody, and you know the trials and tribulations, the difficulties they’ve been through and yeah, you know, even though they’re trying to do well and they do poorly, like is a good movie and a good story. Like he recognizes that, so that then it’s really interesting, because Scrooge probably tends to be one of those characters. So being able to take him and humanize him enough that you’re like oh, yeah, that’s really mad, but he thinks it’s good. Hopefully you can ask that question, you know, or or recognize that in yourself, like that’s, that’s why I love any type of movie, especially movies that are emotionally. Take you, you know, emotionally insane, like take you to crazy, emotional, uh, places, like something like the lobster just off the top of my head. Have you seen the lobster? Um, so, uh, you have to. What is it? Get married by a certain time and if you don’t, in this world you could turn into an animal, um, and that is such a crazy concept to start with.
Ryan Freng:
But then the idea, the, the cultural kind of normative concepts it plays with, and, you know, looks at, you feel all these weird emotions, and maybe emotions you don’t feel in your daily life, which I think is very good. It’s like flexing an emotional muscle, but you’re not tense all the time, right. So you have kind of that capability to emote, but you experience something and you can even relate in a way. But you’re like, clearly, my life is nothing like this, my experience, my emotions are nothing like this, but there’s something I relate to and I can take something away and I feel like that is a win as a movie, as a movie maker, as anything like that.
Ryan Freng:
So when you have a character who’s just like slapstick evil, uh, as an adult, I think it’s worthless, right, I mean for kids and for like, there’s a point to it. You know, to have dragons that are just dragons. Um, teaches them something simple, but we need more complex conversations. So that’s why I love the gray area. You know, like breaking bad, the descent into sin, you know, and like choosing bad and like where? Where did it start or where does it end? You know like, and you empathize with a really bad person. I think that’s a great experience of emotion, so I love the idea, yeah.
Brandon Gries:
And you know, back to the thing about like, say, kids with the story is that if you make the child character even more important in the story, kids would connect to you know a character that they, they. That looks like that right, like so, and there’s a lot of power in this.
Brandon Gries:
So he’s going to be like blazion or something right, like just all colors all people know I’ll try to give him, as I’m still working on all the you know the beat board that I’m putting together for the every kid kid, this story, that so, um, it’s not going to be anonymous, whatever. Uh, disease, right, uh, got leukemia, okay, and um, actually the film starts at a funeral, right, but we never see inside the casket. So this is our mcguffin, right, like we’ve got you don’t see inside the casket. This is like a prologue. It’s very just lyrical.
Brandon Gries:
You know, you’re just kind of setting a tone, setting a mood, and then you’re using the backdrop of you know the, the settings, you’re creating a sense of place, of where you’re at in the world. Then we’re going to cut to the main narrative of our story and we, we introduce our scrooge character, we get some kind of backstory about him. But you’ve already kind of like been set with this impression of like losing a child and in the same moment you have this intense outpouring of community, loss and grieving, which will come up important later, because then you can contrast that with the amount of loneliness and isolation that our Scrooge character, that our Marley character, have. So the audience will already be like, no, no, no, I want that sense of community and like the child has this power that it’s like pulling the communities together, even in, you know, even in their own passing. We do that.
Ryan Freng:
We don’t know what child right, like we, we don’t get that at the beginning so real quick, as you’re describing this, I love the idea of life in death. Right, the, the community, the life, death versus. You know, on the other side of that coin, scrooge death in life. Yes, you know, that is that is it to a t?
Brandon Gries:
yeah, right so, because that’s the, that’s the power that this, this character, is gonna draw on, right? So now, to have this character, be empathetic, you know we always have like scrooge’s nephew. Uh, so in the 2019 one that I was telling you about, they do introduce his sister, because in usually in the story we never hear about who is his nephew’s parents. So it turns out that in the 2019 one, his sister has died.
Ryan Freng:
Right, so we’re going to draw on the same story. I think that’s the yeah, I think that’s the main story too, that his parents have died and he’s taking them on as a ward or giving them a job, whatever it is.
Brandon Gries:
So his sister will also play a part in the story and she will have passed from cancer. So he’s got this personal connection to a cancer story that we’re going to need later on. Because then, as he goes through all of those transformative experiences, right Like so we get the death in life chapter of Scrooge and then he enters into this whole series of transformative experiences because of you know, the ghost is going to go through experiences. Because of you know the ghost is going to go through that in the end, what he comes back around to is the way that he shows up. For our tim character is that the most important thing for you know, like a child with leukemia, is finding a bone marrow transplant. So in the end, that it won’t be because of his money or of his power. The way that he’s able to actually come to tim’s aid is through his own bones, his own like body and spirit, right, which is something that’s available to all of us but is really a sacrifice of yourself, right Like in a giving of your own essence you know over. So it’s like grounded and relatable, yet humbling and powerful, that this person who has all the resources in the world, that the real takeaway of the whole story? Is that what?
Brandon Gries:
The wrong lesson that has happened is that people have lost track of helping the person in front of them. Like where all this stuff got turned on to and famous. What’s the currency of that? Yeah, helping the wider world, you know, like all these things are that are abstractive continents away from us, et cetera. I got to build up bucket loads of money for helping some future person I may never know or see. While that’s important, if you take that to the extreme and you stop seeing the person in front of you, you ignore your neighbor. The real lesson in it is coming back to the importance of the person right in front of you. That’s the real lesson of the whole. Right in front of you, that’s that’s the real lesson of the whole story.
Ryan Freng:
I love too that he he’s giving of himself, yes, you know, giving of the very essence of himself and he gets so much more back. And I think that’s that’s a struggle of us too, people. You know, I had a friend who at one point was like I figured out the key to marriage it’s about compromise. And I was like, oh, if you’re the key to marriage, it’s about compromise. And I was like, ooh, if you’re going to be like trying to negotiate and tit for tat, everything, no one’s ever going to be happy. Like in a negotiation, you know, typically both sides are not happy but that’s not what marriage or relationship should be Right. And when you give and give and give and you know like you’re, you’re a very giving person like helping out your family, you know your extended family and such Like, what’s the currency? Like, what do I get back? You know, like, if you’re weighing that, you’re looking at the wrong thing, so that giving, approaching it from that perspective in an immediate way with your neighbor, I’m loving that.
Brandon Gries:
I’m loving all these themes and these vibes and stuff and I know it’ll seem strange, but, like, the happiest part of the film is actually when our 10 characters in, uh like, in the hospital, you know, for treatment, in like the, the child’s wing, and there are other kids there and all they know how to do is to be kids. Yeah, so like, even amid this thing, that, as an adult, we’re like looking at this situation and the whole point is this should feel very lyrical and poetic throughout. This is, yeah, that’s how the that’s you should never not be in the emotional space in this entire story that this is the happiest moment you know, and the whole story is the way that these kids are all just able to be kids. Did you ever see the movie my Girl with Macaulay Culkin? Oh, yeah, okay, so think that.
Ryan Freng:
Well and like more modern, maybe like Bridge to Terabithia, Like the girl has cancer and dies.
Brandon Gries:
So in the end, we still end on a funeral, right, and we’re back to that scene of, you know, this child’s casket of the funeral. But now what we’ve discovered, it’s not our tin character who has passed, well, what happens is that we again see this sense of community and our tin characters.
Brandon Gries:
How the story, because that’s how you have to end it, right, like god bless us everyone, right, right is that it is him delivering an emotional message because one of those kids that was in the child’s wing didn’t make it. You know, we don’t. I don’t know how many characters you have to have there and you don’t want to have like some sort of token character that you’re throwing away. Like every character has to be important here, but it’s really this like empowering moment where, um, there’s like this moment of bearing witness. You know that tim is bearing with us about the importance of this losing their friend and you know can still end on this very empowering note and in that moment you also have Scrooge being there with Tim, kind of being there in solidarity, sort of like cementing in a real way, in this very vulnerable moment for our Tim character, that this is now an important person in his life, right right, I love that Is this.
Ryan Freng:
how’s this light on my face? It’s like killing me. It’s not great, it’s like killing me.
Brandon Gries:
All right, I probably burned up a whole bunch of this time. You know we aren’t yelling about my hopes and dreams.
Ryan Freng:
All right, with two minutes left. Um, no, it’s great. I just wanted to to be like a hangout and, you know, even if we just talked about nonsense all day, it’s great. I mean, talk too much about me, let’s talk about, talk about you, let’s get into it Life. Life is good.
Ryan Freng:
I mean the, the, the question of like, how’s, How’s it going, how’s business? Like, I always hate that, um, cause everything’s hard. You know, like, this is, this is fun and this is easy. Uh, and same thing with, like, marriage and family. Like, there’s there’s all the wonderful things with that or the business wonderful things, but there’s always the hard things too. So, like, especially when, like in our business, it’s so seasonal and sales take a while and you’re working on things, like the wins are, you know, kind of spread out. Yeah, right, so I’m excited about a couple of projects we’re pitching. Um, you know we’ve had some proposals that it’s like, eh, yeah, we’re just not ready to to do this yet and it’s like, ah, you invest this time and this energy and you know, so that’s, but, like, that’s the level we go to in order to on any project. Try to bring, you know, the awesome and try to bring something that we think is useful. Yeah, right. So, like you know, I shouldn’t complain, right, uh, got my health, uh, my family’s health, and you take care of your own business and take care of your family. I try a little bit.
Ryan Freng:
Yeah, going to Nate Bregazzi tonight. You familiar with the comedian? Oh, he’s so good. I’ll send you some links. Okay, if anybody’s in chat, you should look up the seven jokes to know Nate Bregazzi or anybody. If any back flippers are there, you should share the link I shared earlier. He’s great, great. He’s also nate, or, uh, luke, how familiar are you with him? You, okay, so if you haven’t watched that video, you should watch that video.
Ryan Freng:
It’s kind of like my physical transformation as well. Like him, like, however, many years ago, 10 years ago he’s just like doughy and goofy haircut and goofy clothes that don’t fit well and kind of baggy, you know, and I was like I’m. When I look back at myself, I’m like, why am I just unkempt? Like, if I was just kempt I would look a lot better, you know. And then now I try to, you know, care a little bit more about, uh, how I feel and do a little bit more exercise and nutrition and that kind of leans to um, how I look and how I feel and is really good, and even that, like a lot of people support fitness but it’s tough because I can go overboard. You know, like when I’m pushing it in the morning and Monica’s like hey, you got to take the kids in like 10 minutes, you haven’t showered yet, you gotta, you gotta get off, you got to get off. You know, and that causes angst, but I have the opportunity to do that stuff, you know which is awesome.
Brandon Gries:
So, yeah, it’s like a whole you got a whole website.
Ryan Freng:
That’s like a whole thing. It’s a whole thing, yeah, I mean, and eventually I want to help people as well, like because I feel like I can market and I can sell and get people excited. And then I know a lot of people who are really smart in this area and I know enough to be dangerous so I can help kind of guide that content creation, so, um, kind of make it accessible. For there’s actually two targets like, uh, priests, who are like a captive audience that struggle with health a lot, you know, um, and I’ve been thinking about indigenous communities as well, um, cause there’s a decent amount of poverty. Um, and I’ve been thinking about indigenous communities as well, um, cause there’s a decent amount of poverty. Uh, and sometimes there’s there’s the opposite. Like, you know, there’s money, but when you have money and nothing to do, you know it’s easy to sit around and not be very healthy.
Ryan Freng:
So some kind of captive demographics and then just like middle-aged men, like hey, hey, let’s, let’s keep our health, you know, going so that when we’re 60 we can still do the things that we want and, you know, feel good about it and sit on the ground and stand up without hurting, and I’m like that’s the big thing that I’m working on right now, like fitness is great, but like now I’m like’m going to turn 40 this year, like my knees, my hip, like right now my arm like some bicep tendonitis and tennis elbow, and like having trouble holding my child. I’m like I got to fix that crap. Like, aside from you know the heavy lifting or aesthetics or anything else, like got to fix that crap because it’s not going to get better as we age and it sucks.
Brandon Gries:
So I think that that’s not working. I think one of the key things. So I read the Power of Habit. Did you read the book the Power of Habit?
Ryan Freng:
No, was that by?
Brandon Gries:
I don’t remember. I could draw the cover of the book for you, but yeah, I got four bicycles on the cover. It’s a yellow cover. It’s been these red.
Ryan Freng:
Uh, I don’t think I had right, bicycles were red german. I buy a lot of books when people recommend them.
Brandon Gries:
I haven’t read them all and, uh, one of the things that I got for maybe it was in that or it was in atomic habits talked about, these levels talked about. I think it might have been the power of habit, though, because I I think all I got from Atomic Habits is just be 1% better. That was my key takeaway and the other book it was like these different levels to like how you orient yourself to a habit and you can orient yourself to a habit through like a goal setting lens. But what tends to happen is that once you achieve your goal, the habit falls apart. Right, because the habit was serving you up to the point of achieving the goal.
Brandon Gries:
Right, now the goal has been achieved, so your psyche says I don’t need the habit anymore because I’ve achieved the goal. So if you make it an identity issue rather than like a goal setting issue, you sort of never exhaust the habit. Right, like I’m a person who takes care of my body, and so then you organize habits around that philosophy, that ethos, right, and that’s never a destination. You just I’m a person who takes care of my body, so I’ve designed a set of habits that correspond to my belief that I’m a person who takes care of my body.
Ryan Freng:
It’s really good and you can create those short-term goals, but you complete one of the short-term goals and then you have the next, because your long-term goal and I’ve heard it as well like uh, more of a nebulous, uh kind of ever chasing. It’s a matthew mcconaughey, I think, talked about it at a speech like he’s always chasing himself in five years. Yeah, you know, like I want to be healthy. Or you know, uh, set it out like at 60, at 70, just keep pushing it out as you get older, like have great mobility. Yeah, right, and how do you, how do you do that? Break it down into small steps? Yeah, I think it is small habits I don’t.
Brandon Gries:
Yeah, I didn’t never got the sense that it was like saying you don’t need a goal set, but it was more saying that if you, in terms of the thing that is, the organizing principle for your habits, if the organizing principle of your habits is attached to a sense of identity, your habits will have staying power.
Brandon Gries:
Let it in that I’m going to go to the gym because I’m going to, I’m going to lose those 10 pounds. If the reason, the narrative, the story you tell yourself internally is I’m going to the gym because I’m a person who takes care of myself. Now, while I’m at the gym, what I’m going to be spending my time on this week is there’s this 5k that I’m going to train for. Right, like, you can start to substitute the, the, the goals, the short-term goals, right, yeah, but that’s not the organizing principle for the habit, right, right, like the, the organizing principle for the habit opens up an opportunity. Set that now you can like. All right, you can do some goal setting under that big umbrella, but the goals don’t motivate you, that’s not the thing are you familiar with?
Ryan Freng:
like cognitive behavioral therapy as well, or like positive self-talk is is kind of the dumbed down version of it, but that’s, you know, as you’re saying that I’m like, yeah, I’m, I’m a fitness person, I’m into fitness, I train, uh, I am a filmmaker and an entrepreneur. Like thinking of kind of the hobbies in business, aside from being, you know, a faithful person, being a father and a husband, um, having those other items as well, be like that. It’s like you figure it out and if you, if you tell yourself you are something, then eventually you become that. You know, uh, you’re just not gonna quit. And when people quit, it’s because they don’t believe that they can do something or that they are something. And I’ve I talked to a lot of people, uh, through the fitness stuff. And sometimes it’s like, well, you know, I don’t, I don’t make enough money and like expenses have gone up and I’m, you know, I don’t know what to do. Have you tried this? Well, that’s not going to work because this, this, this and this. Okay, what about this? Well, that’s not going to work because of this, this and this and this. I’m like we’re, we’re approaching this from the wrong perspective, like you have to decide that you can make something work, that you are going to make something work, that you are going to be a successful person. Once you have that as your organizing principle wouldn’t you to use the terminology then you can create these steps and figure it out. Yeah, and all those challenges you’ll overcome or, uh, pivot from, or you know, you’ll figure out some disruptor for yourself to get you into a better place, whether it’s continuing in this lane and just pushing through something hard, or jumping into another lane and getting around that and then coming back, or you know, whatever it is, because you are a person who is successful or you will solve this problem, as opposed to you. Just give me six reasons why this isn’t going to work. That doesn’t make any sense, like that’s not good for anybody ever. So I love that.
Ryan Freng:
And cognitive behavioral therapy is like here’s like 12 or 15 different philosophies. Maybe it’s like um, I’m going to get these all wrong, but like catastrophizing um or slippery slope, or naming Like I’m a. I’m a terrible, I don’t know, I’m a terrible skier. Well, if you tell yourself that you’re never going to try to be better, like you know, tell yourself that you want to be better. You know you want to be a better skier, all right, well, you’ll, you’ll achieve that probably, you know? Um, so there’s like all these things that when you catch yourself doing it as well, you’re like no, do, no, do the opposite. You know, and I don’t believe in like the manifest, like I think, and then it’s going to come into reality, but your thoughts affect your body, affect how you behave, right, and can affect those around you as well. Like just some positivity, just a smile, you know, makes everyone a little bit more comfortable a little bit more happy and that’s going to be better for everyone.
Brandon Gries:
So I’m, I’m into all that. There’s a. There’s another thing that’s been kind of creeping in for, uh, for ashley and I that, as we, you know, get we’re middle age, now that you know there’s a few people that I talk to, that a lot of the ways that they will respond to me about something that I’m thinking about doing or not, they’ll say, oh, you’ll do it or you won’t. It’s just a very nonchalant thing the way that they put it, but it’s really piercing when you sit and you think about it, because at some point, if you’re thoughtful and you understand the trade-offs of the opportunity cost of me putting my time into this versus me putting in my time to that and I will also acknowledge that this represents a kind of uh, a bias to the fact that I’ve I’m at a higher level of maslow’s hierarchy of needs right, like my right, right, you know, I’m, uh, I’ve got my, my life is more secure, so I can, yeah, I can think in these ways that at some point, like, it’s gonna be dead. So if, like, if there’s a thing, yeah, there’s only so much time left. There’s only so much time left.
Brandon Gries:
So, um, it sort of changes how I give myself permission about a thing or the expectations of what I’m gonna do out of it. Like I’ve made it to a point in life where I feel like I don’t really feel like I have something I need to prove to myself or anybody else and, um, the whole idea of like I’m only going to do the thing that I’m qualified to do, et cetera, like there’s some external authority that is essentially qualifying me to embark on this thing. Um, that now it’s more of a simple question of like well, am I going to do it or am I not going to do it? Um, yeah, meaning that it may never come to anything, like the film that we did might not have ever come to anything. But, uh, just the choice of like well, I’m gonna. I, I want this to be a part of my life, so I’m going to bring the best that I can to choosing to make that a part of my life. That’s the only part of the problem that I can control, right, because film such a collaborative thing even the one of the films that I was mentioning, this couple out of texas that’s exactly what he wrote back to me.
Brandon Gries:
It’s like there’s so much about any of these projects that’s just a matter of just sheer luck. That is way beyond your control. Um, to make a thing you know eventually happen, right, so you can’t ever assume that you can control everything about the situation. You can only give as much of yourself, as much of your mind, body and spirit as you’re willing to give to this thing that you think you want, and sort of let the outcome be whatever it’ll be Like. Don’t focus too much on the outcome and more just focus all that mind, body and spirit. If you said you wanted this to be a part of your life, you, you want to take up flying, or you want to, you want to take up fitness or whatever it is that have like, okay, well, you’re gonna be dead soon, so right, if not now, when? Right, right, there’s no perfect time to have a kid. You know all of these sort of things. Right, it like, just like, just, and just do it.
Brandon Gries:
Any of it, yeah, just do it, because it may not come to anything, but that was never the point. The point was you making the choice of investing some part of your mind, body and spirit into a thing that you felt was important to you. Yeah, now, don’t go into it blind. You still have to go into it in an informed way of understanding. You still have to go into it in an informed way of understanding. Anything you choose to do always has a cost. It has an opportunity cost if you’re going to put your spirit into this versus put your spirit into that. So, if you are thoughtful and if you are making good choices about understanding what your trade-offs are of pouring yourself into a thing, after that you don’t need any permissions From yourself or from anybody else. Give it your best shot Right Like this is. You’re just now in your life. This is your life.
Brandon Gries:
Like I feel like this happened for me maybe about five or six years ago. I felt like all of the life choices I was making were in preparation for my life, or like everything was about you know, I’m making choices so I can be the best dad that I can ever be. Well, I still haven’t had kids. Um, I’m making the best choices I can to set myself up for success in my this whole notion of I’m preparing for the life that is coming and you never get somewhere. In my mid thirties it just sort of was like no, you’re just in your life. Yeah, like this is.
Ryan Freng:
Yeah, you are here, this is your life.
Brandon Gries:
Yep, right, you are here.
Ryan Freng:
So you are here, yeah, that idea of like, oh, if I just get this proposal done, and then you know, okay, we’re never there, we’re only ever here. So how do we do all that? Now, like my friend’s uh friend who just had a baby, is like, yeah, we were thinking about, uh, if we’ll ever have vacation again. And again I’m like, what are you talking about? Like, do you want to have vacation? Have vacation, yeah, and then figure out how to get there. Yeah, you know. Like, just make it happen, right. Don’t, uh, don’t talk yourself out of something, don’t be negotiating against yourself, right. And if you want to do it now, do it now.
Ryan Freng:
You know, and like, in the general trend of things, like, ideally you’re, you’ll have more money, you’ll make more money later, like you can borrow a little bit from that. You know, I’m I’m down with Dave Ramsey and trying to get debt free and all that stuff. But you know, do a little debt, live now a little bit. Don’t, don’t wait till you’re 60, and you’re like, now I have money and now I can travel, and but I can’t do a lot, you know, whatever it is, so I love that.
Ryan Freng:
How’s our, how’s our edge? I felt like his edge was kind of bright. Oh, his camera died Go. Oh, his camera died, Go back to me. Yeah, it gets so warm in here. We got to figure that out. We got to put like an ice pack on there. We’ll get your camera back up, but we got to wrap up. I got to run home, pick up my wife and we’re going to hang out at maybe I won’t say it online we’re going to hang out somewhere before the show and then we’re going to go put the name Pregazzi show at the Alliance with the alliance that sounds like a great sounds like a great night.
Brandon Gries:
I got to get to uh. Mentoring a high schooler is what I’m new, yeah sounds worthwhile, but maybe it’s an amazing it is. This is a kind of like give you hope for the future type of type of thing. Actually, the the most challenging part about it is that you know, like after you’ve had a certain amount of life experience, there’s certain ideas that subconsciously you kind of dismiss or you get a jaded edge around like questions. You stop asking, yeah Right, and if another?
Ryan Freng:
adult was-. Now that I’m working in the indigenous world, I recognize it as communal privilege or whatever you grew up with, like knowing how how to invest, knowing to save money, knowing how to have credit. Yeah, and just take that for granted. People grew up not knowing that stuff and you’re like, wow, we can’t even talk up here. We just started the fundamentals yeah.
Brandon Gries:
Or if you had things that when you were young, that maybe you wish the world worked a certain way, and then you kind of grew up into the world and somehow you, you became complacent around the idea of it, like you basically accepted that the world didn’t work that way, even as much as the younger version of yourself wished that it did, oh sure, so you stopped asking the question. Or if anybody were ever to ask you the question, adult to an adult, it’d get a circuit, it’d get a sarcastic answer. Or you, you know we make all kinds of ironic jokes about you know, whatever the comedian you’re going to go to tonight is going to make a bunch of jokes about things that we sort of laugh at because we sort of accept the ridiculousness of it. Right, but this young person, they ask these questions earnestly, no irony, no sarcasm, just earnestly like, well, why don’t we do this? And if I were to do this, you know this sort of outcome. And like you, don’t we do this? And if I were to do this, you know this sort of outcome. And, like you don’t want to feed irony and cynicism back to this person who’s asking this question, you want to answer with the sort of earnestness of you know what’s possible.
Brandon Gries:
I like the way you talk to your kids about things. It it draws this piece out of you, of bringing you back to the world as you wish it were. That this, this child, that’s all that. They, of course they, they want that same thing. And so you have to sort of hold space for the that sort of earnest kind of innocence in the question and you have to say an answer out loud which sort of mirrors back to you like awakening a dormant piece of yourself. And why did I stop asking the question? Yeah, what am I doing to not, you know, get behind this idea? Where have I gone astray in in terms of my own complacence? You know, as an adult, where’s my blind spot? You know that this child, unknowingly, is pointing out to you that’s my favorite part of the whole thing.
Ryan Freng:
We I mean we slow down, asking why, like kids up until I don’t know, junior high, high school, maybe even high school, I mean like our kids in high school are still asking like why, why, why is it why? And you, you have to go back and think why and you’re like I don’t have a good reason or answer for this. It just is and we do it this way, but maybe we shouldn’t. You know, we kind of stop asking why and it’s a, it’s a functional survival tool, right? So no, no shade on anybody who doesn’t ask why. But in creative or in you know, art, we start to ask why again? Or an entrepreneurship, you ask why, like, why is it this way? Can it be better? How you know?
Brandon Gries:
and start to ask those fundamental questions and it’s to be childlike when we ask them as adults, we a lot of times people will put like a prep might be a dumb question. You know like we already start to discount. Yeah, I try to things that feel like as much as I can. Yeah, like it’s. It’s like not a healthy habit. Yeah, you should if you feel a compulsion to ask that question. Don’t discount your own questions.
Ryan Freng:
Yeah, I don’t understand this. Why? Why is it that way? Uh-huh, you know, even say that like instead of like you know, or try to be coy. That’s right. That’s what we do, you know. Yeah, like no. I want you to think I’m dumb, because that’s right. I want to not be ignorant on this thing that you’re talking about.
Brandon Gries:
That I don’t understand it is so relaxing to be vulnerable yeah because, like if you, if you’re just like here’s, here’s the warts and all, yeah, like that’s a great thing to be able to build up from right.
Ryan Freng:
Like you’re not hiding anything it takes energy to to hide your vulnerability, when you’re like sharing that, that peace, that, um, vulnerability, that humility with somebody else, and you know you’re kind of like hey, be gentle. Like the, the japanese say, uh, is this like you, yoroshiku? On the guy, shamas, like please be kind to me. It’s like they’re greeting like hello, nice to meet you, like nice, like it’s for me it’s nice to meet you, or whatever, but they say, please be kind to me, which is just a different perspective, and I kind of like that because there’s some vulnerability to it, whether it’s meant or not.
Ryan Freng:
It’s that idea of connecting on vulnerability. So I like it. We could uh, I could do this all day and I feel like we’re trying to play with the time format too. Like, maybe we like start chatting a half an hour early and then we just start going because, like, I feel like now we’re getting, just, you know, some philosophizing, which is what I really like. So, thanks for hanging, we’re going to run. Anything you want to plug or share no, let’s work on our project.
Brandon Gries:
I’m in, you know, let’s do it. Let’s do a little beat boarding, let’s let’s work on. Let’s work on our project. I’m in, you know, let’s do it. Yeah, let’s do a little beat boarding.
Ryan Freng:
Let’s do a little, uh, little riffing yeah, and it’s, uh, you know, we think in business like what’s our roi, what’s the cost, like the the roi is like feeding the creative soul, you know, and connecting, yeah, and it’s so beneficial and needed. So that’s a little bit of what this is. So, thanks for coming, dude. Yeah, thanks for. So that’s a little bit of what this is.
Brandon Gries:
So thanks for coming, dude. Yeah, thanks for feeding my soul a little bit today too that’s what we got.
Ryan Freng:
I don’t know who we’re gonna have on next. We’re just kind of flying by the seat of our pants to produce this kind of in my office, which is cool. We’re figuring out the lights and the sound, so thanks for hanging out and putting.
