Navigating Uncertainty And Fearless Persistence In A Long Term Creative Career With Adam Leipzig

How can you navigate uncertainty in a constantly changing market? Why is persistence the key to a sustainable creative career? Plus why distribution is so important, and the four ways to monetise your creative work. All this and more with Adam Leipzig.

In the intro, my reflections on running an author-publisher business after a fantastic e-commerce workshop run by Blubolt, and why you will always pay for marketing with either your time or your money; AI-Assisted Artisan Author webinars; and last call for my Kickstarter Bones of the Deep – J.F. Penn.

Today's show is sponsored by Draft2Digital, self-publishing with support, where you can get free formatting, free distribution to multiple stores, and a host of other benefits. Just go to www.draft2digital.com to get started.

This show is also supported by my Patrons. Join my Community at Patreon.com/thecreativepenn 

Adam Leipzig is a producer, former studio executive, and educator whose work spans film, media, and technology. He served as a senior executive at Walt Disney Studios and as President of National Geographic Films.

His film credits include March of the Penguins and Dead Poets Society, with projects recognised by the Academy Awards, BAFTA, the Emmys, and Sundance. He is the author of several books on filmmaking and his latest book is Fearless Persistence: Creative Life, Creative Work, and the Ten Laws of Culturenomics.

You can listen above or on your favorite podcast app or read the notes and links below. Here are the highlights and the full transcript is below. 

Show Notes

• Why writing books still matters in a world saturated with visual media
• The Jeffrey Katzenberg “next” lesson and the power of fearless persistence
• How uncertainty and the “long middle” are essential parts of the creative process
• What film editing can teach writers about cutting, shaping, and refining their work
• The 10 Laws of Culturenomics, including why awareness is not desire and why distribution is everything
• How generative AI is changing filmmaking — and why creatives should be the architects, not the tools

You can find Adam at AdamLeipzig.com.

Transcript of Interview with Adam Leipzig

Jo: Adam Leipzig is a producer, former studio executive, and educator whose work spans film, media, and technology. He served as a senior executive at Walt Disney Studios and as President of National Geographic Films.

His film credits include March of the Penguins and Dead Poets Society, with projects recognised by the Academy Awards, BAFTA, the Emmys, and Sundance.

He is the author of several books on filmmaking and his latest book is Fearless Persistence: Creative Life, Creative Work, and the Ten Laws of Culturenomics. Welcome to the show, Adam.

Adam: Thank you so much for having me, Jo.

Jo: I'm excited to talk to you today. You have written several books, but you have worked on many more films. So I wondered, why do you think books still have a part to play in reaching people?

What do you love about writing books that is different to your filmmaking work?

Adam: You can put so much information in a book, and the beautiful thing about a book is that you can pick it up wherever you want, whenever you want, and leave it off and go back to it. It's just waiting for you and it's there.

It really allows me, and other authors like me, to share information in a different way, with more details and more stories and more specificity. I love the ability to just share that information and have it always available. You don't need a device, you don't need to have a subscription. You can just go to it whenever you want.

You asked me what I love about writing. Like a lot of writers, I'm not sure I love writing, but I do love having written. The thing about a book is that it's a very solitary exercise.

A film is a highly collaborative exercise. No movie gets made by one person. It's made by hundreds or sometimes thousands of people. But this book is just me and a laptop and notes and a lot of thought.

It's a very introverted, almost monkish existence while you're doing that, and then it has to go out into the world—and that's when it really starts to interact with people.

So there's this huge difference between being alone and being always in a collaborative environment, which is what happens when I'm making a movie.

Jo: Most listeners will be independent authors in some way, and a lot of us do this because we're control freaks. We like being the only people.

So how is that different? You mentioned collaboration in the film industry, but is it almost freeing to do a book without having that? I mean obviously you have editors and publishers and stuff, but—

Is it freeing in some creative way?

Adam: It is really nice, because there is not another point of view in the room and I can just say what I feel and know that that's there.

At the same time, you're right—I have had some amazing editor help and I've had some great early readers that have given me feedback on it and helped me make it so much better than it was when I finished the first draft.

I knew that going in. I always test and share what I'm doing to make sure that it lands in the way that I wanted it to land, and it can be helpful for people.

Jo: Getting into the book, you have a chapter on “what you do matters.” I feel like this is super hard. This is not a political show, so we're not doing politics, but there are a lot of big things going on in the world.

It can be very hard as writers to think, is writing my book actually going to make a difference?

So how can you encourage people?

Adam: That's the hardest thing, Jo, because there is a lot going on in the world right now. Everything that's going on in the world right now exists because it's following a certain narrative. I don't believe that narratives are come up with because people look at things that are happening and say, “Oh, well let's just write what happened.”

I think that we do things from micro experiences that we have with ourselves, our relationships, our families, to the macro experiences of politics and global situations. I believe that happens because there is a narrative that is being followed.

So what I say to all creative people is that it's our job to craft and express the narratives that matter—and different narratives—so those narratives can be followed.

One of the points that I make in the book is that poets are not overtly really dangerous people. Poets are generally lovely people, a lot of them don't talk too much.

They're great to have dinner with, and they just work with words—and often not a lot of words, right? Because beautiful poetry is often concise and simple and spare.

Yet there are places where poets are in jail. Because the narratives of those concise, spare, gorgeous idealistic words matter so much that those voices need to be silenced, which means those narratives are dangerous sometimes. Those narratives present an alternate world, an alternate view of reality.

I think it's really our job as creative people, as entrepreneurs, as people who are essentially creating narratives out of the soul of our lives and our experience—we want to express those to the world. It's really important for us to express those to the world, especially now, especially because so much is going on.

Those narratives are going to become pathways that others can look at and maybe follow. I think that's really important. It's the reason why we do our work.

Jo: I absolutely agree with you around writing the narratives that we want in the world. “Be the change you want to see in the world” and all that.

I also want to call out the fact that there are hundreds of thousands of books now published, and you come from the film industry, and many more people really watch films or play games than read books.

I've wondered about this myself. I've written a few screenplays and sometimes it feels that wouldn't it be better to try and put our words into a visual medium? A lot of authors listening will do micro video like TikTok and all of this. So this is back to the question of—

Why books? How can we change these narratives when we feel like we're drowned out by all the media?

Adam: I think it's great for authors to express themselves in other media. I have a pretty active Instagram channel, and I love doing that, but it's a really different thing. I'm talking to people in two-minute bursts with very specific things. It's not the same and not the same detail as a book.

If we let our understanding of the ocean of content that is always coming to us stop us from doing anything, we wouldn't do anything. That's also true about movies. There are probably 10,000 movies made every year. There are a few hundred that are released.

So if every day I thought, “Oh, the movie that I'm working on is maybe not going to be released because there's only a small percent of movies that are made that are released.”

Or worse than that, “Of all the movies that are made, there's 500 different shows on Netflix and Apple and Amazon and there's so many choices.” If I thought that everything I was going to do is going to be drowned out, I wouldn't do anything.

I just don't believe that's true. I think it's our job to do things. Yes, there's an ocean of content out there, but what we do really matters, and it doesn't have to matter at gigantic scale. We don't know the scale that our work is going to achieve over time.

One of the early films that I worked on is a film called Dead Poets Society, and that script was passed on by every studio at least three times. It's probably a film that I couldn't get made now for all kinds of reasons, because it's not a sequel and it doesn't have superheroes or visual effects.

When we made that movie, we didn't know the impact it was going to have. It could have been drowned out by things, but it rose to a level that everywhere in the world I go, someone has seen that movie, including people who were not born when that movie was made.

We don't know the long arc of our work and the people that it affects.

Jo: I love that movie too. “Oh Captain, my Captain.” I can hear everyone saying that behind the screens.

This brings us to the title, Fearless Persistence, because of course Dead Poets Society ended up being an incredible success, but not everything turns out so well. I wondered if you could talk about this persistence.

How do you keep creating after something you perceived as a failure, or perhaps all the things that didn't get made?

Why is persistence so important that you use it in the title?

Adam: I've been super fortunate. I've worked with amazing people and on great projects. I've made 40 films at this point, and I'm making more. I've tried to make 400 films. I failed at getting them made 90% of the time, and that's okay. I just keep going.

When I was working at Disney and I was an executive at Walt Disney Studios for seven years, there was one movie that we were opening and nobody had really high expectations for it. But it opened huge on a weekend and it beat the competition.

We were in our Monday morning meeting and we were dancing on the tables and we were so excited. Jeffrey Katzenberg, who was running the studio at that time, came in, looked around the room, put his hands on his hips, and said, “Next.” We just had to move on.

I really learned the meaning of the word “next” about four months later when we had a film that we all knew was going to be hugely successful and make a lot of money and give everyone their bonuses, and it completely bombed at the box office. It was like you gave a party and nobody showed up to eat the hors d'oeuvres.

We were in the Monday morning meeting, very glum and not sure what was going to happen. Were we going to be fired? What was going to happen? And Jeffrey walked into the room and said, “Next.”

Jo: Mm-hmm.

Adam: And we just keep going. I think that is the great and defining quality of people who really have sustainable lives, either as creatives or business people or entrepreneurs. We're persistent. We're just like those little birds—you put their beak in water and they just keep bobbing up. We just keep going.

It's not about the people who are the most talented, because I'm certainly not the most talented. I'm certainly not the smartest. I'm certainly not the most creative.

There are people who are smarter and more talented and more creative than me all the time, and I get so much energy in being able to know them and work with them. But I am super persistent. I don't stop.

If there's something that I really believe in, I'll just keep going. I started taking notes on this book 10 years ago. There are movies that took 12 years to get made. You just keep going.

There are times, as a producer, where everybody's fallen away. There was a director attached, there was a star attached. They all left, they did other projects. The material is no longer under option. You don't even have legal rights to it anymore.

You just keep blowing on the embers and then eventually maybe it gets made. That's what it's about.

Jo: Do you think there's some kind of serendipity or something more that makes a book or a film? Is it timing? Is there just some chemistry?

You talked earlier about testing and sharing things to see if they're going to work, but as you mentioned, some films you think are going to be amazing and they bomb. Other things are a slow burn.

How do you know when to make a film if you just can't predict this stuff?

Adam: You can never predict it, but I think you start with: do you really, really think about it all the time? Do you really care about it? It's not like you're in a meeting or you read a script or you hear an idea and you're super excited about it—but are you still excited about it tomorrow morning? The next day and the next?

If you keep waking up every morning thinking, “Wow, that's great, I've got to get that forward,” then I think that is the first indication for me that it's going to have some staying power.

I don't think I am that different from everybody else. So if it's something that consistently excites me, I feel like there's going to be at least some other people in the world that it's also going to excite.

Jo: Do you think you have a voice, I guess, as a filmmaker as much as a writer?

Are there things that excite you consistently that you're drawn to? Or do you think it's much wider as a filmmaker than a writer?

Adam: I think it's a lot wider as a filmmaker. Part of it's also just my capacity right now as a writer. I really like the writing in Fearless Persistence and I also recorded the audiobook. I love listening to the audiobook experience. I think it's some of the best writing I've ever done.

I have not yet found the capacity to write a novel or to write fiction in the way that other people can. So part of it's just my skill and capacity at this point in my writing career, where I think I'm pretty good at expressing ideas in a nonfiction setting, but I haven't developed the skill set for fiction.

In movies, I make documentaries. I make fiction feature films. What attracts me is character. It's always the character, the people, the journey.

Are the people really interesting? Do I want to spend two hours of my life in a cinema with them, or 10 hours of my life watching those episodes on a streaming channel? That's what always starts with me. If the character is interesting, then I'll keep going.

Jo: I think the book, Fearless Persistence, has a lot of your character in it and your experience. It's not just a nonfiction book of prescriptive rules. You did bring a lot of voice into it, I think.

Adam: Thank you. I try to make it be like we're sitting down and we're talking and we're having a conversation.

Jo: Coming back to the book—a quote from the book: “Uncertainty isn't the enemy of creativity. It's its greatest ally.”

You talk about these messy and unpredictable times. I'm what we call a discovery writer. Some people say “pantser.” It mostly is quite chaotic and unpredictable.

Could you talk about this uncertainty and messy creativity?

Adam: One of the things I really try to do in Fearless Persistence is give support to all of us in this messy, unpredictable—what I call “the long middle”—where stuff is happening, but you're not seeing obvious results out there. You're either in the world or in your project, and you're just in this mess.

That mess is a beautiful place, and I'm trying to give support to the fact that that mess is gorgeous and it's part of the process. It's part of everybody's process. We shouldn't feel as though we are not doing our job when we're in that long, unpredictable, uncertain middle.

Because out of that, we discover what we actually want. It gives us a way to refine our taste and refine our direction because we are so uncertain.

Then there's this moment—and I don't know if you find this in your own writing, Jo—but there's this moment where that uncertainty changes into: there's no choices here at all. This is just what I have to do.

I actually think that the greatest freedom is when there's no choices. Where the path is just there, but we've got to get through the thicket to get to that path. And there's always a thicket.

Jo: There's a moment for me where the chaos becomes more certain and I'm like, okay, that's the story. I thought it might have been something else, but now that's what it is.

I often have too much material as well. So I wanted to ask you about this too, because as an author with a book, editing is hard for us. Of course there are lots of words and we have to go through it all, but editing on a film—I can't even imagine how hard the editing process is.

Could you talk about editing and how you cut and organise these massive projects?

Adam: Yes, editing is really hard, but it's also so fun. I think being on a set is great. It's the most fun a kid could have. But being in an editing room is also the most fun a kid could have, because you have all of the pieces and there are so many ways to do it. This is where a film is actually made—in the editing room.

Probably the way books are made also is in the editorial process between the writer and your own brain as the editor, or if you have someone who's helping you edit it.

Editing is really interesting because it's the only craft that did not exist before filmmaking. Everything else existed, right? There were scripts, there were actors, there were costumes, there was art direction, there was production design, there was music.

Editing was a craft that had to be invented for film. So it's a craft that's only about 120 years old.

When we make a film, the first thing that the editor does is just put all of the scenes together in a first editor's cut, a rough assembly. It's basically every scene that was in the script as it was shot, and the editor just tries to choose the best angles.

That generally comes out maybe a week or two after we wrap photography, and that first cut could be three or four hours long because it's got everything in it.

Then the process is: let's take that out. Let's take that out. You don't need this. You can move this scene here and move it there before the other scene. We don't really need that shot. Or can we get to a closeup there? And you get it down, down, down—just like in writing where you kill your darlings.

I actually find editing the most fun I have. “Oh, I don't need that sentence.” Or, “I can take out three words here and the sentence is better.” We go through exactly the same process in film editing and squinch it all down to the most compelling and efficient way to tell the story.

Jo: I'm glad you say it's fun because I also like editing. I find the editing much more creatively fulfilling because I actually can figure out the book that way. It's so funny, I think as writers, many people either love the editing or they love the first draft. It seems like you enjoy the whole process.

Adam: I like the editing so much more than the first draft. I feel like I had to get through the first draft. That was my long middle, that was my uncertain period, that was my thicket. Then my editing was, “Oh, great. Let's cross this out. Let's change that word. Let's lose that paragraph.” That was fun.

Jo: So let's say we now have a book or we have a film. In your book, law eight of culturenomics is that “without distribution, there is nothing.” So now we have to get this out there, and this is really difficult.

Can you talk about how film distribution has changed? Can you also reflect on how it is for writers, because our distribution has changed a lot too?

Adam: So, as you mentioned in the last section of the book, I've observed over the past 30 years that when a work is both aesthetically really excellent and also economically viable and sustainable for the creators, it always observes these ten principles. I call them the 10 Laws of Culturenomics.

One of them is “without distribution, there is nothing,” by which I mean: unless your audience, your market, the people that you are seeking to share or serve with the work—unless they can get it, it doesn't really matter. It's like that tree falling in the forest and no one's around to hear it.

I always think about my market and my distribution before I start making the movie. I was thinking about that as I was writing the book, because I really want it to be there to meet people where they are and I want them to be able to get it.

Film distribution has changed a lot, especially during the pandemic. People stayed home and cinema admissions have fallen off 30% from pre-pandemic levels, so people are going out to cinemas less.

That means fewer films are being distributed in cinemas for any viable period of time. Sometimes some movies will be out there for one or two days, literally, in cinemas, and then they go right to streaming.

On the streaming side, there was a glut of streaming content. All the streaming channels overinvested in streaming. There were too many shows. I don't know about your Netflix queue or your Amazon queue, but it's unnavigable. There is so much stuff. Now they've cut back a lot—they're just doing a lot less.

We're in a situation now where anything can get out there somehow. The question is, does your market, does your audience know about it? Do they want to invest the time to experience it?

One of the other Laws of Culturenomics is that “awareness is not desire.” There's a lot of things that we're aware of that we don't want to spend our time with. Everybody was aware of Disney's new Snow White movie. Nobody wanted to go see it.

Jo: I must say, I'm not the key demographic for that!

Adam: But you knew about it?

Jo: Was that a live action one?

Adam: Yes.

Jo: I don't understand those live action ones, to be honest. Maybe that's why—

Adam: I think we are sequelled out. I look at the movie business and I just think what audiences really want is something new, please. Something we haven't seen before. We don't want the 95th iteration of something from the MCU.

The studios, because the movies cost so much and they're so risk-averse, talk a lot about “pre-aware titles.”

In other words, titles that you've heard of before, so you're going to go see the movie.

It works to a certain extent, but I just think it's cinematically boring. In that world, you never could have predicted Oppenheimer. You never could have predicted Barbie. Movies that really don't have a precedent, but they did so well because they're different. I think audiences are craving something different right now.

Jo: It's interesting though, isn't it? I agree on one level, but then I also watch Bridgerton and we watched the latest series as soon as it came out. I guess that is pre-aware to a point. I don't read historical romance, yet I really like the show. I think it's because of Shonda Rhimes. I watched Grey's Anatomy for about 20 years.

Adam: She's great.

Jo: She's amazing. So I feel like this is why it's hard, isn't it? It's hard to know. As fiction writers particularly listening, we have very specific genre audiences, and they often don't cross over into other genres. They love their genre fiction. So it is hard to balance original work that may not be easily sold and the other stuff.

I guess that's why the studios do it, right, because they think they can make enough money with the next Marvel movie.

Adam: Yes, but I'm curious to know what you think about this, because even within a genre, a really good genre movie or a really good genre book is not the same as all the other books or films in the genre. It's familiar in that it does what the genre says you have to do, but it's different.

It's got those unique things that make us feel like super fans, that we really love it. It's familiar enough to fall within the genre—and yes, genres have rules that you've got to follow—but then there's something unique and different that's exciting. And that's why we say, “Hey Jo, you've got to read this book.”

Jo: I agree with you. I love that you said “awareness is not desire.” This is another problem with our creative work, right? We have to do marketing. We can throw all this stuff out there, and yet it may or may not work.

So let's talk about your book marketing. Obviously you are on this podcast, and I presume your publicists are pitching lots of podcasts, but—

What are you doing to promote the book that might be different to a film release?

Adam: Well, I don't have a hundred million dollars.

Jo: Surprise!

Adam: Right? I've got a few hundred dollars, so we're just doing it this way.

As you know, once upon a time, legacy publishers actually did marketing. Legacy publishers barely do any marketing now. Every author has to do it themselves. So we have to do this ourselves.

It's been the hardest thing. I think it's the hardest thing that we've all had to adopt, that we have to do this thing where there used to be a marketing department and you just hand it over to them and we could just be in our own little creative space. But no, we've got to do this also.

So what am I doing? I've amped up my social media. I'm speaking. I am on podcasts like this. I'm sharing as much as I can.

I'm asking circles of people who have been early readers of the book. I'm really grateful because I've had really enthusiastic response to it, both from creatives and also some business people, which was surprising to me, but really great.

Someone said, “This is the best business book in the past 10 years,” which is really interesting, right? Because you read it, Jo, as an author, but she read it as someone who sits on the board of major companies. That was a pretty interesting response.

I'm just asking them to be advocates and share it around. I'd just like to be those people who blow on the embers and let's see if we can make a fire.

Jo: We talked about the fun bits earlier. I'm enjoying our conversation, but I know that marketing is not necessarily in the fun bucket.

Are you finding bits of the marketing you enjoy?

Adam: Yes, I love meeting the audience. I love meeting the people that I'm writing the book for and sharing it with.

I've been fortunate enough to be asked to run a writer's workshop in Greece for the past few years. It's a retreat centre called Rosemary's House. It's on the east coast of Greece. A dozen writers.

I work with writers all the time, but they're always writing a specific thing, like a screenplay or something. This was a dozen writers all writing different things, and I'd never done that before. I had an extraordinary time.

The first year I went, I'd had all these notes for this book, Fearless Persistence, that I'd been compiling for some time. But there I was in the room and I was with the people that I was really intending to write the book for, and that kicked me in the butt and I wrote the book.

Then the next year I was back and I finished it while we were there at the writer's retreat. So that was great, and I was with another group of writers. I'll be back there again later this year and the book will be out.

So it's this fabulous continuation of really engaging with and meeting the people that I'm seeking to serve with this book.

I really enjoy encouraging and mentoring and sharing the systems that are undergirding the creative process, and then the process of how do you build a sustainable life, including all these super practical things that they don't teach you in art school or writing school or film school or even business school.

How do you actually build a sustainable life in this practice? I love that. I guess that's marketing, but it's also just being with the people that you're there to serve.

Jo: I love that you use “serve.” I use the same word. I say, “Who do you serve?” And that can help people, because I feel like creative people are like, “We don't want to be marketers, we don't want to be salesy.” So if you reframe it as service—who are you trying to help, who are you trying to entertain—that actually helps.

Coming to the business side, you mentioned systems. You are right, the book has a lot of business in it, which I love because we talk a lot about business on this show. In one section you say there are only four ways to monetise your creative work.

So could you talk a bit about those different ways to monetise your creative work?

Adam: Yes. This has been true for maybe 5,000 years because it's not about technology, it's just about how work is monetised. There are only four ways that any piece of work is monetised.

1. For sale. You have a book, and you go to your favourite bookstore and you buy the book, and now you own the book.
2. For rent. You could rent a book from your library, or in a movie context, what you're really renting is the seat for two hours to watch the movie.
3. On subscription. People have subscriptions to Kindle Unlimited or other platforms, or people have subscriptions to a streaming service.
4. Free. When it's ad-supported. That's like linear television where there's ads, or Amazon where there's ads and you don't pay for it.

For sale, for rent, on subscription, or free—those are the only ways anything is ever transacted.

When it's ad-supported, for example, some people have YouTube channels that are very successful. YouTube is free, and then YouTube is making money from the ads and the creators are getting a tiny little slice of the ad revenue.

Jo: Like this podcast. I have sponsors who pay, and they're all related to the author industry. They're companies that I use and work with. I personally recommend them, and that means this podcast is free.

Adam: Thank you, sponsors.

Jo: Yes, thank you, sponsors! I also have patrons—people who subscribe to the show to support it as well. So I guess we don't have to be in one bucket or another.

We can have our work in different buckets.

Adam: Ideally, you can have your work in every single one of them. Not always, not necessarily always at exactly the same simultaneous moment, but at a certain point as the work gets out there into the world, as it's lived long enough, it probably will be in every bucket.

That's great because we want our work to be as accessible to the people that we're serving in any way they want to get it.

Jo: I totally agree. And your audiobook, as you mentioned, will be available in those different formats as well.

Adam: Yes.

Jo: I find that, especially with nonfiction audio, what I love is being able to listen to just a chapter, just a chapter in a specific part. Someone could actually listen to the 10 Laws of Culturenomics separately to some of the rest of the book. I love that.

Adam: I'd never done that before. It was so powerful to record the audiobook because up until that moment, my relationship with this book was fingers typing keyboards, electrons on a screen. It was a completely silent experience.

Then I was in this recording booth in Los Angeles and I started speaking the words, and I was visualising the people that I was writing it for as I was doing it. It was so powerful. Then I listened to it and I thought, wow, this is actually a really good experience.

It was so powerful that I was recently in Paris because I'm working on some films that are in Europe, and I decided to create a special advanced listener edition of the audiobook, where I took the chapters and put them into individual or grouped listening units.

In a recording studio in Paris, I recorded some prefaces and reflections on those listening units, which are now thematic.

I'm really proud of that edition. It's not for everybody. The regular Audible audiobook is going to be out there, but this version, which is on my website, I think is a really wonderful version for someone who just wants me to walk with you as you go through the experience of the book.

Jo: Are you selling that direct from your website?

Adam: Yes, I'm selling it direct on the website.

Jo: Brilliant, because we all do that too. You can actually make more money selling audio direct than you do from the streaming.

Adam: Yes.

Jo: I realise we don't have much time left, but I need to ask you this because the film industry and publishing are in this great time of change with the advent of generative AI.

We've seen in the last week the actor Ben Affleck's company, InterPositive, has been acquired by Netflix. So it seems like technology is disrupting a lot.

How do you think we can navigate this time? What are your feelings around this new wave of generative AI?

Adam: It's a great tool. It's not a great writer. It's actually really a terrible writer. You can always tell when generative AI has written something because it has a certain very annoying style, but it's a great tool. I use it in my production.

I teach at the business school at UC Berkeley. We train people on how to use it for various kinds of problems and solutions. But the important thing is that you are the architect of the machine. It's a machine. It is like a paintbrush, but it is not the hand that holds the paintbrush.

So I am not concerned that AI is going to go make movies that we all care about, and I am not concerned that it's going to disrupt, in the largest sense, the employment picture. Certainly some jobs are being lost, but new jobs are being gained. It's really interesting.

For example, you mentioned Ben Affleck's company, which Netflix just partnered with. It's not making new content. It's creating a better production workflow. It's taking what is shot or what is planned in the production workflow and just making it better and more efficient and implementing it and adding to it.

That is a really good use of AI. All the creative power retains within the hands of the creative humans, but it's giving the humans more tools.

Jo: I've been reflecting on the idea of the film director, in that people often know their names and they win awards, and yet they didn't necessarily write the script. Some do, obviously, but they didn't act in it, they didn't do all the editing, they didn't do all the different jobs, but it's their creative vision.

So is that how you see us playing that part?

Adam: I do. I think that's a really good analogy. And look, AI—it's good. It's going to keep getting better. It still has massive error rates, so we still have to be very careful about what we attribute to it and what powers we give it, and what facts we believe from it.

Jo: So what are you excited about next? Obviously you are promoting this book, you are doing speaking things, but are you looking to your future continuing to work across film and books?

What are you excited about in terms of your creative projects?

Adam: The big arc of my creative life is creating ecosystems where creative people can do their best work. This book is part of that.

With the movies that I make, as a producer, I try to create the ecosystems where people can do their best work. I envision, and I'm excited about, continuing to do that. Whether it is in a book or in a workshop or in a film that I'm making.

I just want to keep doing that: creating these ecosystems where people can really do great work and express themselves creatively, entrepreneurially, and with a positive view of the world to come. Because that is a responsibility, coming back to the first question you asked me.

Jo: Brilliant.

So where can people find you and your book and everything you do online?

Adam: You can find me at my website, which is AdamLeipzig.com, just like the city. Of course, the book is available wherever you buy your books, and the Kindle and the audiobook are exactly where you would expect to find them.

You can also find me on Instagram at @AdamLeipzig, and you can find me on LinkedIn as Adam Leipzig. I love interacting with people, so come and find me. AdamLeipzig.com is the best place to find everything.

Jo: Brilliant. Well, thanks so much for your time, Adam. That was great.

Adam: Jo, thank you so much for having me. It was great talking with you.

The post Navigating Uncertainty And Fearless Persistence In A Long Term Creative Career With Adam Leipzig first appeared on The Creative Penn.