I whisper to Handsome Devil Joseph Gordon-Levitt
Don Jon himself makes contact to reveal the hidden mysteries of HitRecord
Hi,
Look I’m fuming right now, absolutely livid, down in the dumps, upset, lost. I had a date at 7.30pm. It was a nice date and a nice restaurant. I had my outfit picked. I was going to whisper words into his ear and show him pictures of sunsets and ducks.
Then I got this email:
from: Joe
to: David Farrier
date: Sep 21, 2021, 4:18 PMSo unfortunately, some new work stuff has just come up, and I won’t have my evening free for dinner tonight. I’m really sorry about this, I tried all day to protect this time, but it hasn’t worked out, I’m afraid.
Fuck it. I knew it was too good to be true, handsome Hollywood devil Joseph Gordon-Levitt had done the dirty and let me down. He would never look at me like he looked at Batman and I guess I just have to get used to this reality.
Joe and I were meant to eat dinner together because I wrote about him a few weeks ago in the flatteringly named piece “Has Joseph Gordon-Levitt lost his mind.”
In that newsletter I attempted to make sense of his project HitRecord, and his ongoing messages on social media to elicit content including sunsets, ducks and whispers:
I wanted to understand it. Not just comprehend it, but feel it deep in my bones; my fibre; my being.
And so I wrote that newsletter and I hit send — and then I heard from a man called Jared. Jared is the guy on the left with whizzy hair, posing with a boy who looks like Joseph Gordon-Levitt.
Jared Geller is the President & Co-founder of HitRecord, and he’d read the piece. He wrote me a nice email and was quick to quash my theory that HitRecord was a data-gathering venture for Big AI:
“First, I can definitely guarantee we do not have our database hooked up to train some giant AI by feeding it simple word and photo prompts. I can admit to you that years ago a large and well known tech company did very initially run a similar kind of idea by us which we very quickly passed on. This isn’t something that interests us.”
Look, to be honest — I’m not convinced. I’ve done some digging into my date and was alarmed to find out he was married.
While that was alarming to the date-scenario I was double-alarmed to find out his wife Tasha McCauley is a technology entrepreneur and robotics expert who was formerly involved in a company called Fellow Robots. While she’s no longer there, I discovered Fellow Robots is now called FellowAI. It’s an artificial intelligence company. Occam’s razor here we come.
Jared went on. He was a big talker. And good on him, so am I. He started explaining HitRecord to me:
“The mission of our company is to inspire creativity through collaboration. We started HITRECORD when we saw that folks were having fun and meaningful interactions building on each others creative ideas.
We have found that going out with extremely simple creative prompts — four word stories, pictures, etc — tends to inspire way more people to actually participate; to make things. They post on fb, twitter, of course. But, many of these prompts are launchpads for people to join our community…”
I thew my laptop aside in anger. I was getting the push-around, the PR spin, the bullshit.
“Give me Joe” I screamed. I needed the man behind the scenes, the Tinseltown Top Dog. A few days later my wish was granted.
Not quite knowing what was planned, I fired off some questions to him about HitRecord. I imagined them landing in his inbox. He was probably reading my questions on set with Martin Scorsese, Scarlett Johansen and Leonardo DiCaprio.
But surprisingly we got talking about dinner: “Would Tuesday evening work? Perhaps we could have dinner together? I should be free by about 7pm…” Immediately, I had my guard up: I knew he would be cunningly trying to thwart my journalistic endeavours; my search for the truth about Mad Dog HitRecord.
And so we went back and forth like any date: geography, phone numbers, dietary requirements. “I’ll eat anything” I said, perhaps too eagerly. When it came to sitting a time, Joe said “I’m free from 7”. Making a Power Move to negate my prior beta status I suggested 7.30pm, despite having absolutely nothing on. My life was empty, a husk, a shell. But Joe didn’t need to know that.
But look — we all know who won that war: Joseph: “So unfortunately, some new work stuff has just come up, and I won’t have my evening free for dinner tonight.”
So unfortunately
some work stuff
has just come up
and I won’t have my evening free.
Fuck it. It’s 7.30pm and here I sit alone, typing this newsletter. Joe is probably at an Elon Musk ayahuasca ceremony or a George Clooney mezcal tasting. Perhaps he’s engaged in a spirited debate with Tom Cruise, or deep in the bowels of his wife’s AI supercomputer sorting through images of puddles.
Despite my vision blurry from water build-up in my eyes, I decided to keep reading Joseph’s email.
“The past couple days, I did some writing and took a stab at answering your specific questions. See below. I hope you like what I’ve written! :)”
He’s left a smiley face but all I saw was him laughing in my face.
:)
:)
:)
I read on:
Again, I apologize for the last minute change of plans.
Thanks!
J.
And then he answered my questions about HitRecord. About the sunsets, the ducks, the whispers and the puddles. This is how our virtual conversation went. Just imagine it over the nice dinner scene in Don Jon but replace Scarlett Johansson with me.
Hi. Look, is it you posting, or your team?
It is all I do with all of my time! :) No, it’s not me. I sometimes write stuff on Twitter, but not often, and never on Facebook. I do post on Instagram, usually half-hating myself while doing it. But since you’re asking me this question, I have obviously not made it clear enough that it’s not usually me posting. I apologize to anybody who feels misled. I can see how that might seem weird. And I’m happy to make some changes so it’s totally explicit.
These days, it’s typically a very smart and capable woman named Alexandra who posts stuff on my Facebook and Twitter. Now, why have I asked Alexandra to post a steady stream of easy creative prompts on my Facebook and Twitter? Alexandra works for HITRECORD.
What is HITRECORD? HITRECORD is an online community I started with my brother Dan many, many years ago full of people who love being creative and collaborating with each other.
Dan was not always a very outgoing or artistic person growing up (don’t worry, this will all come back around to the Twitter prompts). He was a pretty shy software engineer, but at a certain point in his life, he decided he wanted to change this about himself. He got good at photography and fire spinning, and grew into just about the most swashbucklingest adventurer / artist you’ve ever seen.
And in the early days of HITRECORD, he was always focused on helping people who, like him, felt an urge to express themselves through art and creativity, but for whatever reason weren’t quite doing it. Dan died years ago, but encouraging beginners is still a big part of our community’s culture.
What we’ve found is, the best way to inspire the most people to get their creativity started is to offer them something creative to do that’s very easy, but just challenging enough. This is the purpose of those creative prompts we post on Twitter and Facebook.
Transparently, we know that Alexandra’s posts work, because we can see how many people do the easy creative prompts, and how many people then grow into doing more complex, ambitious, and meaningful projects from there.
That said, I hear you when you say this approach feels off-putting to you and others, and, in full candor, I occasionally have a similar reaction myself. Your criticism has been illuminating, and as a result, we’re gonna make some changes to how we post on Facebook and Twitter, even if that means our numbers take somewhat of a hit. So, thank you for the feedback!
Why are there so many requests for similar things, but from different countries?
Just because we’ve found that people often feel inspired to create something about where they’re from. For example, we made this together with a number of people from Taiwan, and I think it’s beautiful.
Okay let’s cut the shit. Where does this stuff end up? Let's do the images as an example: I assume you get THOUSANDS. What are they for? What happens to the images that don't get used? How do you decide who gets paid for this material?!
“What are they for?” you ask. While I’m tempted to go off on a philosophical rant about purpose, creativity, and the great existential mystery, I will restrain myself.
Like I said, most of the prompts that we post on Twitter and FB are just very easy things to do to encourage beginners to try something creative. And I’ll add that thinking of the prompts as the driving force of HITRECORD might be giving you the wrong impression.
I’d love for you to come to our platform, check out some of the collaborative art we’ve all made together, and I’d especially love it if you earnestly jumped in and started collaborating with the community. I think you’d find far more than the little prompts Alexandra posts on Facebook and Twitter.
It’s true that on HITRECORD, we’re all about Remix, meaning anything anybody posts is up for grabs for any other member of our community to download, sample, build on top of, refine, revise, and turn into something new. And sometimes a contribution will get remixed in ways you never expect.
It’s also true that HITRECORD has a production company. Now and then, the team and I will collaborate with our community to make grander-scale productions. We’ve made TV shows (btw, fact check, we won the Emmy last year, not this year!), published books, put out music, partnered with brands and foundations, and much more. And this is where money can come into the picture.
I’ve spoken a lot over the years about how HITRECORD handles money. We’ve always done our best to be as transparent as possible. Here’s the video that’s currently on our “How It Works” page.
But to summarize: Whenever anybody’s contribution is included in a money-making production, that contributor gets some of the money. We have a thorough system for proposing, discussing, and finalizing payments, it’s all done by humans, not by algorithms, and it’s all done out in the open, where anybody can see or join the discussion.
This talks to that bigger question around spec work: Obviously some people worry this is unpaid spec-work — can you talk to that?
I was getting a bit at this in my last answer, but to be clear: the vast majority of stuff that you’ll see from us on social media is not part of any monetized production. And, in our monetized productions, for any parts of the creative process that require more “work” than a simple, fun, creative prompt, we either have our team do it internally, temp hire an industry professional, or temp hire a community member.
I think part of the confusion may stem from the fact that this admittedly isn’t always how we did things. We learned a hard lesson a few years ago that made us overhaul our process.
The short version: In 2018, HITRECORD launched a partnership with the video game company Ubisoft who wanted to include their fans in the creative process of making the games. Some people in the gamer community interpreted this as a strategy to cut costs by crowdsourcing creative labor. It really wasn’t that.
Ubisoft didn’t save a dime by working with us, and working with HITRECORD did not lead to a single job lost for Ubisoft employees or contractors. The program wasn’t even intended to make all that much content. It truly was about inclusivity.
To the extent that there was a business calculation on Ubisoft’s part, the project served as a marketing campaign for their fans to feel a greater emotional connection to the game by getting to be a part of making a small piece of it.
The open collaborative process we used with Ubisoft was the same as we’d been using for the past eight years, partnering with enormous brands and making award-winning TV.
And this was the first time I had ever heard anybody refer to our process as spec work. So I was surprised and concerned. And after a lot of thought, as well as discussing it at length with our community, we set to work changing some things.
I do think there are some important differences between spec work and what our process used to be (I wrote about this here.) However, in the end, we saw that people were finding it confusing or worse, and so we decided to change how our production company operated.
Our methodologies have been an iterative evolution from the beginning. We’ve always been figuring it out as we go, because frankly, we like trying to do things that haven’t been done before.
We’ve definitely made mistakes, and sometimes we fail to see our mistakes until we get the benefit of hindsight. But we have done and will continue to do our best to learn from our mistakes and make real changes so we can avoid repeating them in the future.
The other prompt I could not understand was to deliver this audio dialogue - as whispers, or basically in any form whatsoever. What for?! It's so broad. Where does this end up? This trips me out so much.
It’s honestly not that deep. It’s just an easy acting prompt. It’s fun. Put down the gun, David.
My personal theory is that you are training a giant AI machine, feeding it endless images from all over the world, 4-word stories, and dialogue said in a variety of ways. Can you confirm or deny this?
This was my favorite part of your article. What’s funny is that the dystopian scheme you’re describing is the EXACT business model of Facebook/Instagram, Google/Youtube, Twitter, TikTok and so on.
Those platforms feed massive troves of user-generated content and meta-data into the most sophisticated machine learning algorithms on the planet which generate “insights” they monetize through advertising. They are making historic amounts of money, and (with the exception of YT), they share almost zero dollars with their users who collectively create all that value.
HITRECORD is one of the somewhat rare exceptions, because we actually don’t do this.
Just financially how does this work? I read you got a series A of about $6 million. Is the idea that this is a profitable thing for you guys, and how do you decide how much is fed back into this pool of avid, passionate and excited contributors you have?
Yes, we did raise venture capital. I talked about it here, and recorded a conversation with our lead investor here. But our investors were not betting on our production company.
The truth is, our production company has never been a very viable business. For the first couple of years, I bankrolled it, and we operated at a loss.
After that, we were able to break even mostly because I was leveraging my Hollywood career into opportunities — like our TV show, or several TV commercials — that would have normally been paydays for an actor, but instead of taking the money myself, I’d put it into HITRECORD.
I’ve never made a dollar from the production company. But making money was never the point for me, and it was never the point for our community either.
And even now that we’ve raised investment money, HITRECORD is still not really about the money for me. My investors don’t exactly want to hear that (what’s up Alex!), but they also know it’s true.
This endeavor has always been something much more deeply personal to me. My goal with raising money is to build a version of HITRECORD that can self-sustain and keep going and growing long into the future.
And in fact, we’ve just finished building what I hope is exactly that. Our community has known we’ve been working towards it for some time, but we’re just launching it to the wider public now.
The idea is to take what we’ve learned and built around community, creativity, and collaboration, and apply it to online learning.
It’s called CLASS PROJECTS, and it’s all about learning by doing. I think if you want to learn a creative skill, like acting or writing or photography or music or whatever, you can’t just sit back and watch videos about it. You have to jump in and try it. And HITRECORD has always been about that kind of participation.
So with Class Projects, we’re kinda formalizing that philosophy through a subscription service.
Subscribers get to join as many Class Projects as they want, and we’re going to put out new ones all the time. The open part of our platform will stay completely free, and our community will get to keep doing everything it’s always done. And our production company will keep going (using the reformed methodology I mentioned above) because those projects are fun and inspiring.
But Class Projects will drive the business model, allowing HITRECORD to keep going and growing.
This big collaboration you have going on — I get the utopia of that idea — but to make stuff that really sings you need structure and leadership.... and a great thing is not just the sum of its parts! Is this a logical way to make things? I suppose just honestly I want to understand what this is. When I think about HitRECord it's sort of like thinking about SoulCycle or some LA cult — I just don’t get it. Make me understand, Joseph.
What you’re saying about a creative process needing structure and leadership, and a great thing being more than the sum of its parts — it’s ironic because I completely agree with you, and this is exactly what HITRECORD exemplifies.
Our collaborative projects do have quite a bit of both structure and leadership. But again, you won’t necessarily see that just by looking at the prompts that get posted on our Facebook and Twitter.
As one example of many, here’s a collaborative nonfiction writing and podcast series called “On Mornings.” This six part series was a partnership between HITRECORD and Medium, and we invited a talented and positive member of our community, Evyn Williams (or, ‘thatwasnotveryravenofyou’ as she’s known on the site) to lead it.
(Total coincidence that the famous founder of Medium is also named Ev Williams).
Evyn rallied the community to create written stories, illustrations, voice acting, and all kinds of collaborative artwork centered around different parts of their morning routines.
Under her direction, and with the diverse perspectives of people around the world, I think this series turned out artful, cohesive, and unique. And people had a fun and meaningful time making it together.
Here you’ll find the first episode, and here you’ll see all the different community members that had a hand in it.
I do strongly believe in the idea that many people can come together online and collaborate to create things they might not have been able to on their own. You and I agree: it takes structure and leadership.
And that kind of framework is what we’ve been experimenting with and iterating on for years on HITRECORD. Our execution falls short sometimes, but our community holds us accountable.
That back-and-forth is what has always shaped HITRECORD’s evolution, and it always will. I accept that you might not join our community, David (for fear of being kidnapped and forced onto an LA soul cycle whispering four word stories in your ear), but again, please accept my gratitude for your candor and feedback.
Thanks again <3
J
He’s a Charming Handsome Devil and my mind is swimming with information. I’m still digesting it. The main thing that makes me feel somewhat sane is that JGL agrees that the requests for sunsets, ducks and whispers can come across as truly unhinged.
“I occasionally have a similar reaction myself” he’d said. “Your criticism has been illuminating, and as a result, we’re gonna make some changes to how we post on Facebook and Twitter, even if that means our numbers take somewhat of a hit.”
With that in mind I will be watching his social media like a hawk to see if things change. If they don’t, maybe I’ll get to whisper four words of my own into Joe’s ear afterall:
“I still do want to get dinner, if you’ll accept a rain check! I know you’re in Eagle Rock, which is pretty near me, and I also know you’re friends with our mutual friend, who’s also in Eagle Rock. Maybe we could all get together. Or I’m happy to do just us as well, whatever you prefer.”
whatever
you
prefer.
So yeah — stay tuned. I still have questions. Online communities fascinate me. As a teenager in the 90s, I grew up on message boards. HitRecord started as a message board and turned into one of the strangest production companies I’ve ever seen.
It may not be harbouring a sentient AI to take over the planet (we’ll see…) but it’s still a mad beast and the community there has opinions and experiences that I want to explore.
David.
PART III: Joseph Gordon-Levitt part III: an Act of War
PS: What did I do when my date was cancelled? I wrote this and then made a date with this bath bomb. Why any date with me gets cancelled I have no idea —
I still don’t get it.
There’s only one way to find out for real. Get him drunk, David. Find out where he’s keeping the sketches of duck whispers.
wow what a great dang interview and article bud this was a very fun read. it is so nice when buckaroos like you and HANDSOME JOE get to communicate in open way it instantly makes so many dang joyful timelines like a swirling bathbomb of good times all you gotta do is 'have an open heart and some questions' and 'have an open heart and some answers'. what a treat thanks bud