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Rewind: OK Go: Making the impossible possible
00:57:35
In this episode on the creative process, we talk to Tim and Damian about how they come up with ideas, the macro and micro elements of their creativity, and achieving the impossible.
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- [00:00]
Aaron Walter
Hey everybody. Aaron and I are traveling with our families for spring break, so we're bringing back one of our favorite episodes from 2023 with the band OK Go. In the time since we recorded the interview, they've come out with several new music videos including for the track Love shot with no Cuts, Just Mirrors, robotics and a whole lot of planning. Enjoy.
- [00:24]
Damian Kulash
The one thing that's ever going to work is the thing that you don't know how to make a formula out of. It's right at the edge of what you're looking for. It's like it's got to hit you in that emotional spot that makes you feel like this was impossible, that this is that alchemy of one plus one equals 500.
- [00:43]
Aaron Walter
Not many bands hire Russian pilots to film a zero G video on their cosmonaut training plane known as the Vomit Comet, but those are the kinds of extremes that OK Go will go to in the pursuit of creativity.
- [00:57]
Tim Nordwind
Tim Nordwin and Damian Kulash, the band's founders, met at camp as preteens in search of a fellow creative nerd and ended up founding the band in 1998. Over the past 25 years they've created three Grammy nominated music videos and they won Best Music Video of the Year for Here It Goes again. From the perfectly timed explosions filmed in slow motion for their song the One Moment to the immensely elaborate Rube Goldberg contraption they created for this two Shell Pass, OK Go is almost like a performance art troupe that just happens to be a fantastic rock band.
- [01:36]
Aaron Walter
In this episode on the creative process, we talk to Tim and Damian about how they come up with ideas, the macro and micro elements of their creativity, and achieving the impossible.
- [01:47]
Tim Nordwind
One more thing. We're excited to announce that we just launched DBPlus, our new premium service that gives you access to ad free versions of the show, released a week early before anyone else gets it. Subscribers will be invited to AMAs. That stands for Ask Me Anything Conversations with big names in design and tech from companies like Nike, Netflix and the New York Times who will field your questions about compelling topics. Visit DesignBetter plus to learn more and subscribe. That's DesignBetter Plus.
- [02:24]
Eli Woolery
DesignBetter is supported by Aqua Tru. There are few things more elemental to your health and well being than getting clean water. That's what our pals over at aquatru are all about. Eli and his family have been using an AquaTrue countertop water filter for a while now and they just love the purity of the water that they're getting. They can can really taste a difference, especially when compared against the tap water that they get just out of their kitchen. Aqua True removes over 84 of the most harmful contaminants. Things like microplastics, chlorine, fluoride, arsenic, nitrates and pfas. These are these forever chemicals that are in so many different things and they find their way into our water. Aqua Tru have water purifiers to fit every type of home. From installation free countertop purifiers to those high capacity under sink options which are so nice. They even have a WI fi connected purifier with mineral boost options. That's pretty amazing. Perhaps the most compelling part of Aqua Tru is when compared to other filters. Aquatru filters are affordable and long lasting. You don't have to change your filter every two to three months. Aquatru filters last six months to two years. You can get 20% off an Aquatru purifier at aquatru.com that's a Q U a T R U dot com and enter the code designbetter at checkout. Save 20% off an Aqua Tru water purifier when you go to aquatru.com and use promo code designbetter. Creative people need to see and be connected to creativity that's happening in our world right now. There are amazing, inspiring people who can teach us. But how do you find them and how do you convince them to teach you? Well, lucky for us, Masterclass has done the legwork for us. I've learned so much about the creative process on their platform from folks like Frank Gehry, Herbie Hancock, Anna Wintour, Jane Goodall, Bob Iger, David Sedaris, and so many more. Imagine people like that as your teachers. That's just incredible. And I just discovered that Masterclass produces these amazing documentaries too. I watched a documentary on songwriter Diane Warren that just blew my mind. You all know her songs, they're mega hits sung by like Whitney Houston, Celine Dion, Beyonce, Justin Bieber, Justin Timberlake, Eric Clapton. I mean this list just goes on for days. And seeing how her mind works, seeing her creative space, it's just like piled up with stuff. And the work ethic that she has. It's fascinating. You can access masterclass on your phone, your computer, your smart tv, or even in audio mode. You can just listen. Right now, as a design better listener, you can get 15% off an annual membership@masterclass.com designbetter. Trust me, it's the best thing you're going to do for yourself this year. Get 15% off an annual membership of MasterClass@masterclass.com DesignBetter. There's so much to learn. Go to masterclass.com DesignBetter to sign up now.
- [05:34]
Tim Nordwind
Damian Kulash and Tim Nordwind of ok Go. What a treat to have you on the Design Better podcast today.
- [05:41]
Damian Kulash
Thank you. It's an honor.
- [05:42]
Aaron Walter
Thank you.
- [05:43]
Tim Nordwind
Y'all have known each other for a long time, I think. If I read correctly, you met when you were 11 years old at summer camp, Is that right?
- [05:50]
Tim Nakashi
Yeah, yeah.
- [05:51]
Aaron Walter
I think.
- [05:51]
Tim Nakashi
I think I was 10.
- [05:52]
Damian Kulash
It's been almost six years. I'm just kidding. We are in our late 40s, so, yeah, it's been a long time.
- [06:00]
Tim Nordwind
That's incredible. And you were at it for quite a while. So the band officially formed in 1998 just to make sure everybody listening kind of has the background, at it for a while, making songs, and we're going to dive into your creative process. And then in 2007, you ended up winning a Grammy for your video Here It Goes again. Curious, like, how that felt. Like after that investment, you finally sort of got this validation.
- [06:27]
Damian Kulash
It was such a fast and weird ride that it just felt reactive until, like, it was amazing, but also just a whirlwind until, I'd say, around the time of the Grammy. Our first record came out in 2002 and had a big major label single on it. I mean, I shouldn't say big. It was top 20, but it wasn't, you know, we weren't the Strokes, but we also weren't a failure. And that's enough for a major label to give you a second record, but not so indisputable that they have to keep pouring money on the fire. So they let us put out another record, but didn't particularly promote it. We started touring six months before the record came out, and 12 months after the record came out, the Here It Goes Again Homemade video on treadmills came out. So we had been touring for a year and a half when that video hit and became, you know, an overnight success. And suddenly the sort of the record cycle started for us again. We toured for another full year, and by the end of that year, we were in the middle of this whirlwind with the success of that video. So the video itself was successful overnight. That record we'd been touring on for two and some years, and we'd been a band for nearly 10 at that point. So it was, you know, it was the sort of like, overnight success takes a long time to happen kind of cliche.
- [07:49]
Tim Nakashi
I'd say from 1998 to 2007, it was like, this is fun.
- [07:53]
Aaron Walter
This is exciting. This is fun.
- [07:54]
Damian Kulash
This is exciting.
- [07:55]
Tim Nakashi
And then. And then when 2007 happened, and here it goes, made it onto YouTube, it was like, okay. Things just got really weird and exciting, you know, it's like, got weird and exciting, you know?
- [08:05]
Damian Kulash
Yeah. And we. I don't think it was just sort of chasing our weirdest ideas in a good way until that video happened. And it was so huge and felt so inevitable in the moment that we were just sort of like, yeah, until a few months after, which is about the time that they start giving you awards for something. It's never when it actually is happening, of course. It's always, you know, six months later that somebody's recognizing it. So we were in the middle of celebrating it and also realizing this can never be repeated. Like, we are now a one hit wonder, and our one hit isn't even a song. It's a ridiculous dance routine. We had to sort of like, try to figure out what that meant while we were in the middle of the kind of maelstrom of it. And the models we had were sort of like, you can be Radiohead, who, at my understanding at the time, I don't know if this is actually true, but they were like, they never wanted to play Creep ever again. They weren't a radio band, they weren't a pop band, and they were basically gonna run the other direction and be cool. And that's very attractive when you're worried about, like, people thinking you're uncool, but we're not as cool as Radiohead. And we kind of liked the thing we made. And we figured that the chances of us succeeding if we ran the other direction were pretty low. So it was like, well, then how can we expand on this? What can we do that ties this to what we really care about instead of, like, leaving it off on its little island? Can we show that this is the tip of an iceberg of good ideas, or at least ridiculous ideas? And, you know, can we double down on. On what this is? And we were like, well, we know we can't just sort of launch into being showing at Gagosian in Guggenheim. Like, we can't. We can't pretend we're just, like, high art all of a sudden, but we can sort of lean into the weirdest ideas and hope that, like, we become that video band. And maybe from that video band we get to expand out into that creative and wind up back where we wanted.
- [09:48]
Tim Nakashi
To be as kids. We Made a lot of homemade videos and things like that because we have known each other for so long, you know, that when here it goes again, all of a sudden started resonating with more people, I remember feeling like a sense of relief that like, oh, well, this is what we do as friends. And it's great that people are responding to this. We can probably keep doing this. And like Damian said, yeah, it seemed like if this is the tip of the iceberg, then what else can we do? This is great.
- [10:17]
Damian Kulash
And there's also like, in 1998, we were a rock band because you had to choose between being a rock band and being other types of creative stuff. Neither of us grew up as instrumental prodigies or even particularly great players. Like, we picked up music relatively late. I was a little kid, I was really into visual art.
- [10:35]
Tim Nakashi
Yeah, I was into theater.
- [10:37]
Damian Kulash
And we kind of got into music because of punk rock in high school and learned to play relatively late. And even when OK Go started, we were in our young 20s and still not particularly great players. We're decent now because we've practiced every night on stage in front of people. But like in a world of Jack Whites, you know, like, who are just these like stellar instrumentalists, that was never our universe. There was no version of being a rock band. And all the other stuff that was readily available to somebody in the mid-90s, like, you sold records if you made music and you sold movies if you made movies and you, you know, sold newspapers if you like to write. But there wasn't a thing that sort of collected all of it until all of a sudden the Internet kind of melted them all into one big lump.
- [11:18]
Aaron Walter
I'm a longtime fan of your work, but my wife wasn't really familiar. So we were watching some videos and she's like, these guys are like an amazing performance artist who also happen to have a really great rock and roll band. And I'm curious, like, how intentional was that over the years, like, you kind of built this audience up in that sort of modern way with, you know, everybody's getting more oriented over the years towards YouTube and now TikTok, et cetera. Was that intentional or was that just kind of happenstance as you know, your story played its way out.
- [11:46]
Tim Nordwind
It's almost like another video killed the radio star moment where like your timing was impeccable.
- [11:52]
Damian Kulash
It was like, video killed the video star. Yeah. People give us credit for felling MTV in a single swoop because if you can make a Grammy winning video for five bucks, then why pay half a million dollars Anymore.
- [12:02]
Tim Nakashi
Yeah, I mean, we definitely started thinking like we're a rock band, but you know, for all the reasons Damien just sort of described and just sort of in the late 90s, you kind of did have to choose or it felt like you had to choose. It felt more like a natural progression.
- [12:17]
Damian Kulash
Yeah, I'm trying to think if there's an honest answer to this sort of binary question of like, wasn't it on purpose or did it just happen? And it's kind of like we were responding to it in real time. And most of being a self employed creative person is triage, you know, like most of the time you're trying to figure out how to make this career keep on lasting another five years. And if you're a moderately analytical person, you already know that like the chance of success of any one project is at best 10%. You know, probably more like 1%. Like once you've got a big track record, maybe it's 10%, but for rock bands, especially little rock bands who don't have anything going for them yet, it's like one in a million. And. And so you just throw everything at the wall with a lot of unearned self confidence and then chase the things that are working. And as they do, it's sort of like you look for the pattern in them. Especially if you don't trust the kind of corporate system around it, you're likely to see the DIY pattern more than anything else. And so all of that is a long winded way of coming back to sort of like when we had direct access to fans through the Internet. Like when we could make something and watch people download it directly, it sure made the advice of our major label seem a lot less worth following.
- [13:36]
Tim Nakashi
Yeah, we started at a time when the traditional music industry was really starting to fail. So it sort of felt like that scene in Indiana Jones. I think it's Temple of Doom where he's running over the bridge and every time he makes it over another step it just falls and falls and falls and falls. And so it was like, you know, when we started it was like radio and mtv. That was it. That's all that mattered. And by the time our second record came around, all of a sudden it was like more about YouTube and the Internet.
- [14:05]
Damian Kulash
YouTube didn't quite exist yet. Did you remember what the. For our second record, what did exist was Napster.
- [14:10]
Tim Nakashi
Napster.
- [14:11]
Damian Kulash
And they were terrified that because we were like a sort of picture of a college band, like we were the type of thing that college kids loved. We were going to Be the example of how to stop Napster from stealing your successful college band's music, right? So on our second record, we got wind that they were going to put DRM digital rights management software on the cd, which would have prevented you from ripping the CD to put on your ipod. Ipods were brand new. They had just come out, like, two years earlier. It was already the thing that you basically couldn't exist if you couldn't exist as an MP3. And the major labels, their response to this was like, ha, ha, now you won't be able to get this music off the cd. And from our perspective, it was like, of course we want to be paid for our music, but if you can't be on ipods, you might as well not exist. So we asked them not to use DRM on it, and they politely declined. So we thought and thought and thought and came up with a way around this, which was to provide a hidden track on our master that was exactly 32 minutes and 17 seconds long, or whatever it was. We needed to fill up every last byte of the disk so that there was literally no space left on a compact disc to put the drm. And it kept on failing qc. And they eventually were like, okay, well, I guess we just have to put it out.
- [15:28]
Tim Nordwind
That's brilliant.
- [15:30]
Aaron Walter
That's great.
- [15:30]
Damian Kulash
And, I mean, I'm sure that they then, you know, our music was then stolen over and over and over again, but at least we got to keep existing.
- [15:36]
Aaron Walter
So we. We wanted to talk about your creative process here. And one thing that we're curious about, and we've asked the other guests, is do you have any rules for the way that you operate your creative process, the way you collaborate? And maybe you could talk us through your process for songwriting versus video creation.
- [15:51]
Damian Kulash
You have so many norms that build up over three decades of working together and so many sort of expectations, and you recognize the pattern of what works and what doesn't. And I'm sure this is common to so many of your guests and to you guys and so many of your listeners. The thing that works is always a little bit out of reach for some reason. I always think of it like cotton candy. It's like it disappears as soon as you've tasted it. It is very real. You can look at it, you can taste it. You know, it takes up space, but you can't really get your hands on it. It just kind of evaporates. And the one thing that's ever going to work is the thing that you don't know how to make a Formula out of. It's right at the edge of what you're looking for. It's like it's got to hit you in that emotional spot that makes you feel like this was impossible, that this is that alchemy of one plus one equals 500. And as soon as you figured out the math of what one plus one really equals, you're just going to get two every damn time. You might not get to 500 every time, but you would like it to be one plus one equals a little bit Something weird when it's not quite two, you go, we've got something. And then you chase what that thing is.
- [16:50]
Tim Nordwind
Can I tell you what I think is like, the elements of the recipe of ok, go videos and tell me if this is way off.
- [16:58]
Damian Kulash
Okay.
- [16:59]
Tim Nordwind
Central ingredient would be surprise. Making the familiar magical color from an aesthetic and visual component.
- [17:08]
Damian Kulash
That.
- [17:08]
Tim Nordwind
That's a common theme throughout and Community. Everything that you make, it's clearly like it's so much bigger than you. And so everyone is sort of like cheering for your success. This is impossible. I don't know how you did this. I don't like this Rube Goldberg machine. This, like, army of people who are performing in Japan with umbrellas and making it this digital thing. The cosmonauts in Russia who are helping you defy gravity, you're doing the impossible with Community. It is about you and it's beyond you.
- [17:43]
Damian Kulash
You're good at this.
- [17:43]
Tim Nakashi
That's really good.
- [17:44]
Damian Kulash
Yeah, well said. Those are the rules.
- [17:46]
Aaron Walter
Nice to meet you.
- [17:50]
Damian Kulash
The one plus one equals more than two factor, that's kind of what all collaboration really should feel like, right? Like, when a collaboration works, it feels like cheating to everybody involved that I came in with a really good idea and I'm leaving with an even better one. If there's a lot of sort of territorialism over credit, that can't work. But if it's sort of like what we want is this amazing thing and everybody who's involved with this amazing thing is part of this amazing thing, then it's very additive and everybody who puts something into it gets the total out of it. I think our attraction to the ideas that are in the videos is mostly that sort of being attracted to that kind of collaboration, going like, wouldn't it be awesome if we could find a scientist who wanted to do this incredible thing? And you want to celebrate that person and you want to celebrate that collaboration. And we certainly are never presenting ourselves as, like, particularly good at that thing. When we're working with dancers, we're the worst Dancers in the room. When we're working with scientists, we're the worst scientists in the room. You know, like, it's.
- [18:53]
Tim Nakashi
It's.
- [18:54]
Damian Kulash
You're just sort of honored to be let into the room. And so celebrating the community has seemed obvious from the beginning, I guess.
- [19:00]
Tim Nordwind
Yeah.
- [19:01]
Damian Kulash
In terms of the process for the video, specifically. So I. There's a pattern that we've realized works. We certainly didn't, like, start out with it, but here's what it is. We have to find an idea that feels big enough and small enough. It has to feel like it's expansive enough that we are going to be able to play with it for a full three or four minutes and small enough that there will be boundaries to push up against. Because if there's no boundaries, there's sort of no form. You know, we want the simplest version of that. So if you can get rid of a clause in the description, get rid of it. You know, it's not this and that and that and that. It's like, we want to make something in zero gravity and use all the best tricks in zero gravity. Or we want to make something that's a Rube Goldberg machine, but not a Rube Goldberg machine. And the blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. The best ideas are the simplest ones. And then if you can find within that sort of what we refer to as a bag of tricks or a vocabulary of, say, 20 great surprises. And this is to your point? Yes, it's all about surprise. If there's moments that really hit you in the gut instead of in the brain and you think you can get 20ish of them, like our videos usually need, between 10 and 15. If you can only find 12 and you need 12, it's going to be very hard to make a good through line to all of that that stays musical and stays emotional and stays useful. Right. So what we want is a vocabulary that's a little bigger than what we need. And then we need to sequence those in such a way that it is a crescendo of surprises where you're not giving away everything. Right. Just sort of classic narrative structure stuff. Except it's not boy meets girl. It's surprise leads to surprise. And of course, it has to also match the music and has to feel like the music. So, I mean, the thing that almost always happens at some point in making our videos is like, yes, but how does the chorus bust out? How does this part feel more than the last part? Most ideas that seem like they're pretty good fail at that place that there's no, this is a really exciting way of showing pixels, or this is a really exciting way of animating things, or this is a really exciting emotional surprise. But once you've shown it, you have nothing left and there's nothing that leads up to it. So, like, one video we made that I think sort of failed in this respect is we made a video for the song Last Leaf, which is all toasted on bread. It's an animation made with a laser cutter toasting bread. And that seemed like such a cool idea to us. And it's a really great way to make an animation. But you get the whole point of that in the first 20 seconds of the film, and then after that, it's a very beautiful animation, but not any different than animations you've seen your whole life. So you sort of get this expectation that it's going to break your mind. And it does a little mind break in the beginning and then go anywhere after that. And so we've done very few animated things since then because we've learned that, like, unless we can keep one upping the animation itself, that's kind of a dead end.
- [21:55]
Aaron Walter
So on the topic of coming up with ideas, Rick Rubin has this book he wrote recently about the creative act and talks a lot about. You're not actually creating, you're really channeling. And I think you both have talked about that. You're sort of. These aren't your words, but you're not really exactly sculptors, but you're more like archaeologists kind of finding things and discovering things and meshing together things that weren't previously together. Can you talk about that discovery process?
- [22:20]
Tim Nakashi
Yeah, just starting with the band and the music, you know, Damian I meeting at 11. As far as discovery being an important factor in what we do, it's like, I think early on we didn't really play instruments very well, but we were, like, curious about being in a band playing music. We loved listening to it. Now we were curious about doing it and it was like, hey, do you.
- [22:44]
Damian Kulash
Want to do that?
- [22:44]
Tim Nakashi
Yeah. I don't know that much about it, but let's try it. Let's find a couple other people to do it.
- [22:48]
Damian Kulash
For me, it's. It felt like the discovery of 1, 4, 5, the progression in pop music. Like, obviously there are many, many chord progressions in pop music, but this is the most common one. And everybody figures it out at some point in their life. And that's often when they make their best song. It's like some of the Beatles best stuff is their earliest stuff. When they're just figuring out how to play the thing because those notes were always there. Those chords are no different than what Bach and Mozart. But when they break your soul, when they scratch that itch deep inside your brain, they become yours, or they become. You get that one plus one equals 500 feeling. And that is the case with making music in the first place, that you're just arranging these frequencies in such a way that it means more than it's supposed to. And in a way, it's really. You're discovering something within yourself, because it's all out there. I've just come back from vacation in New Hampshire at a little house on a lake where my great, great, great grandfather built a cabin. And this little house has. Across the lake, there's a set of hills and one little triangular kind of mini mountain right in front of someone behind it, and they just happen to cross behind it such that it looks like the one in front of it is actually the overlap of the two behind it. It's just a perfect parallax thing where, like, because of where that house is situated, it looks like you've got a transparent mountain in front of you. And you're not discovering something about that mountain. You're discovering something about your position, right? About where you're watching from or what it feels like to you as a human to be confused by that. And that moment isn't about owning those mountains. It's about owning that position in the sand going like, wow, this is where I see that from. And in terms of what that means for creativity, for us, it's meant leaning into generalism a little bit, that knowing a little bit about many different sciences and thinking, wow, the puzzle piece at the edge of this chemistry thing could plug into the puzzle piece at the edge of this filmmaking thing, which really plugs into the idea we were sort of trying to get out with this song thing. Like, we're not the greatest songwriters in the world. We're definitely not the greatest filmmakers in the world. And we don't know anything about chemistry. But if we know just enough about those things to plug them all together, we get that place in the sand where the mountains cross. And you go like, wow, look at that. Look at that cool illusion over there. You know, we didn't make the mountains, we didn't make the sand, but we're standing right there.
- [25:13]
Tim Nordwind
And just to build on that, there's also, like, this historical awareness that's in your work, too, that some people will pick up on. And, you know, some people won't and that's totally okay. Like references to Busby Berkeley. And I know our common friend Tim Nakashi came to y'all with an idea about these kind of stop motion photographs from the early 20th century, the beginnings of, like, movies, and saying, like, hey, we could do something like this where you see these trailers. And he directed your video wtf? Which was beautiful and amazing. And can you talk too about, like, historical inspiration and staying connected to history?
- [25:50]
Damian Kulash
Yes. There aren't a lot of truly new types of Marvel or wonder out there, I don't think. There are always new ways of getting at them. You know, there's always sort of new water slides into that big ocean, but the ocean's pretty static, you know, it's like the fact that you can take a bunch of still images and run them by your face really quickly and that makes a movie is always going to be miraculous. And it's really the same general principle as learning pop music the first time. Just like everybody else learns the same chords and is amazed by them. We're still learning from Elvis learning that, from Muddy Waters learning that, from the Beatles learning that. Like their high school experiences are just as fresh to us now as they were then. I guess just a teenage experience. And that's the case with the incredible dances of Busby Berkeley, like you said, or the early experiments in photography or the long history of people who've made incredible Rube Goldberg machines. We were accused of ripping off Fishley and Weiss with our Goldberg machine because they have a famous one from the 70s. And I remember a big shot in the art world kind of being very dismissive of us because it was stolen that from Fischley Weis. And in the statement, they were like, they stole the Rube Goldberg machine from Fischley and Weisz. And I'm like, you just called it a Rube Goldberg machine. That is the crazy. It's like everything builds on the stuff before it, of course, and we love referencing those things. We also just were jealous of them. We'll never get back to the place where we discovered those first three chords of pop music the first time. We can't find that wonder again. But we keep on finding new other things to be little marveling children at. And so when we just sort of fall into a world of art or of science or of. Or of dance or really anything where that initial surprise is still fresh to us, we want to like, grab it while we can.
- [27:42]
Aaron Walter
Maybe you could talk a little bit too about the importance of play in your work. And then just actually before that A quick fire question. My son Dashiell, who's seven, it's really hard to get him to listen to anything other than the Beastie Boys right now. For some reason he's got affiliate them.
- [27:56]
Tim Nordwind
But major worst things could happen.
- [27:58]
Aaron Walter
Yeah, totally. He had a question for you guys. Because I played your video. He's like, man, this is awesome. And he asked me to keep playing it over and over again. The one in the. In the plane, the vomit comet. But he was just wondering who was driving the plane. Plane. And then maybe you could talk a little bit about play.
- [28:11]
Damian Kulash
We had some very senior Russian scientists. Yeah, that was the Russian version of the NASA plane. It's called Roscosmos in Russia. And they're much more for hire than NASA is, especially 10 years ago. And they totally thought we were a joke.
- [28:28]
Tim Nakashi
They were like, we showed up with pinatas and paints to their plane. I think they were like, what are these goofballs doing?
- [28:36]
Damian Kulash
This actually segues well into play and into process. So the video you're talking about is for the song Upside down and Inside Out. It's shot in a zero gravity plane. A misnomer of course, because really, weightlessness, there's always gravity, but you don't experience it when you're falling at the same rate as the plane is. And as soon as we learned about that, about the fact that people could do that and you could get one of those planes without being a lifelong astronaut, we wanted to do it. And we pitched that idea to every brand, sponsor we could find for 10 years. And when it finally came together, this was our process. We were like, well, there's no way we can choreograph something in a space we've never been in. And we have no idea what things will look like or feel like. We really don't know how wonder will work in this space. So if we can afford 20 flights in this plane, let's break it up into thirds. We'll do six flights of pure testing. Then we'll take a month off and look at all those tests, figure out what happened, what we learned, and try to choreograph something out of it and go back, spend six flights practicing that choreography and changing it up and seeing if we can actually make it work. And then spend the last seven flights filming it. And what that meant was that the first six flights were in an empty plane, a big cargo plane in Russia with all these sort of semi retired scientists who were kind of vaguely ex military. Like the crossover between Roscosmos and the military Was sort of unclear to us at the time. And so it had a very kind of like, I guess the way you would expect with NASA. Sort of a very, like, these guys have probably come from the Air Force kind of vibe. And we're a bunch of kids showing up to play.
- [30:19]
Tim Nakashi
Literally, we had not come from the Air Force.
- [30:21]
Damian Kulash
Yeah. But our whole thing was like, we had. Out of the six flights. So there's. Each flight, you get 15 parabolas of weightlessness. You know, they fly in this parabolic shape so that the plane effectively throws you into the air and then follows your flight path until it has to catch you when you're getting too low again. That's about 28 seconds of weightlessness. So you get 15 of those during a single flight. So over six flights, we had six times 15. What is that, 300 parabolas. So we picked out all the things we wanted to test, and we put four GoPros are on a PA in the back of the plane with each of those things. On flight one, you're going to open a can of beans. On flight two, you're going to throw Skittles in the air. On flight three, you're going to see what it feels like to hold up bricks. Everything we could think of. Because we basically assumed that we wouldn't know what the thing was that was going to hit us. And we, during that time were just. We had a couple of chairs to work off of, and we just started jumping around in the space trying to figure out what moves we could do that. Like, what looked great, what we could recreate, what we could figure out at all, how much we could do before we started vomiting, all that kind of stuff. And the crew there basically just saw a bunch of American kids screwing around. And they were like, this is the stupidest thing. Who would spend this money? And I remember at some point, Andy, our guitarist, turning to thank one of the crew members, and he just looked at him and goes, any wishes for your money? That was the whole response, right? Like, you guys are going to waste your money on this plane. We'll do whatever the f you want, you know? Then we went home, came up with our basic plan, and came back a month later. They'd watched all our videos, realized what was happening. Our crew had started to build the set of a smaller plane inside this plane. And their attitude had completely changed to this. Like, they're like, oh, now we get what you're doing. And by the end of filming, they were more into it than we were. And it was so, like, There was this, like, military drill leader type guy who would get so pissed off at Andy if he would use the wrong hand to break his pinata with. You'd hear him shouting in Russian, like, nine. And there was just, like. It was this beautiful love fest, like, military love fest. By the end of it, it really. Well, it felt great. It felt great to, like, know that a good idea will overcome those cultural and sort of, like, lifestyle differences.
- [32:45]
Tim Nordwind
That's incredible.
- [32:45]
Damian Kulash
A lot of play.
- [32:46]
Tim Nakashi
Just speaking to play for a moment, you know, the 10 days that we came home between week one and then week two and three, we were watching all the footage and then trying to sew something together that we would then go back and test as, like, more solidified choreography. And I'll never forget this. Like, we were in, like, a dance studio going through this, and it was just like, we'd watch something and be like, yeah, we could, like, pew. And then do, like, pew, pew, pew. Like, we, like. It's like just a bunch of sound effects for, like, 10 days straight of just like.
- [33:20]
Damian Kulash
Yeah.
- [33:20]
Tim Nakashi
And then we'll jump off and it'll be like, you know, because, like, we. Because we obviously couldn't float.
- [33:25]
Damian Kulash
Yeah.
- [33:26]
Tim Nakashi
So it sounded like play. It looked like play.
- [33:28]
Damian Kulash
Yeah. I mean, it does really feel like you're kind of. You're coming up with a vocabulary. It's like a new language that you're trying to figure out. And I remember this on the treadmills, too. That I remember. It felt to me a little bit like scuba diving. Have you ever gone scuba diving? Like, I've only done it once or twice, and just in lessons with a teacher or whatever. But there's a moment when your body goes like, this is an experience that I'm starting to understand that doesn't exist anywhere else. But my muscles are getting just enough used to it to sort of have some instincts. Like, we never get better than that at the treadmills. It's not like we became acrobats. It's just your body does get used to standing on ground that's moving the wrong direction and very much the same in zero gravity. It's like you get used to it. And it was weird. On the last flight, I remember being like, this might be the last time I ever experienced this in my life. Like, I now know how to fly, and I'll never do it again.
- [34:16]
Tim Nordwind
I want to talk about something that's seemingly much less creative, and that's business models. I think that that is something that you all have figured out seemingly from the Outside that sort of like a modern day business model for how a band can operate. So you alluded to it very briefly that what sponsor could we get to help us build this video? And so you've had like State Farm, you've had Morton Salt, others. There's a paper company that you worked with for that incredible. The Printer Paper video as well.
- [34:46]
Damian Kulash
I think one of the most underappreciated ones for the video all is Not Lost was paid for by Google because they were just rolling out HTML5. And we did it as an HTML5 thing. That was a scary, scary cliff to jump off of because I grew up in Washington D.C. in the shadow of Discord Records. And in fact I shouldn't say shadow like I was a Discord mega fan. That's the label that Ian Mackay ran for his bands Fugazi, a minor threat along with other great people who work with him. And it was extremely anti establishment and extremely anti corporate and extremely anti sellout. And that was my whole universe in the early 90s. It was also very, I mean, it instilled in me personally a lot of the sort of sense of DIY that I think still fuels us. But 15 years later, without a music industry, a functioning music industry at all, we sort of were faced with what does DIY mean right now? And couldn't tell if we were just lying to ourselves when we made the decision that working directly with brands was actually going around the middlemen of major labels, not just selling out. Further, that basically, if you look at the music industry from a far enough distance at that point in time, there's no money going into it from anywhere other than marketing. No one's buying music, no one's paying for music anywhere other than live shows. There's no real input to the system except for marketing money. And we could continue to try to work with a major label who basically take that marketing money and then dole it out to their biggest bands and figure out how to keep most of it for themselves. Or we could establish relationships directly with those things and try to stay in control of the art. It was mostly pushed by the fact that we wanted to make those videos and this was the only way to do it. But it was scary. We really didn't know how people would react or how we would feel about it. And now 15 years, 20 years later, it's bittersweet because it's like, it's amazing that we get to do that. I couldn't be more thankful for what that has meant for our band specifically and creatively and we've gotten very lucky to have gotten into that sort of world early enough that we have a clear model of keeping control of the art. But in terms of the finger in the dike that we may have helped pull out, the branding of creativity and the sort of the infiltration of corporate aims into art making has not been good for the world.
- [37:11]
Tim Nordwind
Yeah, I want to dig into this a little bit further because there's another aspect. So one is partnering with sponsors to build these complex projects. And look, that's been happening for a long time. And what you described with the military guys not understanding this creative thing you were doing. If we keep creativity quarantined off in the side, in the back corner with the cool kids, that really doesn't do what we wanted to do when we got into a creative process. We want to bring more creativity into the world. And so there's everyone can play is my view. But the other thing that I think is really smart. So if you think about the typical band business model, it is make a record, you got to get noticed. Make the record, put it out there, hopefully make a few nickels from that record. And then you tour like crazy, sell some merch and you basically pay your rent. Put food on the table with the tour and the merch, you all have that. But there's also, there's videos, there's these other partnerships and so forth. It's a multi stream revenue model that I haven't seen from any other bands.
- [38:15]
Damian Kulash
We're very lucky in that respect. It's hard to recreate when we're asked like, how do you do this? You get really lucky. You chase your ideas and hope that the weird little corners you're in turn out to be fruitful ones. You mentioned that the common model is touring and merch. And that's really another way of saying that music has turned into a service industry. Right. That you can get paid as long as you are on tour for your entire life, which is possible if you happen to be named Mick Jagger and basically no one else. I guess Mr. McCartney is doing fine too. But they also happen to be people who still have royalties from the old situation. There is no model for musicians today to continue to have a living.
- [39:00]
Tim Nakashi
Right.
- [39:00]
Damian Kulash
Like it used to be that what creative people made in the last century was a revenue generating piece of art. So whether that was a novel or a TV show or a film or a record, if and when that thing was successful, it would pay for the next 10 that you did that weren't as successful. Not because there's so much fat in the system. But because nobody is able to make all hits all the time, the only way to do that is to make sure you're being really, really boring and chasing whatever else is doing. And that too will fail eventually. Right? You've got to be swinging for the fences, and not all of them are going to hit. I mean, this is why the writers are on strike right now, right? The only way to live as a writer now is to be constantly employed. That's literally impossible. But on top of that, you would need to be constantly employed in hit shows, which is even more impossible. Right? You need a system where each success pays for a little bit of the downtime for the next one. When there's no royalties, when there's no back end, whether it's the record or the TV show or the movie, whatever it is, you wind up in a service industry where you're just. You're paid for the time you show up there. And we wouldn't be able to do this if the only way to make money is touring. And frankly, we're not that successful of a band. You know, we're in the middle of the pack. We do just fine. We're very happy with our success. But if you want to tour and make money every single night for the rest of your life, you have to be enormous because you have to sell 5,000 tickets in every city, not just in New York and la. You have to be big enough to sell that many tickets, you know, 200 nights a year.
- [40:28]
Aaron Walter
So, past 10 years, I've been teaching this design class at Stanford, and we share your videos a lot with the students as, you know, creative examples. And we also do this warm up game that you guys either popularized or invented, where you essentially try to guess what each other is saying. And not to put you on the spot, but maybe. Could you demo that for us real quick?
- [40:48]
Damian Kulash
Yeah. The game is called say the Same Thing. It's a game that was often used by theater groups and improv groups. But our guitarist, Andy, who is a coder and does a lot of interesting stuff in the app space, he and his friends put this app together and we helped popularize it. It's called say the Same Thing and we will attempt to do it in front of you. So you're trying to get to the same word. Okay, you ready?
- [41:12]
Tim Nakashi
You ready? Yeah. On the count of three.
- [41:14]
Damian Kulash
One, two, three. Star. Automobile. You say stars?
- [41:18]
Tim Nakashi
Stars. Yeah.
- [41:18]
Aaron Walter
Automobile.
- [41:19]
Damian Kulash
Stars.
- [41:20]
Tim Nakashi
Okay. All right, I have 1, 2, 3.
- [41:27]
Damian Kulash
Subaru.
- [41:28]
Tim Nakashi
Oh, yeah. Subaru is the. Subaru is the right answer.
- [41:31]
Damian Kulash
So you can't. Can't ever go back. So I said Subaru, and you said rocket.
- [41:36]
Tim Nakashi
Subaru. I have one.
- [41:38]
Damian Kulash
Okay. Right, yeah.
- [41:39]
Tim Nakashi
Three, two, one. Transportation.
- [41:42]
Damian Kulash
Oh, you were that. Transportation was. Right. Okay, so we'll say Saturn and transportation.
- [41:49]
Tim Nakashi
Okay.
- [41:50]
Damian Kulash
Okay. Three, two, one. Apollo. Oh, wait, we got. Wait, Apollo in space?
- [41:57]
Tim Nakashi
I think so, yeah. Okay.
- [41:58]
Damian Kulash
Three, two, one. Master that.
- [42:03]
Tim Nordwind
Amazing.
- [42:04]
Damian Kulash
Every time I try that one.
- [42:07]
Aaron Walter
NASA.
- [42:07]
Damian Kulash
We can't go back. Well, I mean, I'm not allowed to say any hints here, but.
- [42:13]
Tim Nakashi
Oh, no.
- [42:15]
Damian Kulash
Here we go. Three, two, one. Ross Cosmos. Oh.
- [42:22]
Tim Nakashi
Oh.
- [42:23]
Damian Kulash
Science. Ross Cosmos.
- [42:24]
Tim Nakashi
Okay, ready? Yeah. 3, 2, 1, 0.
- [42:28]
Damian Kulash
Cosmonaut. We're a little out of practice. Can you tell?
- [42:32]
Tim Nakashi
It's all good.
- [42:33]
Damian Kulash
We're in.
- [42:34]
Tim Nakashi
What is this called? This is adjacency.
- [42:35]
Damian Kulash
Yeah. We refer to this as adjacency, where we're stuck so close to an idea that there's no middle point anymore. What are we at?
- [42:42]
Aaron Walter
You know, this is the creative process at work. We're watching it live.
- [42:45]
Tim Nakashi
Yeah.
- [42:46]
Damian Kulash
I mean, you get the point, right? Like, we're supposed to land on the same thing, and it is quite fun. We're actually in the process of bringing that app back. That app fell out of use for a while. It was called say the same Thing. Hopefully by the time this airs, it'll even be up again. But it probably won't be because you guys know how development goes.
- [43:02]
Tim Nordwind
Before we go, Tim, you're working on some comedy stuff. Could you tell us a little bit about where people could learn more about that?
- [43:10]
Tim Nakashi
Yeah, I've started working on some comedy stuff. I play a character called Ron Persky, who's a songwriting tutorialist. You'd sort of end up learning just as much about Ron's neuroses as you do songwriting. And most of what you can find of Ron right now just exists on his Instagram, which is onpersky. P E R S K y. I'm actually about to go to the Edinburgh Fringe Festival to do some shows with Ron Persky this year.
- [43:36]
Aaron Walter
Fun.
- [43:37]
Damian Kulash
Nice.
- [43:37]
Aaron Walter
A fun venue.
- [43:38]
Damian Kulash
I have a question about Ron. Yeah. Who's more real, Tim Norman or Ron Persky?
- [43:43]
Tim Nakashi
Ron and Tim are like, is he.
- [43:45]
Damian Kulash
Playing you or are you playing him?
- [43:46]
Tim Nakashi
That's the question. Ron isn't so different from Tim, and Tim is exactly like Ron.
- [43:51]
Damian Kulash
Yeah, it's sort of like Ron Persky is doing a comedy bit here. This is Ron actually doing his comedy.
- [44:00]
Tim Nakashi
Yeah, exactly, exactly.
- [44:03]
Tim Nordwind
And, Damian, you've got a film that came out just, what, 1112 days ago?
- [44:08]
Damian Kulash
Yes, My Wife Kristin Gore and I have directed a film for Apple tv. It's called the Beanie Bubble. Strangely, it's about Beanie Babies, something I never cared about growing up and still don't care about. But that weird event in American history when the world decided that $5 tchotchkes were a great investment vehicle is a hilarious moment. But also it actually, it's very much about tech. It's about how that really was the advent of ebay that started all of that. And there's a lot of dark undercurrents of American culture that run through it. And so it made for a very absurdist and fun film to make. Zach Galifianakis, Sarah Snook and Liz Banks and Geraldine Bisvanathan. Incredible cast who make give amazing performances. Some very good music in that, including a new song by OK Go. But also 15 wonderful tracks for the 1980s and 90s and we're very proud.
- [45:04]
Aaron Walter
I watched it last night with my wife Courtney and really, really enjoyed it. And one thing that kind of felt like it was cross pollinated from your music videos was these color themes which were really wonderful. That kind of like staged through the movie.
- [45:15]
Damian Kulash
I'm glad you caught that. We had a giant spreadsheet of what colors were allowed in each scene. So there's three stories that run through it. It's actually the narratives of three women who were involved in the making of the Beanie Babies. And it's a little bit of a bait and switch. The film, you think it's gonna be about Beanie Babies, but it's really about these three women and their relationship to the guy who ran the company. And they happen over two different decades. So this sort of confusing timeline. And in an effort to make those timelines distinct, but not so distinct that you're in different films, each of those three stories has its own color palette and we lean a little bit heavy into them so that it's a little bit extra. It's got just a little bit of sort of magical surrealist vibe to it. We want it to be not a period piece about the 80s and 90s, but a kind of fable about America. And so it needed to feel a little bit, a little bit magical and a little bit timeless. So I'm glad you noticed the color. Thank you. A lot of work went into that.
- [46:15]
Tim Nordwind
Amy and Tim, thank you for being on the show. What a fun conversation today.
- [46:19]
Damian Kulash
Thank you.
- [46:19]
Tim Nakashi
Glad having us.
- [46:20]
Aaron Walter
Yeah.
- [46:31]
Tim Nordwind
I gotta tell you, that was a real treat for me. I love OK Go. And I've enjoyed them for a Long time. I love their videos. I love, you know, just like, the creativity they bring to everything they do. And to have the opportunity to just kind of hear how that unfolds is pretty fascinating.
- [46:49]
Aaron Walter
Yeah, same. I've been following them for at least 10 years, probably more than that. I just always wonder, like, how do they go about thinking up these ideas, get these creative videos and what is their collaboration like? And, you know, it was also clear that, and I didn't know their backstory, but that Tim and Damian had kind of a special relationship that helped foster what they do. So it was neat to sort of dive into that a little bit too.
- [47:12]
Tim Nordwind
Yeah. So I think, you know, they're a band in particular that I think we can learn from because their creative process, it's very open, as we kind of heard. Anything's possible, it seems, but it's also, there are boundaries and I like the way that Damian was describing that. We know what we're after and there's a certain level of rigor and there's so many other factors. People like, let's just do this the slightly easier way. And they're like, eh, no, we're sticking to our guns on this. But they have this open process of discovery while also staying very focused on what they're trying to achieve.
- [47:51]
Aaron Walter
Yeah, absolutely. And I think, you know, prototyping kind of plays into it a lot too. They talked about how they, you know, in the. The Vomit Comet and the Zero Gravity video, that they had to go test things first. And I think as designers, we often think of prototypes as trying to address risks or answer questions that we have. But it's also a space for exploration and discovering things that you might not realize would be valuable to get them out in front of somebody and say, hey, this is great, but what about this? And you didn't. You just didn't realize that before. Realize the potential of what you're doing or you make a mistake and it ends up being better than what you intended on doing.
- [48:27]
Tim Nordwind
I'm fascinated by how their creative process also falls into their business model. You know, they didn't intentionally create this business model with multiple streams of revenue, ways to have partnerships and so forth. But again, they. They stayed open and then that started to unfold.
- [48:47]
Aaron Walter
Yeah, that's cool. I mean, even for our own show here, it's inspiring to think of, maybe we got these creative partnerships we can work on ourselves and hopefully things that will be interesting to our audience and. And also, you know, keep us going too. So. Yeah, I love that part.
- [49:01]
Tim Nordwind
The collaborators are Also a really key part of what they're doing, the collaborators. There's a lot of how they're made videos on YouTube and you get a sense for how the directors and the other people, like the grips, everyone who's on set is a collaborator one way or another. Damian talked about how he wanted this. One plus one equals 500, 5,000, something bigger. When you find the right collaborators, that phenomena happens. And I think in the tech world, we often call that as like a multiplier effect when you're working with the right people.
- [49:38]
Aaron Walter
I was curious that we didn't really get a chance to ask him this, but your friend Tim, I think he came to them with an idea, this sort of stop motion, or almost like Edward Muybridge type thing where it shows a trail of photographs. It's multiple exposures. I wonder how often that happens versus them kind of on their own, like coming up with the idea or how, you know, what the ratio is there. Essentially, yeah.
- [50:00]
Tim Nordwind
I'm not sure. The story about how Tim Nakashi, my friend, ended up connecting with them is fascinating. Where he was pulling into a parking lot at a Pinkberry in LA and almost hit, okay, go, Tim. With his car. And they started talking. They did sort of know each other, I think, already. And then they started to explore this idea of what a video might look like together. And that video, if you haven't seen it, the WTF video is just. It's amazing. And look at the. How it was shot. It's surprising, like what is actually happening on stage versus what's happening on camera.
- [50:35]
Aaron Walter
Yeah, it's so cool to think about being in a position where you, your, your job is essentially to just, you know, play together, find the sandbox where you've got the space to try out these different creative ideas, see what works. There was. There was another interview I was listening to with Damien where he's saying, you know, when you have the sequence of things that all has to happen together, like the, say, the Rube Goldberg thing, for example, it was like 130 different interactions. Those all have to go essentially perfectly because, you know, even if each one of Those has a 90% success rate multiplied times each other, it's like one in a trillion. I can't remember the exact number. It has to be 99% reliable. So you, in essence, you kind of have to work with the building blocks of things that, you know will work and then combine them in surprising ways to make something new.
- [51:26]
Tim Nordwind
That's something that can be extrapolated into any different medium, regardless of what your creative pursuit is, but part of it is knowing your materials to some degree. Like they're working with people who know their materials, the science, how to work with the airplane, et cetera. So they're collaborating with the right people. And then I loved what he said about adjacency and learning a bit about science, a little bit about physics, a little bit about history, that the more that you know of these different disciplines, the more you start to see the opportunities and the relationships. And that is a huge opportunity for creative thinkers, is to do more of that, is to study what is not directly in your field.
- [52:08]
Aaron Walter
Yeah, I think that idea of kind of like stacking these different areas of expertise, even sort of the breadth versus the depth, but being able to, again, combine things in unique ways, that's pretty powerful. One other thing that I was hoping we'd chat with him about a bit but didn't was this idea that creativity is so driven by emotion. And there's this another quote by Damian where he says that humans lead with our emotions, then our brains fill in and pretend they were in charge. So it's like we think we're being rational, but actually we're. And you obviously have written a lot about this. We're really so driven by emotion and we kind of backfill and rationalize that. No, we were actually thinking logically. And to some degree you have to kind of openness yourself up to that to be really creative.
- [52:55]
Tim Nordwind
Yeah, emotion is such an important part of the creative process. And I think that for people in design or film or music, when we have to work with people who are very rational, it's a little hard to sort of see from another person's perspective. But the two go hand in hand. You know, when we think about how our brain works, we want to make rational decisions about the purchases we're going to make, the thing that we're going to do today, or how we're going to approach our work. And sometimes there are multiple plausible, rational solutions in front of you. And emotion is often a tiebreaker or the. A force that pulls you towards the thing that it feels right. I just feel like wearing this pair of pants today, or I just feel like doing this type of work today. There's a lot of that that is in who we are. We like to think that we're so rational because it feels definitive, it feels certain. And that's the place that confidence, we think confidence comes from. But creative confidence is really about not being certain. It's about being open to trying a thing. And that is what OK Go is all about.
- [54:08]
Aaron Walter
Yeah, absolutely. And, and emotion also comes into so much in decision making. And we may have talked about this on the show before, but there is this famous study about a guy who had had a, I believe a brain injury and it left him without the ability to process emotion and he couldn't make any decisions. He would have like a pencil, like two different pencils in front of him. He couldn't decide which one to pick up. You think rationally you should be able to choose, but it was the emotions that would lead that for basically everybody.
- [54:36]
Tim Nordwind
Yeah, emotion often gets characterized as like our old brain, our lizard brain, this part of the past, this residual history of who we once were and not often characterized as such an essential part of who we are and how we think. But it's very important piece. And yeah, everything that OK Go does, it's clear that it's built into what they're doing. So if you haven't seen the plethora of OK Go amazing videos, do yourself a favor, pop some popcorn, sit down and watch them on the big screen because they are so good. Eli and I love producing this podcast, but sometimes we find ourselves wondering, what sort of feedback does our audience have? How could we improve the show? Maybe you could help us by taking just a couple minutes to complete a survey, answering a few questions about your thoughts about the show, sharing your feedback, and telling us a little bit about you. To take the survey, just go to DBTR Co Survey. That's DBTR Co Survey. Our thanks in advance for completing the survey. It'll really help us improve the show. This episode was produced by Eli Woolery and me, Aaron Walter, with engineering and production support from Brian Paik of Pacific Audio. If you found this episode useful, we hope that you'll leave us a review on Apple Podcasts, Spotify or wherever you listen to finer shows. Or simply drop a link to the show in your team's Slack channel. DesignBetterPodcast.com It'll really help others discover the show. Until next time.