← Takin' A Walk - Music History with Buzz Knight
Takin' A Walk - Music History with Buzz Knight
"The Creative Harmony of Damian Kulash of Ok Go"
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- [00:00]
Talkspace Advertiser
You know when you're really stressed or not feeling so great about your life or about yourself, talking to someone who understands can really help. But who is that person? How do you find them? Where do you even start? Talkspace Talkspace makes it easy to get the support you need. With Talkspace, you can go online, answer a few questions about your preferences, and be matched with a therapist. And because you'll meet your therapist online, you don't have to take time off work or arrange childcare. You, you'll meet on your schedule wherever you feel most at ease. If you're depressed, stressed, struggling with a relationship, or if you want some counseling for you and your partner or just need a little extra one on one support, Talkspace is here for you. Plus, Talkspace works with most major insurers and most insured members have a $0 copay. No insurance, no problem. Now get $80 off of your first month with promo code space80 when you go to talkspace.com match with a licensed therapist today at talkspace.com save $80 with code space80@talkspace.com In 2020, a group of.
- [01:02]
Margie Murphy
Young women found themselves in an AI fueled nightmare.
- [01:06]
Damian Kulash
Someone was posting photos. It was just me naked. Well, not me, but me with someone else's body parts.
- [01:13]
Margie Murphy
This is Levittown, a new podcast from iHeart podcasts Bloomberg and Kaleidoscope about the rise of deepfake pornography and the battle to stop it. Listen to Levittown on Bloomberg's Big Take podcast. Find it on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.
- [01:31]
Damian Kulash
Taking a walk Any real success you have in music is going to be word of mouth, right? There's yes, you can push things down people's throats, but you know, if you've got enough money. But at the end of the day, most people pick up what they really love from their friends. And so it's going to be either digitally passing it around that way or physically. And we were just among the first people to be like, no, we just want to do it. We just want people to email us to their friends. It worked.
- [01:57]
Buzz Knight
Welcome to the Taking a Walk podcast where Buzz Knight explores the musical path of artists of all shapes and sizes. And today, Buzz is joined by someone who's been making waves in the music industry for over two decades with his band OK Go. Damian Kulash is not only the lead vocalist and guitarist, but also the mastermind behind some of the most innovative music videos of our time from the viral Treadmill Dance. And here it goes. Again to the gravity defying antics in Upside down and Inside out. Ok, Go. Has consistently pushed the boundaries of creativity. Let's join Damian with Buzz Knight on the Taking a Walk podcast.
- [02:41]
Interviewer
Damian, so great to have you on the Taking a Walk podcast. Thank you so much.
- [02:47]
Damian Kulash
Thank you for having me.
- [02:49]
Interviewer
So since the podcast is called Taking a Walk, I want to ask you, if you could take a walk with someone, living or dead, who would you take a walk with? And where do you think you might take that little saunter?
- [03:06]
Damian Kulash
I think I'm just saying this because you ended with saunter, but maybe George Saunders. I'm a big fan of his writing and I mean, it's just. There are too many people I'd want to meet for me to keep. For me to really give you a single answer. And that's the one that popped into my head. That is for obvious reasons, but I am a huge, huge fan. And where would we go? I think it would be interesting to watch tourists with him. I think he's. I love his take on. He's a writer, of course, he writes short stories and they're all very sort of playfully surreal and sort of a little bit sardonic. And I love his take on humanity and I think it would be very fun to play that. Like, what do you think that person does game with him and watch his.
- [04:09]
Interviewer
Brain go, which is a great game. I love the answer and I love the person and thank you for that. So appreciate it. So we got a lot to talk about here. We're going to talk about the two new tracks. First of all, take Me with you, this is how it Ends and the new, the adjacent Possible as well, the tour. We got a lot of stuff to talk about. You are a busy band and a busy lady, but can you talk about upbringing in Washington and how it shaped you musically?
- [04:46]
Damian Kulash
Yeah. I grew up in Washington, D.C. during my most formative musical period around early high school and high school in general. It was an incredibly good place for DIY punk rock. And it was so. It was so inclusive and invited people in so much that I think I really have that to thank for a career in music and a career in the arts in general. I was the kind of kid who always wanted to make stuff. And I'd spend a lot of time with legos and a lot of time drawing and usually when I was doing either of those, I was listening to music on my Walkman. And my earliest memories are of. Of pop music from the early 80s and then the late 80s. And that stuff was Heavily influenced by a love of Prince and Depeche Mode and Run dmc. And it was all really, really wonderful music, but also music that did not scream out to you, you too can make this right. I mean, Run DMC didn't seem like it was made by humans at all because there's so much sampling. Sort of like I didn't feel like I had access into being a rapper, and Depeche Mode didn't seem like it was made by humans at all. Everything is completely electronic and synth, and Prince doesn't really seem like it's made by humans at all. Even though he's technically a human, he's so much better than other humans at playing that. It sort of seems too perfect. By the time I got to high school, I. I think I fell into the idea of playing my own music because of Pixies and the sort of brokenness in their music and how a single chord, kind of misplayed and struck over and over again, could speak my rage as well as perfection of Run DMC ever could. And Fugazi and Minor Threat and Shudder To Think, and all these bands that were DC punk rock legends, they were doing that right in front of me there in DC. And all shows were all ages, all shows were $5. And it was something that was sort of levied across the city by Ian Mackay, who ran Discord Records. And because of that ethos that they. And he sort of spread across the. My understanding of music, as soon as I started spending time at those shows, I was going, oh, wait, I can do this. This is something I could try. And in fact, anything you want to make, you should just try figuring out a way to make it. You'll never be Prince, that's fine. You'll never be Run dmc, That's fine. You'll never be Depeche Mode, that's fine. You'll never even be Pixies. But you know what? Fugazi is standing right in front of you doing something pretty awesome. And, um. And that was a. That was a. It really made me want to. To be involved and make stuff. And. And I think it gave me a sense of sort of being in charge of my own creative future. That. That I. You know, it might even be unrealistic to give kids that much belief in themselves, but I'm so happy that they did. You know, like, we wound up on a major label, which would have been. Which. Which is anathema to the whole Discord scene. But as the world changed and feel like it prepared me for the idea that records aren't going to sell anymore. Go do something else. And record labels aren't going to support you. Go do something else. And sort of doing it our own way and not worrying about the system too much definitely is a direct result of that DC upbringing. Sorry, that was a long and weird answer.
- [08:44]
Interviewer
Perfect answer. Not long. That's why we're here. We got time. Tell me what your grandfather though meant to you in terms of your amazing creative force.
- [08:57]
Damian Kulash
Wow, you've done your homework. Thank you. My grandfather, well, I have two. Two grandfathers. I only met one of them. My father's father was a studied bugs. That's not a paleontologist. A what? Oh boy, I've lost it again. My father's father discovered a click beetle. Somewhere out there there is a specimen. In fact I've seen the specimen in the Smithsonian of the Glyco. I think it's glycolics Coulosha. It is. Wonderful man. But I never met him. He died when my father was still a teenager. My mother's father invented the modern fish stick. He was a biochemist and he was the one who discovered that if you freeze fish a particular way you can keep it rectangular form even after it's been cooked. He also was. Isn't that amazing? It's amazing, isn't it? And he was such a ball of life and such a wonderful, wonderful man. He had 14 grandkids and he would torture us all in such a joyful and wonderful way. I remember he would stomp around outside giving us candy until we were all worked up into this insane hyper state and then just hand us back on it, hand us back to our parents and get pissed. It was great. Anyways, I won't take you down that rabbit hole. But he also, he was very fond of my creativity and very supportive of it. And I remembered and I remember when I was a teenager reading a pamphlet that Simple Machines, a record label outside of D.C. had put out. It was a five page pamphlet I think that said here, like here's how you can put out your own records. And it had all of the. It was basically just a Rolodex for who you have to call. You'll need it mastered. Here are the three vinyl mastering houses that still exist in the US that kind of stuff and a simple budgeting for it. It takes about. You couldn't make a record for I think less than about 5 or $700 in the late 90s. And I remember thinking, well, I don't have 5 or $700, but I really do want to make a record for. And so I took a loan from my grandfather, who was just so excited that he could support my young entrepreneurial and musical endeavors and put out a record for my friend's band. And we sold just enough to pay back my grandfather. And that actually inspired me to. I was like, okay, now we're going to put something. Now we're going to do a cd. And I walked up to Ian Makai's house, or the Discord house. It wasn't actually where he lives, but Discord Records was. They were in a house in Arlington. And I walked up to the house and asked him if I could have a loan. And Ian Mackay, like the godfather of DC Punk rock, was like, yeah, sure. And he gave me a couple. I think it was $2,000 to support this CD, which it was a benefit CD raising money for this small school in Haiti, which I had learned about through my school. And I remember saying, like, don't I need to sign some kind of contract or something? And he's like, no, I have about $5,000 that I use to support local scene stuff like this. Do you want to be the kid who stops that from happening? That was. That was the only. Only assurance he needed that the money would get paid back. And I put out this. This cd, which, with, you know, sort of. It was just kind of like B sides and rarities and stuff from a bunch of DC punk rock bands. But I just wanted so badly to be involved in that scene, you know, like, it was just so awesome, all the stuff that people were making, and I was. You know, all my free time was spent at these shows that were in cafeterias and churches and, you know, clubs. And it was just like this very, very inclusive scene. And I was so impressed with. With what everyone was doing, and I wanted to be part of it, you.
- [13:03]
Interviewer
Know, but creativity is one thing, but creative resilience is. Is another. And when I think of, you know, over the career of the band, your career right up to the present, the amazing A Stone Only Rolls Downhill video project. But all of the work that's, you know, so visually stunning, that's not only creativity, that's creative resilience. So the resilience came from somebody, didn't it?
- [13:39]
Damian Kulash
I. This is a hard thing to put into words. I guess I've just. The fascination with making stuff has always been a dance with myself, if that makes sense. Like, you're always trying to make something that brings you some sense of wonder, and that is definitionally kind of at the edge of your own abilities. There are wonderful types of creativity and sort of emotional release that always work, right? Like a 1, 4, 5 progression in a pop song. It's just a beautiful feeling, but the first time you discover it is you make the world's greatest punk song, the world's greatest Beatles song, the world's greatest pop song because you're just discovering it and you feel how amazing that is. It still feels great when you've been playing it for 20 years, but it doesn't have that urgency anymore, right? And it's that sort of sense of mystery and magic. When you first discover something, it's just different. And so pushing to your own limits, there's something, like, required if you're. That's not the right way to say it. There's. The most magical stuff is always going to be kind of at the edge of your limits and. And that means it's always going to require some resiliency to get there. That you're never. It's never going to be something you can do on the first try. Or rather, if you did it on the first try, you wouldn't know how to. How to. To value it because you wouldn't realize how. How hard it was. Right? And I guess there's, you know, it's. It's the good side of perfectionism and there's a bad side to it also, which is that, like, you're never happy with what you've done. And there's always something you could have done better. And there's. And no matter how perfectly you sync the shot, you think of the ways you could have sunk it better, you know, And I guess, you know, tying this back into the stuff we've been talking about, the dance between that and the broken chord of a Pixie song is. Is that's kind of life, right? Like, that's. It's all about, like, getting yourself loose enough to just enjoy the, the emotional flow of. Of a broken Pixie's cord, but also having enough of a neocortical higher brain out there going like, wait a second, you could, you could, you could do this better, right? Or maybe I could learn to play this better and get a little bit more like Prince, which speaks to the.
- [16:20]
Interviewer
Constant state of musical transformation that the band continues to go through. It's. You're not just comfortable in one spot, you look over to the next place that you're going to take it. And that, to me, is one of the things I admire so much about what, what you do and the band does. It's it's not ever a question of, well, how Damien, does the band evolve or it's because you always are evolving. That's you. You live it and do it.
- [16:51]
Damian Kulash
Well, I would say, you know, I sometimes envy bands that have a more clear brand. I mean music like, you know, from the outside, we're that video band. I've got that brand covered. But you know, when you hear a Stroke song, you know it's a Stroke song, right? When you hear a Pixie song, you know it's a Pixie song. When you hear an Elliot Smith song, you know it's Elliot Smith. And those are all bands I think are. And. And artists who I think are incredible. It's nothing. But there's a specific bullseye they're aiming for each time. I guess it's because this all started for me, being a fan first and foremost that I'm. Half the time. Well, not even half. I'm. Some of the times pulled towards that Prince reference, some of the times pulled towards the Fugazi reference, some of the times pulled towards the Pixies reference and usually some mix of them that I'm not even aware of anymore, but they're not. You wind up with a mixtape of influences that. That's what you are, right? And maybe to the outside world it is more cohesive than I think. But I remember turning our first demos into labels in 1997 or something and getting the response that this is great, but pick a style. And that felt to me like what that's like being like only paint with one color. I guess it worked for Picasso for a while, but it just. There's. We live. Maybe it's growing up in this era where the past is accessible and now it's much more so than it was of course in the 80s and 90s. But you could be influenced by jazz and you could be influenced by hip hop and you could be influenced by rock and roll, whether that meant Led Zeppelin or it meant Minor Threat, you know, and there was so much to fall in love with and be moved by. And now that's only gotten more. The case that you can discover Billie Eilish and Billie Holiday back to back. They're both right there on your phone streaming off whatever platform it is you're using. And that was hard but possible. I mean Billie Eilish didn't exist yet. But the point that that type of cross pollination was possible when you had to walk into Tower Records and it just wasn't possible before that. I guess I have this sort of feeling that it feels so arbitrary to be stuck in one mode. As a maker of things, as a, as a consumer of things. I know when I, you know, if I'm sad, it's time to put on Elliot Smith, you know, and I'm not quite sure what to do with a band that kind of is all over the place. And I, you know, it's a, it's the, the balance between whether I'm making things for me or for everybody else. And you can see which one I chose because we're all over the place.
- [19:40]
Buzz Knight
We'll be right back with more of the Taking a Walk podcast.
- [19:45]
Talkspace Advertiser
You know, when you're really stressed or not feeling so great about your life or about yourself, talking to someone who understands can really help. But who is that person? How do you find them? Where do you even start? Talkspace. Talkspace makes it easy to get the support you need. With Talkspace, you can go online, answer a few questions about your preferences, and be matched with a therapist. And because you'll meet your therapist online, you don't have to take time off work or arrange childcare. You'll meet on your schedule wherever you feel most at ease. If you're depressed, stressed, struggling with a relationship, or if you want some counseling for you and your partner or just need a little extra one on one support, Talkspace is here for you. Plus, Talkspace works with most major insurers and most insured members have a $0 copay. No insurance, no problem. Now get $80 off of your first month with promo code SPACE. 80 when you go to talkspace.com match with a licensed therapist today at talkspace.com save $80 with code SPACE.
- [20:45]
Margie Murphy
In 2020, a group of young women in a tidy suburb of New York City found themselves in an AI fueled nightmare.
- [20:54]
Damian Kulash
Someone was posting photos. It was just me. Naked. Well, not me, but me with someone else's body parts on my body. Parts that looked exactly like my own.
- [21:05]
Margie Murphy
I wanted to throw up. I wanted to scream. It happened in Levittown, New York. But reporting the series took us through the darkest corners of the Internet and to the front lines of a global battle against deepfake pornography.
- [21:19]
Damian Kulash
This should be illegal, but what is this?
- [21:22]
Margie Murphy
This is a story about a technology that's moving faster than the law and about vigilantes trying to stem the tide. I'm Margie Murphy. And I'm Olivia Carville. This is Levittown, a new podcast from iHeart podcasts Bloomberg and Kaleidoscope. Listen to Levittown on Bloomberg's Big Take podcast. Find it on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts or wherever you get your podcasts.
- [21:51]
Buzz Knight
Welcome back to the Taking a Walk podcast.
- [21:54]
Interviewer
Yeah, I like the boy. I don't know how to necessarily describe this music, this art that to me makes it special because, you know, the formula world that we live in is, you know, gets boring. So I, I like the fact that it's, it's, it's. It's a special trait to be hard to always put a. A complete handle on it, you know. And the independence that's in. Involved, which clearly leads me to leaving Capitol Records was a major part of the continued independence of you and the band, wouldn't you say?
- [22:38]
Damian Kulash
Oh yeah. And definitely something I have yet again to thank ian MacKay and DC for is that being on a major label in the first place, I kind of always felt like I had one toe in. Cause I was sort of scared of the whole corporate system. Appropriately scared because I had been raised on this sort of countercultural like we don't need that, you know. I don't think a better thing could have happened to us. Our first record, the single was a song called get over was a sort of medium sized radio hit. It was top 40, but it wasn't top 10, which is enough for the label to decide you get a second album, but not enough for them to pour tons of money on promoting it. And I couldn't be more thankful to capital for promoting and giving us a chance in the first place. I don't mean to be ungrateful for that, but it does mean that by the time we were making our second record, we weren't a priority. They were just sort of throwing it out there to see if it stuck, you know, and didn't at first. They. They made a video and it was. We toured for 18 months, I believe it was before and. And you know, people were coming out to shows, but we weren't the next Strokes by any means. And that's when we put out a little video of our own of us dancing on treadmills, which wasn't even really like. It was just sort of a go nerdiest fans. It was like we thought we had. We knew of a particular kind of like mode of Internet fan that we had, which was a. Which was a minority back then. Right. It was like you didn't expect people to discover you through the Internet. They were buying CDs, you know. But we did have this sort of nerdy fan base that we were like, we'll make them this ridiculous thing. And that exploded. It Just so happened that we were. You know, that happened right at the birth of YouTube and VH1 picked it up and all this stuff. And so suddenly we had one foot in both camps. We were, you know, we were the most played thing on VH1 and MTV @ the same time that we were sort of the reason that they were getting given up for YouTube. And it was huge. And we had a, you know, it was a Grammy. And it was. We were. We toured for another 16 months straight after. I mean, it was more than two and a half years that we were on the road without ever stopping with that album. And so we were working our asses off and. And super happy about the success, but also really, really tired. And when we went to make our third record, it was already clear that we were going to be that we're now that video band. Worse, we might just be that treadmill band. But we figured, like, okay, this is an interesting corner of the world to now inhabit. We did things a different way. And that is. And we get to keep doing that. It's really hard to get any permission to do things the wrong way generally. And once you've established that you know how to do things the wrong way and it'll work, man, double down, you know. And so we went back to the label and we were like, okay, for the next album, we want to make a video for every song. And they said, great idea, let's do it. And then when we started to ask them to pay the bills for those videos, they're like, I don't know, you know, and we weren't asking for much money. It was just like a little bit. And they just basically, I think it wasn't a good fit, right? Like, we wanted to do things the quote unquote, wrong way, and they liked that in theory, but they didn't actually want to do the work of doing it the wrong way. And so they amicably let us go. They were just like, look, take your record back and get out of our hair. And we did. And it was the greatest thing that ever happened to us because it meant that we could keep doubling down on this type of creativity and this type of. And this business model, which was sort of like Roadrunner off the cliff, right? Just keep making things for this new millennium of technology. We're going to make stuff that people will pass around via link rather than pass around via trading vinyl records or making mixtapes. And I mean, you know, it's always going to be. Any real success you have in music is going to Be word of mouth, right? Yes, you can push things down people's thro. But, you know, if you've got enough money. But at the end of the day, most people pick up what they really love from their friends. And so it's going to be either digitally passing it around that way or physically. And we were just among the first people to be like, no, we just want to do it. We just want people to email us to their friends. It worked.
- [27:17]
Interviewer
So take us inside to the new project and how it all came together. And what differs in that sort of songwriting creation, you know, production creation from previous work.
- [27:34]
Damian Kulash
I would say the only difference that I think runs through the whole new record, it's subtle, but it's real, is just. I don't think we're trying to plant a flag anymore. It's nice to be coming back to this as a quote unquote, adult, you know. The band took an unexpected hiatus for many years at first because Andy and I both had children around the same time and both of us really didn't want to be touring when our. When our kids were young. And then my wife and I. And then there was a pandemic and my wife and I made a narrative film. We directed a film called the Beanie Bubble, which was on Apple a year and a half ago, two years. And that meant that by the time we got back to making our record, which it never felt like we really stopped, we were just doing other things at the same time. And by the time we got back there, it had been almost 10 years since our last album. And that sort of caused the kind of break. It's too long since we did the last thing to quote, unquote, keep it going. You know, you're just sort of not chasing something in the same way. It's just kind of like, look, people are going to. People will. They either like what we do or they don't. But it's pretty known what we do at this point. And rather than sort of like planting the flag going, we're the type of band that X, Y or Z even saying we're the creative band or we're the video band or we're the whatever, it just, it stops being a way you define yourself, I guess, once you get to a certain point in your career. And so the music itself feels more just free flowing from who. Who we are as people. I think it just, it. It feels more honest. Not that I ever felt dishonest before, but I think. You know what I mean, there's a sort of like Ease with which it just came out of us. And I am more proud of this record than I have been with any we've made so far because of that. It just feels more like us. And I. And I love it.
- [29:39]
Interviewer
So do I. When I think of Take me with you or this is how it ends, or just some of the other themes running through, you know, the entire project, is it fair to say there is a theme that's underlying, that is about finding hope in the midst of some of the craziness that's. That we're living with? And did that. If that's true, did that come from the COVID period?
- [30:10]
Damian Kulash
I think what's interesting is I feel like I've said this with every album we've released. It's been like, these are prayers for hope in a really dark time. It's just the times keep getting darker, so the prayers keep getting more extreme in the sense that the only thing that I feel I can offer right now is that human connection that I get when I listen to music that soothes my soul. Right. That there's. Sometimes you need a song that's as sad as you are when you're sad. And sometimes you need a song that. That recognizes your sadness and also can pull you out of it. And we do a little bit of both. I think I'm enough of a cynic that our music that my lyrics are always a little bit reflective of the darkness of the world around us, but the music itself is mostly pretty buoyant and pretty bright. Not entirely, but I guess I would put it in the. In the vein of, like, Elvis Costello or something, where it's like there can be pretty cutting lyrics along with something that you just want to bop your head to. You know, if this record has gone even farther into that territory where there's some songs that are just all about hope and some songs that are all about how hopeless it seems that might be more reflective of being a father than it is of COVID I think having kids has been the most. I have twins, and they're six years old, about to be seven. And it opens you up to the emotional world again. Of course, we've all heard this a million times from parents. But what I guess I wasn't expecting was not just that it's sort of when you feel wonder, you're feeling it through their eyes, but that new wings of old emotions open up like the dream you have when you are back in your old childhood home. But then suddenly there's a door. And behind that door, there's a whole new wing, a warehouse or a ballroom, you know, and there's something. And you just sort of find yourself like, what is this? Right. Well, that feeling of love, which I think I have known my whole life. I. Suddenly, there's a whole new wing of love that has opened up, and it's familiar, but surprising and new all the same. And it makes the stakes of the world so much higher that not just kind of like, what world are we leaving to our kids? But just. You feel how abject horror can be when the world isn't safe and how unbelievably warm and cozy and assuring it can be when the right song is on. You know, it's like everything. My kids at this age are not bounded by their upper brains. You know, there's no guardrails on their emotions. They're swinging from, you know, from the world's greatest highs to the world's lowest lows, all in the space of 10 minutes. And it really opens you back up.
- [33:23]
Interviewer
How excited, as an artist, are you to take the work from and the adjacent possible out on the road?
- [33:30]
Damian Kulash
Oh, man, I can't wait. It's been a long time. We played a few shows last summer, and it was a little taste of how fun it will be to go back out. We're playing because of our families. We're not doing 13 months in a row, but we are doing these short runs to hit. We're doing one run in the Midwest and one run on the east coast and one run on the west coast, and we'll keep doing that for a while, so till we get everywhere. And it is so, so fun. We've started rehearsals and stuff, and it is just such a joy to be playing these songs in a physical way, to really, like, have it in our hands again.
- [34:10]
Interviewer
I wanted to ask you also about the Sandbox project. Can you talk about that?
- [34:15]
Damian Kulash
Sure. Well, we've, you know, we, of course, are known for our videos, and with the release of the new album, we have a new video for the song Love, which is. Was shot in a train station in Budapest and is the most ambitious and exciting video I think we've ever made. And I'm so, so curious to see how it lands in the world. And the videos have this interesting life, which we never expected going into this, which is that we make them as sort of selfishly as we make any of our art projects, which is this the thing that we want to see? It's the thing that we want to make. Right. It's. It's it's the, the thrill of chasing an idea that's in our brains. But we put them out into the world and the weirdest thing started coming back, which is that, you know, for years it was the. The person backstage would, would be like, you know, one of the other bands playing the show would be like, hey man, I. I love this. Some of them, you know, like, I love that thing you made with, with such and such. And it started being more and more, hey man, I learned about you from my physics teacher, or hey man, my kid's first grade teacher was showing your video in class the other day, and it kept on being teacher, teacher, teacher, teacher. And we realized that our videos have this other life, teaching physics and math and art and resilience to young kids because teachers struggle to take those incredible concepts and put them into something as thrilling and playful as a music video. Right? And we realized that if there are good humans out there taking this selfish stuff we have made and making the world a better place with it, the least we can do is support them. So we've started making behind the scenes videos and instructional videos that go along with the music videos that teachers can use in their classrooms. So it's. The website is okgo sandbox.org and it's all free to use. And it's just classroom challenges and instructional videos and things that are mapped to curricula in ways that middle school teachers will understand. We do that with the help of a group called the Playful Learning Lab at the University of St. Thomas in Twin Cities. And it has been a really, really gratifying project. It's just incredible to watch these things take on a life of their own and do something good in the world that we didn't even plan them to do.
- [36:57]
Interviewer
Damien, such an honor to speak with you. Congrats on the adjacent possible and the tour and thanks for all the inspiration, man. Really enjoyed it.
- [37:07]
Damian Kulash
Oh, thank you. And really appreciate your time and your patience with my long and winding answers.
- [37:11]
Interviewer
Awesome answers. Thank you.
- [37:14]
Buzz Knight
Thanks for listening to this episode of the Taking a Walk podcast. Share this and other episodes with your friends and follow us so you never miss an episode. Taking a Walk is available on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, and wherever you get your podcast.
- [38:06]
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- [39:08]
Margie Murphy
Young women found themselves in an AI fueled nightmare.
- [39:12]
Damian Kulash
Someone was posting photos. It was just me naked. Well, not me, but me with someone else's body parts.
- [39:19]
Margie Murphy
This is Levittown, a new podcast from iHeart podcasts Bloomberg and Kaleidoscope about the rise of deepfake pornography and the battle to stop it. Listen to Levittown on Bloomberg's Big Take podcast. Find it on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.