Looking Out My Window and The Strike

The following is a Terry Wise production. Hey everybody, welcome back to another episode of the podcast. Welcome to Wie's Thoughts. I am so glad you decided to tune in today for this episode of the show. It'll be time well spent as we gather around the virtual campfire and for more episodes of wife Thoughts, make sure you visit my website, Wie thoughts dot com. Just make sure you spell my name right Wyce white Slots dot com. And if you want to check out my YouTube channel, it's Wie Thoughts on YouTube. You can tweet at me on Twitter or as it is better known now as X. Just look for at Terry Weiss on Twitter or X or whatever you prefer to call it nowadays. Well let's get into the podcast showy. By the way, if you want to email me, it's mail m ailmail at Wie thoughts dot com. All right on with today's show, So welcome, Welcome, Welcome, one and all, Welcome to another episode of Wie Thoughts. I am Terry Weiss, and I am I'm so glad you decided to join me today. Having some technical fun in the studio today. As I don't know, I think I got a bad down. I think I got a bad input on one of the boards here because I had to go into the alternate mic input. I don't here. I'm thinking it's the chord, it's the microphone. I'm just doing all this stuff. And I said, you know what, I'm gonna put it an input number two and we're gonna see what the heck happens. And lo and behold old, yes what, Yeah, it worked? So thankfully for that. So how are you? How are things moving along today for you? I hope well. I hope everyone is well. I hope your family's well. I hope all is good in your world. And so what do we want to do as we sit and gather around what I'd like to call the virtual campfire here on wife's thoughts? So what I want to talk about is I just got done. First. Let me start off with I just got done watching probably one of the most violent television shows I have ever seen in my life. And I know what you're thinking out there right away, thinking, oh my god, you watch the Sopranos. No, oh, did you watch what was that one with the Steven Spielberg The Brothers and Arms or whatever it was? No, really no okay television show now, and this was one that was on a cable network, mind you a cable network it was on and I watched its initial program quite a few years ago, and this was a spinoff series from said television series, and it was probably one of the most violent television series I've ever seen. I'm like, wow, this is They were running this on cable TV. I granted at ten o'clock at night was its normal airtime. I finished watching it on Hulu, but it was called Mayan's m Seed. It was the spinoff show if you were from Sons of Anarchy. Now. Sons of Anarchy was a pretty violent show in it back in its day, but it was a very good show. It was about a motorcycle club in California and the ins and outs. It was almost like a modern day kind of Sopranos type of thing, and it had some violence in it and some wow moments. You know. However, took it to a whole another level. I mean the last I was watching the last season. It went through five seasons and it is now done, it has ended, and the last season, I mean, they just kept ramping up the violence and sometimes I don't know, if they did it for violence sake or the shock factor, because the story just started kind of spinning off in odd directions, at least to me. I don't know if any of you've watched Mayans, or you know, watched The Sons of Anarchy and then watched Mayans, but it was at some point the entertainment factor left for me and I was like, okay, this is kind of getting to be like I just at that point, I guess I was vested in it and I wanted to just finish it out and say, Okay, I completed watching this, so let's see how they're going to end the series and let's go from there. And so that's what I did, as I ended up watching the end of Mayans, and boy, i'll tell you the last the last few episodes, like four or five episodes, it was like, holy crap, man, I couldn't believe that they It was just I mean, blood and gore and just crazy stuff. And I don't know, maybe maybe I'm getting softer in my old age. I don't know, But if you've watched Mayans, or if you watch The Suns or Anika, or if you have comments about maybe the violence that we're being exposed to on the television nowadays. You know, leave a comment down in the comments section at the website at wastelots dot com under this episode I'll put it. I'll see if about putting a reference to the link for it, and I believe it's on Hulu now that you can watch all the seasons of it if you have Hulu. But wow, wowie wow wow? Was that was that ever violent? Holy moly, guacamole. Man? It was just something else, but that being sad. However, that being sad, I finished it, and uh, you know, another another one under my belt. I did some light binge watching on that one. Nothing too crazy or out of the ordinary. But anyway, how are you? I think I've asked that a half dozen times. I hope you're good. What else is going on? Well, summer is in full swing, so that's a nice thing. We are really into the throwers of summer at this point, and I hope you're enjoying your summer. There's a lot of talk on the national news and other places about the unprecedented heat. I don't know if I can agree with that statement. I've been through heat waves folks here in the Northeastern United States. I remember back in the early to mid nineties where you know, New York Way in the continental United States, where we had heat where it was ninety five ninety six during the day and it felt like over one hundred for like ten to twelve days and beyond and mind you, in the evening when it was supposed to, you know, be cooler, it didn't get down below like eighty degrees eighty eighty one, eighty two degrees at night with if you are lucky, a light breeze. There was really nobody running around that the sky was falling in the world was ending. And here I must digress. We've had a few hot days. But the other day here up in the New York State way, a few days ago before I recorded this episode of the podcast of Wife Thoughts, they sent out an alert from our governor, you know, advising us to cut down on our usage for power during the day. And this is coming from a state that wants to go all electric. Okay, they want to go all electric in the state, which I find really amusing. And you can't even handle what's going on now. And this was like for a day, I mean, this wasn't even like we were having multiple days of high heat. This was one day it was going to be like eighty nine I think, with a heat indecks into the nineties. And it was dropping that evening right down to like seventy two or seventy three degrees. And I just sat there and I literally shook my head when I got that alert and said, really, you want to you know, procure or restrict people's energy use, and you want to meanwhile transfer this whole state to electric in the next five years, you know, this big political push. I just had to sit back and literally shake my head and laugh and chuckle and told my wife, I get a load of this, get a little this though, And she had some words which I won't repeat. I'm trying to be a kindler, gentler, terry wife on the podcast. She had some words I won't repeat. But you know, all the hooplop folks at summer all right in the in the northern hemisphere, it's gonna get hot, it's gonna get warm. I don't know, do you feel that we And when I say we, I'm being general of course, as a society of really we're not as tough as we used to be. I mean, our settlers I mean, I was watching. If you have cable, which most people do or some type of access to cable or streaming, there's a channel called Story Television. It used to be, I believe, the old History channel Biography or History two, and then it went to the Biography Channel, and I believe now it's been rebranded quite a little while back as the Story or Story TV, Story TV, Story Channel, Story TV something like that. And I was watching that day as a matter of fact, when this actual alert came out about don't use all this energy. Oh my goodness, you know. And they were doing a show called Year by Year. It's like a half hour thing where they take a year in history of the world, and it was like nineteen thirty eight. It happened to be nineteen thirty eight, and they were talking about the incredible heat wave throughout the country and they showed, you know, people out in Nebraska, we're sleeping outside of their complexes and buildings intense because of the intense heat that has been going on for the past seven days, with temperatures in the nineties, well into the nineties and lower ring into the eighties at night. And I'm and that's another you know, folks, my opinion. I'm not a scientist. I don't have any I probably don't have well, I don't have any you know, scientific papers to back this up. I'm just gonna give you just something based on my own life experience. When I was growing up, even as a youngster. All right, we had heat waves, we had and my folks didn't have air conditioning early on, okay, and we had heat waves and things where we were sweating, sweating pounds off. All right, I must have lost, you know, pounds by the week. Back when I was a youngster, you know, seven, eight, nine, ten years old. You'd put you know, you'd draw the curtains during the day to keep the heat out for the greenhouse effect, and at night you would open up those curtains, put a fan in the window, window fan. That's why they sold these things called box fans or window fans. You would put them in your window and you would, you know, pull in that cool air in the evening to cool you down. You know. The ceiling fans weren't that event. And homes at the time, they were more of a real luxury before they became mainstreaming. A lot of homes and you would use those window fans to push air around and such, and people would go into the sprinkler and squirt themselves with the hose and all that kind of stuff, you know, pools and go to the beach when I was growing up to cool down, you know, go to places that had air conditioning, like certain stores back in the day, and a lot of stores didn't even have air conditioning back in the day, if my memory serves me right. So it's something that you know, this is nothing new, folks. I mean, I don't know, you know, there's I think there's maybe a lot of hoop love being much ado about nothing, as they say. And I know some of you out there are probably shaking your head right now saying, well, Terry, there's scientific fact that the Earth is warming, but I would digress that the earth also cools too. I mean, you can go over and take a look at that thing called the Grand Canyon and you'll see layers of the I don't know what type of rocket is, bedrock, sediment, rock, whatever, but as the canyon goes down, you can see you know, different times of when the Earth was hot and cold. I have heard that there is a correlation between this space between the layers of rock. Same thing with trees. The rings on a tree, how you know damp or moist that year or decade was. You can do that by you know, older trees that have fallen and you you know, you slice them, you know, in half and look at the core of the tree itself too. You can tell a lot about the environment that that tree experienced going on, you know, decades and what have you. And I just I don't know, maybe it's just me. There seemed to be quite a few people that agree with me that there's just not enough evidence at this point to run around that the sky is falling. And I know again some of you are out there going to say, hey, Terry, look at the intensity of these storms. They had blizzards back for hundreds of years they've had I mean, there was a great dust storm that went across the United States back I believe in either eighteen hundreds or late eighteen hundreds early early nineteen hundreds, a great dust storm that swept a cloud that started west and went east and you know, pretty much darkened the country. Many many people lost their lives and animals as well, and great damage and cause of loss of life. It wasn't the end of the world. There's been earthquakes, there's been tidal waves, there's been droughts, there's been great flooding and things like that. I mean, it's just the part. It's just part of life, my friends, and the natural ebb and flow of things and what we're living through. I've experienced times when we've had rainy seasons in the summer, and I've experienced time where it's been drier than anything. I can recall, you know, the current home we're living in now, the second or third year we moved in here. You know, we're in a well system outre I live, and it was dry, and a lot of people around, you know around that lived around us were running out of water, actually having to pay to have water brought in by the you know, the tanker fall to them so they could live. Fortunately, me and a couple of my neighbors were on a natural spring set where we've got all kinds of springs feeding into our system, and so we were fortunate, you know, where we never ran out of water. I mean, we didn't go crazy and abuse it. We conserved. We were more mindful of our water consumption during that time. But we went almost a couple of months or so, a couple three months where there was literally hardly any rain at all at all, and it was you know, it was in the news, but it wasn't chicken little it's the end of days in you know, the life is ending on this planet kind of news. I just think, as we belong here, we're supposed to be more sophisticated, we're supposed to be more aware, we're supposed to be more informed, But are we really. I mean, I hate to use the term fake news, but golly whizz, folks, galy whiz. How many people to use that term gully whiz? I mean, let's face it, folks, I mean, there's a lot of scare tactics going on out there in the news media. It's been proven again and again and again that you can look up and see a lot of false narratives, a lot of false news on all sides, all sides. Okay, I guess you just have to take your news, don't take it for granted. Don't just look at it say oh yeah, that's the way it is. You gotta, I guess, be more informed now more than ever. And one would think in this day and age, with all the technology, all the resources all the I mean, we can see around the world, We can talk to someone around the world in a namosecond, we can look at cameras from our comfort of our own homes from around the world, and we can look at cameras and outer space. You know, all this information is available to the people in ways that throughout human history was never ever available before. And yet here we are. It seems like we're less informed, a less informed population than ever. Some might argue, I don't know, whatever your opinion. If you get opinion on it, hey tweet at me on Twitter at Terry Weiss, or leave a comment on the Facebook page under the show, or actually go to my website Weiss thoughts dot com and you can do that and leave a comment under the comments section of this episode of the podcast. You're more than welcome to do that, obviously. I welcome to any and all opinions and variances on the topic of discussion here today. But I guess I've rambled on along about enough about that. Another big thing going on in the news. Oh my gosh, looks like the Emmy Awards is going to be postponed if it even happens at all this year. That's supposed to be coming up in September, but we've got the ongoing writers strike in Hollywood and now an actor's strike. They have joined forces and the writers strike. I think it's with that, if I'm understanding correctly from what I've read, is about pay um, you know, back pay or the way their their pay structure is set up currently that they feel they're not being fairly compensated. And as far as the actors joining in with them, I believe the actor's main concern the SAG SAG SAgs Screen Actors Guild, what their main concern is is the emergence of AI, artificial intelligence, which seems to be rapidly, rapidly accelerating at an exponential level here where their likenesses and or voices are being used in ways that they don't give permission to. Now, as far as the actors go in their their problem with AI, I understand where they're coming from. However, if I may play devil's advocate it for a moment, A lot of people say, you kind of sell your soul to the devil in Hollywood to make it, And you know anyone who's made it in the business, you hear I mean, just read watch things online. You've heard a lot of horror stories of things that some of these actors and actresses had to do to get you know, to get um, you know, promoted in Hollywood and do things you know from the casting couch. And you know, I say more about that and other things, so, you know, and the shady deals and the agents taking them for money and stealing their money, and even family members of actors and actresses stealing their money when they were young actors. And you know, we're maybe more naive. So there's that signing, bad deals and things of that nature. It's all over the entertainment industry, just not for actors as well. But with the emergence of this AI or artificial intelligence, which is basically computer algorithms that you know, technologically we have advanced so far now where you can it's getting pretty good where you can't tell a real voice from from a real human voice from a computer generated one. And James Cameron terminator, you know, the terminator guy Skynet need I say more, said he'd warned us about this stuff back in the eighties. Man, And my scary thought is, wow, what if I hope our government does not turn this stuff over to the military, because you know what, we might have a Skynet situation where an artificial intelligence becomes self aware and decides, you know what, the human race is a scourge. God help us if that ever happens, because we're in trouble because they can screw up our lives in so many ways and slaughter millions, you know, just like James Cameron's sci fi fantasy film and film series with Arnold Schwartzenegger and Linda Hamilton and the like portrayed, and that that is scary and as in and of itself. But I understand where the actors are coming from though, because you know, if you, let's say you go to work for an employer, I'm just going to try and lay it out in Layman's term. You go to work at let's say, I don't know a burger King. I'll just pick something national here in the United States and something that's probably known worldwide if you're listening around the world. If you go to work as a cashier at burger King and they say, well, you might have to, you know, work the frying machine, and you might have to work the register besides working the register, and you might have to clean tables and mop the floors and maybe clean the bathrooms. And he's like, okay, that's my job duties. But then all of a sudden, you're driving down the street and you see your face on a billboard, standing at the you know, checking someone out, or standing at the French fry machine, and your likeness is being used. And you didn't give permission for that. You didn't sign anything. You weren't informed. Okay, you weren't given due diligence and being informed. Hey, you know you come to work here, we may use your likeness. You didn't sign any kind of release, which is typically required legally. You have to, you know, if you're gonna if someone's gonna use your likeness, your voice would have you. I've done that being a voiceover artist. I've had to sign a release when I've done projects for certain businesses that says, hey, we can use your voice. You know, because you did this, you know e learning project or training project for us, that you're giving up all rights. You know, when you can't come back after us twenty years from now and say, hey, you're using my voice for that training session on how to mop a floor on the second level, or what you're paid for this. You know, you're given whatever compensation for this, You're up and out, okay, And so you have to know and be given due consent. You have to give consent, and you have to be duly informed of what your rights may or may not be. And if there's every a question of that, my friends, please consultant a legal person, you know, an attorney. You know, if you ever have a question and not anything in life as far as legalities go, whether from an employer or what have you, I employ you definitely seek seek legal counsel. I know people say lawyers, I hate lawyers of the earth. That's what they're there for, That's what they went to school for. Granted, some of them are not the most ethical people, as we have found out throughout history. However, that's what they are there for, and that's what they are there to help with, is the simple fact of you know, hey, is this legal? Can they do this to me? Am I getting you know screwed over here? Always canst you know, reach out to the advice of counsel. I would say if there's any doubt on something like that. But that's what the Hollywood actors from my takeaway and information is what they're primarily sorry about. That if you heard that squeal on the mic, like I said, we're having some board issues. My takeaway from that is is that's what they're mainly ticked off about, is that their likenesses as far as visually and or audibly, are being used in ways that they never consented to. So I certainly can understand their dismay and them being disgruntled. As far as the Hollywood writers, you know, they just want, you know, time to renegotiate a contract. And you know, from what I've am led to understand the Hollywood writers, I mean that that's a tough job. I mean there's some pressure there, you know. And granted, I know you'll say, well, they wanted to go into that former work, Terry, just like you wanted to go into voiceover or sales or this one wanted to you know, become a I don't know, a nurse or whatever. You've got to take the ups and downs and the challenges that come along with it. I get that, Granted, I understand all that wholeheartedly. However, what I'm stating is is that if you knew from the onset what the parameters were, and if new technology that comes along, whether there should be more full disclosure and a renegotiating of how, okay, how your likenesses or whatever is going to be used and you should have some say in that conversation moving forward. So I am understand that the writers and the actors, I get it, and I side with them on this. Granted, Hollywood hasn't been producing really much quality content lately. We have to go to more independent sources, at least from what I've seen, because a lot of the stuff coming out of Hollywood is so computer generated anyway, with the graphics, you know what I mean. There's these some of these action movies lately, Let's face it, come on, they are so far out there. But I guess in another breath that you can say, hey, this is what we go to the movies for. Is to escape, is to fantasize, is to take that trip away from reality, forget about the daily struggle and humdrum life to life trouble. So I get it. I get what they're saying with regards to that. But hopefully they'll get that resolve soon because that's already starting to affect some things going down the road. And who knows wh might be seeing more independent creators prop up this is Hey, if you're an independent creator out there and not in the Screen Actors Guild or the Writer's Guild, maybe this I mean and they would call those people scabs because they're crossing over, you know, a dispute between labor dispute. But maybe that's leaves an opening for some of the less known people out here, or the people that not in the forefront right now, to maybe be pushed forward and bring up some content that we might not have sought out in the past. Who knows. There's there's always some type of fallout when when something like this happens. So hopefully they'll get that all resolved soon and figure all that stuff out. I'm hoping at least, but anyway, we'll see what happens. I suppose. Thanks for spending some time with me today on Why's Thought. I'm glad you were here. I hope this time was well spent for you as well as it was for me. I enjoyed myself. I hope you did as well. And remember, if you have any feedback, you can reach out and email me at mail m Ai l Mail at Weiss thoughts dot com. Don't forget to check out my website Terryweiss dot com, wyse terrywise dot com. If you need any kind of voiceover work or voice acting work, whether it's your audiobook, your podcast, you want to create some stingers, intros, outros, what have you. If your organization needs some e learning done, or if you're in a business and want to have some commercial audio done, I'm there for you. Check out the YouTube channel at wise Thoughts on YouTube and on Facebook dot com backslash wise Thoughts as well. Until next time, my friend, Like I always say, to see a change in the world, you have to be the change in the world you want to see. It all starts with you verse and looking back at you in the mirror every morning. Be kind to yourself, be kind to others, be kind to animals. And until next time, take care,