The Artful Infiltration - Unlocking the Gates of the Art World

In this episode of "There Is No_System," host Brian Behm takes you on an adventurous journey through the art world, likening it to a masterfully planned heist. As an art director, designer, and musician from Austin, Texas, Brian delves into the challenges artists face when breaking into their desired scenes. He addresses the roadblocks that might be holding you back, whether they're personal doubts, community dynamics, or larger-than-life challenges (Godzilla, anyone?).

Brian explores the concept of artistic gatekeeping and the irony of punk-rock capitalism, highlighting the sometimes contradictory nature of anti-establishment movements. He emphasizes the importance of recognizing and combating gatekeeping, both externally and within our own ideological tribes.

The episode further delves into the intricacies of navigating the art world with a heist-like strategy. Brian discusses assembling a diverse "crew" of artists, curators, and other key players, each bringing unique skills to the table. He shares personal anecdotes from his experiences in Austin's film scene, his volunteer work at SXSW, and his journey to his current role at Emergent Order, illustrating how strategic networking and skill utilization can lead to success.

Brian encourages listeners to embrace diversity in artistic voices and reject monolithic views of art. He concludes with the "Gatekeeper Challenge," inviting the community to engage with and reflect on their role in artistic gatekeeping.

Music From This Episode
Introductions - No_System
The Greatest Heist - AGSoundtrax
Chicago, IL - David Holmes / Oceans 11 Score
Texas Skies - Scorewizards
Safe Ride Home Underscore - Adi Goldstein
Hacker - NikiNPhaser
Swamp Fever - John Cameron
Cinematic Ambient Guitar Indie - music2noise
Inspiring Ambient Cinematic Guitars - music2noise
Dramatic Modern Underscore - BCrutchfield
Numb Instrumental - Beachtiger

Social Networks and Getting a Job: Mark Granovetter 
https://youtu.be/g3bBajcR5fE?si=bLcZYFLXLxY0EAbJ

The Anatomy of a Heist - Charles Kunken
https://www.charleskunken.com/blog/the-anatomy-of-a-heist-the-16-conventions-part-1-of-3

Sneakers - https://www.imdb.com/title/tt0105435/?ref_=fn_al_tt_1

Micmacs - https://www.imdb.com/title/tt1149361/?ref_=fn_al_tt_1

My Sucky Teen Romance - https://www.imdb.com/title/tt1707821/?ref_=fn_al_tt_1

My Sucky Teen Romance SXSW Q&A - https://youtu.be/VIImmmWArQA?si=6vQAeR30rdksoMVn

Blue Like Jazz - https://www.imdb.com/title/tt1758575/?ref_=fn_al_tt_1

A Million Miles in a Thousand Years - https://www.amazon.com/Million-Miles-Thousand-Years-Learned/dp/1400202981

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Transcript

Fifties Announcer: 0:00

There is no system is brought to you by no system. Yes, we know that sounds weird and redundant, but you are just going to have to go with us on this. Stay tuned for a special message from this sponsor later on in the episode. Maybe I'll even hum. You like humming, right? Hmm ? No system your favorite or at least one of your favorite end-cap clothing brands see beneath the surface and now with no further fanfare, there is no system. Enjoy

Brian Behm: 0:32

What's standing in the way of your artistic journey. Remember, I I use artist in the broadest sense. Is it personal doubt, the challenging scene you're trying to break into or let's say a Godzilla sized obstacle? If it's really Godzilla, well that's a valid excuse, but on the other hand, Welcome back fellow adventures, the vast landscape that we call creativity. My name's Brian Beam and there is no system. I'm an art director, designer and musician in the media space in Austin, Texas. I'm also currently the art director at Emergent Order Foundation. Curious about no system and the clothing and other things we create. Dive into nosy knows.com to discover more. Still getting my rhythm back with the podcast and video series and still getting my voice back after being sick this week, but still contemplating ideas for a Patreon. Any suggestions or thoughts? Drop me a line at nosis, at nosis knows.com . In the last episode, we made a twist on intersectionality and looked at it through a Venn diagram of what makes us unique. We also talked about epistemic humility. The idea that we fully acknowledge we could be persuaded to change our ideas if we were given better information. One gives us prism to see ourselves and others and their uniqueness and the other provides us with a check to be able to correct our prism. I think that a more significant sense of who we are will be the key to navigating the gates, but I don't wanna spoil the ending.

The Voice of God: 2:09

There was no system. There is no system, no system, no system. Episode 10, the artful infiltration, cracking the code of creative gatekeeping. To know more about no system, visit noy knows.com .

Brian Behm: 2:38

Today I want to treat navigating the gatekeepers in a scene like a heist. I love heist movies. I don't know if it's the planning, seeing people have to figure out how to work together or just watching it, how it plays out, but I love seeing the puzzle come together.

Fifties Announcer: 2:56

You're

Brian Behm: 2:56

Looking for recommendations. Two of my favorites are the 1992 film sneakers and the 2009 film M Max . Max is a fantasy, revenge heist comedy by the director of Amali Jean Pire Jue . It's lovely and weird like all good Jue films are, but the film that I mainly want to talk about is sneakers written directed by Phil Alden Robinson. If you know his name for anything, it's probably Field of Dreams. It's a post-Cold war, spy oriented heist film . And as much as I like Field of Dreams sneakers is a much better movie. It's still saved for one thing they couldn't even contemplate at the time. Holds up haste movies often focus on large ensembles. Think about the team that Stephen Soderberg put together for Oceans 11 and the sneakers Ensemble is fantastic. Robert Redford, Sidney Poitier, Dan Aykroyd River, Phoenix, Ben Kingsley, James Earl Jones, Donald Logue. It's completely stacked. It's also got a film score that I've probably listened to more than any others. It's not really available save for YouTube, but it's lovely and it's worth a listen. It's also stay tuned till the end for a special challenge. It's called the Gatekeeper Challenge and it's all about making your own personal heist mission in the creative world. So art and heist, not art heist . So though they're a slew of those films too, let's get started. Section

The Voice of God: 4:26

One, identifying the target.

Brian Behm: 4:29

I'm not gonna tell you to stop the podcast and read them, but I wanna give a big shout out to Charles Kan and his three-part Anatomy of a Heist blog series. It'll be linked in the show notes. As much as I love heist films, reading his thoughts on what qualifies a film as a heist goal was really beneficial. Think of your artistic journey as the plot of a heist movie. What's the prized possession you're after? Is it a gallery showing a published novel or maybe your first album release? You can't have a heist movie without having a singular goal, something they're trying to steal and one of the first beats in the film has to be what the object is gonna be. There might be multiple steps in the process that feel like mini goals , but the primary goal, for example, is to get away with stealing the crown jewels. In the 1999 remake of the Thomas Ground affair, kan noticed the first act opens with Pierce Brosnan eating breakfast in front of the Monet He'll steal Later on in the movie. One of my life heists was using connections to offer my VFX help on a film adaptation of a book called Blue like Jazz. I've always had a philosophy that if I don't have money to invest into something that I care about, I could try to invest my time and, and I really wanted to invest my time into that adaptation. There's stories to be told about that project, but I want to take a look at something. Donald Miller, the author of Blue Leg Jazz, wrote about turning his abstract journal into a narrative with an actual story arc in his book, A million Miles in a thousand years. Donald Miller writes that a movie is one tiny glimpse into a timeline. There's a distinct beginning and end. There's an entry point to the story. For us, if we're looking at this through a heist movie, our entry point is where we're trying to go and at least in terms of story, it's gotta have an ending. That means that our goal, whichever one we're trying to come up with, can't be so nebulous that it's something that encompasses our entire career. We're looking at this as a single project, our current mission and like in any good story, your artistic journey has chapters. What chapter is it that you're writing right now? What's the goal of the chapter? What's going on in your life right now where you can clearly see something that you wanna accomplish? Maybe take a minute to pause and think about your own goals and as we dig through the rest of the heist, it'll give you a way to picture what you're trying to steal. We're also gonna be talking about South by Southwest multiple times. This episode, it's a big festival here in Austin every year, and the beginning and end of my blue like jazz heist would be that the film premiered at South by Southwest. It'd be my second film to be screened at our big historical theater in town. Afterward, I'd be at dinner with the cast and crew including Donald Miller, a beginning and an end. I really wanted to work on blue like jazz, and then I made it to the culmination of that project in a heist movie. That dinner would be the equivalent of driving or sailing off into the sunset. And just like my journey with Bluelike Jazz, think about your own artistic heist. What's your starting point and what does driving off into the sunset look like for you?

The Voice of God: 7:50

Section two, next stop. Austin, Texas,

Brian Behm: 7:53

Almost 15 years ago, a few days before I turned 31, my wife and I moved to Austin. We started over for a second time. We both grew up in the suburbs of St . Paul and moved to Colorado for work after we got married. And when we got to Texas, we knew a handful of people, but no one in the film community that we wanted to be a part of. I remember getting together with our local friends for dinner that first year and wondering what 12 months of living in Texas would do to my birthday party the next year. What was it gonna be like and who would we know? My primary goal was to figure out how to become a part of the film community here. That was my heist. We'd been watching everything happening in Austin from a distance, mostly through the eyes of the film blog. Ain't it cool news? We'd met Harry Knowles who ran Ain't It Cool a couple of times, but but it really felt like between what Robert Rodriguez and Richard Linkletter were doing, what Anna Kool was doing and what the Alamo Draft House was putting on, that there was something happening in Austin that we needed to be a part of, even though we'd visit when we could, it became crystal clear that we were gonna continue to have regrets if we didn't try to become a part of the community that we'd come to admire from a distance in sneakers. There's a flashback sequence when we discover the inciting event that sent Robert Redford's character on the run from the government. It's an essential beat in the movie because it introduces us to, spoiler alert Ben Kingsley's antagonist. For me, the flashback would be spending time with Harry and his wife Patricia at a screening of North by Northwest at Mount Rushmore. They were on their honeymoon and following the Alamo Drafthouse rolling roadshow around the country, we'd driven up from Colorado because come on, it's north by Northwest at Mount Rushmore. If you haven't seen it, go watch the film. Not now, but watch it. One of our ways of staying connected to this Austin community we're falling in love with was to do whatever we could to get a dose of Austin film culture that year. The closest this touring movie screening was gonna get to Colorado was South Dakota. We were feeling the FOMO of not having driven to see the Alamo screen close encounters of the third kind at Devil's Tower. So we made the several hour trek from Colorado just as we were drawn to the Austin film scene. Can you think about where you're feeling the magnetic pole in your artistic journey? How are you connecting with your community or your field of interest even before you arrive that night? There were only about 20 people who stayed for the film. Honestly, that was one of the reasons for traveling in a way. It was starting to do reconnaissance and build connections that we could work on more later. We could get higher quality time with people that we wanted to know than we would if we were amongst a bigger crowd in Austin proper. If you're a designer and there's a designer that you want to know that will be at a conference, think about attending. There's something about meeting someone in person that will always go beyond meeting them via email or social media. The film that evening was one of the most extraordinary private screenings I've ever attended. I still look back on it with fond memories. Afterward we went down to Keystone and hung out with the crew who were traveling with the draft house . We talked all evening about what it would be like to move to Texas. You know, your goal is gonna be different than what my goal was, but are there similar moments where you get closer to the thing you want in your life, even if you're not quite there yet? If you're writing a book, do you have author friends who are also writing? Breaking into a new scene is about more than just showing up. It's about understanding the dynamics, the people, and finding your unique entry point. Remember, it's not just about being there, it's about being strategic and intentional. Now let's flash forward. We've moved to get closer to this community we love, but how are we gonna get in? We were gonna have to stake out the joint, do more reconnaissance, and that's more than just observing. It's about understanding and finding our place in this new world.

The Voice of God: 12:15

Section three, doing our recon .

Brian Behm: 12:18

Going back to sneakers. Our friends have stolen what they were asked to steal, but they get double crossed and there's a murder and our hero gets kidnapped. Bishop Robert Redford's character wakes up in a car truck , he can hear sounds outside the vehicle he is stuck in, and when they arrive at his destination, Bishop fading in and outta consciousness, discovered that he's being framed by the old friend. He abandoned now the fall guy, he's knocked out again and dumped on the street where he'd been taken. Now the team has to plan the real heist or go to prison for something they didn't do. Whew . Okay, that's a long-winded way of getting to one of my favorite scenes in the movie. David Strahan, who plays a blind hacker named Whistler, asked Bishop about the sounds he heard. I'll let scene play out. He

Martin Bishop - Sneakers: 13:07

Threw me in a trunk, drove around in circles. It could be a hundred miles away. It could be next door, it could be underground, it could be in a sky, rise , forget it.

Whistler - Sneakers: 13:13

Bish. What did it sound like?

Martin Bishop - Sneakers: 13:15

What

Whistler - Sneakers: 13:16

The road when you were in the trunk, what ? What did the road sound like?

Martin Bishop - Sneakers: 13:21

Oh , I don't highway a regular highway.

Whistler - Sneakers: 13:24

Well, did you go over any speed bumps? No gravel. Uh , how about a bridge?

Martin Bishop - Sneakers: 13:32

Bridge? Yeah. Four bridges in the Bay area.

Whistler - Sneakers: 13:36

Was the Golden Gate fogged in last night?

Martin Bishop - Sneakers: 13:39

Yes.

Whistler - Sneakers: 13:40

Did you hear a fog horn ?

Martin Bishop - Sneakers: 13:43

No. Scratch the golden gate that leaves three.

Whistler - Sneakers: 13:49

What did it sound like? Did you go through a tunnel in the middle?

Martin Bishop - Sneakers: 13:52

I'm not, no. Scratch the bay. Well that leaves two San Mateo and Dunbarton.

Whistler - Sneakers: 14:02

What did it sound like?

Martin Bishop - Sneakers: 14:07

Lower. Lower . There was a recurring sound

Speaker 6: 14:22

Like

Whistler - Sneakers: 14:23

Seams in the

Speaker 6: 14:24

Concrete

Martin Bishop - Sneakers: 14:34

But further apart.

Speaker 6: 14:40

Yeah,

Brian Behm: 14:45

So they didn't know where to go and they navigated back to where they needed to go by using the unique skills they had available. Whistler saw the world differently because he was blind. That meant that he knew the sonic questions to ask Bishop that could lead them in the right direction. They knew where he had left from, so there were only a small number of options to get them headed down their path. For me, I'm a researcher, call it my A DHD superpower, but I will rabbit hole into something with the best of anyone. I didn't know how to break into the film community here, but I knew that if I were gonna figure it out, I needed a map or a schematic. If you're a pirate

Pirate: 15:27

Pirate's life for me,

Brian Behm: 15:29

You need a treasure map and if you're a bank thief, you might need the building plans . For me, I needed a social map of the community. In the clip, Whistler had access to noise generators and sequencers that let him find the sonic signature of the bridge. Bishop had crossed the tool that I had available was Twitter or X . Still can't get used to that. Side note, I do wanna admit that there's an aspect to this next story that involves something adjacent to social engineering and information security. Social engineering involves psychologically manipulating individuals into performing specific actions or revealing confidential information. In effective social engineering, the target often doesn't realize they've been manipulated. Unlike a straightforward con, social engineering is typically one of the first steps in a larger, more complex scheme. It's essentially about influencing and tricking people into making decisions that might not necessarily line with their best interests. It's important to clarify that my use of Twitter for networking within the film community was ethically grounded. I wasn't getting anyone to share anything, I was just using the information that was already publicly available and then carefully listening, I just wanted to connect and engage with people in the industry and learning about people ahead of time allowed me to go in with as much knowledge as I could gather. And for me, I knew that it would be mutually beneficial. I was a designer, it was sort of smart and sort of funny, and I thought there were things I could offer them that would make their life richer. They weren't getting robbed, they were getting brined . I guess instead of deception, they were encountering genuine engagement. Getting Bryant meant forming a real connection based on shared interests and potential collaboration. It was sort of like I was my own operator. Like Batman has Alfred talking to his ear. I had myself telling me about the upcoming mission specifics. So let's break down what I had available. Just like we were plotting our heist, I knew who the primary bloggers from, ain't It Cool , were usefully. Their Twitter handles were the same as what their Ain't a cool writer name was and more than one of them lived in Austin. Felt like I didn't necessarily have the social standing to go directly to these bloggers. You know, I didn't always have the most self-confidence at the time they were public figures. Sure I could be friendly and say hi to movie , but was there an easier way? How could I earn the trust of higher status people? Well, for one, I could get to know the people they interact with, the proverbial security guard at the bank or the bank teller. The cool thing was that Twitter did that you could easily see who someone was replying to and determine whether that person was in Austin. And once you discovered that if they followed each other, you could start to piece together the people that they were interacting with. Work your way backward, looking at the Austin people they interact with, and you could start to piece together a map of a good chunk of the social relationships that revolved around the Alamo in a cool and the film community. So what's our takeaway here? It's all about the reconnaissance. Understanding the landscape you're entering and the people you're interacting with isn't just about observing, but truly understanding and finding your place. Something you wanna keep in mind is you're navigating your own scene. So once I had that social map, there's a much lower barrier to start following someone on Twitter versus friending them on something like Facebook. Facebook was personal. You generally needed a relationship to connect with someone there. Twitter was the wild west. As I started interacting when I was at a movie, I could talk to people afterward and say, oh hey, by the way, I'm Beam Creative on Twitter. It would gimme a slightly warmer connection to build from, particularly if we'd traded messages back and forth. Even better, when you met someone in person at a film event, it would make it richer when you'd engaged later on on Twitter. It wasn't an overnight tactic, but we quickly became familiar with the people we wanted to know and started to build acquaintanceships and friendships. If you're paying attention and reading between the lines, you can glean a lot about someone by how they interact online, and that's beyond them sharing their opinion on whatever movie happened to come out that week. Salespeople use a lot of the same tactics when they have a sales call. They'll put information about the meeting into a database so that the next time they meet that person, they can ask about someone's kids or if they brought up their love golf, how their golf game's been, makes people feel seen, wow, I should buy from this person because they're really paying attention to me. I was doing the same thing, but with social media, if you're a designer trying to get a job at a studio going in through the front door, it's not the best option. You're gonna be competing with 8,000 other people when a job posting gets listed. But a significant number of jobs don't even ever get listed. If you participate in user groups in your community like A IGA or Independently organized Meetup, you might run into someone who knows someone who works at the agency you wanna work at. You might be able to meet that person they know and if you befriend them, you might be the one they call on to help with some project. That guy who's the creative director at the agency, he's gonna be hard to meet, but the junior designer, they're gonna be flattered if you start asking them design questions and being interested in their story, it's gonna be your way in the door. Summarize all of this. It's key to understand the social landscape around you. It's not just about having the right tools like Twitter in my case, but also about using them strategically to build relationships and make meaningful connections. So now that we're in the door of the bank or film scene and have made our connections, we need to strategize about the approach and execute our plan after the break. Let's uncover how to make the most of our groundwork

Fifties Announcer: 21:31

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Fifties Announcer Humming: 22:56

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Fifties Announcer: 22:59

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Brian Behm: 23:08

So we've started to do our reconnaissance and we know who the people are around us. Now we need to get into the building, like we mentioned, can't walk in the front door, right? Well, not without some kind of disguise anyways, mission Impossible. Movies aren't technically heist movies, but there's a heist in the movie Ghost Protocol that I love. Even Hunt and Simon Pegs character use a projection screen to navigate a Russian hallway without being seen. It tracks the eyes of the garden as he moves, it animates the projection on the screen. So it seems like his perspective is the same. We need to figure out how to use the tools and special skills that we have. Those skills are gonna be our team. A heist isn't just about watching and waiting, it's about action and making careful, but bold moves in sneakers when they're stealing back the box. There's both motion sensors and heat sensors in the room where it's being kept. The team ends up having to hack the thermostat to raise the room to body temperature, and our thief very carefully moves at a speed that won't trigger the sensor. For us. Volunteering our skills and offering a helping hand is like finding the secret passage into the vault. It's about showing up, not just online, but in the flesh. And when you do, you bring your unique skills like a key card to those previously locked doors. A friend just yesterday was having issues with the color of her video on Instagram. That's something that I've run into and I had some semblance of an answer, so I passed it on. It generally just doesn't do any good to keep knowledge to yourself. One of the reasons our parents have pushed college has been because the diploma became a security key card into the door of an organization. You'd unlock a better life. Yeah, you'd also learn and become more well-rounded, but it's the diploma if you're self motivated and learning. Anyways, I'm a dropout. I've got an associate of arts and broadcasting and several years of college and all of those were spread out across multiple degrees because I had undiagnosed A DHD. And now that I look back on those years, a lot of things make a lot more sense. As important as a diploma could be. The network of people that you went through school with is potentially, actually not even potentially. It is more valuable after college. Everyone goes off in a different direction and leaves warm connections in many new areas. Having relocated before I completed my degree, I didn't have that. Have you heard that cliche? It's all about who you know. It's generalization, but the reality is that it's all about who you loosely know. The acquaintances end up being more beneficial. A 2022 Harvard Business Review article investigated whether strong connections, your family, your close friends or weak connections were more helpful in transitioning to a new job. It's not the art scene we're trying to break into, but it is a useful analogy. Their discovery. Testing the hypothesis of a 1973 paper on the strength of weak ties used LinkedIn connections on who you may know to study, whether the earlier papers hypothesis could be confirmed. It turns out that it could. Here's Mark Granovetter, the author of the original study, talking about his discoveries. A lot

Mark Granovetter: 26:41

Of times when people would tell me that they found their job through someone they knew, I would say to them, oh, so you found the job through a friend and over and over again, people would correct me and say, no, no, no, not a friend, just an acquaintance. Just an acquaintance. When you hang around with your best friends, they tend to know each other and you form a clique with them. Uh , and their best friends are kind of the same as your best friends. So if you want new information, if you want to be clued in on the latest styles or trends or information , uh, then you ought to go to your weak talks . Your seventh and eighth best friends, they're in different circles from your circle and they connect you to the , to those other circles in a , in a sense, they are your windows on the world.

Brian Behm: 27:22

My social networking map ended up being more valuable because a lot of the people that I was meeting were still acquaintances. They became one of the tools I could leverage with the other tools or members of the heist team. One of those loose connections was my friend Emily Hagens. Here's Harry Knowles. Introducing Emily at South by Southwest in 2011.

Speaker 10: 27:44

Oh man, this is Stan p . About a decade ago I got an email from Peter Jackson , uh, say that he had gotten a letter from a mother in Austin , uh, named Megan Hagens, who said that she had this little daughter that , uh, wanted to be a filmmaker and Peter said, Hey, look , uh, she's in your town , why don't you, you know, help her out. I hardly did anything, but the great thing that's happened was over the past 10 years has been my privilege to get to know and watch Emily Hagens sort of learn as a filmmaker . More than that, though, the thing that has been really extraordinary about living in Austin for the past decade, the the Hagens era , um, is does that , is that we, we've gotten to see an entire community sort of , uh, gather around , uh, the vision of Emily Hagens and try to help her in the best ways to achieve harder and harder visions that she has that she's wanting to get up onto the screen.

Brian Behm: 28:54

At the time I mostly knew of her. There's a documentary called Zombie Girl about her making a feature link zombie film at age 13. When I met her, she was still in high school and working on her third feature. Yet that feeling that you're feeling about being on accomplished, that is definitely the same feeling that I had. A friend freelancing for me at the time was working as a producer on this newest film, my Sucky Teen Romance. It was at the height of the Twilight Craze and the film is about vampires hiding out at a sci-fi convention. I mean, we're better to be out in the open as a vampire because it was a vampire film. They ran into the issue of needing to figure out how to remove reflections from a mirror. They also didn't have anyone who could do the work because my friend Paul, the producer, was working with me. He knew that I might be able to solve their problem and what started as a handful of shots ended up ballooning into dozens throughout the production. 'cause I've done a lot of things in my career. I picked up a lot of random skills and I was able to use them on the film for a whole myriad of other things. My favorite piece that I worked on on that film was a set of postcard sized bubblegum trading cards. Those cards, God, they're one of my favorite silly projects. One of my calling cards, no pun intended, is that , uh, I love doing the extravagant thing. It can sometimes take something that's just work and make it into art. In anime animators call these moments Kuga , where they bring all of their energy to a specific shot. You know, most anime is shot on twos or shot on threes, and that means that it's, it's shot at either 12 frames per second or eight frames per second. Japanese animation as a style is designed to be cheap to make in these moments of kuga , they in a lot of cases, will end up going in and hand animating every frame, and so you go from eight frames per second to all of a sudden these beautiful couple of seconds that are like 24 frames per second, they bring all of their energy to a specific shot instead of just animating the mouth that's moving. Maybe they carefully hand animate a perfect explosion or the way a muscle ripples in an arm. It's the type of thing that can shine a light on the thing that you're spotlighting even brighter. I was asked to do visual effects work, and I did, but the cards were the unexpected gift where I was also able to help the marketing and surprise and delight the filmmakers and the people that we got to give them to. The most effective thing you can do is to find the moment where you can go above and beyond for someone. Keep your eyes open to places and situations where you might be able to help. I should also mention that design helped the film get finished. I submitted my poster to a contest that a plugin manufacturer called Red Giant was having to get set dressing for a film they were shooting. A lot of film people aren't designers, and my posters stood out about the other things that had been submitted that drew their curiosity and they eventually ended up gifting us software that we were able to use to pay other VFX artists to finish the picture. I talked earlier about how my social media reconnaissance was about knowing that I could make their lives better. This is the exact kind of thing that I was talking about. I saw that there were needs the team had and 'cause I had built a relationship, I was able to step in when that situation happened. When you put yourself into the same situations, you can be there to help solve someone else's problem. Side note, the bright side to doing silly and extravagant things, I got to give Guillermo del Toro a pack of the trading cards south by Southwest that year. More importantly, the aftermath of my Psych Teen Romance is that it led to pretty much everything else that's happened for me in Austin since then. Not too long after the film, I got asked to do VFX work for a short film with a director who was friends with Emily. He'd seen my work and he was impressed that director and his writing partner were friends with the people at Rooster Teeth . They're the people behind the Halo based Machinima series, red Versus Blue. Those loose connections led to a referral to help them with VFX and the referral got me in the door, but it was a bit of unintentional deception that got me the job. One of the other bits of recon I did when I first moved to Austin was to volunteer for South by Southwest. I spent every summer for 15 through 35 attending or working for a music festival called Cornerstone. We talked about that festival in one of our first episodes, and it's worth going back and listening. I helped run their media coverage and as I was getting settled in Austin, I leveraged those skills to start volunteering with the production team at South By the biggest perk of volunteering is that you get a badge to the festival. I was pretty broke and still am so honestly it's good deal. It was a couple thousand bucks whiling away my volunteer hours in the edit suite. I asked if I could make some graphics for what we were doing. Again, I'm not getting paid, so the supervisor said, sure, sounds great. When I made a new motion design reel, I used those graphics I'd done for South by and when the Rooster Teeth people found it, they were super excited that they had found a title designer who had quote , done work unquote for South By . They thought the work was particularly prestigious when it was really just me being allowed to make cool things. We never know what thing is gonna lead to the next thing. If we go into a situation and try to be helpful and bring our best, generally, that pays off down the line, and even if it doesn't, you can feel good that you're able to help in a situation and solve a problem. Now, think about your own unique set of skills. How can you strategically use them to navigate your professional landscape? Remember the most unconventional methods, those are often the ones that could be the key to your success. Section

The Voice of God: 34:58

Four, happy endings.

Brian Behm: 35:02

It wouldn't be a heist movie if they didn't somehow get away with it at the end. Seeing the 2000 person premiere of my SCU Teen Romance at a grand and historic theater called The Paramount here in Austin was the happy ending I'd gotten into the scene and that scene led to a lot of other opportunities that film. My first IMDB credit only came after I was in my thirties. I beat myself up a lot for the fact that I didn't achieve nearly enough in my twenties. I don't know if that's true though. All the skill sets that got put into play when we were on the heist, they were things that I picked up earlier on. When I got my A DHD diagnosis at 42, I went through a similar depressive moment, mourning what I could have accomplished. My wife to her credit, told me to shut the hell up. Do you know how much you accomplished without knowing, and she did have a point. I also had to thank the A DHD for the fact that all the rabbit trails that sent me down gave me the tool chest I needed to pull off the heist. Once we moved here, we are constantly molding ourselves into the next version of who will become and on a long enough timeline, a little inflection from picking up a new skill can send us on an entirely new adventure. But what about the gatekeeping? Was that the McGuffin of our adventure the entire time? To an extent, I'm not saying that there aren't gatekeepers out there guarding domains out of misguided good intentions or fear. The outsider, you can't help but look on something like X or really Twitter before it became X and see that there's gatekeepers out in the world. But gatekeeping isn't always an external obstacle. Our brains gatekeeper every day. It's internal. It's the mechanism to cope with the overwhelming flood of life stimuli. Take a look at my A DHD experience when it's acting up. I can't filter. My struggle with A DHD is the internal gatekeeping. It's like my brain is constantly filtering a deluge of stimuli. Sometimes it misses the mark. This internal struggle is pretty much a mirror of the external gatekeeping we often encounter in our creative journeys. I take in every sound, every site , and fricking A , it's overwhelming. Misophonia too plays its part. Some sounds that are innocuous to most can drive me to distraction. It's not irritation or annoyance, but my brain's uncontrollable response. My struggle with A DHD exemplifies internal gatekeeping. You know, there's some fascinating science that's been developing recently called the second law of Photodynamics. Second law of thermodynamics says that energy can only become more chaotic entropy or stay the same picture, ice becoming water and then water becoming steam. The least chaotic is ice, but as it transforms, the molecules get more and more disconnected. But the second law of info dynamics in simple terms is the inverse of that. It suggests that information systems become more efficient over time. They shed what's unnecessary. It's kind of like our creative process where we constantly refine our skills and focus and we become more adept at overcoming obstacles. We can picture our brains or our scenes when they're properly filtering to get the central bit of information that needs to be focused on. Melvin vsan saw the evidence for intentional mutation in his second law in virus DNA, but then he could see the same patterns expanding ever larger into the universe as a whole. It was like to him, the universe was intentionally making zip files of itself humorously. This also made him say that he can't disprove the idea that we're living in a simulation, whether we're living in the matrix or not, like the way information system streamlined peak efficiency. We as creatives also undergo a process of honing our skills, shedding unnecessary doubts and distractions to reach our full potential. The first time you do something, it feels rough, right? My first podcast and my 10th podcast are different experiences. I'm more efficient at going through the process and I have a better idea of what I can cut out. That adapting over time is our growing and refining and becoming more efficient. I don't know if this ties into the law, but have you heard the saying about how you do what the people around you do? Jim Rohn says you're the average of the five people you spend the most time with. The heist of breaking into the Austin film scene was an intentional discussion, was an intentional decision to be around people who were making and not just consuming film. I put myself in the stream of that culture and found myself adapting and becoming more like the people I was around. Hopefully, some of those people became more like me, and as we build those relationships, suddenly the gatekeepers stop paying as much attention because suddenly you're not seen as an invading virus to be filtered out. You know , thinking about all of this, while I've been writing the script, I , I realized that every challenge, every instance of gatekeeping, both internal and external, was a chance to grow. Your journey's gonna be unique, but every small step contributes to the larger story. You have to embrace the challenges as opportunities to evolve. We can adopt the Elon Musk approach, metaphorically speaking, and face our gatekeepers and tell them where to go. Bob, Bob, are you here ? Just make sure you run your race. Focus on your story and let the small personal victories cascade into more significant triumphs. Remember, the micro, the micro often leads to the macro in the end. It's about the art of navigating through around, and sometimes even with the gatekeepers, both real and imagined. But before we wrap up, let's translate the insights into action. I wanna challenge you to apply the strategies in your own artistic journey. It's time for you to plan your heist, and time for you to navigate through your own gatekeepers.

The Voice of God: 41:49

The call to action, the gatekeeper challenge design your personal heist mission

Brian Behm: 41:54

This week. Your mission should you choose to accept it, is the gatekeeper challenge. I want you to identify a scene or a community that you want to be a part of, pinpoint the key individuals in that scene. Then think about one action you can take to start building a connection with that community. I'm not saying it has to be complex. It could be as simple as starting a conversation on social media, attending a virtual event, or sharing your work in a forum related to that scene. I want you to step outta your comfort zone and make a move towards your goal. Email me at nosis@nosisknows.com or tag me at Nosis knows on Instagram with your action and progress. Let's break down the gates together. Next episode. We're gonna dig deeper into politics, but hang tight. It's more about figuring out how to navigate when the politics don't necessarily line up with the people you're spending your time with. We'll be exploring the tricky dance between our art and our personal beliefs. It's like trying to paint a masterpiece while walking a tightrope. It's thrilling, but it's definitely challenging. I've got some stories for you, like that time, my blue hair made waves in the most conservative spaces and the post-election atmosphere at Rooster Teeth . Trust me, it's been a wild ride. But here's the real kicker. We're not just sharing woes. We're talking solutions, talking strategies and how to keep your artistic fire lit and burning. No matter if someone's trying to pour water on it. At the end of the day, it's not about fitting into a box, it's about breaking out of it, creating something uniquely yours. Although, ironically, as a designer, I talk a lot about how I need a box to be able to design. In worst thing in the world is when somebody tells me that I can do whatever I want. So I'm always gonna be a set of walking contradictions, but go with it. It it makes sense here. I hope you'll check it out. Also, please share these episodes with your friends. If you've gotten something useful out of it, share it so that we can grow our little snark rebellion. You can find me on all of the social media platforms at NosysKnows and the shop store at nosysknows .com . Above everything else though, always remember that there

The Voice of God: 44:16

Is no system.