Keep Going: Follow the fun, even when it costs you everything
“When you're going through hell, keep going." This podcast is about failure and how it breeds success. Every week, we talk to remarkable people who have accomplished great things but have also faced failure along the way. By exploring their experiences, we can learn how to build, succeed, and stay humble. The podcast is hosted by author and former TechCrunch and New York Times journalist John Biggs. He also hosts The Innovators, a podcast focused on brand new startups and C-Level Executives and Creators. If you’d like to appear on either show, email john@biggs.cc. Our theme music is by Policy, AKA Mark Buchwald. (https://freemusicarchive.org/music/policy/)
I talked to Ela Thier this week on Keep Going, and she said something early on that told me exactly where the conversation was headed. Filmmakers, she said, know a lot about failure. That sounded like a joke, but not really. It was more like a basic fact of the trade. Thier is a writer, director, and the founding director of the Independent Film School, which now has something like 65,000 members. The strange part is how it began. She could not get a job. She applied for a dog-walking job and did not get that either. So she did what a lot of people do when the normal routes close up. She made her own opening. She announced that she was starting a screenwriting class. Two people signed up. One of them wanted a discount. So she made the first class free, twenty people showed up, eight stayed for the full course, and the thing took on a life of its own. That story sounds neat when you tell it fast, but what I liked about her version is that she does not pretend she had some polished strategy from the start. She was trying things. She was paying attention. She was making changes. Now people would call it a lead magnet and act like it was all part of a system, but back then it was just common sense. Let people see what you can do. Let them decide if they want more. There is a lesson in that which has nothing to do with film school and everything to do with work. A lot of people wait for permission, or for the market to confirm them before they begin. Thier did the opposite. She put something in the world, saw what happened, and kept moving. That is a better way to build almost anything. The phrase she kept coming back to was “follow the fun,” which could sound soft if it came from somebody less serious. From her it did not. She meant it as a discipline. She meant that when the work stops feeling alive, you should pay attention, even if the safer move is to keep grinding in the same format. She said she has changed things at the school in ways that cost her students and forced her to rebuild. The biggest break came when she moved from in-person teaching to online teaching. Most of the old students vanished. She had to start over. But the move let the school grow in a way it never could have otherwise. That is the hard part of following what feels alive. It is not comfort. It is risk. Adults forget that. Kids do not need to be taught how to enjoy making things. They do it by default. Then school, work, status, and all the usual junk come in and flatten that instinct into a set of measurements. Thier’s point was that the chase for success and fear of failure can pull you away from the work that actually matters to you. For artists that is deadly. It is probably bad for everyone else too. She was also blunt about money, which I appreciated. When I asked how an artist makes enough to survive, she did not romanticize it. She said you get a job. That was her answer. Being an artist, in her telling, is a labor of love, not a reliable business model. If some money comes from the art, good. But counting on that is like building your life around a winning lottery ticket. Better to separate the two goals. One is keeping the lights on. The other is making the work you need to make. Once you jam those together, you often fail at both. That answer matters because too much advice around creativity is built on fantasy. We tell people to monetize their passion, build their brand, scale their gifts, and all the rest of it. Most of the time that just means turning the thing you love into another machine for stress. Thier has a more useful view. Protect the work first. Protect your ability to do it. Get honest about the economics. Then keep going. At the same time, she does not draw a hard line between art and business. She said that when she moved the school online and had to learn marketing, course-building, team management, and sales, she found that process deeply creative too. She treated it like making something, not like taking a day job away from her real work. That is probably why she got through it. She was not just doing admin. She was building a structure that could hold the rest of her life up. Still, there was a cost. For a few years, she had to put filmmaking aside and put her energy into the school. That tradeoff was not theoretical. It took real time away from the work she most wanted to do. But the payoff came later. The school made it possible for her to direct another film, one starring J.K. Simmons, which she is releasing this year. That is the kind of delayed return most people hate because it takes too long and gives you no guarantee. It is also, very often, the only kind that counts.
One of the strongest parts of the conversation came when she talked about her film Tomorrow Ever After. By her account it did everything an independent filmmaker could ask once audiences actually saw it. It got standing ovations. It won awards. It had a perfect Rotten Tomatoes score during its run. And yet it still could not get proper distribution. She told me about meeting with an executive at Sony Pictures Classics who said they loved the film and could not buy it. It was not at Sundance. It had no known actors. They could not sell it. That, she said, was when she became a grownup. It is a hard line, but an honest one. She realized that if you want to beat the game, sometimes you have to pretend to play it. So the next films got built with financeable actors attached. That was not the death of her principles. It was an adjustment to reality. There is a difference. Artists hate that distinction because it feels like compromise, and sometimes it is. But there is also a point where refusing the rules just means nobody sees the work. That can become its own kind of vanity. I asked her why she stays in New York when it is expensive and hard and increasingly absurd in all the normal ways. Her answer had nothing to do with career. It was about people. Family in Brooklyn. Her nephew. The relationships that make a life feel real. She said those are the safest investment we have. I think she is right. A lot of people make decisions about where to live or what to build based on some abstract idea of winning. Thier’s view is more grounded than that. Stay near the people who make you yourself. By the end of the interview it was clear that her school is not some side project that got out of hand. It is part of the same body of work. She cares about her students. She would like to coach all of them herself, but the thing is too large now, so she coaches the coaches and keeps the system going that way. She also argues, correctly I think, that her students are better served when she keeps making films. If she stopped doing the work, her advice would go stale. She has a book coming out in May called How to Fail as an Artist: My Best Tips, which is the exact kind of title I like because it does not pretend the road is clean. She described it as a memoir, but also as a pep talk for artists who have given up, or are about to, which probably means most artists at one point or another. That is what this whole conversation was really about. Not failure as branding. Not failure as a cute origin story. Failure as the weather you work in if you care about making something real. Thier’s answer is not to deny that. It is to build a life sturdy enough to keep working anyway, keep teaching anyway, keep making films anyway, and keep some part of the whole thing joyful enough that you do not turn into a dead machine while doing it. You’re currently a free subscriber to Keep Going - A Guide to Unlocking Success. For the full experience, upgrade your subscription. If you’ve been reading or listening to Keep Going for free, you’ve already seen the value of having independent work that isn’t shaped by corporate sponsors or the news cycle’s noise. But independence has a cost. If you find something useful here, if these words make you pause or think, I’m asking you to step up. A few dollars each month means I can keep doing this work without compromise. Without your support, this project stays fragile, balanced on the backs of a few.
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AI video slop is becoming the news, and no one is stopping it
A bit on the politics of AI slop video.
AI video slop is becoming the news, and no one is stopping it
My mother, born in 1950, was sitting in a large red IKEA chair a few months ago, listening to something on her phone. I could not hear the audio at first. Then a few words broke through: Barron Trump, choking, schoolteacher.
I leaned over her shoulder. She was watching what looked like a documentary. It had the pacing and tone of cable television, the slow narration, the swelling pauses, the promise that something meaningful was unfolding. But it was all synthetic. The images were stiff. The voices flat. The story assembled from fragments.
The plot was simple: a couple from Missouri, schoolteachers, ordinary people, came to New York for a rare night out. They chose Trump Tower. A splurge. A story about aspiration. Then the turn. The husband begins to choke. The wife panics. The narrator continues, calm and steady, never quite human.
“At that moment, Barron Trump walked into the room. He saw the choking schoolteacher and approached, his tall frame filling their view.”
The voice lingered on that detail. The scene stretched on, minute after minute. This went on for half an hour.
I stopped her and explained what she was watching. Not a documentary. Not reporting. A machine-made story stitched together to hold attention. She nodded. She understood. But she did not care.
“It’s on here, so it’s fine,” she said.
That sentence matters more than the video.
There is nothing new in praise stories. Hagiography has followed power for as long as power has existed. What has changed is the container. This material now arrives dressed as fact. It borrows the grammar of television, the tone of authority used by networks like TLC and Discovery Channel, and it slips into the same stream as everything else. There is no clear border between the real and the fabricated. Not for her, and not for many others.
“This is my news,” she said.
That is the line that should give pause. Not because the content is extreme. It is not. It is mild. It is almost boring. But it replaces something older, a habit of trusting institutions, flawed as they were, with something far thinner.
So the question is not whether this specific video is dangerous. On its own, it is not. It passes the time. It fills a gap. It sits alongside the other things she watches, including endless AI-narrated pieces about Princess Diana, stories that drift between fact and invention without much concern for either.
The real question is slower and harder. What happens when a generation that did not grow up with this technology accepts it without resistance? When the signal and the noise share the same voice, the same authority?
We tell ourselves that media literacy is the answer. That people should know better. But that assumes time, patience, and a kind of discipline that even younger audiences struggle to maintain. My mother watch to watch “the news” and wants to stay informed. She is adapting in the only way available to her. She watches what is in front of her.
Her children practice media hygiene. We check sources. We cross-reference. We distrust what feels too neat. But those are learned habits. They come from years spent online, years spent being fooled and then learning not to be fooled again.
Should we expect her to do the same?
Or is this simply the new shape of information, one that does not ask for belief so much as attention, one that does not argue but repeats, until repetition itself becomes a kind of truth?
The Propaganda Problem
The real issue is that videos like the ones my mother was watching are being used to wage war against unity.
UK-based Refute has published a report on foreign interference in recent European elections, pulling data from Romania, Moldova, and other active fronts. The content that is flowing out of Russian propaganda systems is AI slop, the kind of posts and images that you see your conspiratorial uncle sharing on Facebook. And more and more of this propaganda is focused on video that describes the world as a lawless and terrible place, threatened by the awful Other.
The report makes a simple point: Interference is no longer a last-minute push or a few bad actors. It is planned early, coordinated, and spread across the entire election cycle.
The aim is not subtle. The protagonists want to split the electorate and to convince people, especially those abroad, that their country is failing. The diaspora, folks like my mother who came from Poland in 1974, imagine their home countries as they were when they left: poor. The answer? Convince that powerful voting block that it’s up to them to save their homeland.
Further, these videos help politicians, usually illiberal ones, win.
“If you’re a politician running to be elected, mathematically speaking, the best strategy is to divide the electorate and then only appeal to part of it,” Galu said. “That’s a much easier way to get into office than to try to speak to everyone.”
In Romania’s 2025 presidential election, Refute tracked about 32,500 TikTok videos backing populist candidates. Many showed signs of coordination, copied content, reused formats, and AI-generated media. The audience was not just local. About 24% of Romanians live abroad, but nearly half of the engagement came from outside the country. That points to deliberate diaspora targeting.
Moldova saw a heavier operation. The report points to a mix of vote buying, online campaigns, and activity tied to embassy networks. Refute identified more than 16,000 bot-like accounts during the election period. Intelligence estimates cited in the report put spending at around $150 million. That’s money that used to go to billboards and TV ads.
What emerges is a layered system. Bots, influencers, and synthetic media work together. Content moves across TikTok, Telegram, and Facebook. Organic and artificial engagement blur into each other, which makes attribution hard and slow.
Galu is blunt about the imbalance.
“We have to think about this information warfare as pretty much the same thing as conventional warfare. We are in a war situation, it’s just fought with different means on different grounds,” he said. “It’s a very low-effort, very high-yield activity. For us, the cost is much higher because we need certainty and clarity, and that requires compute and data.”
The campaigns lean on familiar themes. Defense spending framed as waste. Calls for accommodation with Russia. Early claims that elections cannot be trusted.
Hungary shows similar patterns ahead of the April 2026 parliamentary vote. European security sources cited in the report say the playbook matches what was used in Moldova.
The report lands on an interesting conclusion. The weak point is no longer the ballot itself. It is the information environment around it. By the time officials react, the narrative is already set.
“Once disinformation campaigns begin, it is extremely hard to rein it back in again. Prevention is far more cost-effective than damage control.”
Galu argues for continuous monitoring and automated analysis. Right now, most responses come too late and at too small a scale.
What does this have to do with AI video? Plenty. The tools that were used to engage my 76-year-old Polish mother are the same ones being used to enrage small-town Romanians or older Hungarians. The models that are creating space aliens and new Avengers clips are the same ones telling us that Haitians are eating the cats and dogs. These tools, like so many forms of media before them, are simultaneously vital to building conversations and frightening in their power. It’s up to us, then, to educate folks who might be lured in, although, as my mom said, this is their news.
Generated is a newsletter about the craft behind AI-powered video. Edited by John Biggs, it looks at what happens when video production and AI tools start to merge. The focus is on the people, tools, and techniques we are using in the fascinating medium.
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