Ahmed notes there hasn't been a major contemporary Shakespeare adaptation since Kenneth Branagh's 1997 Hamlet, giving his own modern Hamlet a clear long-tail cultural argument.
Where this was said
At 19:18 · chapter starts 19:00
Mendoza brings Hollywood's bigger challenges into frame — shrinking cinema audiences, streaming wars, AI, IP consolidation — and asks how Ahmed factors business thinking into his creative decisions. His answer is layered. Hamlet, he argues, has a long tail: contemporary Shakespeare adaptations endure, and there hasn't been one since Branagh's 1997 film. Bait was designed to break through in pop culture — and touch wood, it has. But the deeper insight is about how he defines success. The projects that have worked best, he says, are the ones where he wasn't chasing a commercial result. Bait's internal definition of success was genre-level: can Episode 2 be a Bond film? Can Episode 3 be a Bollywood soap opera? Can Episode 4 be a Linklater walk-and-talk? Nail those, and everything else follows. If you dance like no one's watching, that's the best dancing. [1] — Riz Ahmed "Episode 2 is a Bond film. Episode 3 is a Bollywood soap opera. Episode 4 is a Linklater walk-and-talk. Bait's definition of success wasn't …" 20:00
Episode 2 is a Bond film. Episode 3 is a Bollywood soap opera. Episode 4 is a Linklater walk-and-talk. Bait's definition of success wasn't ratings — it was whether the team could pull off six wildly different genre experiments within a single story.
Trust your gut on creative decisions — then surround yourself with hard-nosed people who will tell you it will never sell. That's the balance. Don't try to hold both things yourself; outsource the commercial reality check.
The music conservatory Mark Manson attended had a dropout rate of approximately 87–90%, illustrating how few people reach the 'religious' stage of commitment to a creative calling.
A novel called 'Call Me, I'll Hide the Body' triggered a 14-publisher bidding war and sold for $2.4 million before critics alleged it was predominantly written by AI.
John Mulaney cold-texted Robby Hoffman out of nowhere to offer to produce her Netflix special, which became Wake Up.
Robby Hoffman posed as a courier to hand-deliver her spec script directly to the president of HBO Canada early in her career.
Robby and Mulaney filmed two shows in one night for the Netflix special; after the first they knew they had it, so the second was a victory lap.
Jimmy Carr performs up to 300 shows a year, often doing two shows per night, which he says reduces nerves rather than increasing them.
Jimmy Carr says that speaking at roughly 92 beats per minute is the optimal cadence for comedy and public speaking, including political speeches like Obama's.
The oldest recorded joke appears in a Roman book called 'The Lover of Laughter' and is still funny — a barber asking how a man wants his haircut, who replies 'in silence'.
Jimmy Carr argues that comedians like George Carlin, Richard Pryor, and Dave Chappelle have permanently expanded the conversational Overton window on sex, politics, and taboo topics.
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