Creativity in The Age of AI | with Kylee Peña

About Episode

At its core, I organized my 5 day virtual summit about Navigating the Future of Entertainment to help us creatives, artists, and storytellers answer two key questions:

What the hell is happening to our beloved film industry? And how can we shape the future of cinema?

In this episode, I talk with Kylee Peña, Sr. Product Marketing Manager at Adobe and longtime post-production expert. We explore how AI is reshaping the creative process, what it means for editors and storytellers, and how to navigate the tension between innovation and artistic integrity. Kylee shares how tools like Adobe Firefly aim to protect creatives through transparency, and why understanding AI—rather than avoiding it—is key to staying relevant, empowered, and truly creative in this next chapter.

Key Takeaways

Stay ahead by keeping up with the speed of AI. Its explosive growth is outpacing legal, ethical, and creative frameworks—staying adaptable is your most important asset.
Let AI handle the creative friction. Offload repetitive tasks so you can spend more energy on emotion, storytelling, and bold creative decisions.
Use AI tools that prioritize ethics and transparency. Choose platforms trained on licensed data and commit to content credentials that clarify how media is made, altered, or sourced.

Transcript

Zack Arnold: So Kylee, the reason that I wanted to have you as a core part of the narrative of this entire summit really comes down to the following phrase that you use to describe yourself in your about page, which is, I'm a recovering television editor and a seasoned Problem Solver with a lot of opinions about the way that we work in the entertainment industry. I could literally copy paste that sentence and put it in my own bio. You and I have a lot in common when it comes to all of this, but I just, I wanted to thank you so much for taking the time to be with us today and share what is just an absolutely diverse array of perspectives, tools, experience, expertise, like, if you are not the quintessential like Jack of all trades, but master of one that really understands this argument from so many different facets, it's you. So I'm really, really pleased that we were able to make this happen and you can be here.

Kylee Peña: Yeah? Likewise, I'm glad to have a space for these kinds of conversations.

Zack Arnold: Yeah, agreed, and we could probably spend the entire time talking about how you and I have known each other for many, many years, and you were even, if I remember correctly in the very first beta hiking group that I had for fitness and post well over a decade ago. So again, that could be conversations that we have at another time. But where I really wanted to dig in was the following. This is again, also going to be coming from the way that you described yourself in your about page, which is that I want to use my well honed sense of user empathy and my well earned technical knowledge to bridge the gap between creative and technology. And it's the intersection of those two where I would really like to see that the heart of today's conversation, coupled with that you say that you have a chronic sense of volunteer itis. And the reason I bring that up is because I don't think I know anybody else in this entire industry that knows more people that's involved with more organizations that's having more of these real conversations with the boots on the ground in person than you do. So I say all that because what I'm wondering first is, when people are approaching you in person at events, whether you're doing something that's specific to Adobe product demonstrations, versus you're doing other volunteer events. You're doing industry events. What are the biggest fears that people are coming to with when it comes to where this industry is going next, with fears about being replaced by AI like, what's the doom and gloom side of this conversation that you hear a lot specifically coming from the skeptics?

Kylee Peña: Yeah, definitely being in the spaces that I'm in, there tends to be either a lot of excitement or a lot of fear. And over the last year, I've seen people kind of coming more into the middle, which makes a lot of sense when there's a new technology, the hype cycle is always everyone's like, this is going to change everything, whether that's good or bad. And then it sort of dies down, and then gets incorporated into daily life. And the two big things that I've seen are, from one side, it's, are we going to lose something about our creative humanity? Is this going to make us lazy? Is this going to I saw an article I didn't get a chance to read today. Does chat GPT cause brain rot, like all these things, and then the other the other side, it's, is this going to fundamentally change my job in a way where I don't belong here anymore? So those are two of the kind of gloomier arguments around this, and I think that there's a lot to consider. I'm not saying that those are not valid viewpoints, or valid viewpoints to start a conversation with by any means. It's it's an important conversation to have, but yeah, it either, it either comes down to this is going to change how we think, in a way that might not be good, or this is going to change my ability to survive. Both. Pretty dire.

Zack Arnold: Yeah, it's funny that you brought up that article, because I've actually seen a few articles that came out just yesterday and today, where now the data starting to come in. That's saying outsourcing our thought process and critical thinking to things like chatgpt Claude, and otherwise, we're actually seeing the detrimental effects to cognitive thought. And this is something I've been talking about for a couple of years, where if you ask somebody, how many phone numbers do you remember? They're like, uh, I don't remember phone numbers. I know my phone number when I was a kid. I know the number of my best friend across the street when I was seven, but nobody remembers phone numbers anymore, and nobody knows how to navigate with a map, because those things have been outsourced to technology. And that's one of the biggest fears I've talked about with a couple of other guests as well, specifically with Nick Milo, was what happens when we outsource critical thinking and writing and storytelling and problem solving, and it's just literally impossible to keep up with all this. I'm trying to stay current, trying to record all these conversations as late as I can, like, damn it. I should have talked about this yesterday. I need to talk about it tomorrow. It just move so quickly. So what I am encouraged by though, and this is something that I've been seeing over the last couple of years as well, from the very beginning when chatgpt came out, and especially those in post production and filmmaking, the storytellers, it was really one side or the other. Like you said, it's either. This is our new storytelling utopia. Or it's all going to burn down, or we're all going to be replaced by robots. And I was cautiously optimistic and talking well over two years ago, saying, This is an opportunity for us. This is a new way to collaborate. And as I've said in a couple of other interviews, I still have the scars from the flaming arrows that were shot at me, because how dare I talk about something that's going to replace this all Don't I have any empathy for the worker? And of course, I do. That's why I'm here, and that's why we are here. So when you said, when you said, there are valid concerns, I'm curious what you think the valid ones are, because I have a feeling most of this conversation is going to be about the good stuff and what we can do. But before we just go right into here all the opportunities, here's how we can embrace this technology. What are some of the valid concerns that you see right now?

Kylee Peña: Sure, I think when I say valid concern, I think that's a that is a perfectly reasonable thing to see on the outset without diving deep. And I think all those emotions are valid. I think the one thing that is making this uncomfortable as a topic and a thing that we're experiencing is how fast it's happening, and that's the root of the valid concerns for me is, you know, we have the industrial revolution. We had the transformation from film to digital, but those didn't happen the same way chat GPT came generative. AI is just so exponential in a way that we haven't seen maybe ever. You could probably find parallels here and there in history, but this is at a scale, communication wise, at a scale to a large number of people, the whole world, and we've never experienced that. And so we don't know what the outcome is going to be and how we are going to follow it, because technological advances happen a lot faster than society is able to come up with constructs to deal with them, and when the technology is like, 10 times faster, it's kind of a little bit sketchy to think about, how are we going to how are things going to be in a year? Because, like, for example, I went to school, went to undergrad, did media, but my my minor was in computer science, Applied Computer Science, let's be real. And so it was a little bit of looking at programming languages, getting a little bit of that. But a couple weekends ago, I spent some time, maybe an hour, vibe coding for the so I was creating all this code telling Claude how to code, going to chat GPT, getting some ideas around frameworks, and then going back to Claude. And I updated, speaking of volunteer writers, I updated all the pages of a nonprofit I work with in an hour and and I had really clean code. It was commented. I never comment my own code. It was great. And so then I think vibe coding is fundamentally changing everything I learned in undergrad, and it's changing a whole job someone had, and that's just one tiny little piece. And I don't think this was possible in January at this scale. So that's the kind of thing where I'm like, the speed at which we're careening toward this and seeing these vo three videos of these very convincing looking clips of man on the street interviews or world leaders without any guardrails is a little bit sketchy and scary, but I think that a lot of what I'm working on is around trying to put This in the hands of creatives in a way that's ethically sourced and is thoughtful about how it fits into a workflow. Because I think that's the key is, how does this fit as a tool that you can use as a creative instead of replacing a whole big chunk of jobs a whole department? Doesn't seem right to me.

Zack Arnold: Yeah, and the risk of this careening towards shameless self promotion, but I'm happy to do it. I really do believe that of all the companies that are out there in this space or adjacent spaces, I really think Adobe is going, they're really going at this better than anybody else, because it seems to me, and I don't know what's happening in the internal conversations, but in the articles that I'm reading and the press releases. It really seems like this is about putting creatives first, but also about protecting creatives, because you're very clear about the content that's being pulled into your large language models, so you can have generative AI, so you can have Firefly, so it's not a matter of, well, we're just going to pull in everything. We're not going to go mid journey style and just decide that we're going to take all the things. It seems to me that you guys really are focusing not just on the creative tools, but protecting creatives too.

Kylee Peña: Absolutely. That's been sort of the central ethos of when Adobe wanted to incorporate generative AI, because they've been doing AI for a long time. And I personally think that for creatives, the really interesting part of AI is getting rid of the things that take cognitive load away from the critical thinking and the really the the interesting part of being creative. But when it comes to generative AI, Firefly was the first commercially safe model, which means it was only trained on things that we had permission to train on licensed content. Public Domain content. And because of that, you know, if you compare the output from mid journey to something from Firefly, Firefly has literally never seen IP from major studios. So if I did an experiment, I wrote Spider Man swimming from swinging from a web, and I got it out of one model that's trained on everything, and it was literally, there's Marvel's guy, and then I tried it in Firefly, and it was just a spider. I guess the Spider was male. I don't know. I didn't check, but it was a spider hanging from a web, because Firefly is like spider man. So you know, depending on what you're trying to do and what point you're at in your workflow, your ideation process, maybe those other models are what you need. Maybe that fits into your workflow, but Adobe wanted to have an option that's commercially safe for all the people that don't want to potentially touch anyone else's IP and the other piece of that is the content authenticity initiative, and that's a coalition that Adobe co founded in 2019 that is, it's a group of 5000 or so companies, news organizations, manufacturers that are working together around transparency with the use of AI and generative AI, and they're developing in an open standard called Content credentials, which can be applied at the acquisition stores so on, on cameras from like Nikon or in Premiere, if you use generative AI with generative extend, if you export, you can apply content credentials. The BBC, for example, also uses them to kind of show a chain of custody for how things were altered. So if they like, get an image from a journalist and crop it, then they can say, you know, we cropped it. Here you can see the content credentials. It's interesting for creatives as well, because you're able to essentially sign your work in a tamper evident way that travels. And the ideas around what that could mean for maintaining credit through the use of an image, for example, is really interesting. So it's about transparency in who created it, but also how they created it. So I'm a really big fan of that that was created before Firefly. It was, it was a thing that came out. Because I think that companies saw some things on the horizon way back in 2019 so it's, I'm glad it exists. It's still, you know, growing, and I do encourage everyone to go check it out, because it is open source. It's built out in the open. It's not an Adobe thing.

Zack Arnold: Well, first of all, 2019 honestly feels like it's both a week ago and, like, 50,000 years ago, like that's, I don't even know what 2019 is like. It's, I even know. I don't even remember what 2022 was. But to talk about 2019 I feel so far away. But whomever it was that thought to themselves, I see this on the horizon, and we need to build this chain of command. Holy cow, do they see the future coming? But to go back to something you said earlier, this has been one of the narrative threads of this entire summit. Has been me talking about, I have a mixed relationship with the word unprecedented, where so many times over the last five years, every newscast, every article, all of this is unprecedented. And I continue to say that if you look at it in singularity, all of these things that are happening, they're not unprecedented. We've seen massive technological shifts through history. We've had pandemics. All of this has happened before. It's the speed at which all of it's happening, and it's how all of it's happening at the same time that, to me, is what's so unprecedented. So I just I say that to set the table for anybody that is holding it upon themselves, and many of my students in the Academy will do this like, why can't I figure this out? Why is it so hard to not get sucked into the news? Or why is it so hard to not be afraid my job is going to be replaced? Or why is it so hard to not be worried about all these pandemics or, you know, protests, or all the craziness that's going on, and I try to explain to them, we've never in human history experienced anything at this speed in this level of severity, like, imagine if we had all these social media channels in like 1940 or 1941 while they were switching from horses to cars all in the same year. Like, are you kidding me?

Kylee Peña: I know. I know. That would have been a lot, yeah. That would have been something like, yeah, the shift from something like film to digital, it felt like a marathon, or even from tape to, you know, tapeless workflows, it was a little bit more of a marathon. You could kind of join in, but AI is a full out sprint. So we kind of have to come along more quickly and bring others along too. We and we cannot afford to let any emerging creatives get left behind. So that's another thing that I'm really bringing a lot is people are like, what about what about the next generation? What about job loss? And I'm like, it's up to us and our communities to go at this with intent and say, This is how newcomers get trained. I think a lot about, you know, dailies and workflow. When I. I moved to LA 10 years ago, if you can believe it, my first three years or so were spent in dailies and workflow, and I learned so much because there's so much problem solving, and I think there that will that workflow supervision will still continue to be a very, very critical role, but it's going to turn way more into the soft skills, because a lot of the technical I think, is going to be automated, so it's going to be and already the role was really soft skills, being able to talk to all different kinds of people, but there was a lot of the baseline, foundational technical stuff that I was able to get my hands on and really try to understand. So now I'm I reflect, and I'm like, is that important? I don't know how to ride a horse, I know how to drive a car. I don't know how to process film, but I know how to capture from tape. Which of these things are important and which kind of aren't, and then how do we help newcomers, you know, take the ladder up into their career and get the right foundations? And I think that to an extent, some of us hold on to that old stuff, like, Oh, you have to know this. You have to know what one light means. You have to know what a C 47 is. I'm like, do we I don't know. I'm still asking my questions about, like, the foundational knowledge. But in any case, we have to come at it with intent and bring back things like apprenticeships or, you know, mentorship has to be very strong, and all these structures have to be in place to support people into their career if we want to maintain the same level of storytelling.

Zack Arnold: You and I have been beating that drum for years. I'm very much on the same page, so much so that I just decided, hey, I'm going to make a massive career pivot, and I'm going to literally mentor for a living, because I think it's so important, and this is one of my biggest fears, and it's also something I wanted to dig into much further with you, because you've been such an advocate for so many years. Way before Adobe, you were one of the, I don't know if necessarily, one of the founding members, but a core member of Blue Collar post collective for many years, all about mentorship, all about helping others. And I kind of want to tie that into a little bit broader conversation as well, about walking this fine line between this is going to make things easier for creatives, versus who's getting replaced or displaced because it's easier. So I'm going to go back to a conversation that I had when I was on a panel about AI at edit fest a couple of years ago. And there was this conversation where they were saying, Well, we're we're really worried that, you know, if somebody has a prompt based system, that they can replace the editors, right? And that's was a very valid concern. But then somebody in the audience that said, oh, did you know there's this really, really cool tool, and what it does is it allows you, it's kind of like using Garage Band, but you could, like, make your own compositions. And I said, you realize that that's going to replace the composer that's making that music. So from our it was a very myopic perspective. It's, well, they're gonna replace us as editors, but look at all these cool tools that are gonna make our lives better without thinking, Yeah, but that's replacing somebody else. That's replacing an entire line of jobs, especially the entry level ones. So we're totally on the same page about it's necessary to protect this entry level work, but what I don't even know the answer to, and I'm not expecting you to know it either. But how do we actually do this with how quickly all of this is changing? When I, for example, would say, Bring on the tool that allows me to say, Find me the shot of the red car in a medium shot boop, rather than I speak to my assistant, hey, can you take a couple of hours and can you string out all the shots of red cars. That's a really tough line to walk.

Kylee Peña: It is, yeah, and it's like, how much does an assistant editor get out of looking through hours of footage to find the red cars? I don't know. I mean, I think that a lot of people would argue that that's really important, and a lot of people would argue it was boring, and I hated it, but I think that we need to really kind of come around and align on the idea that AI can remove the friction, but not the creativity, so getting rid of the technical tasks, so that editors can focus on the rhythm, the emotion, the narrative, or if you're a creative professional, you can expand instead of replace. So I think it's also really important to remember that AI is based on predicting what comes next. It's about frameworks so it can give you it knows all these stories. It knows a storytelling. You know, formula. You know, Act One, act two, act three. But the moments that really move us as humans are unexpected, they're risky. And that comes from the spark that a human brings. It comes from human ingenuity. You've got messiness, and you know, like from that messiness comes kind of a meaning that other humans can get to. And it's sort of like there are a lot of shows that I watch that are formulaic, and I think that when they rise above and really make me lean in, is when there's that moment that kind of pushes back against the structure. And I don't think AI is going to be able to do that, because, at least not in its current state of, you know, being a predictive model. All, because it can't predict what's going to resonate in a way that is an opposition to a story. So I think having humans and and making it so that they have the space to create and take those creative leaps is really important. So there, I think that maybe a lot of the time that you save paying somebody to do all this, you know, do a string out of every time they say this that can be spent, you know, paying people to do other, more creative tasks that then compete for eyeballs in a way that has to be, you know, the competition comes from the creativity instead of just churning out content, essentially. And I know that that could be a naive or very optimistic look, but I think that I'm a kind of a techno optimist, so I choose to think that in a lot of cases, people will use that time differently and, you know, ideate and put more money on the screen and just make it so our business models, a lot of the business models in the creative industry that often run on very thin margins can thrive a little bit more and more types of viewpoints can then be seen because people have access to the tools that get

Zack Arnold: it out of their minds. You and I, as always very much on the same page, where I I consider myself a pragmatic optimist, where I can be optimists, almost to a fault, like I literally have our keynote speaker named Ted hope, because I wanted to bring hope to this conversation. And anybody that hasn't watched the speech with Ted hope, you'll see what I'm talking about. Like just the eternal optimist amongst all of these things that are happening. But the pragmatic side of me is also preparing for the worst and making sure that I hedge my bets, which is one of the reasons that reasons that I had Annie Duke as a guest on this podcast talking all about the psychology of which direction we go. But having said all of that, if we start to dig a little bit deeper into this, the optimist, the optimist in me, says, All right, let's use this example of some of the tools that I know that Adobe already does where it will now do transcription so transcriptionist, like manually, that's pretty much gone. I don't know anybody that's paying 1000s of dollars for transcripts anymore. Now we've got text based editing where you can throw a transcript in, you can kind of do a quote, unquote paper edit right in the window, and there it is in your timeline, and you have your assembly. So then one would say, Oh, thank God. Now we have more time to tell better stories and be more creative. The other side of it is deliver this three times faster, because now you have these tools, and we're still scrambling. Like the quintessential example I use from film to digital, and I know this wasn't the case. This was the the idea that if you had a dissolve and you made it with a grease pencil, you ship it to the lab and you have lunch and you wait for the dissolve to come back, which wasn't true, but it's not like all of a sudden we have more time to be more creative or take a nap or really, finally, focus on work life balance, the demands are just going to keep doing this. So that's kind of the the fear that I have amidst this optimism.

Kylee Peña: Oh, for sure, I of course, have that fear as well as someone that lives in a, you know, bit of a capitalist hellscape like you, you know, everybody always wants to go faster, more put out more. There is, there are a lot of videos that people are just able to create and put on the internet. Right now, I was watching, there's a lot of these. I think they're like Bigfoot vlogs, whereas somebody has created Bigfoot, and it's like, he's an influencer, and he's in these very strange situations. And I'm like, and I'm like, That is a really interesting idea. And I that whoever did that, I don't know who they are, but would they have been able to do that without this tool? And is the world better or worse? I mean, you know, you can argue what you want, but it is a valid thing to be like it is all that money, is all that time going to go to creativity? And I hope so, and I think that we as creative professionals can continue to advocate for that, but I also think that a lot of the jobs that exist right now will kind of transform. Because somehow, I think even when we I mean, as you said, even when we have more free time, we find ways to fill it. And I think that we will having some of this taken off our plate, so to speak, we'll find more tasks to do. So I wrote down some job titles that I've talked about with people, of course, prompt engineers. I think that will kind of go to the wayside and be more integrated. But I don't know if anyone's watching this has ever tried to prompt video. It's not that easy. You have to understand how the model speaks. Firefly is trained on, you know, creative creative language, but it's also a lot of these are like talking to a brand new film student, like they're trained on the classics, and they're very eager and they're ready to please you, but they don't have the life experience. So being someone who is able to prompt at a really high level and create. Really cool stuff. First you have to have the idea, and then you have to know how to do it.

I think that a lot of times we'll have these really high powered VFX simulations as well, like we'll be able to do things that we never thought we could do, and that's going to bring in a whole different subset of needed expertise, production, AI engineers, so you know, when you're on set, somebody has to know about how to generate these environments, especially if it's like a procedural environment in a virtual production space where things need to be altered and changed, or will alter and change R and D for AI that is in really high demand right now, and it is very specialized, even predictive AI assistants, somebody that gets good at really understanding the model itself. Because I think, and I believe it's also Adobe's perspective that the reason they are allowing third party models inside of Firefly to be used in different workflows is because there will be a lot of models in the future, and a lot of them will be good at one specific thing, or they will be trained by specific professional creative professionals to use in their own situation on their own. So there will be a person that really knows how that model works and knows how to work with it. So it's sort of like a different kind of Assistant Editor, but ultimately, like, I think that storytellers are going to rise to the top. So I think if you're ultimately someone who wants to tell stories, there is going to be a place, and it might not be the traditional place that it was, but there are so many places where it can be. And I just saw a really interesting New York Times article yesterday that showed a bar graph of what was it? Share of television time spent by streaming by type, YouTube, like this, the next highest, Netflix.

Zack Arnold: It's a 60% increase. Yes, it's a conversation. I've had this conversation with many students, and I've talked about it throughout the summit. You ask somebody in this industry, which is the number one streaming platform, it blows my mind. Everybody says, Netflix. I'm like, What planet are you living on Netflix? Like YouTube has destroyed all of it, including Netflix. Netflix isn't even worried about the other streaming services. It's not Netflix is worried about HBO Max, or worried about Hulu, or they're worried about YouTube. That's the only thing Netflix is worried about, and the rest of them, they're like one. I don't think Apple TV was on the list. It was so tiny. It was so small.

Kylee Peña: Yeah, yeah. And it's really interesting, because when I came to LA YouTube was obviously a thing 10 years ago. But the big players, I mean, the shows that I worked on my first two, three years were Jane the Virgin scorpion. They were all on traditional TV, either CBS, CW and so you had to, there were very there were a lot fewer doors to be able to be seen. And then over time, and even when I was at Netflix, it was about not competing for television viewing, but eyeballs like viewing hours, literally, which screen Are you watching and for how long? And for a long time now, YouTube has been like the big thing. YouTube, tick tock, Instagram, like the smaller rectangle, instead of the big rectangle, has been competing more, and in some markets, mobile viewing is higher than than anything else. So it just goes to show you that there, there's a lot of unknowns, but there's also seems to be a lot of opportunity. And in fact, I've seen a lot of YouTubers, which is a weird thing to say at this point. It sounds derogatory, but it's not

Zack Arnold: like, TV ears, you're a TV or like, what does that even mean? Yeah, agree.

Kylee Peña: Traditional YouTube first people kind of like building out their own production companies, so they're growing too. It's a very interesting world to live in, to be in Hollywood and experiencing this massive contraction, but then also see these other entities growing so much.

Zack Arnold: Yeah, it's so so it's so funny that you say contraction, because I've been writing about this where I don't think it's a contraction, because contraction will denote expansion. I consider this a correction. This is us finding a new equilibrium. Yeah, and one of the the core theses of this entire summit is, I believe the future lies in the intersection between the legacy Hollywood creatives and the next generation of content creators, right? It's somewhere in the middle there, and this is where I want to come back to generative AI, because this is where I'm very optimistic, but I know that there are fears that come with it. If we take something at least for this conversation, we'll say Google vo three, but by the time this conversation is over and I release it in less than a week, it'll probably be something new, because it's impossible to keep up with all of this. But one could say, if I want to put in a prompt and I want to make a really cool sci fi short, there's one argument that somebody could make where they're like, well, by doing that with a simple prompt, you have replaced what could be an entire crew of 100 people and their jobs. And I would say this was never going to exist. In that world because I don't have the resources, I don't have the connections. The only reason it exists is because of generative AI. It's not replacing what would have been done. Now it's different if the head of Paramount Studios decides to do it, but for me as an individual, I can create things I could never create before, and now the gatekeepers have gone away, because I can just post something that's user generated content, and if I know I'm using a responsible, large language model, who's going to stop me from putting it on YouTube, building my own audience and being able to tell these kinds of stories? And I feel like people are missing these opportunities because they're so worried about, well, how does it affect legacy Hollywood? But they're not seeing where the future is going with these tools.

Kylee Peña: Yeah, yeah. I think there's a lot to I think there's a place for legacy Hollywood, especially in sort of like the best practices and structures. I think that standards are a good thing. I think that when we all kind of work to in similar ways, similar technologies, and have interconnectedness, that is good. But I also think that what the Creator economy is bringing is really important, because there's bigger risk taking, especially when there is this, I agree it's a contraction to a correction.

Zack Arnold: Yeah, I'm not sure what the hell we call it. The great resignation to the great contraction, to the Great Recession. Like there's too many great things happening right now, the great calibration, that's recalibration, great way

Kylee Peña: all these things are happening. There's this, you know, economic anxiety, post strike, stuff, consolidation, all these things that are businessy and big and kind of whatever. There's a lot of reasons for it, and there's a lot of opportunities for non traditional paths. But there's also this bridge from one to the other that I'm seeing, and I think that it's possible for people who would never have had all those resources are not displacing anyone by using something like Firefly to have their vision actually shown in a way that feels Real and authentic to them, but then see that scene and potentially get that amplified. I'm seeing that happen a little bit more, but I also see it as a bridge to show, to allow people to communicate better in in between, in between, those creative and legacy it creates this creation tool. So for example, we released Firefly boards in public beta, and it's a it's a infinite canvas where you can do all your generating images on it. You can do it from Firefly. You can add different models. You can also add pictures you took videos you took other documents. And it's just this infinite collaboration space, and it allows you to remix and and iterate ideas so that you have an idea, you bring in inspiration, you create a mood board. You can, like, generate things on that. And it's very rapid ideation, and it allows you to get to a point where it's like, yes, that is what I wanted, a lot faster. So then you can show someone, or you can generate a video from it. And I think that's really powerful, because that sort of pre visualization, historically has only been for the most expensive things, because they're going to prototype a thing before they spend, you know, 100 million dollars on it. But now I can previs, and I can use that pre visualization to communicate with another creative professional, and it kind of puts us on the same level. So if it's legacy Hollywood, it gives creative control to, like, you know, the director to say, this is what I want it to look like. I can generate it and drop it in the offline edit so nobody falls in love with the random stock footage they use, you know, in the meantime. Or if I am, you know, a creator at home with a couple of people, I can express myself in a way that I would have had to spend a lot of money and time on just to get to the point where I understand, like, you know what a pick whip is and After Effects, or like, track mat or something like, there's all these things that were barriers to creativity and storytelling. So I think there's this interesting bridge that's able to happen, and it's fundamentally for for the highest end productions, generative AI is still an ideation and pre visualization tool, because it's not final pixel. And I don't, I don't know where it's going to go, but for a lot of people, it's fine. For a lot of people, it's temp, and I think in both cases, it's really powerful for just communicating the thing that just is always on the tip of your tongue that you're like, No, it's not quite right yet, but now you can get there faster.

Zack Arnold: Yeah. We talk a lot about the concept of the final pixel in my conversation with Sean Cushing, because we go a little bit deeper into visual effects workflows. And again, this is something that could change in a week. But he said, at least as of recording this, as of, you know, middle of 2025, we're not allowed for a single pixel in any of our final deliveries to be generative AI or any form of AI, because they don't know where that information come came from that are in these models. So a. Like, Oh, well, that makes it a really simple conversation, because you can't, literally even use it, but that's at the highest levels. That's working for, you know, Avatar and working for Marvel films. So it's not so much. Well, there's a studio executive that's going to take all of our jobs, because he says, I can just write a prompt and I can say, this is the scene that I want. Number one, it's the workflows to be able to do that aren't even there. Number two, legally, at least, most of the studios have not gone down that road. But number three, this comes back to something you said before that you've written about, is the power of taste, the power of instinct. And we all know anybody that's worked creatively for a living, it doesn't even have to be in Hollywood, but when you've worked for somebody else, when you're writing, when you're directing when you're editing, people don't know what they want, and they don't know how to communicate what they want. So to think that somebody is going to write the perfect prompt and eliminate us from the entire process, to me, is absurd, because our job is to know what's the note underneath the note, and how do I give you the thing that you don't even know that you want?

Kylee Peña: Yeah, that's that's what I was saying. And I've been telling people about soft skills, like, if you're afraid of this, just think about the time that you have been looking at notes and addressing notes, and then it's not at all what the client wants. It's like, how often does that happen? So, you know, it allows you to do so much. But ultimately, the human intuition behind it is, is really the thing that makes you a good collaborator. It's like a nice assistant to have to, like, bounce ideas off of rapidly. But ultimately, you know, in in a world where, in a world where there's like, endless options, I can generate literally anything, then judgment becomes that rare skill that sets you apart. So I think that's going to be really critically important to to just lean into the soft skills that decide the why, instead of AI just defining the what.

Zack Arnold: Yeah, I mean, ultimately, I've always, I've been saying for years and years that we get paid because of the quality of our decisions and our choices. So me saying that's good, that's not good, that's not going to change how we do it. Is going to change our ability to communicate via words, via prompting. I think that's going to be immensely important. I've always thought that our ability to communicate is much more important than our ability to manipulate footage with an asymmetric print tool or segment versus lift overriding like everybody gets so lost in all the details and all of their crafts, like editors are just like any other creatives, where they get so lost in the weeds on this stuff. But ultimately, our ability to communicate is no different. And know, what's a Yes, what's a no? This is how we want to communicate the story point. I don't think any of that's going away, but whether it's moving colored blocks or communicating via a paragraph of text and a prompt, that, to me, is where we need to be focusing our attention, as far as where we adapt rather than, well, it's all going to change, and we're all going to be replaced. I just, I don't see a world where any of that happens.

Kylee Peña: Yeah, and as fast as everything is going, I still think you know, knowing how to use these tools is is going to be important for a long time, because there's only, I mean, agentic AI, the the ability for AI to recognize what's going on and, like, control everything. For you, it will see where it is in a year, but it is still kind of difficult to integrate into existing tools and to figure out, like, exactly what we're talking about, which is like, if I ask premier to make my mix good, what does that mean? Is it good for broadcast? Is it good for YouTube? Does the dialog need to come out? Like, that's a lot to ask, and I have no doubts that some of these models would be able to figure it out, but just the connecting tissue of that is really challenging. So in the meantime, a lot of the AI creators, the very AI forward filmmakers that I talk to are, in fact, like their teams are growing, if not like the same size. They're able to hire more people, and they need those people that know, After Effects Premiere or whatever, because they're taking the best from all these different tools and models and pulling it together, and really like building on that. So they're using this to get the to iterate faster and make things that they wouldn't have been able to make with that budget. But then they, you know, they do 10x more with all these other people that are, are artists on their own right. And I think that's really interesting to see those teams that are that are quite large.

Zack Arnold: Yeah, so again, just kind of completely continues to feed into my assertion that there's going to be a lot of displacement and change in evolution. But I don't think it's just we're going to disappear as a workforce, and somebody is at their laptop and they spit something out. Now there is the alternate argument, and I'm curious what you've heard, because you're really deep into the AI tech space. If we're going to go to a very extreme end of the spectrum, it's I pick up my Netflix remote, or my YouTube remote, or whatever it is. So. Me, a 90 minute movie starring me and Tom Cruise. There's some dancing pandas, and there's a high scene like, my understanding is that world is not impossible anymore.

Kylee Peña: Yeah, I think that that is kind of the dystopian version.

Zack Arnold: But they're dancing pandas, they're fun, yeah,

Kylee Peña: I think that's really interesting use case. I'm curious how many people in the world would want something so hyper personalized. I think that this kind of intersects with my interest around web three, which, this is not about web three. I'm not going to talk about crypto. I'm not going to talk about the blockchain, but I think it's really interesting, and it's really interesting as a way to combine with something like content credentials and then have this innate way of linking things to people for ownership.

Aside from all that, that plus the innate ability for AI to generate things, personalize things very quickly, opens up a lot of creative opportunities. I mean, there was that Black Mirror episode on Netflix, which is, like a choose your own adventure, and that was like, like, a very hard coded version of what it could be to to do. And that was really popular. But I don't, I didn't see that creating, you know, a new series where every streamer is suddenly wanting to do that, maybe because it was technically very hard, but also maybe because I think that humans have always really liked sitting around a campfire, telling stories, sharing the experience movie theaters, sitting around, you know, my HDR TV at home, but I like watching things with other people, even if we're all alone, we're watching it together with the shared internet. So I feel like, Yes, I think that hyper personalization, where you're just creating a movie and inserting yourself into it is definitely possible, and I think that I'm sure we'll see that, but I'm personally not sure that anyone really will want it, because it takes away from the ability for us to be like, Did you see that? What did you think? And have this discourse that we we like to argue with each other, and we can't argue with each other. We each had a unique experience. So it's really interesting. But people also love video games, so And those can be very, you know, nuanced and personalized. So there the convergence of those ideas in the future will be very interesting, and is definitely one reason why I am I chose to pursue more more study around this because I think the way generative AI influences storytelling and our our sensitivities as creatives, is just a fascinating thing that needs to be explored a lot.

Zack Arnold: Well. As a side note for anybody that's wondering, Well, what was that Black Mirror episode? The one you're talking about is called Joan is awful, and I remember watching that episode right when it came out, because I've been a big black mirror fan for many years and thinking, holy shit, this isn't that far off from what could potentially be a future with AI. And when it first came out, it seemed absurd. But with the speed at which everything is moving and how exponentially fast it is, I do think there is a world where we're not that far off from it. But I want to come back to what you said, which is, I don't think anybody's going to want that. I don't disagree with you, but I'm going to play counterpoint for a second. Imagine going back about a decade and explaining to people what Tiktok is. And I think people would say, Oh, my God, nobody's going to want that. Like, just stupid 32nd videos of do like, just all there's so many crazy things on Tiktok. And if you were to show that to somebody 10 to 15 years ago, they'd say, nobody would want that. It's the number one form of social media on the planet. So that's one of my fears, is you and I say, Well, why would anybody want that? But then all of a sudden it becomes a thing. But what I come back to, go ahead,

Kylee Peña: I have a counter to your counterpoint, which is, I was a huge fan of vine, and I think that was one of the best points of the internet, seven second ridiculous videos. So if someone had shown me Tiktok, I might have been into it. I think it would have. Also depends on generationally too, because one of the oldest videos on my YouTube channel which I shot, this video long before YouTube existed. I shot a video in high school, and I put it on my Youtube, like, in 2007 when I had a first had an account High School, this would have been shot in 2002 but my friend in the dryer, I just we put her in the dryer, we opened the door, we held down the button, she spun around. That would have been gold on Tiktok. So I think it kind of depends on who you're talking to and when, and that's why I'm like, I actually don't know. I feel like, maybe not, but i That's why I want to explore it so much. Because maybe,

Zack Arnold: Well, this is definitely where I fall into the old man yelling at Cloud category. I'm very aware of that. For anybody that is of the younger generation, we've got, you know, late millennials, Gen Z, they're like, dear Lord, He's. So old. I'm very, well, very hyper aware of that. But here's, here's my general prediction. Obviously, having no idea where we go next, I think there's going to be a place for this kind of user. And I don't even want to say user generated content. It's where the user really drives the creation of it just for themselves. It's really hyper specialized content. It's going to be a really cool parlor trick. It's going to be, oh, this is fun. Let's make this but I'm going to come back to what you said before, because this is the exact same conversation that I had with Walter Murch. So clearly you're onto something, because I'm, I'm going to trust that Walter Murch has some sense of where things are going next with the 60 years of technological innovation he's been a part of, yeah, ultimately, what we crave as human beings, and by the way, we're craving it now more than we ever have is social human connection, and that has been completely destroyed because of social media, because of working remotely, because of the pandemic, we've really lost a sense of this community experience. And although I don't think we're going to be going back to the movie theaters every single weekend, we're always going to need that experience. We're always going to need to feel like we are collectively experiencing stories, and those stories need to be of our time helping us make sense of the world. One of the things that Ted hope has said is there's enough movies until the end of time. We don't need more movies. We have more than enough things to watch. You can watch one of the best movies from the 70s, and it's still a great film, but it feels like it was made in a completely different universe. Because we live in a different world, we're always going to need stories that help us make sense of our realities. We're always going to need storytellers to tell those stories to make sense of our realities. So I'm in between both of our perspectives, where you're like, I don't think anybody's going to like it. I think there's going to be a place for it, but I don't think it's going to replace what we're doing now with long form, high quality storytelling?

Kylee Peña: Yeah, I agree. And I think that's another interesting part, the community aspect, because I think younger people largely who were, you know, digital natives, or really, you know, iPad kids, people that grew up with the internet right in their hand, in the way that is more like what we have today. Their idea of community is different than ours. I think, you know, I grew up going outside. I remember before having a computer community was the kids in the houses next to me, and now it could be chat, you know, or whatever, or the comments on your on your YouTube. And I think that that's different, and I think that there's a lot of bad by around having screens between us, but I think that there is a lot of good with having all this connection. I think that the young people that I work with and mentor are feel so much smarter and more ready to defend their values than I ever was. So I think that's definitely true, and that's ultimately why I think that storytelling is at a really interesting point when you have all these tools in so many hands, it doesn't mean that you know you can't keep storytelling just because someone else has access to these tools, it just means that you know yours have to yours have to be pretty good to get the eyes, or they have to speak to a certain kind of person, and that's where the the empathy and the collaboration and the taste Come in that will just be the deciding factors for storytelling, for creatives in the future.

Zack Arnold: Yeah, and that's one of the areas where I see tremendous opportunity. And like you've been talking about, the bridge to get there is going to be really bumpy, but my hope is one of the things that comes from this is the return of a meritocracy to the great content, the great stories are actually the ones that win. I won't go deep into this because Ted hope and I went super deep into this, like my brain was broken after he explained this to me, but essentially, the way that the business is organized now is streaming platforms and vertical integration and user acquisition. It's not a meritocracy. They don't even care if they have the best films and TV shows anymore. That's not what it's about. So I won't go any deeper into that, but I believe there's a there's a world where a meritocracy, in this world of YouTube and user generated content, where if you have the best stuff, it's going to get the most eyeballs, because there's no gatekeeper that's deciding we're not going to finance that, or we're not going to put a lot of ad money behind that. It's like, if you have something great and you know how to build an audience around it, the best stories again, are going to ring. So to me, that's one of the really cool opportunities that I'm hoping materializes from all this madness.

Kylee Peña: Oh, I agree, and I think that that's a really interesting opportunity for generative models, because we think about it in terms of like image and sound and video, but it's a predictive model, so it's it can know you in a way that others don't know you as well and know your taste and what you like to see. And so it can mean that while the box office won't, maybe won't have, like, you know, billions of dollars of this one movie, you know, maybe sometimes something will go viral. But I think the real value is that there is something for everyone. On, and that in the generative time, they can actually find it, and that you can build these really good communities, really powerful audiences with stories that speak to them in a way that, you know, media. 15 years ago, you really had to go and hunt for those you know, you got these niche audiences. And then even longer ago, 2030, years ago, you had to go on like a bulletin board to find your little niche of people. I used to go on an X Files fan board. People always gravitate and find their community. And I think it'll be easier for people to connect over stories, because it'll be easier to find them, easier to make them, and then the best stuff will rise up. And it doesn't mean that it's going to be, you know, Blockbuster level. It's just that we I think we might have to recalibrate how we think about success in terms of of storytelling, too.

Zack Arnold: Yeah. And frankly, I don't think it has to be blockbuster level, at least right now, Blockbuster level isn't even leading to success. By and large, obviously, there are the few outliers, but by and large, blockbuster movies aren't even making money. So like, for me, some of the best films are those true indies, or maybe the Indies that had one really great star and a little bit of extra money so they could get what they needed on the screen. But most of my favorite films of all time, they're they come from the indie world because they're great stories, not because they're blockbusters.

Kylee Peña: Yeah, my favorite time of the year is when I get to go to go to Sundance Film Festival, because it's a bunch of movies that are doing something unexpected for the most part. In my opinion, those are the ones that I really love.

Zack Arnold: But now what we don't have to worry about is, well, I have to get it into Sundance, and then I need to be the 1% that gets acquired by a studio. Then that studio has to have a marketing budget. They need to distribute it, and then people will see it. I feel like that's where the opportunity is. But going back to kind of the central thesis of this overlap of legacy Hollywood and content creators, I'm just going to keep saying this. We need to stop thumbing our noses at content creators and this younger generation, because they know how to build audiences, they understand algorithms, they understand how to build a community. They're just not great storytellers yet, and we come in as the great storytellers where they know how to build audiences and community. That's where I think things get really, really powerful for all of us.

Kylee Peña: Yeah, I definitely agree. I think I I've been watching a lot of YouTube creators lately, and I look at their channel and I'm just like, you know, they they make all these thumbnails, you have to think about thumbnail design. That's something when I was at Netflix. You know, I don't know if you've ever noticed, but all the thumbnails that you look at are personalized based on your profile. They're going to be different for yours versus like your spouse, and they're all doing all this themselves and managing, essentially, small businesses. Just because it's on YouTube doesn't mean that it's not a huge, huge undertaking. And some of these, a lot of the creators are incredibly high production value, like they have grown up. And I think, you know, it's also something that I think in the traditional Hollywood sense, has to change, because I know a lot of people that work on these things and are not able to really be taken seriously if they're in cities like LA or trying to get, you know, in the union or something like that, and try to level up and be and have a community there, but they're they're not seen as full editors or visual effects people or whatever, and I think that that's A little bit of a challenge for the major cities, the major media hubs, are going to have to think about, how do we support the development of media in this world and in something like Los Angeles and allow these, these kinds of creators to thrive here too? I don't think we've got that figured out yet.

Zack Arnold: No, well, there's a lot of things that we haven't gotten figured out yet. That's for sure. Where I want to come back to to wrap everything up, because I want to be respectful of your time, is back to this idea of the younger generation. You have an article that you wrote about five years ago that if there was ever anything that is just so Kylee, it was this one, and it's about graduating into uncertainty, some encouragement for 2020 media program grads. And again, 2020, might as well be a century ago. But again, very, very similar. And by the way, I want to frame this properly, this is not about actual college graduates. They're included in this conversation. But I'm including everybody, because all of us right now, it doesn't matter if we're 20 or 60, we are all going back to school. We are all entering a totally new world that we are completely unprepared for under horrendous circumstances. So I just, I wanted to talk a little bit about, if you were speaking to the quote, unquote, next generation, knowing everybody's trying to figure this out, we all have to go back to school. We have to put our students hat on to figure this out. What's some advice that you give to all of us, young graduates that are entering this new world that we are unprepared for?

Kylee Peña: Go get hands on with these generative AI tools. With these other AI tools, you have to go and use them, because they're evolving really quickly and you. You have to be part of that. If you're not part of shaping it, then you're not in the conversation. You're going to get left behind at this point. And I'm not saying that everyone has to go be an expert on AI and go join every discord and listen to every AI podcast and be, you know, really in it, deep in it, like some of us. No, I I'm saying Go grab one of these programs, whether it's Adobe or not, if you're in LA, there's AI LA, there's a lot of other similar groups around the country and world that are just people that are a mix of skeptics and enthusiasts, that have local events. I'm going to one next Friday about ethical AI go on LinkedIn learning and do a couple of courses that are just generally about how generative AI works. Just have some sense. Even if you're really against it, you need to go and see how it's being used and where your voice can be heard in shaping it. With Adobe, we have been doing a lot of meeting people, bringing in customers and skeptics and people that are already using it, AI, filmmakers and people that are very against it, and and listening, and that's shaping our development. And at the TV Academy, I'm part of the AI Task Force. We're talking to everybody working in the TV industry about this. The conversation is happening right now, and it's already AI is already here. Generative AI is here, and the shape that it takes in the coming days is going to be up to all of us, so you just have to jump in and play around with it and have a perspective, have an informed perspective, and don't let anyone else, including me, give it to you.

Zack Arnold: One thing that I probably should have said much earlier in our conversation this summit. Nor is this interview sponsored by Adobe. This is me genuinely believing in what Adobe is doing, believing that of all the companies in the space, they're doing it the best full disclosure. I think you guys might be posting on social media one saying, hey, check out this summit. So I wouldn't be completely and totally honest, but if they're thinking, well, they're only saying this because Adobe's paying him to No, they are not. I would have loved to have Adobe as a sponsor. They're not a sponsor. But it does not matter. I truly believe all the things that we're saying about what this company is doing, what these tools are doing, and you literally just spelled out like you gave seven things, seven pieces of advice for new grads. Your first one was, keep learning. Right? We have to keep learning and be a part of this conversation. We're not going to get through all seven, but there's one more than I want to speak to that I've been talking about in multiple conversations for the summit. And you say, don't wait for permission to share your knowledge. And I think especially in this user generated content creator space, there are so many people thinking, Well, who am I to think that I could be on YouTube or I could make these stories? I think that there are so many people in our industry, in all the various crafts, that we've been conditioned to believe my job is to wait for other people to give me their stories so I can help them. I've talked to so many editors specifically like, well, there are no jobs, and other people need to have shows before I can get the jobs. And it's this idea that when somebody else has the show, I become their crafts person and I become their technician. But I don't believe in this space we have that kind of time. We need to just put ourselves out there and share our knowledge and not wait for permission. So let's, let's talk a little bit more about the importance of this from your perspective?

Kylee Peña: Yeah, I think that that's a really important thing to recognize that everyone has a platform for better or worse, and that you can use it, and you don't have to wait. And anyone who says they're an expert on generative AI or AI or where the this is all going. I mean, there are certainly experts, but nobody knows what's going to happen, and your your perspective is just as valid as everyone else's, so come out there and be a part of that. And if you have a story that you want to tell, just go do it. I know it's easier said than done when you know you're unemployed, or you haven't worked in a long time, or you're, you know, you got laid off or something, but honestly, like, there's no better time than right now to start just getting hands on with something brand new. And I think that that's been really important part of my career. I've been very lucky to be in positions where I can do formal learning at universities, and I am seeing a lot more people that are outside of that that are going to those free MIT courses, or I think Harvard has a bunch of free course like there's so much out there that's free, and I think that never getting too comfortable with what you're doing right now and always being curious is going to be the differentiator in times of massive amounts of change.

Zack Arnold: The last point that I want to hit again, using your framework and not mine, this, to me, is. May be the hardest part of all this, and this is what I spent an inordinate amount of time helping my students in my academy with. Your advice is to pace yourself. That's a hard one, like with everything changing so fast, all the things we need to learn, we need to be putting ourselves out there. We need to be on social media. We need to be updating our resume and our website. We need to be applying for jobs. We need to be learning AI, but ultimately, we have to find a way to do this sustainably. And I know that that's a challenge for you just as much as it is for me, because you and I could you want to talk about starting another organization, overachievers, anonymous, right here?

Kylee Peña: Yeah, I that's the part advice that's hardest for me to take, pacing myself, but it's really important because there's so many things like just within the generative AI space, it's like drinking out of a fire hose, and I quickly get overwhelmed with everything. So I try to at least read something, one new thing every day, a new perspective to add and think about, I don't do it every single day, but I try to, and then have pockets where I'm going to be diving in, like something that is kind of cool, when by the time this airs, I'll be in the middle of it. But next week at work is what we call innovation week, and it's when everybody can put aside their current backlogs and stuff and just focus on a project they wouldn't normally have the resources to do, like a hack week. And so I'm going to be doing that next week, and I'm going to be trying to learn some new AI tools and see what I can create as somebody who is like, not non technical, but definitely not a C Plus Plus programmer. And I think that little time box, things like that are really valuable for kind of growing and and allowing yourself to be, be curious and grow. But you also have to time box the other stuff, self care, whatever it is for you, I need to sit on the couch and associate into my rectangle. Sometimes we all do It's okay.

So pace yourself. Is really I'm glad you brought that up, because it right now, especially when it feels like the job market, especially so competitive, and you just have to keep running and put yourself out there. It's it is life like AI is a sprint, but life is a marathon. So you know, you do have to maintain something that is sustainable.

Zack Arnold: Yeah, we're on the same page there. And I always talk about how all of this is a chess match. This is not about I gotta race around the checkers board. I think a lot of people are scrambling in Go Fish mode and playing a game of Go Fish. And I just gotta get everything I can is is challenging and as scary as it can be. This is a game of chess, and you really got to take the time to strategize and think several moves ahead. And one of the most important, if not the most important, moves, is taking care of yourself. So you survive all of it, because if you sprint to 26.2 mile marathon, you ain't surviving that. You're not making it to the finish line. So yeah, work, life, integration. That's a huge, huge core component of all that we're doing, which is a challenge now, more than it ever has been. But I refuse to let that one go, because if we don't do this sustainably, like everything is going to fall apart. So,

Kylee Peña: Yeah, absolutely, I've been there, and it's not a good place. I know you have to So,

Zack Arnold: And we've talked about it before podcasts, way back in the day, we've had those conversations. Yeah,

Kylee Peña: I know that there's a level of privilege with being able to have an hour to yourself that not everyone has, but yeah, you got to fight for it any way you can.

Zack Arnold: Yeah, exactly. Well, we'll go ahead and we'll wrap it up here, but before I do wrap it up, is there anything else that you believe needs to be said that we didn't cover today that you would want to leave us with?

Kylee Peña: I think that the biggest thing that I want everyone to know is that if there are filmmakers on the call um, or any any kind of like digital art, this is a very technical art form, and I think that ultimately, generative AI can give you more creative control to work with it. So if you think about it as additive, then I think that it puts you in a better mindset to say, Okay, let's explore this together. A lot of open questions around it, for sure, but go into it with an open mind and also connect with me. I'd love to know what storytellers think about this.

Zack Arnold: It's a wonderful place to leave us, and that begs the final question, how do people connect with you and find you knowing you are so hyper connected and involved with everything? I have a feeling a few people might reach out.

Kylee Peña: I think the best place to get me at this point is on LinkedIn. If you search for Kylee Peña on there, I'm also on Instagram. It's mostly reposting pictures of possums

Zack Arnold: and as Instagram should be, by the way,

Kylee Peña: But occasionally I share some other tidbits on there as well.

Zack Arnold: Well, I can't speak for everybody else, but I'll try and that. This was really eye opening for me. I spent all day every. Day for months, researching, preparing, trying to understand what are all the different perspectives. And you definitely brought some new things to the table that even I hadn't considered, which I knew would be the case, which is why I wanted to reach out and have you as a part of this conversation. So once again, I just wanted to leave us today by thanking you for all of your expertise, all the you know, the generous insights and the time that you shared with us today. So thank you so much.

Kylee Peña: Yeah, and thank you for hosting a very important conversation.