Ep. 66 - Media Literacy - Why Every Family Needs a Filmmaker

Anna Thalman: 0:27

Okay, welcome to the podcast today. We are very excited to talk about media literacy and why every family needs a filmmaker.

Kent Thalman: 0:35

Now I want to just start this, by saying that the title has a little bit of a dangerous infamy, which is a rhetorical term, meaning like an assumption underneath of it's sort of putting two things together. It would assume that a film maker is media literate. Now filmmakers are typically more media literate, but we're going to get into what media literacy means, what media illiteracy means, and why we think it's so important. Media literacy. That is, but I do wanna just start by saying. Most people don't truly understand the media that they are engaged with. Even

Anna Thalman: 1:09

sometimes filmmakers,

Kent Thalman: 1:11

even a lot of filmmakers, I find, young and veteran filmmakers are making media, but they. Th they don't seem to actually deeply articulate themselves. They, they sort of go, oh, I'm, it's, it's imitation as opposed to true understanding. I fear. So that said, let's talk about what it is and, and we'll get into why we felt like this was such an, a. To create an episode on.

Anna Thalman: 1:38

Yeah, it's interesting because literacy, wasn't always something that was deemed necessary. You know, it's only in the. Last century or two that it's really become a necessity that everyone learned to read and to write. And even in the world today, there are places where people are not literate. So, you know, in, in developed countries, media literacy, I think is becoming more of a need because it's starting to become so common where we're all surrounded by so much media that we really can't. Engage in our world without understanding it or having some knowledge of,

Kent Thalman: 2:13

yeah. To Anna's point, a lot of people think that they're literate in, in media because the world is so full of it. Like it's so common and we engage in it so constantly. We think, yeah, I mean, I understand movies, I understand YouTube videos. I understand social media. It's just, they're all just different, you know, whatever

Anna Thalman: 2:33

Instagram reels

Kent Thalman: 2:35

or whatever. Yeah. Or a lot of people are, are under the assumption that, that like, you know, media is just for passing the time or becoming like entertained or whatever. And so, if they think that that's really all there is then. And you're, if that's what your impression is, then you're probably media illiterate, meaning that you are, you're not understanding the communication that's actually happening, when you're watching or engaging in different forms of media. And obviously we are most concerned with filmmaking, as a medium in this podcast, but it applies to. Everything music, radio, visual, art paintings, all that stuff. There's a literacy. There's a language here that is, is, connecting people, on a sort of. Emotional intellectual and metaphysical level. So, yeah.

Anna Thalman: 3:22

Yeah, that's a good point. There are so many different kinds of literacy and things you can be literate in. I pulled a quote here from the national council of teachers of English and TCE. I don't know if that's widely known, but that's what it is. And they have this article about literacy that we'll link to in the show notes, where they're trying to define it. It says as committee members, we regularly wrestle with pinning down a comprehensive definition of literacy. The common definition, the ability to read and write gets increasingly complex upon closer examination. What does mastery of reading and writing look like? How do we measure. Despite the complexity literacy is the global metric. We use to assess the health and competence of communities. High literacy rates have been found to correlate to everything from better access to economic opportunity, to better nutrition, to environmental sustainability. And then they conclude at its simplest. Literacy is the way that we interact with the world around us, how we shape it and are shaped by it, how we communicate with others via reading and writing. But also by speaking, listening and creating in is how we articulate our experience in the. Hmm. Do you think is really nice? How we articulate our experience in the world could be through words or it could be through images, or it could be a combination of both one.

Kent Thalman: 4:41

You can see that they're clearly saying it's everything. How we communicate with others via reading and writing, but also speaking, listening, listening to music, listening, I mean, there's an auditory aspect of film in its various forms and creating meaning. I think that that could include all sorts of creative arts. And, we all know that there's, things like body language, which is like a social cue that people can learn to detect. To understand or even project and communicate with, and so I just think there's all sorts of, like you're saying there's levels of, of, of literacy and it used to be that sufficient literacy did not include reading and writing for a long time, probably longer than, I mean, it's only recent history really that reading and writing became at all mainstream. And then once it did. Learning how to read and write will not get you very many jobs. It used to be that reading and writing could get you off. That was like a college education. And even now college educations are becoming so democratized, which is a good thing. In my opinion, I don't think it's like a bad thing. And that college is useless. I think that levels of education becoming democratized is good. And I, and we're, we're hoping, and I have hope that that's what we're seeing with media literacy. but right now I think we're just starting to enter that world. Now that media is becoming super accessible because of streaming social media, cell phone cameras. I mean, visual sort of film like media is just everywhere and we don't. And also just like high production feature films are becoming more common too in different languages anyone with a few bucks a month can watch gazillions of hours more than you can possibly. It's really not money anymore. That's stopping us from consuming all the media available to us. It's that there's not enough time in the day to consume all the media that's available to us. Therefore media literacy I think, is becoming super needful.

Anna Thalman: 6:34

Yeah. And I think it's important to make the distinction between consuming media and being literate in media. Because, for example, I think about Spanish, we both speak Spanish and so we've learned to. Be fluent in that language and what that process looks like. And I remember a lot of American children whose parents were immigrants. And so they grew up hearing Spanish in their homes, but they couldn't speak it. They couldn't write it and they couldn't write it, but they could understand it. So would you say that they're fluent because. They can't really engage in a conversation if they can't speak or write the language as well as they can hear it and understand it. So I do think there is something valuable in being exposed to diverse media, many types of stories and perspectives, but it's very, one-sided the illiterate person is an observer rather than a participant and they're dependent on others to be able to navigate

Kent Thalman: 7:30

that world. Yeah, absolutely. I mean, I really agree with that and I feel like. Obviously that's most of us, most of us are so engaged in media and film that we are probably used to thinking that we are fluent. Like we're just like, yeah. I mean, I understand it because we are, there's a lot of things that we subconsciously understand, but if we don't consciously understand them, that's actually kind of more dangerous

Anna Thalman: 7:51

I think it's interesting that a lot of schools teach reading and comprehension together. It's very important that we don't just know how to read the words, but we're understanding what they mean and what the overall story means and what messages it's communicating, because what is the point of communication? If you don't really understand the message

Kent Thalman: 8:09

you

Anna Thalman: 8:09

know, we homeschool our kids and so they're learning how to read. And I can tell if they understand the sentence or if they just read the word and I ask, what does that word mean? I don't know. You just read the word and they just said the word, but they don't actually know what that word means. And so I think. On a bigger scheme, they might read sentences and be able to read them and say them and not know what it's talking about. So that's a whole different skill set.

Kent Thalman: 8:36

Yeah. Well, you were small children. You can even see sometimes they use words and they, they use it. Do you know what that word means? Because you're kind of saying it in a funny way or whatever, and you realize quickly, like they don't actually have a clue what that word means. And so, yeah.

Anna Thalman: 8:51

So anyway,

8:52

I wanted to mention this article that I love.

Anna Thalman: 8:55

it's in the new Yorker and it's called why facts don't change our minds. And I think it's really interesting, but there is a specific study that they cite. And I put the quote here. I was pulling up. I'm just going to read a few paragraphs from it's really good. And I'll put this in the show notes as well. It says virtually everyone in the United States and indeed throughout the developed world is familiar with toilets. A typical flush has a ceramic bowl filled with. When the handle is depressed or the button pushed the water and everything that's been deposited in, it gets sucked into a pipe and from there into the sewage system. But how does this actually happen in a study conducted at Yale graduate students were asked to rate their understanding of everyday activities, including. Toilets zippers and cylinder locks. They were then asked to write detailed step-by-step explanations of how the devices work and to rate their understanding. Again, apparently the effort revealed to the students their own ignorance because their self-assessments dropped toilets. It turns out are more complicated than they appear. Sloman and Fern back see this effect, which they call the illusion of explanatory depth, just about everywhere. People believe that they know way more than they actually do. What allows us to persist in this belief is other people in the case of my toilet, someone else designed it so that I can operate it. This is something humans are very good at. We've been relying on one another's expertise ever since we figured out how to hunt together, which was probably a key development in our evolutionary history. So well, do we collaborate Sloman and Fern back argue that we can hardly tell where our own understanding ends and others begins.

Kent Thalman: 10:43

I love that last sentence that we operate so well together that we can barely discern where our understanding. And I think that is, that is so true in the world of literacy, whether you're understanding a novel or a film or a painting, we sometimes look at it and go, that's a realistic looking painting, or like that was a fun movie. Or that was a good read or whatever, because I didn't get bored, you know? And so we have these criteria for the things we're engaging in is. I dunno, I guess I grew up in a family where it was like, was it super entertaining in the case of movies and books? It wasn't paced fast and is the painting realistic? We had like, no taste for abstract art whatsoever. And so like photo realism is the gauge for good paintings, which I think has a problematic, Basis for it because eventually it's like, well, why not just take a picture with a camera? Like the whole reason you're painting is to copy something as photo realistically as possible. Anyway, that's a tangent, but it's true. How many of us actually understand how a film operates. We just are so used to sticking the disc in our player now, nowadays they don't even, most teenagers aren't even doing that. Right. They're just, they're just clicking something on their phone. And sometimes not even deciding to search it out, it's being presented to them on a stream or a, or a slide or something. And so we just take these things so for granted that, we don't even know. Why this makes the ball spin down and flush everything away. I mean, that's a simple, mechanical thing, but that phones are like immensely more complex than that. And then all the media that's being created is hundreds. If not thousands of man hours behind every minute of experience, you know, that you're, that you're consuming and we take it. So. Not just for granted, but we just don't, we don't know what's going on behind the scenes. Well,

Anna Thalman: 12:36

and along that vein, the only show that we let our kids watch or TV show is Mr. Rogers. And he often will demonstrate processes. Even in his time, his day, we were entering a world where so many things exist and children. I have no idea where they came from. It's like magically, these things exist. And so it's so helpful for them to see the process of creation. Like, oh, someone actually made this and there were machines and there were people and there were elements mixed together and they can see that there's a process. That comes behind that end result, which I think is really healthy.

Kent Thalman: 13:12

Someone created it. That reminds me also, our kids are very young by the way. Like, it's not like we're never going to let them watch television we're filmmakers, but they're very young. And so we're, we're keeping their media consumption pretty low. And they watch movies now, but Teligent programs wise, it's Mr. Rogers neighborhood, which is the best anyway. It's our favorite show too? The other one is, we're reading. The little house books, like little house in the big woods, little house in the Prairie by, Laura Ingalls Wilder. Sorry. and just remembering all three names in the correct order. And, what's really amazing is that those books are just a collection of processes. Like little house in the big woods is literally about. This house and like little house on the Prairie is even more about every single step required to fell a tree, shave it, notch it, Lincoln log it. You know, I don't even know the current terms, but you read these chapters and it, and you understand that, like she grew up in the 1860s, but she was writing these well into the 1900. And the world had super changed now between post-Civil war to post world war one, it was like a different planet in the United States, you know? And so like, what Anna's saying is I think those people are so fascinated by her books and I think they maintain their relevance because you read these detailed processes that are firsthand. She's basically writing autobiography in a novel form. And you realize that these children, Laura, for example, who's in the books, grew up seeing every single process unfold before her eyes. She saw her father create the pegs and notch, the wood planks and stick the door together and hinge it and create a lock with a thing and another thing. And like, you know how to dig a well and how to take care of animals. And, and now this. Phone that I have in my hand is totally mysterious. I don't, I couldn't even start to tell you how that thing works. It's just, it is so complex. And I remember even as a child thinking. That a compact disc was total magic. I still don't quite understand how compact discs were and those are archaic now. So the world is spinning so fast. It's fascinating to me anyway. I know that was somewhat tangential, but it really reminds me of how familiar are we with the world around us? And are we, We kind of literally we have an understanding of what we're engaging in. Yeah.

Anna Thalman: 15:34

So that is one way that helps us become more literate. One way that helps us be literate is understanding the process behind the product. You don't have to be a filmmaker to be pretty media literate, but it's a really great way to. Increase your literacy is to have some awareness of that process and what it looks like. And if you are a filmmaker, it doesn't guarantee that you're literate, like we said at the beginning, but again, that can be a contributing factor.

Kent Thalman: 16:00

Literacy may be well-developed by learning how to understand literature, if we learn how to understand and critically communicate about the books, we're reading. I think that's probably one of the best things you can do to be able to watch a film and start to break down the story, at least the same way. But then if you want to Mol taste of the technical, understanding then maybe trying to make a few projects here and there that's a really good way, but even if you're not a filmmaker, you don't even want to touch the media. I'm reading a book like making movies by sitting in a little may or, you know, these are not super hard reads, they're simple books, but you read them just to get somewhat of an understanding of what that process is. I mean, even for me as a fifth grader reading, a tiny little four youth biography on Steven Spielberg, it was a very simple. Simple language rights, fifth grade read. It unfolded this process of, oh my gosh, they shoot with a camera and they just shoot all around and do take after take, and then they cut it up in the editing room. That was new information for me. Right. Like, whereas before I remember watching television thinking. It was magic. How do they, how are you here? You know, looking at this person's face and then like in an instant, you're looking at the other person's face and that sounds silly, but we all grew up without understanding that for at some point it was darkness to us, you know? And, and that's a very simple example of gaining some sense of literacy, but, That can grow as you grow, as you get older deepening your understanding of this language of these, media that you are engaging in will bring deeper understanding and protection and.

Anna Thalman: 17:41

Yeah. And that's part of why we read the little house books is because they are showing these processes and it helps our children understand, they don't see that with our own house. We didn't build our own house, but they

Kent Thalman: 17:53

are getting, they're getting

Anna Thalman: 17:53

a tiny bit of it, but not a ton. And the books help them kind of see that process outlined. Going back to Mr. Rogers. Again, he also shows the process of his own film making by taking you behind the scenes. And he shows this as my studio and here's how we shoot and there's lights and there's people and it's not real, you know, and here's the puppets. And I think that's really good for him to make that distinction because it's true that. It's either like magic or they just think it's reality. My kids will see a video of someone cooking on Pinterest where it's like they do this, or like they snap and suddenly there's butter or they like just throw things in it's super fast. And they're like, how did they do that? How they do it so fast. It's a trick. They sped it up like they

Kent Thalman: 18:42

Jumpcut. Yeah. And for a six year old, our son is very media literate. He understands shots and editing. He sees us doing that, like kind of like little house. He grows up with little movies in the big woods and, and he, uh, he gets that he watches an Instagram video like that, and he. Oh, wait, how are their hands moving so fast? Are they actually that fast? That's his first assumption, even though he understands that these things can be fabricated. He's just young in his understanding of that. And so his, his mind sees that and doesn't automatically assume like this has been fabricated. And we're

Anna Thalman: 19:17

not children though. I think we can still see something and think, oh, that's just how the world is. It was caught on camera. This is real. This is how people think this is what's normal, especially for teenagers. Like, they're very aware of like, what is normal? What's cool. What, you know, what are people doing? And when they watch media, they start to get these ideas about what that looks like. What does being a high schooler look like? What are most people's experiences? And, and what they see is probably not actually accurate. It's just what someone created for their

Kent Thalman: 19:49

story, but it's accurate maybe to one person. Sometimes one piece of film for a young person, or even, even a young adult, even an adult, even an old person. Sometimes these media like can like give you such a powerful impression of what the world really is, what reality is actually like that, I guess there's room for deception, which we don't want to make it all sound like doom and gloom media literacy. We don't learn it just out of fear. Like I said before, it's protection and enjoyment. I mean, even beyond enjoyment, I think it's, it's a sense of meaningfulness and fulfillment. It's deep engagement with truly thoughtful media can, can bring this. I really think I would even say joy, because if we actually are thinking critically, not just about the media we're consuming, but our life experiences themselves and we marry those two things together. A great piece of art can connect us with people who live far away or who don't live in our time or our generation and help us feel like we're starting to understand what being human really is at its core. And it helps you feel less alone. It helps you feel like your life matters. I think great works of art can do that for us. And I think it's greatly needed. We see society. Where suicide is becoming a greater and greater epidemic depression. And the sense of loneliness and meaninglessness is only accentuated by our, feverish consumption of media that we don't understand, and that we're not engaged. Deeply, but when you start to become literate, your selection becomes more careful your interaction with it becomes more purposeful and you start to find films that had you seen them pre-literacy you would have you would've missed out on all of the great and you've all, I think we've all experienced this, right? Like where you watch something that you grew up watching as a child and you. Either. Wow. I've really outgrown that and it's not so good or wow. That's way more profound than I ever believed. That's why I loved the movie, the black stallion. So many people who were children in the seventies watched that film now. And they say, I love that film as a kid. And I watch it again. And I'm realizing all the emotions and the memories and, and just how meaningful, you know, that feels to experience that stories. That's one of the reasons I I think this is so important. It's not just because it's like, oh, it's so scary. If you're not it's, it's just, it's just a wonderful thing. We're all engaging in media

Anna Thalman: 22:16

anyway. And to teach your kids this about reading, you know, like it's not fun at first because you're not good at it yet, but eventually there's so much. Available to you. Like the world will open up when you become literate and they're just starting to notice, oh, there's letters everywhere. Like there's words all over the

Kent Thalman: 22:33

place. And then yeah, it reminds me of, oh dear Kent. Not citing his sources again. It's a very important famous person whom we may put in the show notes. If we remember to look up the source, but it's a great quote, which is, the world is full of such a number of things. I'm sure we should all be as happy as Kings. That may not be perfect word for word, but the essence of that idea is just, I don't know. I read that and I thought, yeah, that's really true. There's such an abundance of good things in the world. And if we learn to have eyes that can see them in ears, that can hear them, there's so much sort of physical and spiritual, nourishment that we can experience from all of those things.

Anna Thalman: 23:17

One more quick comparison that I love to make is comparing literacy to food. And we all eat food. We're very familiar with it. Like the toilet analogy in the new Yorker. Most of us even make our own food from time to time. Right. So we might think we have good taste because we've tried lots of things, but good taste doesn't mean knowing what tastes good. It's knowing what you're tasting at all. And. When you eat, are you familiar enough to discern the ingredients and the techniques that were used to create the food that you eat? Or are you relying on the labels to know what's inside? So what tastes good is individual. It varies from person to person. And good taste is not about that. It's not about your preferences being superior to anyone else's or saying, oh, I'm a filmmaker. So what I like is better than someone

Kent Thalman: 24:08

else, you can treat us that way. They're like, so what, what is good? And it's like, well, I'm not exactly an authority to say that just because I make films, yeah,

Anna Thalman: 24:16

your opinion is your own. So what's good is what you like, but, But having good taste is being able to discern and understand exactly what you're tasting. You know, that you know enough about it, that you can tell someone like this has these ingredients. You can recognize quality. You can recognize the effort that went into something. And, if it involves some sort of difficult technique, which leads to a greater appreciation for what you're eating, just like in media, you can appreciate film even more. If you understand. The art of it, or like when it recognized something really high quality,

Kent Thalman: 24:54

I think it's interesting what you said about like good tastes like good taster, you know, if you're good at being able to discern, what it is that you are consuming. And so I feel like you, you don't always have to know, but there's the discernment of what helped create it. Then there's also the discernment of understanding what it's doing for you or what it may do for you. If you keep eating this thing, or if you keep in the case of engaging with stories and media and whatnot, if you believe these worldviews, if you believe. And keep engaged key there, keep engaging in the media. But if you keep engaging in it, I think eventually you'll start to find yourself thinking about or thinking or seeing the world through those lenses. And so being able to discern if that is good for you is also part of having, I guess, not just good taste, but good judgment. I guess those are two different things in the sake of this conversation. So, and that judgment is, a heavy responsibility for all of us, I suppose. It's what makes us. Discern between good and evil and whatever that means for each of us. But, but I think a big part of discerning good and evil, which kind of goes almost beyond the literacy conversation is having some sort of standard of being able to see the long-term. I've been thinking a lot about long game. Perspectives being essential to be able to judge things in the short term, because it's like, where would this belief take me? Where would this food take me if I ate this food, like every day for the rest

Anna Thalman: 26:16

of my life, if that is a part of it, being able to see the effect that that would have on your body. And I think we've all heard of someone who has eaten something and then they found out how it was made and they're appalled, but they're like, I'm never going to eat that again. So our ignorance of what we're eating, doesn't spare us the consequences of eating it. And the same thing with media, our ignorance of the underlying messages of the media that we consume doesn't spare the emotional or psychological consequences or beliefs that will start to. Solidify.

Kent Thalman: 26:49

And so to close here, we do need to wrap up, unfortunately, unfortunately for you, maybe, maybe, I don't know, depending on how much you're enjoying this podcast episode. But I'll just say in closing, it's important for us to understand what we can do to become more media literate. We've mentioned some things here. I think I've mentioned, we've talked about reading and engaging in media more thoughtfully and, learning the critical. Theoretical approach to even just understanding literature itself. I think that goes a long way in digital media. but also there are times there are valuable times that are sort of naturally built in that sometimes we like to skip for discussion. Credits are wonderful time to sit in the theater or sit in the living room or just pause and either talk about if you're with someone. Or think about, or maybe even write down if that's not too nerdy for you. It's good for you to talk about it. I mean, just verbally articulating, what did you like about it? What didn't you like about it? Why did you like it? What, what do you think this meant and why do you think it meant that. And so, because those, those things are naturally built in. I think we just take advantage of them, the car ride home, if you're at a theater or, or even if you're just hanging out with someone and someone mentions, Hey, I saw this movie recently, and I hated it. Well, I loved it. Well, okay. Talking about it's more than just like, these are all the reasons why I know it's bad or these are all the reasons why I love it and know it's good. And have to defend my opinions. Always the question people

Anna Thalman: 28:15

ask, did you like, did you like it. What if we ask more interesting questions than that, like, well, what does that film about for you? What resonated for you? Do you, what was the filmmaker trying to say? Do you believe that? Is that what you think too? Or do you believe something different? Yeah.

Kent Thalman: 28:29

Or if you disliked it, what do you think caused that? Why did you reject it? Or, or what parts of it do you not like, and it's, it might be medium based like, oh, I just didn't like how they executed certain things. I felt problematic to me. And, and, and yet it might be just like, well, I thought the story was false. Or I thought that what they did was wrong in this way or that way, or on the flip side, it might be like, I just thought that this way that they articulated this thing had extra resonance because of its unique, execution, or, or maybe I thought that what they were saying was really important, hopefully bowls. Right? Being able to articulate yourself even around. The specifics of that. And maybe we should go into details on like a specific, case study or something in the future on an episode that we have more time on. But, but those kinds of discussions are, so I love it when someone actually wants to sit down and say, Something they learned and why they understood it from a particular piece of media or even just a book or, and there are some kinds of media that we do this naturally with religious people will often talk about scripture this way, very thoughtfully. And we could do that. I think with all the media that we're engaging in is like stop and say. Well, let's make the last two hours of our life mean something by actually sort of digesting it, because if you don't digest your food, you're just shooting it right through that little good. It does your rights. So talk surprises in your body.

Anna Thalman: 29:58

So, if we could leave you with one challenge or one takeaway, I think it would be this to just have discussions. Try to have a little discussion after you watch a film and it doesn't have to be an hour long, invite all your friends over book kind of thing. It could be,

Kent Thalman: 30:11

that'd be cool, but like college level vocabulary or be a genius. Yeah. Anyone can talk, talk about it

Anna Thalman: 30:19

with your family. Talk about it with your filmmaker friends. If you have them. Or even you can engage in discussion online and see, what are the critics saying about this film? And is it historically accurate if it's based on actual events and, how was it received by audiences? And you can kind of use that to inform your own opinion. I actually find that reading critical reviews is really valuable. I learn a lot when I read those reviews They can do a good job of breaking down a film and the process, whereas we're so used to lateral feedback and reviews of just our fellow peers and lay people who are just going to say, yeah, I liked it. Or I didn't, or this person was attractive or not, or it was cool. And I liked the music. But they're not skilled at the craft or

Kent Thalman: 31:03

literate. And, and, and I think the other thing is more than even just reviews because reviews are often, they're ultimately just people's opinions. But. But they can sometimes, like I often found that Roger the reason he was so enjoyable to read. It was because he was, he was literate and he was pretty thoughtful. And sometimes he was just a fan boy. And sometimes he hated movies that I thought were good. He said the village was like the worst movie you've ever seen. And I was like, man, I don't think that's the worst movie you've ever seen, but, and that's okay. Like eventually opinion comes into this. It will always play a role in these discussions and you just have to kind of learn to see that for what it is. But also, even on YouTube, there's people with making beautiful analyses of, of works of art music films, and they're often some of these people are very thoughtful in their deep analysis because they usually only analyze films that they love, unless it's just like a bash session, which I don't think those are very valuable, even if it's not a good film.

Anna Thalman: 31:58

People who participated in the film that give you some insight into, you know, what was the director thinking when they did it this way? Or how did this actor interpret the character the way they did. And that can be

Kent Thalman: 32:08

really interesting. GA podcasts are really enjoyable and there's other podcasts for all sorts of things, but, DJs directors, Guild of America. And the directors will talk about their films in front of an audience of DGA members. So they'll often go into not just craft, but sometimes like their approach and their, what they were trying to say with it. And those are good things. You don't have to do all of these things, but all these little efforts, if you watch something and it'd be funnels you, or you liked it, or you really didn't like it, but you had a strong experience with it. And you want to engage a little deeper. These things will add to your ability to understand and appreciate. All of the media that you're consuming and digest it, so that it's good for you. Yeah.

Anna Thalman: 32:47

You'll become more empowered to make informed decisions and be able to have discussions and it will become more meaningful to you.

Kent Thalman: 32:56

We'll catch you next time.