ABOUT THIS PODCAST 🔗
Most people watch a movie. We use it as a launchpad for ideas.
Don’t Encourage Us takes films and TV apart to uncover the creative decisions, strategic trade-offs, and unexpected insights hiding beneath the surface. From Barbie to 3 Body Problem, we connect the stories on screen to the bigger questions about business, creativity, human behavior, and how things actually work.
The goal isn’t to review what’s been done. It’s to discover what it makes us think about, what we can learn from it, and what new ideas emerge when we look at familiar things differently.
Listen to the show. Rethink everything.
Don’t Encourage Us takes films and TV apart to uncover the creative decisions, strategic trade-offs, and unexpected insights hiding beneath the surface. From Barbie to 3 Body Problem, we connect the stories on screen to the bigger questions about business, creativity, human behavior, and how things actually work.
The goal isn’t to review what’s been done. It’s to discover what it makes us think about, what we can learn from it, and what new ideas emerge when we look at familiar things differently.
Listen to the show. Rethink everything.
Hosts:
Update frequency:
every 52 days
Average audio length:
67 minutes
Guest interviews
Video podcast
English
United States
58 episodes
since April 16, 2023
episodic
LATEST EPISODE 🔗
Actors face a frustrating catch-22: you need a reel to get work, but you need work to get a reel. Steve Custer's solution starts with a small production studio. Then the hosts ask a question that changes the business: What if actors aren’t the customers?
The startup moves from producing demo reels …
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PREVIOUS EPISODES 🔗
We gave an AI every transcript we had and asked it to figure out what the show actually is.
It found moments worth discussing:
- Why MCU box office is determined by sequencing, not quality — and what that means beyond Marvel
- The structural difference between a high concept and a gimmick, and w…
Sam Wilson has the shield. Harrison Ford has the best arc in the film. And somehow Captain America: Brave New World still doesn't have a main character. We break down what went wrong, what worked, and what Marvel should do next — including the one character from this film who deserves his own serie…
A plot can be broken and a film can still work. Deadpool & Wolverine is Exhibit A — we break down exactly why the character work and tonal execution carried a thinly-plotted story to $1.3B, and what that says about where creative effort actually needs to go. Then: Roadside Picnic and Tarkovsky'…
In this episode of *Don’t Encourage Us Plus*, our fearless hosts briefly touch on Deadpool vs. Wolverine and then dive into the philosophical depths of Russian sci-fi classic *Roadside Picnic* and its haunting adaptation, *Stalker*. The duo explores the novel’s themes of alien artifacts, human resi…
Guests: Matt Baughman (actor), Steve Custer / Spidey Steve (actor, Starwipe Films)
Topics
Plot and structure:
The plot was reverse-engineered from a wish list of cameos and set pieces
"Anchor being" as a concept invented to justify the multiverse Wolverine tour
Three layers operating simu…
Topics
Apple TV+ sci-fi as gimmick:
Dark Matter, Invasion, the Chris O'Dowd show, Godzilla series — all set up sci-fi premises then abandon them for soap opera
The difference between sci-fi as gimmick and sci-fi that reveals something about humanity (Three-Body Problem comparison)
Apple's …
A $15 million Japanese film delivered better visual effects than Hollywood blockbusters spending ten times as much. Godzilla Minus One isn't just a great monster movie it's a case study in what happens when a director with VFX expertise controls the budget, and when a three-year script delay actual…
Is Netflix deliberately making its shows easy to ignore — and if so, what does that mean for every advertiser writing them a check? The hosts unpack the streaming advertising problem no one's naming, then turn to Amazon's $153 million bet on Fallout and find a classic storytelling template hiding u…
Road House (1989) vs. Road House (2024) — full comparative breakdown.
Topics discussed:
The character arc problem: 1989 Dalton grows past his need to kill, 2024 Dalton doesn't
The pool murder scene: why it breaks the 2024 character with no recovery
Bouncer culture as worldbuilding: what th…
Disclaimer: The podcast and artwork embedded on this page are from Don't Encourage Us, which is the property of its owner and not affiliated with or endorsed by Listen Notes, Inc.
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I have no special talent. I am only passionately curious, and
I listen to podcasts.
‐ Albert "Llamacorn" Einstein
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