Welcome to the Experiment

Last month, I sold my house, moved into my parents' basement, and decided to start a one-man content studio with AI as my creative partner.

Yup, you read that right. Fifty-five years old. Three decades in television. And now, downstairs at Mom and Dad’s — not because I’ve given up, but because I’m actually doubling down.

It’s not a midlife crisis—that happened 13 years ago. I’m calling this a midpoint pivot (for some very specific reasons I'll be sharing soon).

The Boom, the Bust, the Basement

For most of my adult life, I’ve been a freelance producer and editor in unscripted television. If you’ve watched behind-the-music biographies of aging rock stars, follow-docs about people living off the grid in Alaska, fin scares during Shark Week, or paranormal investigators chasing off-camera apparitions— there’s a decent chance you’ve seen some of my work without knowing it.

The unscripted world is its own strange ecosystem. We were supposed to be the cockroaches of television — impervious to market shifts, thriving even when scripted budgets were cut or writer’s strikes brought productions to a screeching halt. And for a while, that was true. The streaming boom only made it better. Every network and platform wanted content, and we fed the beast.

Then, somewhere between 2023 and 2024, the air went out. Production slowed to a crawl. My best financial year ever was followed immediately by my worst.

I’m not the only one feeling it. Colleagues across the industry are on the bench, waiting for calls that aren’t coming. The “content glut” narrative has been making the rounds. But underneath the market correction, I see something deeper: the early tremors of AI reshaping how stories are made and who gets paid to make them. (I’ll have a lot more to say about that in future posts.)

The Leap

So I decided to stop waiting for the phone to ring. I sold my house. Packed up my life. And set up shop in the basement — not out of shame, but strategy. No rent. No commute. No overhead. Maximum creative runway.

And with that runway, I’m jetting straight into the belly of the beast that is AI.

For the past six months, I’ve been learning the tools — writing, image generation, video synthesis, music composition, voice emulation. I want to understand not just what they can do now, but how they’re evolving month to month. Honestly, it’s fascinating. And it’s terrifying. Some days I think I’ve glimpsed the future of independent creative work. Other days I feel like I’m watching the birth of the world’s most efficient content landfill.

Why You’re Here

This publication — Dead Air — is where I’m going to share what I’m learning. (The title will make more sense as we go.)

I’m not here to sell you “ten hacks to master AI” or promise that you’ll make six figures in your pajamas. The internet is already drowning in that.

Instead, think of this as part lab notebook, part op-ed column, part behind-the-scenes commentary. Some days I’ll post dispatches from the studio: “Here’s what I tried today, here’s what broke, here’s what surprised me.” Other days I’ll zoom out and talk about the bigger picture: the economics of AI, the cultural shifts it’s accelerating, the ways it’s going to change creative work — for better and worse.

I’m not a tech bro, and I’m not a doomsayer. I’m a working creative, in the middle of a major career pivot, trying to figure it out in public.

My Angle

Four things shape how I look at all this:

* Thirty years in media. I’ve seen formats rise and fall, platforms come and go. I know what it takes to actually make something watchable — and what happens when the people making it are replaced by cheaper, faster alternatives.

* A storyteller’s brain. I write screenplays — psychological thrillers, supernatural horror, and historical fantasy. I’ve always used symbolic systems —myth, tarot, even astrology — as creative engines. That part of my brain is very curious about what happens when you feed those symbols to a machine.

* McLuhan-trained senses. I don’t just care about what tech does. I care about what it does to us. What it rewards, what it erodes, and what it leaves behind.

* A metamodern sensibility. I'm interested in the spaces between — irony and sincerity, human and machine, collapse and emergence. Sometimes I'll step outside the story I'm telling to examine how the story gets told. The tools shape the tale, but so does the consciousness wielding them.

The Ask

If you’re a creator, a media worker, a storyteller, or just someone who wants to see where this AI thing is going without the hype or the despair, stick around. This is going to be messy, and it’s going to be honest.

Some of what I share will be e