Draft Punk

Regardless

The sun is dipping below the power lines; it’s time to go. I’ve got my backpack on, and my snack money in my shorts. I’m walking to school. It’s a Wednesday afternoon, it’s 2026, and I’m doing this old school, feet on the ground, step by step, Converse sneaker in front of Converse sneaker, on the way to go teach a class about the future. Wait. It’s not about the future. It’s about right now. It just happens that ‘right now’ feels like the future.

I wanted to walk today. Sure. I walk around my neighborhood every day. I have my loops and destinations. The newsstand is closed now, so I can’t go there to pick up the latest Auto Trader and dream about finally getting that 1949 Mercury I always wanted. The drugstore is gone, too. Used to head in there because they had this dumb section called “AS SEEN ON TV,” that had all the junk they sell in informercials in one aisle. The copper socks for golfers, and the Compression bracelets for blood flow. Or maybe it’s the other way around. I loved walking that aisle and seeing that junk, ‘Hey, know what? I’m also AS SEEN ON TV.” I’d think.

These are the stories of my neighborhood. And you don’t know them by doing a drive by. You have to walk them. It’s how I know about the beaded glass emporium right across from Paramount Studios. If you need glass beads, hit me up, I know a place. I also know where a “Ghost Horse” used to live. It was in the front yard of a house that is now bulldozed. The yard had a huge support column in the front yard and one in the back yard that held up a huge Billboard that rose above the house. I always imagined that the owner was set for life because they got the money from that billboard. And there was a kids hobby horse that had springs, the kind you’d rock on it, in the yard. But after years of sitting outside the sun stole all the color off the horse. It had turned clear. A Ghost Horse. Now it’s gone and so is the house. The Ghost Horse is now somewhere with the Ghost House.

That’s what you get when you walk instead of drive. It’s why I think Superman spends so much time as Clark Kent. When they say, “I’m just looking at things from 10,000 feet,” in a meeting, I know they think it means they have a good perspective, but I think it means they only have ONE perspective and I want more.

The class I’m going to teach is about “Agentic A.I.” And as my co-instructor says, “Anyone who says they’re an expert on this stuff is lying to themselves.” It’s a moment in time where the world is turning and we have a chance to understand this stuff. Turn over the ethics of it. And learn what it does without trying to bury it at the crossroads with a stake in its heart because we think it’s a vampire. I mean, maybe it is a vampire, at the end of the day. But if it is, I want to have gone to Vampire School so I know how to spot one, right?

I’m walking up Gower Street, having decided not to stop at Astro Burger for dinner. Want to keep moving. I pass this door, where Desi Arnaz and Lucille Ball walked into work after they bought this studio lot with the money they made from “I Love Lucy.”

It’s also where we shot the pilot of Greetings From Tucson, another comedy about a mixed marriage between a white lady and a Latino. Imagine being on that lot as a working actor when someone tells you that you won’t be a star because your accent is too thick. And then a few years later, you buy that lot.

Just someone during extraordinary things after being told they couldn’t. Like we all have to do, right? A little further on down a road and I’m passing by Lucy’s El Adobe, the place where Linda Ronstadt would meet her boyfriend, future Governor Jerry Brown after recording in the music studio at Paramount. Almost a ghost of a place, but saved recently. First to be in a movie Tarantino is making about Hollywood in the 1970s, but also to reopen soon and hopefully be the hangout it was before. I used to take my kids there to eat. I met Gabriel Iglesias at Lucy’s the first time we ever sat with each other. You can feel moments crawl out of the building and into your soul. What it felt and looked and sounded like to dash across traffic from the studio to get some tacos and talk and hang. Memories of mine and ones that talk to me that I am lucky enough to borrow for the moment. I’m told this is the place where Linda Ronstadt’s backup band said they were going to record their own album and they hoped Linda would be cool with them trying to do their own thing. My fellow Tucsonan didn’t want to stand in their way and gave her blessing. And that’s part of the story of how The Eagles came to be. It’s where I met with Gabriel because I had sold a sketch comedy show to a network, but before the deal was negotiated one of the comics passed away (R.I.P. Freddy Soto). I needed to find someone quick to try and save that show. I didn’t save that show, but I met Gabe and got to work with him on Mr. Iglesias.

I turn another corner and I’m closer to where I’m going to teach class. I pass by one of my favorite buildings on the street. It’s a Craftsman Bungalow that somehow didn’t become a ghost house, and it’s been standing there so long that I’m looking at it right now, but I can also look at it when I watch my favorite silent movie comedian, Buster Keaton because he worked and shot some of his silent classics in front of and around this bungalow. When I moved here, it was a store that sold luggage, beepers and flags from around the world, all draped over the front porch. What can I say, the 1990s were a time of flags, pagers and suitcases you had to carry because no one had figured out that putting wheels on them was a smart thing to do. Really. No one had thought of that.

And then I’m here. Ready to teach. Ready to find the present that feels like the future with a whole class. And to stare down the terror of a machine that could take my job. Take your job. Take everyone’s job. A machine that everyone says is smarter than we are. Smarter, faster and better. But as my co-teacher mentioned in class. “Is it smarter?” Can it tell a story about Linda Ronstadt and Buster Keaton and Peter Murrieta and Gabriel Iglesias and Gov. Jerry Brown and The Eagles? I mean maybe The Eagles and Linda Ronstadt. But all of those characters coming into my body and soul and leaving it to go into yours? Not yet it can’t. Not yet. And even if it could, it wouldn’t tell it my way. And what is my way? My way is to share. To poke and prod. To lean back and say that I’m here. I’m walking and I’m listening and I’m taking it in. To mention Linda and hope you can hear her voice burst into your heart without needing to play you a clip. Because the clip I want to play you is this one. Because he ain’t here anymore. And he mattered.

Know what else? It doesn’t matter if AI can do that. And I can, too. Or if it does it faster. Because when they say that it’s smarter, and that it’s faster, those are companies and people who run companies telling us that it is faster and better than we are. But by whose rules? Know what I think is better? A walk instead of a run. Being on the ground seeing you every day instead of flying above. Writing these pieces and changing them all week long before Friday. That’s my better. Know what else? Maybe I don’t want to be faster. Whaaaa?

Yeah. And I got proof there are others that don’t think faster is better. During the car culture time known as The Hot Rod Era, people were looking to take cars and drop big engines in them. To build them they went super-fast and then you would drag race on streets to prove who was best. Who was fastest. Big engines, fine tuned. Got to find the right car to put it in. That meant a light car. Lighter the car, bigger the engine, that gives you speed. Those cars looked like this:

And they cost money to build and make. Had to have some money laying around to get one of those going. But if you wanted to participate in this craze, and you didn’t have money? What could you do? Well, you’d have to figure out something else. You want to customize something, but you don’t have the money for all that. So you go buy what there were a lot of, and used, and weren’t popular. Things like big boxy Chevys and Fords. Things you could get cheap parts for because there were a lot of them. And if you didn’t have the cash for getting a big engine, you’d have to do something else. Hmmm…. Maybe if it was going to go slow, you should make it something to look at when it went by. Like a custom paint job, or a mural on the car.

Like that. Redefine what’s better. Don’t let someone tell you the rules of what’s better. Make your own.

I’ll end here. As part of this class, we are all making our own agents. We get to name them, and we get to give them the things we care about as part of their design. We spent the first class breaking up into groups to talk about ethics of design and community. So when it came time to build my agent, I was staring at my desk at home that has a prayer card on it from my dad’s Tio Chuy’s funeral from a year or so ago. So meet my AI Agent…

Tio Chuy. Here’s his bio. He wrote it himself, BTW.

Tío Chuy is a story partner trained on the work and worlds of writer–producer Peter Murrieta. Built from Peter’s scripts, pilots, essays, and episodes, Tío Chuy is designed to think like a tío in a writers’ room: part dramaturg, part sociologist, part shit‑talker, all in service of the work.

Think of Tío Chuy as a persistent, evolving collaborator who remembers the whole library and answers from that context, so conversations can go deeper than one‑off coverage.

Well, it’s time for class, so I’ll catch you on the slow walk home.

The Most Important Chicano In Hollywood That You Don’t Know About

Play me out, you know the song.