'Why Not?'

When I got my current iPod as a free replacement for the first-generation Mini I had, I decided to forgo the stress of putting music on it (How could I possibly select 500 songs from all the songs I own?) and instead dedicated this iPod to podcasts. I now subscribe to about a dozen, including "How Did This Get Made," "Pop Culture Happy Hour," "Sound Opinions" and "WTF," all of which I heartily recommend.

I also subscribe to SModcast, Kevin Smith and Scott Mosier's six-year-old podcast. The pair (with occasional fill-in co-hosts or guests) have recorded nearly 300 episodes and I'm a recent listener, so I've had some catching up to do and have been listening to the show a lot lately. A LOT. Like several a day. A lot.

Smith and Mosier met at film school more than 20 years ago and have since partnered on nearly a dozen films, with Smith the writer/director and Mosier the producer. SModcast was started as an excuse for the best friends to get together once a week and spend an hour or more having the conversations they had when they first met, sharing personal stories, dissecting the news and playing out ridiculous scenarios, mixed in with a healthy dose of dick and fart jokes, all of which is so much fun to listen in on.

A few weeks ago, Smith and Mosier discussed a news story about a man offering free room and board in exchange for the boarder dressing in a walrus suit into a "Human Centipede"-esque horror story, a story that Smith quickly turned into a screenplay, "Tusk," that begins filming soon. (Smith has written about the story of "Tusk" on his blog and for The Hollywood Reporter.)

I first wrote about the "Tusk" story in the summer and continue to eagerly follow its developments because, even though I'm not a horror movie fan, I'm inspired by what Smith and Mosier have done with this idea and with so many others. SModcast is a great example of that, as it's grown from one weekly podcast into an entire podcasting networking and online radio station with shows that tour internationally.

It's not simply tracking the progression of these ideas from inception into reality that's hitting me so hard at this point in my life, but that Smith and Mosier have been taking risks in doing these things, and are fully aware of the potential costs.

Earlier this week I listened to episode 154 "SMundance", released in February 2011, where Smith talked a bit about Sundance 2011 when he premiered his film "Red State" and announced he'd self-distribute the film, which led to a ridiculous amount of backlash. Mosier hadn't produced "Red State" because he was working on developing his own projects as a writer, director and producer, which he admitted in the episode was a big gamble.

"I've been trying to do my thing and, honestly … I just knew that if I kept doing it, I would keep doing it," he said. "I knew that I had to basically be like, 'All right, motherfuckers, swim,' I was like, I've got no choice. … I'll admit something personal, for the first time I many, many years in my life, I sit down every month and I'm figuring out how to pay my bills sometimes."

Nearly a year ago I was presented with the option of taking an assumed safe route or going out on my own, and chose the latter because I recognized how much of a trap being safe can be, because I know how easily time slips away, because I didn't want to be in suspended animation for the rest of my life and because sometimes you just have to jump. Overall, I've been secure in my decision, though every once in a while I hear a tiny doubting voice. Listing to Scott Mosier tell his own story about taking a really big chance quieted that voice and the only thing I heard after that wasn't "Why?" but "Why not?".

This fall, two-and-a-half years after "SMundance" was recorded, Mosier has been making the rounds to promote two of his projects, the acclaimed documentary "A Band Called Death", which he produced, and the upcoming animated film "Free Birds," on which he is a co-writer and co-producer. Even though my own gamble probably won't have such tangible results, it's great to see what could happen if you take a chance.