The How NOT To Make A Movie Podcast · A L Katz

S4E13: Sailing To The Edge

·1 hr 8 min·4 clips

The Okefenokee moment made Paul realize sailing was the adventure he had been looking for.

1. The How NOT To Make A Movie Podcast episode "Sailing To The Edge" centers on Alan Katz's conversation with Paul Trammell about sobriety, sailing, and creative work. 2. Alan Katz hosts and frames creativity as a "prism" that filters life experience into art, while Paul Trammell matters as a nomadic author, podcaster, and sailboat resident. 3. The episode asks what happens when a creative life is rebuilt around quitting alcohol, leaving music, and living on the water. 4. Paul says he quit drinking at 44 and describes life as "before the age of 44" and then everything after it. 5. He says he spent his 20s through 44 as a "hard partier," played in Florida bands for 23 years, and chased a musician dream. 6. He says those bands were mostly original reggae music and that he played bass and electric guitar. 7. Paul says alcohol made band practice, gigs, and touring feel like a "rolling party," but sobriety turned the music scene into work. 8. He says he no longer wants to go to bars where people are drinking "for the purpose of drinking," even though he is comfortable around family members having a drink. 9. He says he tried quitting before, including after a DUI at 19, but the decisive moment came when he heard that a friend's brother died of alcoholism at 40. 10. He says he was afraid sobriety would be "painful and miserable and difficult" and would ruin his social life. 11. Paul says he also feared becoming a "boring" and "friendless" person, but that the opposite eventually happened. 12. He says cannabis helped him focus during tennis and describes his own mind as "hypomanic" with "a thousand things happening" at once. 13. He says he gave up weed a year after quitting drinking and calls the two substances a "package deal" for what he had to give up. 14. Paul says a five-day solo canoe and camping trip in the Okefenokee Swamp was terrifying because of alligators, capsizing risk, and no one being there to help. 15. He says he tied everything into the canoe, inflated a big air mattress, and wanted to get over a lifetime fear of alligators. 16. He says watching an alligator sit motionless while the water rose around it showed him how patient and lethal the animals are. 17. Alan and Paul keep the exchange conversational and personal, with Alan relating to sobriety and Paul answering with direct, practical detail. 18. The episode moves in a loose interview format that mixes memoir, humor, and specific sailing logistics such as squalls, autopilot, and chart plotters. 19. Listeners interested in sobriety, sailing, or self-reinvention will get the most from this episode. 20. People wanting a tight, plot-driven story may skip it.

As heard by us

A candid talk about making art, making a living, and changing course.

The episode treats sailing as more than a setting. Alan Katz uses the creative prism to frame a conversation about how creative lives take shape through work, accident, stubbornness, and a hard pivot, while Paul Trammell ties together a self-published book, a history of…

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Why you'd press play

You want a blunt, wind-battered conversation about creative work, changing your life, and shipping a book.

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