I Spent 1,600 Hours Typing Other Writers' Books

About This Video

Transcript

If you haven't figured out your life's purpose then your life's purpose is to figure out your life's purpose. But

if you reach the age of 25 and you're not hot on the trail, then your life's purpose might not be your career. In other words

25 should be your cutoff if you're trying to find your thing, your thing to do for a living.

And if you reach the age of 25 and you haven't found your thing, find the thing that will pay you

the most money for the skills that you have. Forget finding your passion. Forget, "Uh I wanna..." No.

Real life is going to hit you. You cannot waste your 20s because you'll never have that energy

again and that's when you build your career. So I learned this lesson twice. Once

on my way to finding my thing and then the second time was in probably 2019.

And the second time I learned the lesson was when I strayed from learning the lesson the first time.

And this is the story of these pieces that I made. I took this book by Kurt Vonnegut called "Breakfast

of Champions" and I built a little rig for it and I typed out the entire novel verbatim. Then I ran

those pages through this machine that put adhesive wax on the back of them. Then I sliced out each

line of the novel and then I mounted each line of the novel to this piece of paper, which is a big

sheet of seamless paper I think it's 10 feet wide. And then I traced each drawing when I came to the

part of the novel that has the drawing in it. So the idea was to have an entire novel

on one piece of paper that you could look at and see it all at once in one space. It took me maybe

three or four months of basically full-time labor to finish the piece. The reason I did it...

So with my life, with my quest, I knew, like, growing up, I knew that I wasn't going to be good at

a conventional thing that would pay me the money that I would want to make as an adult. When I was a kid trying to learn things I was just on the quest: what is something that I am good enough

at? And I tried everything. Okay, I'm going to be a spinal surgeon. I'm going to be a lawyer. I'm going to be an engineer. I'm going to... and then it just, things, I reached these walls. Like with engineering I

reached the the mathematic wall. I'm not good enough at math. With, you know, medicine like most

of us it's the physics and biology and chemistry walls that we hit and we're not going to medical

school. With law it's like the reading load you hit. And so, what am I good at, what am

I better at most people at? At first you're trying to find, oh what am I a genius at and in my mind I was like oh the thing that I don't have to try to do and I'm just better

at everyone with with full natural talent. And I guess by the time I was in college I reached

the realization that there is no such thing, that that doesn't exist and that there's going to be

I'm going to have to just work at something. So my first quest was I wanted to be a writer because I

could write O.K. I had a, you know, I could write with somewhat of a sense of humor and I could

go to college and read lots of books and sort of follow the trail of writers that I had loved like

Hunter S. Thompson or Tom Wolfe or Susan Orlean. So I was hot on the trail of a writing career.

I got a writing job at Scholastic Publishing writing for kids science magazines. And while I was

while I was on this trail I knew that this was going to be the hardest part of the journey

the hardest part of making a living from like your thing from your talent is finding it. For me that's

what I knew. I knew that that was going to be the hardest part. What do you, what do I, commit to? Because no matter what it is it's going to be hard and it's going to be probably unlikely that

I will be successful. And again being successful meant I get to live like a successful dentist

with the income I earn from my talent. By weird circumstances I got a job being a fabricator

for an artist. Before that by weird circumstances I bought a video camera and a computer to edit, began

editing got hooked on it. Had no intention of it, it was impossible, there was no such thing as a career

of making videos with a video camera and making a living from that. It just did, not no one had

ever, it didn't exist. It wasn't a paradigm. I got the job as the fabricator brought my video camera to work, kept working with the video camera making more and more movies. It was sort of, there was an

effortlessness to it or maybe not an effortlessness but a compulsion to do it wherein

I didn't have to force myself to do it the way that I had to force myself to sit down and write. Or I would have had to force myself to sit down and study and become an engineer.

There was this compulsion to it. And by all these weird divine interventions it was

clear to me, okay, well this is your thing. Making these little videos is your thing.

And so the story of this is me straying from that having learned that. Because what happened

was I was about 17 years in or something, I was fed up with making little videos. I

was fed up with the cameras. I was fed up with the... I hate the computer. If the computers work...

The computers, the cameras, the equipment; setting up this set today I was so stressed out. It took me

two and a half hours. I was so stressed out and I was like, oh, this is why I quit. This is why I

this is why tried to become a gallery artist. And that's what this was an attempt at. So

you know I heard the story of Hunter Thompson typing out the entire novel of

The Great Gatsby. And I had seen this work of art in a collector friend of mine's

apartment in New York City, a wonderful work of art by this artist named Roman Opalka.

The Spirited Man is brought to you by: Spirited Man Merch. T-shirts, sweatshirts hats. Link in the description.

And Roman Oppalka came up in the conceptual artist era. In his entire professional body

of work, which I think was maybe 40 years, four decades, every day of his life. He would paint on

like about a six foot by six foot canvas. He started on the first canvas he ever

painted he painted the number one, then the number two, the number three, the number four, the number five, in about, I don't know, 12 point type.

And then when he filled the canvas he moved on to the second canvas. So if he started,

if he left with 40,338 the second canvas was 40,339. And he painted these numbers with

a super fine paintbrush and I believe when he died he was at like 2.8

something million and he had, I can't remember the number of canvases. I'm sure, I imagine,

you know when he reached my age, and I was 42 at the time, I imagined by the time he was 42 he

was able to live like a dentist and you'd see his house he had like a beautiful villa and it was probably in some awesome country like France or Switzerland or something.

And he had built this easel that went up and down so that he could just stand there and adjust the easel to the height. And I thought of the life of that, the day to day of that,

like the day to day of that, though difficult, would not be like incredibly stressful and heart attack

inducing the way that I find filmmaking to be. And also if you could hook the career somehow,

if you could somehow stabilize the career so that there was more of a demand for those pieces

than you could produce, you would sort of not have to worry about money, do you know what I mean? Like

you could, you wouldn't have to live this feast or famine lifestyle that I feel like I've been living my whole life. So I

I said, okay I'm just gonna make a piece. I worked for Tom Sachs for a decade.

I know a lot of people in that world. I sort of understand how it operates.

And the task at hand is to get a gallery. So I finished this first piece and then I think I

immediately began the second piece, which was the autobiography of of Dick Gregory.

Which is a word, the title of the book, I cannot say. And then I did one called "Truly Tasteless Jokes."

I did, I typed out a book called "Truly Tasteless Jokes," which was like this extremely offensive

joke book that came out when I was a kid. My strategy was okay, you have, I have, to get a gallery.

You have to be represented by a gallery. And the sort of the stature of your gallery, sort of

demands a certain price for your work. And so I went and looked through all of the LA galleries.

I like went to some website and found all of the LA galleries and then read and looked at every single one of them and narrowed it down to five galleries, and then for those five galleries I made

a Super 8 proposal in one of my cartridges and with my Super 8 Movie Viewer of introducing

myself and introducing the work and saying I would like this gallery to represent my work. And

I had to make the movie five times, you can't duplicate Super 8, and I had one camera.

So I had to shoot it, there's no editing, I had to just shoot this movie five times and it was like

the same movie five times but with five different gallery names at the point in the movie where

I mentioned the gallery. Click click click click click click click click click click. And I thought

well someone has to at least respond to this with a phone call. Okay, and I sent it in a nice box.

I did get a response. I got a response and it's from, because a friend of mine

had a relationship with one of the galleries, and the gallery was called Ibid and the man in charge

of the gallery is named Magnus Edensvard. He saw the pieces and we had a great

rapport and we got along very well. He was the only one who got back to me by the way.

And he put me in a group show and I sold the small piece. It was called "Truly

Tasteless Jokes" and I sold it to a collector who had bought my work previously and bought

collaborations that Casey Neistat and I had done previously. The gallery show was called "White" and

I built this beautiful little invitation dispenser that you'd pull out the invitation and tear it off

to this gallery show. So every time I ran into someone I could tear off an invitation and they'd

have the little paper invitation. Before that gallery show I called my friend and mentor and

teacher Tom Sachs and I told him about this thing, I told him about this gallery show, I'm

doing this thing, and he said, why didn't you call me earlier and then he basically advised me

you know we talked a lot and he has been in that world for 30 years and by the end of it I said well what should I do and he basically told me go back to filmmaking.

And so I sold the piece and it was, you know, I sold it for a lot of money. But I think if you

were to do it by the hour it wasn't... it just wasn't worth it. And then I started writing a

screenplay 2019-2020 that started to, you know, that picked up steam and then I had to quit that. And

as a hedge, after the writing of the screenplay and during the sale of the screenplay for production which never happened, I started this, making short

videos for a YouTube channel. Meaning I went back to the thing I spent 25 years discovering was

my life's purpose or maybe my career's purpose or my life's career.

It's the thing that I'm meant to be doing and it's this thing right now.

And so I quit these. I quit making these. I did one more after the art show. I did one more that was

"A Light in the Attic" by Shel Silverstein with tons of drawings. And

coming up is the one year anniversary of the end of the Kickstarter campaign for this channel.

And the Kickstarter campaign was the sort of do or die for the channel like if I didn't reach the money then I wasn't gonna do, I would, I don't know that I would have launched the channel.

And if I did make the money, I had to launch the channel and commit to it and that's where

I am right now. I've launched the channel. I've committed to it. This is my thing. I have strayed

and then when the Kickstarter came out and I nearly doubled my ask and I thought my ask was

way too high and the reception, the very quick successful reception, of the channel was just

like big signs from God that this is your thing. This is your gift. Respect it and do the

best you can, and this is your blessing. And so on my run on Friday I was really thinking about

you know when is the cutoff age? When do you know? When do you give up? When do you give up on like, okay, I'm gonna be an actor, I'm gonna be a blah blah blah, but I'm not really sure. I'm not really,

you know, maybe I should, maybe I don't know. I'm not really passionate about anything but I really like taking photography and I'm, you know I was really good at theater and blah blah blah. It's 25 years

old. Because you can't waste your 20s and at least by the time you're 25 you have half of your 20s

left because you'll never get that energy again. So we're coming up on the one year anniversary

of the end of the Kickstarter campaign and the beginning of the channel and as a celebration

of the success of the channel I just thought I would talk about one of my beautiful failures.

This week on the Patreon a livestream answering your questions. The link is right there.

Products & Tools Mentioned

• Super 8 Movie Viewer mentions — used as a proposal delivery mechanism for galleries
• Kickstarter mentions — funded the Spirited Man YouTube channel launch

People Referenced

Roman Opalka, Tom Sachs, Casey Neistat, Magnus Edensvard, Hunter S. Thompson, Tom Wolfe, Susan Orlean, Shel Silverstein

Books Mentioned

• Breakfast of Champions
• The Great Gatsby
• Truly Tasteless Jokes
• A Light in the Attic
• Dick Gregory's autobiography

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