LIVESTREAM #5 March 11, 2022 9:00am PST

About This Video

Livestream number 5, March 2022. One of the earliest Patreon community sessions. Van is still figuring out the live format, and the looseness is part of the appeal.

Transcript

all right says i'm live so i'll do some time killing while people sign on i learned something new

this morning at four when i posted the announcement for this live stream which i forgot to post yesterday

so my time zone is called p d t pacific daylight time when it's daylight

savings time and pst pacific standard time when it's not daylight savings time and right now it's not daylight savings time so i've been

putting e d t for the past however many weeks but really it's p s t until

i think sunday and then it's p d and there was some initiative here in the u.s on one of the ballots i don't

know if it was a california ballot or if it was like a federal ballot like during one of these last elections

to like get rid of the damn daylight savings thing and i don't i've never met anyone who

likes it and yet for some reason we still have it i wonder do you have that in foreign countries do you have to you set the clocks back

i know they invented it for world war ii i'm sorry for world war one to like preserve fuel so you'd have an

extra hour of daylight and during the work day i guess uh and then i don't know just keep it

whatever it is in the spring and summer just keep that that's what that's my vote uh okay so there's

13 people watching 14 so maybe that's enough to get started

uh calvin ttg asked me where did i get my glasses i got them on ebay they're like american

optical which were i believe i believe these are the safety glasses we had when i was in school

when i was in like uh 7th probably through 12th grade they had these cabinets where you kept all your

they kept all the safety glasses and they said at night they would turn on these um uv lights inside the cabinets to kill

all the germs on the glasses but i wonder if that's true and they looked like these uh

and they're like really tough glasses and when i first started buying them on ebay

you could buy like a lot like in boxes and this was only a few years ago this is maybe 2015 or something it was like a

lot of 25 boxes like they in the original boxes american optical shop safety glasses

for like 100 bucks and now they're like a hundred or two hundred dollars a [ __ ] pair and they're like weirdly rare so

somebody caught on probably you know you see a lot of stuff like this in japan a lot of like old americana stuff

so maybe somebody in japan or some you know collectors or who knows bought them all up but now like

i think this is my is my second set of this is my second set and i have another set that are just clear these are

prescription but i have clear ones that i use when i ride my motorcycle with an open-faced helmet and uh i think

those were the cheap ones and then after i bought those i bought these but that's uh that's where i get them ebay

and maybe i unknowingly like drove the market price up uh let's see

okay here's another one how do you think about oh this is from grant how do you think about and seek

adventure in your everyday and how do you teach your boy to do the same so

this is a great question so metaphorically to me what defines

an adventure is anywhere you go that requires you to consult a map

and it's kind of literal but it's not fair to make it literal because i have the worst sense of direction of anyone i've

ever met i know everyone's like oh my god i'm so bad with directions no no no no no no you go with me to a movie theater that

i've been to 150 times and when we go to the bathroom and leave that bathroom i just

in my mind i flip a coin and i just go one direction or the other so half the time i'm going in the right direction half the time i'm going in the wrong

direction just back to the theater that i just came from five minutes before that so my sense of

it's like a ironic that i love traveling around the world and it's also ironic that i kind of don't like gps although i depend on it

in la and um so that's that's like to me that's the definition

metaphorically but in my case kind of literally for a uh for an adventures any place where you need to

that you're gonna go to consult any place that requires consultation of a map and

that i guess includes putting you know putting it in google which is a pretty low bar or google maps that's a pretty

low bar i get it but adventure's a pretty low bar and so

i love unknown i love chaos i love being a foreigner i love being um

a little bit scared i love like managing like the weird inherent

biases that we every single human being on planet earth including people who write all that literature about

you know we're all racists and stuff these inherent biases that every human being that's ever lived has in their soul in their dna i love being

confronted with it like in a biological way and then with you know wisdom and

uh knowledge just being like no dude you're just either being racist or you're just nervous because this is not

a this is a poor place you know this is dirty and kind of like grooving i you know i took

my son you know he's like a pandemic kid he was two when the lockdown started

and so his whole world has been sort of topanga canyon or we'll go you know or

l.a playgrounds but we haven't been able to do real city stuff so i took him to his first subway ride

um we drove like 25 minutes to the last stop on the red line here in in los angeles and it was the noho north north

hollywood stop and it's like so much different than new york like they had an enormous parking lot with

tons maybe 200 vacant parking spots for your car because they strongly encourage of course you use

mass transit here and the day before i told him about okay this is what it is you go down into this scary hole there's scary people in there

and you a train comes through the tunnel and you get in the train and it goes in the darkness really fast and then when

you get out you're in a totally different place and you come up from under the ground and i got him like really and it was like fun and we built up to it we built

up to it and um and the the subways are a little unkempt here to say the least in los angeles

which is not to say that they are camped in new york they're i think they're washed every time they reach the end of the line in new york i

think i saw a documentary about that so when they get to this end of the line they get washed they go back to this end of the land to get watched so they get washed multiple times during the day i'm

pretty sure they're not that that that bad but here they're a little they're a little filthy anyway we rode the subway

and all that and i was just so rusty at being a city person but it was a real adventure for us and so we got out at hollywood and vine

so i wanted to show him the stars on the sidewalk he didn't give a [ __ ] and uh he was you know he gets and when i'm with my kid it's like he's

in charge like i'm security but he's in charge of like where the adventure goes so sometimes it's like

you know we stopped in the parking lot before we got on the subway and there were these like trees that bear weird berries and a lot of berries were on the ground and it was like 20 min not 20.

eight minutes of us looking at the berries and smashing them and blah blah blah and so same when we get out of the

subway and it's like you know there's machines and there's people and blah blah blah we didn't leave like

we were two blocks we spent like an hour and two blocks in hollywood just because there's so much weirdness and he like

explored a parking garage which had like in one of this he loves going into stairwells and unknown doors and we go through and one of them had like

somebody had set up a camp in there and it was like there was human [ __ ] in there and that's one thing that like i guess is a universal human disgust so he

was like we gotta get out of here and we you know we got out of there and then when we returned to the subway

uh there was a mentally ill person who was acting the way i act when i'm in a rage uh on the in on the on the uh on the i've already paid side of the of the turnstile so we refilled our like

metrocard thing and you i could hear this guy like i wanna [ __ ] kill

[ __ ] like a [ __ ] debris and i'm with a three-year-old and this place is empty i mean it's not like new york it's like there's very very few people no cops or

anything so i was like all right let's ride the escalators and then you know they have the timer when the trains are going to come

and so we rode the escalators until like there was three or four minutes before the train came went down to the platform that guy kind of wandered around us but so

i was so rusty at this at b at being a city person because we're in the woods here

and it was amazing because x in like two hours was able to develop the hatred and disgust for subways that

it took me like a decade of living in new york to develop because by the end of it he was just [ __ ] kind of over it he liked sliding down

the pole that you hold on to so that's an adventure but normally like from zero to

i mean he we started with him right away like i think maybe four weeks old we took him to the summit of um

eagle rock and like he was too little for a backpack i i never did the babybjorn thing and i just like carried

him in my arm i think it's a two mile hike and we climbed up to the summit and then climbed down so and then once he was old enough to hold his head up we

had one of those mountaineering backpacks that you put a kid in and just everywhere every day some big hike with that

and you know let him out when he starts to complain and then he would lead the show and just kind of crawl around eat stuff blah blah blah blah and

as a kid growing up my i mean i'm gen x and we're famous for being sort of neglected and latch key kids and like we

were put on trains and airplanes and buses and stuff at a really really young age like five six seven maybe not five

maybe like seven eight nine something like that and it's like they put you on a train in new london connecticut and then you get off at like

back bay boston and like i'm not i wasn't a city kid growing up i was a woods kid growing up and it's just like okay get off the

platform and look for jim sprowl you have the platform they're like 3 000 people and they've just got to kind of

wander around um but yeah i just it's like to me an adventure is just a you know it's like a

quest into the unknown and then you have the bigger and bigger and bigger ones and those take a lot of planning you got to really plan because we've

there's this great book by david graber called utopia by rest in peace david graber called utopia of rules

and it's about like like our lives basically are bureaucracy and one of the things that i look for in an adventure

is how little bureaucracy can i get away with like how much bureaucracy does this adventure entail like

while you're on it if it's preparatory bureaucracy i don't mind i mean i hate it but it's i'll do it if

it's preparatory bureaucracy and when i get there it's bureaucracy i kind of don't want to do it no matter what it is

like um like film festivals i hate film festivals it's just bureaucracy i don't

think i don't think it matters how high up into the hierarchy if you're like a director of a film i don't think you escape

the the the higher the the the it's especially um i don't know should i name names i won't name names because yeah i don't know just i mean

i went to a a film festival that's going on now in texas that um when i asked if i could have a i was the

director of the film when i asked if i could have a guest pass for a guest i for someone i was with to come to the

screenings with me it was seven hundred dollars and and lines and registrations to get in

lines in this line oh no this line is for that and then oh if you need the thing it's for that line oh no no this is for the music stuff that one's over in there and then you got a park and

then it's this and it's tickets like it's one of the reasons why i hate las vegas there's so much bureaucracy in las vegas just to wander around

anyhow i search for adventures where and if you if you go to like wilder places then that stuff just is

like you know the bureaucracy kind of falls away like to climb mount kilimanjaro by law you have to have a team with you you

have to have two porters per climber and you have to have a guide by law but you don't have to arrange all that stuff

on the internet like the way we did it and i don't know maybe things have changed this was 13 years or 14 years ago

we just went to moshi and went to into a place that said like kilimanjaro and just said

you know uh we're looking for a team to go up there's four of us and then they there's a whole bunch of people and they introduced us they said these guys are

all you know porters and guides and then we was and we just like met people and said okay come on come on and then like the next day we were up there you had to

get i think you have to get a permit to do it but you know that's one of the reasons why i have such a love affair of traveling

over land because you just get in the car and go i love going to mexico although if you're not doing the baja peninsula you

have to get a special car pass that you get when you cross the border and you need separate

mexican insurance for your car or motorcycle and you can buy that on this side you can buy it in border towns like san diego you probably buy it on the

internet and just download a little piece of paper that you keep with you um but that's you know that you need you

need a passport but you can use one of those overland passport cards but then once you cross the border it's just like

it's like the 70s again or something you know you you just go to things there's just parties there's no bracelets in

registration and stuff you just go like you just show up in a town it's like oh this is the donkey racing festival where the where i ended

up somewhere in mexico where there was like are you here for the festival and it was like this little town had this festival where children raced donkeys

through the streets it was like god knows how long they've been doing this and it was amazing the whole town was decorated and there was candy and

flowers and all this stuff i mean i was on a schedule so i missed the festival but for instance

but uh i guess that's not an everyday thing but in the everyday thing you just don't

get into habits and like go like okay so one of the adventures i had to fix the tacoma last week

and we went to this place so we went to pep boys that's not an adventure and the pep boys guy was like oh we don't do your truck it's too old

so then i went to like encino to this awesome guy um named fernando

and he has like his own private shop and that's kind of an adventure and then like he fixed it for such

for like one half the price of one of the parts that the toyota dealer wanted to try to choose and that was fun and then i brought back

like a couple days later i brought the land cruiser back to get the steering damper replaced in the front which and then while i was getting i just went

for a walk and i just walked and it was in not encino did i say encino i get resida and encino

confused because it's all to me it's all the valley it's all exactly the same i'm from the east coast i don't know but this is in

resida and i walked to the you know i walked to the post office bought about book of stamps and walked

back and like they had done the job in 15 minutes and he charged me like almost nothing to do it it's like an adventure to go out to nc

you know and find or resida and find this guy that's one of the things about the why i like the land cruiser because you it's

an adventure to to own that thing you have to like like we're gonna have to ship it up to [ __ ] montana and drive it back

um you know test drive it back to test the engine and transmission make sure everything works uh

yeah i don't know just do things that kind of i just like to do things kind of like a weird way with with my son we um

i have in the back of the tacoma i keep an electric bicycle and so on sundays we go to santa monica and then we go we have like a whole

adventure i guess i made a video about it we have like a whole adventure circuit that we do if we go to in santa monica we have a

whole adventure circuit we go to the venice canals which are so unbelievably cool that and so like very

american and the last time we were there two times ago when we were there he fell in the canal

so so far on my watch he's at like before he could walk he fell into casey's pool uh he fell into the when he could when he

was like two he fell into the turtle pond in calabasas he's uh he

fell into a swamp in malibu uh creek state park and he fell into the lagoon at uh i'm

sorry into the canals at malibu at at venice canal at the venice

canals but you know when he fell into the swamp and he fell into the into the

canal he was being foolish and he did he like literally did not look before he left and in the swamp

it was very terrifying but it was also super cute because there was this embankment and then it went down and the swamp was covered with

like not algae but like green leaves so it just looked like a beautiful field so he runs down he gets ahead of me he runs

down the little field and jumps onto what he thinks is a green field of grass and lands this deep in the water and i

luckily it was in the olden days i had a spare i had a backpack with like spare pants i didn't have spare pants he had to just wear a diaper but a spare shirt

but in venice he had to we had we took his shirt off and he rode back shirtless and wet pants and it was cold and i had to like hold them but that's part of

every adventure requires some suffering um so yeah that's how i teach him just

you know just example and that's his life experience and i think the main thing i'm trying to teach

strength and bravery and part of teaching bravery is you have to teach it in the moment when the kid is scared and

you have and you do not say don't be scared and you do not say it's

not that scary if anything go the other direction just say i know it's really scary it's really really scary

but you're brave even if they're not brave you're brave you're brave and then another thing i say over and over again

it's okay to be scared it's okay to be scared it's okay to be scared and i remember the first time i because i've been planning this i remember the first

time we had that happened we had there's these caves in in red rock uh state park which is right

up the street a mile this way and there are these beautiful caves there and one of the caves is about

it's it's this it's like you know maybe a foot over my head to get into the cave right

and um so he had me push him up there and i like pushed him up there he must have been he he i don't think he was three

yet he was two something maybe two and a half and i pushed him up into this cave and now he's gotta get down and it's slippery

too and i'm not up there i'm on the ground and i and that was the first time i was like and he was like panicking and i was like it's okay to be scared it's okay to

be scared and that really calmed him down it was strange and then i told him exactly what to do i said just jump and i'll catch you and like i

was under him and it was scary for me too i mean it wasn't that high up but i was under him and i could just see the look where he

just committed he like got to the edge and it was like slippery and he just committed and did that thing like if you've ever jumped off of a cliff like a

40-foot cliff and you just have that moment where you're just like you just turn off all the rational thoughts in your brain you just go for

it like i saw him do that at three or two and i was just like i caught him it was so [ __ ] cool like

i'm so proud of you that was so great you're so brave blah blah blah and so now in his mind he's like no i'm a br i'm

brave i'll do this and when it gets same with the kai oh man we were man these people love to talk about their children i applaud i apologize

once we were in the yard we always tell him can't go out at night can't go out in the yard at night he's probably big enough now but not when he was two

he's like i was like there's coyotes and one night we were out and he was within arm's reach of me and it was like

dark and a pack of coyotes maybe five or six came through our yard like scary coyote

looking for trouble and i was like ex-coyotes and he just ran and grabbed my leg and from then on i've like taught him and like you know

you don't run from dogs you don't you have to stand and fight and you know if the coyote comes you gotta you hit him or scream at him or run it towards him

or throw rocks at him or something and he's like obsessed with that and he has like base there like his baseball bat coyote comes and gonna hit this

so i mean that's part of uh part of adventure too where are we gosh i can

talk for days on end um so carol asked me about my writing process

um so my writing process is it's like phases of a writing process i keep um

i keep a piece of cardstock folded in fours with um

each quadrant has four post-it notes on it and so that's just for like when you're out in

the world and ideas to start flying just to kind of i think writing it down just solidifies it and you remember it

i don't know how often i need to go back and look at them so you know ideas kind of like

spawn ideas and they kind of grow so i do that and then i figured out

like i think they tell you to figure out when is your brain most optimized when does your brain work

best some people it's late at night i think hunter thompson started writing at like i don't know at night uh for me it's in

the morning so and i need like absolute privacy so i wake up at four sometimes i'll have like weird insomnia and i'll get up a

little earlier than that today i got up at 4 15 but you know between 4 4 30 and then i do my morning routine i come down here

and i have a typewriter and i usually don't write from scratch like i have some idea like before i sit down in the typewriter i have some idea

what's gonna be like what i'm gonna write about and the first so i

i've found that writing is about like like uh like putting a lot of i mean i don't know what the neurology is but really super concentrating on the thing that you're gonna do

and then you got to sleep on it and then go back the next day and you're i think your subconscious will have like kind of

uh digested the prob the puzzle you're trying to solve so i get more and more specific day by

day so today um i'm writing this like next week's video so today i just

was like general anything ideas just anything stupid and at the typewriter and just keep the keys

the noise going the keys and the noise going even if it's just like distractions just make sure you're writing something i

just make sure i'm writing something and then from there you just some surprise comes and something is like oh

oh like what's the difference between service and charity and then and then it's just like oh

and then you know and then there's more things you go deeper deeper i'm essentially searching for puzzles or or questions that i have

in relation to whatever the idea of like what's going to happen um and that so this is for like the repair station video that we're gonna

shoot tomorrow at the swap meet uh and then i guess the next phase after that is like

structure it's like okay what's gonna happen because i'm writing i'm writing these videos but i don't think it matters so

i'm writing the structure so what how is this most user-friendly and most how does this like gonna encourage the person to stay with it

uh and that you know is the same typewriter or sometimes it's you know typewriter with post-it notes to scratch notes and then or

blank pieces of computer tape paper to write little things and then after the structure i do this i rewrite

the structure and then i'm just and i keep it really simple okay it's this and then like a couple key words and then this and then this and then like little

decorations or something that you know whatever flourishes and then it's the

what is the voiceover right and then that's and then i do big like one sentence a voiceover a big

space and then another sentence of voice over a big space and then with a pencil i write in what the shots the video shots will be

and then i just like almost the second that depending on the time of the day like the second that is done i just take it and then grab

cameras and go as fast as i can it's kind of a bad habit i should be you know i'm working with more people

now so i'll be able to be having other brains help me but it's to me it's like a necessary evil to shoot stuff

and so i'm not very um deliberate i mean i have a code uh but i'm not very deliberate and

creative with like how i'm gonna shoot stuff and if the shots you know it's a lot it's i mean it's a lot a lot of stuff you got to really like

let go of you know am i going to do the drone because like let's face it it's an hour that's an

hour you know you can talk yourself all you want but you got to connect the thing there's going to be a problem is the battery right oh no it's this battery oh

the phone isn't charged you know it's like it's an hour um you know am i going to use whatever

anyway that's essentially the gist of it and like i did all those master class i listened

to a lot of the master classes uh of the like some very successful very commercially successful writers

like david mamet and i think his name is neil gaiman the guy who wrote sandman and uh

judy bloom and margaret atwood and um somebody i think it was neil gaiman said

oh and uh and the guy who did goosebumps r.l stein his is really great i i think a lot of them said or maybe

just one of them and it had a big they said write for process don't write for pages don't try to oh i'm gonna do three pages a day do like i'm gonna do three

hours or two hours a day because i think your brain just gets used to it and then you get you don't

crush yourself with like i'm not doing it was so much better it's just not good

like just quit you know like if it's not good enough and you're so stressed but just don't just do something else there's so much work that needs to be

done out there just quit um because it's just that it's just

you know it's like [ __ ] cutting weeds it's like raking leaves or something you just keep going and going and going you're

gonna get a little bit better a little bit better and then the process is gonna become more familiar to you the like they call it writer's block but it's

just like not writer's block it's either do you have too many ideas going on at once or your idea isn't fleshed out enough

and it's just you're just you have to just keep it's just it's like it's like waiting in line it's

just you just you're going and it's just that's what the process a lot of it is just like staring at the typewriter and like and

it's like anyway that's that's my process and i'm not like a ace writer i'm not like a thousands of pages

writer i just i guess i write hundreds of pages a year because of these videos but um

and also i don't know i've been at it for so long and also in all fairness and something i never mentioned but it is very important

uh is i don't i've been to some i've when i was i've been i went to two

colleges i went to west virginia university and then i transferred to the college of william and mary and west virginia university is not a an

academically demanding school and william mary is and

all universities have writing programs in all universities you're one of the main things you are

there to do if you go to a university one of the main things you are there to do is to learn how to write

learn how to express yourself through writing and you do not know how to write coming out of college problem sorry out of high school unless you did a lot of

it i mean there i mean i guess s e hinton wrote the outsiders when she was 17 that can't be that's the

legend i don't know maybe i think that's the legend uh but you you ain't her and then there's that there's another woman and i can't

remember her name i should but she wrote uh the heart is a lonely hunter at a very very young age

too it's a masterpiece you ain't her uh in college they teach i mean i learned

in college oh my point is like at both of those universities there were very capable you know writing teach creative writing

teachers and they teach you like first thing you need to know

really you need to know the usage you need to know all the you need to know how

the machine of english written word like this goes this way this doesn't mean what you think it means

because you put the things in the wrong order like there's a tremendous amount of that and you have to be re it takes a ton

ton ton of miserable work to learn that and you also have to read

like an animal you have to read like you know just kind of always be reading and uh

you know it's super i love that guy jaco wilnik the navy seal he's a very successful podcaster now and

he also has a company that owns a factory in maine where they we they have a hundred percent american

supply chain and i think they make jeans and boots and everything's sourced from america and they have looms and everything anyway

i heard him on like jordan peterson podcast and peterson was like well what did you major in in college and he said

and peterson was like what because you'd think oh he's a navy seal he's going to name maybe business administration or

something having to do with engineering or mathematics or something you know but he was just like

and then peterson went on to say the most powerful you know ability that you can have is the ability

to write and i agree with that um but it is a pain in the neck and when they talk about

you know there's this new university i think called maybe the university of austin or something that a bunch of these into these uh internet

intellectual stars of the internet are starting and one of the problems is they can al sort of automate it and have it be remote but they can't do that with

the writing because you really need to write in a workshop environment where you're with a bunch of other idiots and you sit around and kind of

criticize each other's work and learn about just the machine of the of the language and of the story

uh and then you know keep a journal every day and just write down

i would say at all costs i would say this don't use adjectives until

okay no let's not that if you're using an adjective you're breaking a rule and try not to break rules too much uh don't use adjectives

for a tremendous amount of time don't tell me what the [ __ ] beach was like

i know what a beach is like okay uh um i think people try to like be they try to leverage style and i think a lot of people when they read something that really blows them away

is that they're blown away by the beauty of the language and the beauty of the style and i i don't have enough experience to

understand where that comes from but i think that the task at hand is to express the idea

as clearly as humanly possible and then sometimes that requires

maybe by coincidence a beautiful style so just i don't know i always strive to be

as clear as humanly possible with the with the language and um

i don't know i read those there's those outlaw books there's like they're i think barney rossett who's like a very famous publisher

who i think published like the naked lunch he published all this stuff that was like super um maybe he published all of burrows

but he published all this stuff was like really hard to get published because it was like at the time considered lewd or whatever his

oh it's right in front of my face my god yeah these these

these outlaw books there's the outlaw bible of american essays i'm sorry it's all very i know i understand i'm

american-centric and uh i didn't become that way until i started traveling all over the world

but i'm just i'm a very american person and that's all it is and this is the outlaw bible of american literature and then

there's one outlaw bible of american poetry and it's i i i mean those are such a great start

because they're the the the literature one is excerpts from books so i think there's like there's one in there

by nas that nas wrote about his dog like his dog that

that like oh it's a [ __ ] tear your heart out and uh okay i'm picking not i'm picking like one of the five genius like top

geniuses of him like you know uh he's he's kind of something like

i don't know how many humans can get there but it's a [ __ ] great example but i find those books extremely helpful

and the essays one is really cool um it's just like people's ideas about stuff and

you know there's like bob dylan stuff in these things and i'll just read some of the i feel like i've done this before

clive barker dave eggers dick gregory eldridge cleaver john sales

[Music] patty smith um hunter s thompson terry southern malcolm x i mean you get the woody guthrie you get that and that's that's the literature

one anyway the point is it's a great way to find books because the literature one is excerpts from bigger books so it's like a chapter of a

bigger of a bigger book and if you like that chapter you can go and buy the book or go to the library and get the book libraries i

love libraries um what's another one five books that changed my life oh my god

i'd say like i think everybody or i don't know maybe some everybody in my generation or maybe it's just guys or

whatever but the catcher in the rye i think changed my life because i always heard about it you know i probably read it at 15 or 16

and i always heard about it and i thought it would be this inaccessible thing because when i was growing because in high school when they taught you what a great piece

of literature was they handed you something that was in unintelligible they handed you the [ __ ] crucible or they handed you

great expectations or they handed you uh nathaniel hawthorne the scarlet letter and they said oh this is a great

piece of work blah blah and you read it and you're like well i'm stupid because this i don't have i have no idea what's going on and like the paragraphs on some

of these books are you know this big and then the catcher in the rye was one of those books that was like required reading

and then there was i don't know what grade that was it was like after it was so weird it was like all the good interesting books

came after the horrifying harder to read books like if they made us read the odyssey in

ninth grade and it's all like when the they made us read i want to say canterbury tells that's not until senior year but

and then it was like in sophomore junior years you hit this sweet spot where they gave you these great books to read

that were you could read like the great gatsby or uh you know the catcher in the rye

um to kill a mockingbird you know those required high school required high school all the hemingway

ones and so in reading the the catcher in the rye i had no idea what it was i thought it was going to be

one of these like dickens things or nathaniel hawthorne things and i read it and i'm like oh this is just a pissed off kid

getting in trouble and he's like bad and confused and he hates everything and it's like and they're teaching me

this and it's like i remember i was on a vacation or something it's like in the back seat in new hampshire or something and i just

could not stop reading and that's so that one would be one of the five ones that changed my life because it was like oh no no

reading is also this so that one so and then i would say fear and loathing las vegas

which is like the drug addict version of that or like i'm a drug addict that and the like

adventure craziness version of that and that got me also into like a real hunter s thompson obsession and just like

reading all of his books and all the essays and all the short pieces and everything i could get my hands on um

you know i did the thing on the the you know recently the thing on the the um on uh the fourth turning that one's a mind

blower so that's three books um there's this man he wrote a trilogy of books his name is morris berman and i found his

book called the twilight of american culture i think that's what it's called uh in um at a my friend's farm just on a bookshelf like just randomly i don't

know what i was doing in front of the bookshelf it was probably 2013 maybe something like this and i

read it and it started me understanding the unraveling

of the american like um narrative like the american tv identity

like we all identify america as it appeared on tv when we were growing up like that's what it is and this is it's called the twilight of american

culture and it kind of goes into like i don't know i don't want to you know i

don't want to trash talk america but you know she ain't what she used to be

in some respects and uh so that i read he had a trilogy there's that one i don't know what the other two

are called and then um from there i read chris hedges and those guys are both pretty left uh

another one came to me that was that was big that that kind of changed oh there was this

book i read a long long time ago probably in 1998 2000 or something like this

it was called the culture of fear and it was basically about

the advertising and news media relationship and how i mean i'm being extremely simplistic i understand that but like television

you know it's almost irrelevant now but television would like the news would just show you all this [ __ ] to be afraid of and then

advertising would just show you sell you all this [ __ ] to assuage fears so just subconsciously

as you're watching tv you know innocently and it's you know getting having a tremendous influence on

your brain one of the one of the influences it's having is it's scaring the [ __ ] out of you and then it's telling you you can solve the

fear with by buying stuff and um that one really stuck

stuck stuck with me i think about it all the time the malcolm gladwell books are great you know outliers and

um there's one called blink there's one called the tipping point i don't know that's five

there's some i'm forgetting a lot of my books are in storage so i'd have to like look at the shell bug this one this one this but yeah those

and then what would i say for a fiction i already said that the catch in the rye for the fiction one um

so daniel asked is ignorance a proper synonym for innocence in my last video

because the last video was innocence versus experience i think that innocence is a more

specific term a more specific kind of or more specific variety of

ignorance like it's a special kind of ignorance like i feel like there's a whole bunch of different so it's in a way

it's uh a synonym but it's also just a more specific word than

ignorance and ignorance is um pejorative for the most part and innocence is kind

of not it's like people it's got like a it's got a like a shine to it in a sense

all right so now i'm gonna start looking at 948 wow this one by fast 948 let's see what's that's the biggest way

your youtube's videos have changed based on youtube feedback either through comments or analytics this is a [ __ ] great and prescient question so corey

smith asked what is the biggest way your youth your videos have changed based on youtube feedback either through comments

or analytics okay so i had always intended this year to be an exploratory year

a sort of like anything goes year let ever throw it on the wall see what sticks year and i had started out with a certain set

of intentions and those are basically all laid out on my kickstarter spirited man campaign which is still up if you want

to like go and read it's so long you want to go and like read the whole like philosophy of everything and the advantage of the pre-launching the

youtube channel was that i had enough i had as much time as i mean you never have as much time but

there was no deadline as to how fast i had to produce the videos so i did six videos before i launched the youtube channel

and the reason i launched them at six is because i felt like okay i understand the voice i understand what this thing is right

and then so i got the money from a lot you know the relationship is is is a lot of this is the relationship to the living you're i'm earning and being the

ability to you know to um to uh fulfill my responsibilities so i launched those six i got a bunch of money from kickstarter and then in the

beginning i got a bunch of money from uh maybe there were some sponsorship deals and there was merch stuff and uh

you know everything was really good i had made some errors like some um uh i don't want to go into specifics but

i had invested money back into the the channel um not wisely and um and i burned through a lot of it and i

kind of got myself in trouble which is a good thing to do with money when you're an artist and you're trying to learn things so

you know my brother's one of the most successful guys out there youtubers out there and so

um of course you don't disregard his advice and i i listened to him and one of the things that he encouraged was you know get you

know to get that algorithm really pumping you out there post on a regular schedule and two a week would be great so that was what i

tried in the beginning and then i read this book called um called um

it's called the youtube formula and it's by this guy his name looks like elvis it's not an

easy name it's like something e-l-w-e-s or something like what's you know his name you don't know his name uh i can i'm just gonna look it up right

now derral eves daryl eves so kind of looks like elvis there's an l a v an e you have all the letters for elvis so daryl eaves he wrote this book called the youtube formula it's relatively new

there's not that many books on youtube um and i read that and it was like

it's a very um it's a very handy book because it kind of talks about the relationship between the content and the analytics of a youtuber

and how to uh what's it called how to uh optimize your content by looking at your analytics um so for instance like oh you know look at

all your videos and where do people stop watching and then go back and look at those videos and see what's happening in those videos at that point

and then understand why people are dropped off by that and uh this guy works a lot with mr beast and mr beast actually mentioned him in

the joe rogan podcast that mr beast was on this week um but i think for me

so that book had a big influence on me at because like i said before i'm in this first year i'm just like okay let's see what sticks anything you know the

the primary objective is to keep the channel alive and to make a living from the channel and by making a living from the channel i will be able

to keep the if the channel takes care of me i'll take care of the channel so i tried to employ a lot of that and it's

a lot about thumbnails and you know um titles and so forth

and then also you know keeping up with the uh the um

with the uh pace and i think the pace started to do me in uh because the first six videos which

are like some of the best ones and then there are after that there are some very there are highlights but it really is a

matter of like time on task a lot of times it's a matter of time on task so

um i think i'm going to be less uh aggressive about meeting deadlines moving forward because we're coming up to the year in about a month it'll be

the one year mark and so i'm like re-strategying re-strategizing what the next year will be

the next year i'm going to sort of go back to those first videos in the videos that are more like in depth of videos that are like third person omniscient like the

spirited man this the spirited man that but these are all very recent conclusions that i've drawn with like help from like

an expert that's sitting next to me and you'll meet him later

and i i've only read comments isabelle reads me comments that she thinks will i will find helpful or encouraging

um because i like to follow the you know the joe rogan's advice of post and ghost so i don't read the youtube comments

with the exception of um i read the one for when i i i specifically asked people to write

whether or not they thought doing a patreon was a good idea for the patreon video i did like killing three birds with one stone i

read those comments like all of uh all of them and took notes and like

i think it the negative it's just it's called nega i think it's called negativity bias and it just the negative comments had

way too much of an influence over me uh and kind of got in my head and so my

experimentation after reading that was to um play with videos after i

after reading those comments the experimentation was okay let's take these negative comments into consideration

moving forward and so you know i didn't i stopped doing the um i don't know if i stopped but i i i

started doing the like first person like kind of conventional youtuber thing and removing the third person the spirited man thing

but this i mean this is you know so that that's one of the that that's another way it went and uh but the you know it's all

part of the like r d of year one and then you know year two which is coming up i will it will be more refined like i

will understand what i'm trying to optimize and what i'm trying to optimize is okay two things on

the creative side i'm trying to optimize the the kind of um i'll just use this blanket quality

of the video the depth of the video right um and then obviously i want to optimize on the

other side the the reach of the video there's all sorts of external tools you can use to do that you know going on

other people's podcasts doing youtube shorts which i'd never considered because you have to shoot them vertically which is like my sworn

enemy but you know you've gotta you've gotta swallow i'm never gonna shoot digital you know you gotta sometimes you gotta just swallow

your pride or whatever take considerations and say well what's the cost of this integrity and if you can make these start making

shorts and it's driving millions of people to you know look at the channel then you just do it it's part of your marketing budget

um so those are the two things i'm going to try to drive the performance of the channel and i'm going to try to drive the quality of the videos but i'm not

going to try to drive the quantity of the videos so the quantity of the videos will probably decrease a little bit

maybe three videos uh a month but then there will be other supplemental things that outside

people will be making so it won't take away from my time on task so like the shorts for instance and then

the patreon is i found to be a really good development because it helps me articulate my thoughts about like this question

and it also you guys give me so many uh i also understand who you guys are and i also understand what kinds of things you

wonder and then you give me ideas i've just lifted verbatim and made videos out of so

i think the patreon wasn't you know that was one of the things we threw at the wall and i think that was a really i think it was really i'm very very glad

i did it and it's like growing and you know i think it'll grow more as i i haven't really hard pushed it yet like i haven't made the patreon video for the

youtube channel which i intend to do and then hopefully

i in my intention because i'm again i'm a gen xer my intention is as the channel gets more and more successful

based on my kind of gut instinct um [Music] actions as opposed to things i read in a book and advice and numbers and analytics i will get more

i will give a [ __ ] a little bit less of a [ __ ] about outside forces and i'll have more

like [ __ ] you i'm doing it this way about it and i think it'll get really interesting and i think

like to do it'll like i'll be able to develop more artistically and then

the channel will be able to and it might have the you know like strangely

um you know unexpected consequence of driving the you know more like-minded people to it like it you know having that [ __ ] you attitude

you know based on what you know like kurt cobain and the wu-tang clan

will hopefully drive the you know the performance of the thing provide and i'm just like go for it

and then you know with the coved restrict all the covet [ __ ] kind of evaporating and getting the truck and having more resources because of

more brand deals and stuff it's like adventure time and the and the subject matter can sort of open up into the world and me interacting

with other human beings like which is starting to happen like this week like tomorrow at the swap meet i'll be with other humans and

you know that i'm very much looking forward to and just in terms of life and adventure because it was really fun to be in this canyon for a few years and

just not really go anywhere besides you know la county and little la adventures but i also have that like you know

bonder lust all right so what is so the biggest way it's what is the biggest way your videos have changed

based on your youtube feedback um yeah i mean like i said i just changed

as experimentation but you know i'm trying to find the optimization can you

can you can you make art if you are a single young human and dating is it possible

well you know the answer to that of course it is um

[Music] hey van greetings from berlin what do you think about the new short video format like instagram and or tick tock i

don't really consume it um apparently like from a business point of view it's very good for driving business um

so i i haven't had enough experience of it to really have a um opinion of it i i don't like that we're getting all

this war this unprecedented first-person war footage from uh you know ukraine and that it's like

you're cropping it you know just it's it's this when it should be this like if i'm looking at it it's called landscape when it's horizontal and it's

called portrait when it's vertical but um my brother told me like

a long time ago he's like it's an unwinnable battle it's just the platforms are vertical and that's just the way it is

so i don't know i guess all people will learn to um people will learn to optimize it and it

will be its entire it'll be its own like genre and eventually it'll get great like everything

um you know not great in general but there will be greats in it and there will be greatness in it like everything

so oh in germany florian gladys says we have it in germany winter and summertime meaning

the daylight savings time and in ireland um [Music] should i just like scroll down and pick one oh somebody cappy dusty said witch eagle

rock okay this is confusing because there's an eagle rock like it's near glendale and it's near um

it's near uh i used to live near eagle rock in los angeles it's like eastern los angeles it's near glendale and glassell park

where i used to live not that one there's an eagle rock in

topanga canyon state park and you just like hike up to it so it's up near two miles away from here um

[Music] there's probably so many eagle rocks it's like red rocks we also have a red rocks state park which there's like red rocks utah red rocks arizona red rocks

las vegas redbox you know [Music] any chance to get some video or even live stream of the repair station yes that's next friday's video will be the

repair station deployment video um oh i forgot in the books the kurt vonnegut books um he wrote a great book called fates worse than death about i think about the

holocaust and then he also you know obviously he wrote slaughterhouse five but what i loved about

vonnegut is that he's able to take these extremely sophisticated ideas and write about them in very simple

language that's also hilarious um thoughts on cormac mccarthy oh [ __ ] of course yep cormac mccarthy [ __ ] unbelievably

great like those are that's one of the guys you fall into and you're just like all right gotta read them all there's the one called um

blood meridian what a [ __ ] inc come up with that title blood meridian

and it's about i think it's about like these bounty hunters who would hunt the native

americans like they'd hunt comanches and [ __ ] and it was like it was written and it's like this is what these guys must have been like like

these crazy wild west guys and i'm gonna spoiler alert or whatever you or whatever that's called

but i'm almost positive there's this in that book there's this part it's so

[ __ ] ingenious it is so good i think it's the it's either the apache

or the comanche or like the us army of the native american nations in terms of how

good their they were at um combat and they were like the bravest i can't remember it's either the

comanche or the apache can't remember so let's just say it was the comanche

and if you're apache i apologize but um so these bounty hunters they're on this like promontory somewhere i don't know

arizona somewhere hot and sunny okay and they can see miles and miles because it's the west

miles maybe 10 miles away maybe more maybe 20 miles away they can see the comanches or the apaches charging

towards them on horseback okay and the bounty hunters have run out of gunpowder

and why it's unbelievably good while the comanches of the apaches are coming

towards them they make from scratch gunpowder with all the stuff that they have and part of the process is you have to

piss into it's like ashes and you pee into it and that's like ammonium nitrate and they like they make gunpowder and like dry it out on the

rocks and scrape it and da da da and then they like load it into the car it's like unbelievable because he doesn't tell you oh and then now they're gonna make

gunpowder he just tells you what they're doing and it's like step by step by step in the oh it is i mean for instance like

that's five pages of this book but yeah cormac mccarthy man alive and he wrote all those masterpieces on a [ __ ]

piece of [ __ ] olivetti latera32 unbelievable um okay last thing in the book seems everyone missing is pretty dang grim that's right

it is pretty dang grim life's grim it's a lot of those other awesome things but it's also grim um

what time is it okay i'll go till 10 15 because remember i do i do the uh intermittent fasting so it's time for me

to eat uh what do you eat in the evening in general i've had i don't know if it's coveted i think a lot of us made kovit an excuse to like like where someone asked me what i eat

in the evening and my diet is abysmal like so bad because i'm intermittent fasting and i'm

running so i'm not really putting on weight i'm not like the calories aren't sticking to me and so instead of like

eating really well and getting super fit and like cut i'm just eating whatever the [ __ ] i i want

and like i work a lot and i don't want to like go into the kitchen and then use the same muscles that i'm pounding up in the same

neural you know the same synapses or neuropathways that i'm pounding on all

day long just to make a meal so i try to do whatever is fastest and most convenient so

isabel feeds me handy i mean feeds me healthily but she's busy too so sometimes you know our schedules don't

overlap um but yeah i eat a lot there was one day i think it was last week

might have been two weeks ago i ate seven hamburgers in one day in one day i think i had hamburgers for breakfast lunch and dinner

um i mean what did i have yesterday yeah i mean i had like chicken carbonara

yesterday for two of my meals and then i had for breakfast i had what's called

what's it called i think it's called this in every single diner it's called the oh

[ __ ] do you remember the all-american i think it's called the all-american in every diner in america and it's like

it's a full breakfast and then another breakfast so it's it's like yeah two eggs any style coffee home fries

bacon and pancakes and sausage and that's like that's kind of my upload

celebration meal and sometimes i'll make it at home but usually i go down to bobby's in the valley which is like my favorite

restaurant uh but i guess the question was what do i eat at night and just

last night i had chicken carbonara but uh yeah it's just been junky i've gone through phases where it's been the

opposite where i've eaten like just vegetables and like really really well um

what else [Music] their lives it's funny people like when i'm trying to think of things people typing they know what i'm talking about and their culture of fear is by barry

glasner also that's what mccarthy's house okay yeah adam curtis those movies if you

guys don't know about him he's i would he's one of those guys like everything he makes is like the fourth turning it's

like a perspective on the world you live in like this is the water that you're swimming in this is what you're swimming in it's

like it's sort of what he's so he has one called the century of the self

and that and these are all bbc documentaries that this man makes and he does he he has a narrative it's a lot

like my it's basically my style's a lot like his it's basically he takes in some ways he takes all the he goes

all archive footage that he found in the vast archives of the bbc but he uses like weird b-roll and weird

stuff that would never go on on tv and then he has

among the best taste in pop music as a score that exists in cinema

now like you know the great there's like wes anderson you know i think scorsese kind of started it or no no i'd say kubrick kind

of started it um but he is that caliber of matching um

conte you know pop music as a score to um the archival foot

archival footage that you're watching and then the narrative is him talking he does the voiceover and it's essentially god knows how many

thousands of books he's read in between you know these these documentaries but it's essentially he's like okay so

he'll just take it he'll take like a historic era in world he'll take a he'll take an era

in 20th century and 21st century world history so he for one of one of the more recent

ones is called bitter lake by the way these are all on youtube you can just find them adam curtis youtube he did one called bitter lake and bitter lake was

where the um king faisal i'm pretty sure is his name

of saudi arabia and fdr met on this destroyer and the

footage is in color you could see fdr in color like bolex 16 millimeter footage they met on this destroyer and bitter lake

which i think is maybe part of the persian gulf or something it's like around there and they essentially divided up the world they essentially

said okay this is what we're going to do you give us the oil we'll give you the money

and we the united states will become the global the you know the global um superpower

and we in in saudi arabia said deal is a deal you can't mess with our religion we have

we have the freedom to have the religion the way that we that we want to do it and deal with those who are not of our

religious you know uh persuasion in our world the way and then it's like that's the that's like the and

it's called the bitter lake it's called bitter lake sorry and then it just goes all the way up to like afghanistan and

the last few shots are like british soldiers like you don't see what they're doing you see

the results of what they're doing but what they're trying to do is they're firing mortars and they're in probably in afghanistan

but what curtis does is he puts the entire thing in perspective it's it's so complicated

it's so complicated and it's and that's why it's great it's really hard to just be like oh it's about this

but it's what it's really about is how if you're to kind of boil it down is how the people who control the world

go about controlling the world and a very very very big theme of his work is unintended consequences

and the most recent one is called i think it's called i can't get you out of my head but it might be called i can't get you

out of my mind i can't remember multi-part series and it's like china-centric and it talks about

mao and mao's girlfriend who is also this very very influential like communist leader and um

started out as like a movie actress that was her ambition um yeah those are on those like as as much

as books those movies have really you know i was in manhattan when the planes flew into the world trade center you

know and i was i'm old i was born in the 70s and i you know i'm with my boy now

and i'm like wow i was like his age it was 1978 there was like two more years of the 70s

when i was his age and like i remember i'm starting to like remember stuff from the 70s and the 70s

the late 70s and i wasn't from i wasn't from like an urban center but we would go to providence i guess

but um the 70s just the way it looked looks like the way america looks now like the pavement was

lit literally the pavement was cracked and broken and crumbly and the formica on the countertops was worn down and the

little machines were grimy remember in the 90s in the early 2000s how like when there was a target how immaculate and

brand new everything in the target was i mean my target here in uh you know and this in a like in a middle-class nice neighborhood

um on ventura is like it's grimy things are broken things are taped together and like things are abandoned and there's garbage in the parking lot that's what

the 70s were like they were like just um and you know these movies explain the

relationship between those two phenomena um all right it's 10 18 i'm gonna go

eat and i'm not posting a video on uh youtube i guess this is the beginning of the

maybe three videos a month era but there's going to be youtube shorts there's going to be a more there's going to be a presence there's going to be

things happening in instagram so forth uh yeah okay hope i see you at the swap

meet tomorrow at uh topanga community center 9 a.m to 3 30 p.m

all right and take care everybody have a good weekend have a good week

Products & Tools Mentioned

• American Optical safety glasses mentions — Van's signature glasses, bought in bulk on eBay
• VanMoof S2 mentions — referenced as best electric bike Van has ridden
• Toyota Tacoma mentions — Van's truck being repaired
• Toyota Land Cruiser mentions — Van's vintage truck, getting steering damper replaced
• Olivetti Lettera 32 mentions — Cormac McCarthy's famous typewriter

People Referenced

Casey Neistat, Isabelle, Cormac McCarthy, Hunter S. Thompson, David Mamet, Neil Gaiman, Judy Blume, Margaret Atwood, R.L. Stine, Jocko Willink, Jordan Peterson, Malcolm Gladwell, S.E. Hinton, Carson McCullers, Kurt Vonnegut

Books Mentioned

• Blood Meridian
• The Catcher in the Rye
• Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas
• The Fourth Turning
• The Twilight of American Culture
• The Culture of Fear
• Outliers
• Blink
• The Tipping Point
• Fates Worse Than Death
• Slaughterhouse-Five
• Great Expectations
• The Scarlet Letter
• Canterbury Tales
• The Great Gatsby
• To Kill a Mockingbird
• The Outsiders
• The Heart Is a Lonely Hunter
• The Outlaw Bible of American Literature
• The Outlaw Bible of American Essays
• The Outlaw Bible of American Poetry
• Utopia of Rules
• The YouTube Formula
• The Odyssey

Films & Media Referenced

• Adam Curtis — BBC documentary about power and media
• Adam Curtis — BBC documentary about US-Saudi Arabia relationship from FDR to Afghanistan
• Adam Curtis — multi-part BBC series about China, Mao, and global power
• R.L. Stine — R.L. Stine's MasterClass mentioned
• Arthur Miller — difficult school reading
• Neil Gaiman — Neil Gaiman's famous work

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