LIVESTREAM #6 March 25, 2022 9:00am PST
Published · 1:11:36 · 789 views
About This Video
Livestream number 6, March 2022. Van takes viewer questions and continues settling into the live-session rhythm with the Patreon community.
Transcript
uh good morning everybody all three everybody whoa all three everybody excuse me technical difficulties
um can you hear me yeah okay i don't know what that was um
good morning i've lost my train of thought because of that um
i usually start with a bunch of questions hold on a second
from your comments and so i have some written down
right here so greg asked me if i've considered doing seasons
of the uh youtube show so that i can um save myself from burnout and the answer is yes and so this first year which
the first year we launched the channel on april 9th so the end of this first year is coming up in a couple weeks
in the first year i've always understood to be a prototype year so we're just trying to figure out
the pace of things uh the the revenue streams how ambitious
we can be with projects and so for the second season it will be more refined like i have a better idea i sort of have the i understand now the families of videos that i make i kind of
understand which ones are fast and which ones are slow to make which ones um
you know uh require assistance and so we're going to tinker
with the second season which will probably start you know sometime after april 9th we're going to tinker with the um
the sort of format of the channel at that point probably going to come out with the same
amount of content but it might be in a little bit of a different form we're still working that out but yeah
on this there was a great colin and samir episode which if you guys are interested at all
on youtube just subscribe to their channel and watch them all because they're the meet the press or the wall street journal of this platform
and they're incredibly smart and insightful and they've talked to a tremendous number of the major players
on youtube and then they've done you know feature stories on youtubers that
they didn't work with like that kid uh i can't remember what his name he does toy reviews and he's like one of
the biggest youtubers like they've done a story on him but i don't think they had him on the show anyway they had colin and samir had
last week an episode called something about it was something about emma chamberlain and about how she's quitting youtube
and the reason is sort of like a it's a burnout reason she said and i i mean anyone who works on this
platform understands is that the last thing you really want to sacrifice is quality and quality takes time
and there's a real um there's a real like motivation to keep up with the with with the pace of posting on a regular basis
and seeing the numbers you know that you get your analytics you know exactly you know the consequences of slowing
down or not posting or what have you so emma chamberlain i mean she's 20
years old and her videos average 5 million views i think 5.5 million views so to me it's like yes quit if this is
like driving you crazy you i would imagine unless you earned i i would imagined although i don't have
any insights you have enough money to not work for an extended period of time not to mention you're a phenomenal success and
you're 20 years old you can go be the creative director at vogue you could go be any job you want any
advertising agency anything that's like just a job job like oh no i got to pull the parachute and get a job i mean of
course she doesn't want a job but all of that is available to her i mean i can't imagine the point being
point being she who's one of the most she might be the most successful woman on the platform
she is i guess maybe taking a break or she said she doesn't know when she's coming back and so colin and samir having thought
about this being youtubers themselves and being on the hamster wheel of youtube themselves they they made suggestions in that
episode that as greg suggested youtubers do seasons the
way that network tv does seasons and so um they also had ideas as to how to like um market that how to promote that you know you
disappear for a little while and then you come back or you could do
less labor intensive like like these are one hour in real time so something like this maybe with a little bit of editing in it
um you know that could be something that you could i could do at a faster pace and release you know
maybe on the main channel maybe release a more like it's kind of a little bit more sophisticated version where i could um
where the editing of it could be uh done by someone else and then the writing there is no writing
it's just note taking ahead of time and then me kind of going off the cuff like i am right now and so i don't know maybe do three or
four of those a week and so that would buy if you're posting once a week you can store those up i know a lot of podcasters do that maybe some kind of
hybrid between the podcast and the and the um and like the the rigid high production youtube videos that i i
customarily do so yeah that came out last week and i thought well that's a terrific idea and let's look into that maybe that's what
we'll do for the second season um what else oh so liam asked me
if i knew any young people making original art writing or videos and the man sitting to my left
braxton haugen is about the youngest and best uh artist that i know of that's making things he
uh we'll put a link to his channel in the in my comments for this um post
but um he's come down from oregon to help me because he's an expert and he's been doing this for he's only 21 and he's been doing this for at least 10
years maybe more than that maybe like 13 years uh and he's excellent he's got a great voice and he's
he's going places and you'll hear about him um go go visit his channel and then you'll hear about him but um who else do i know i don't know young like under 30s
very young and um i don't really do i know of anybody i'm kind of old so i don't
oh you know the people i know are like kids of my my peers so there's this woman named um
gray sorrenti that i've been working with since she was i want to say she was in a video when
she was like two years old but she i've known her since she was born but she was
she was cut out of a space program she was in it when she was like eight or something or maybe she was ten i don't know but
then you know now she's an adult and she's a pretty a very successful photographer
and she travels all around the world i've been to japan with her she's in um a bunch of the tom sachs movies she plays the heroine in the heroine's
journey or the hero's journey that i did with tom sachs and she's she's remarkable and um
how old is she she's 20 something 22 maybe um maybe younger maybe she's 20.
so gray sorrenti is her name who else do i know i don't know if i thought about it if i
thought about people whose parents i know and then worked my and then all the young people i can think of are all the
formula one drivers and they're sort of artists in their own way but that's not what i think liam meant
okay and dave asks a great question how do you balance as like someone who
makes videos about your life essentially how do you balance experience with capturing and video
and so when i first started out not when i first started out but when the i think when the cameras became sd card based
i i just it was so this was around this the nystat brothers era it was so
so much a part of my life it was so just second it was like carrying around a swiss army knife or something that
i didn't really balance it at all i just kind of shot everything and then backed everything up
and sat on it um then i would say beginning in maybe
2010 2000 yeah around then around 2010 2011 i would only shoot things with that were preconceived ideas and
that didn't really that worked okay but what happened was there was a lot of i wish i had shot that
kind of stuff going on and now and i would say for the last um
maybe six years five or six years i've been i've been i want to use the word religiously i've been religiously but that's too extreme i've been carefully um
writing these shots that i need ahead of time so i conceive a video ahead of time as
this was came after reading sculpting in time by andrei tarkovsky
and he suggested a filmmaker just you know exactly what you're going to do when you're rolling the camera and you're not exploring and you're not
discovering or any of that it's just you're fulfilling and sometimes you get lucky breaks and then things happen
so i went a little bit too far into the only you know shooting scripted things
and i missed or i didn't have the infrastructure that allowed me to be very organized
with footage that i just shot so a footage that i shot let's call it the and why the wild footage right
that i shoot out in the wild and they all sort of sent all those shots centralized into my phone
my iphones so i put together this i don't know when this is maybe a year ago or less i put
together a archive hard drive that was just chronological of all of my other hard
drives and phones and so forth and part of putting that together it's a footage archive part of putting
that together was going through all my phone data and luckily they organized chronologically because
i have a huge recommendation just do everything by chronological order and camera
the name of the camera and then the date that you dump the footage that's how you should organize your folders
probably put the date in the beginning because then it goes in chronological order except for years
because like 03 20 it it doesn't do the year you have to
put a folder for the year because the way the machine the apple works or whatever it will put
you know december starts is 12 and march is three so it puts march
22 ahead of december 21 because 12 and so you have to make folders for year
by year so that's how that's what my archive looks like it's just two thousand two thousand one two thousand two two thousand three two one
and then you go in there and then it has the date the name of the camera sometimes
it has the event or it has the location just so i'm not just randomly looking through things but i've started shooting less footage and that's
not as important i can sort of figure out you know from the phone where i was or from my calendars where i was
but that's how i sort of balance is that i have kind of
home movie dad stuff that's just you know what you would normally shoot any that anyone would shoot professional or not professional
i try to always hold the camera sideways i don't try i just do hold the camera sideways although
because i'm hearing that these um youtube shorts are so incredibly effective and driving people your channel i think i'm gonna have to start
doing youtube shorts in the vertical you can't win every battle in the vertical format but
um and so i think that's the balance i think it's like the iphone is just the
experiential stuff and then everything else is pre pre-predetermined
and you go out and shoot it and sometimes if i've done something that was really cool and i didn't shoot it i'll just go back and redo it if i come
up with a movie oh i should have made a movie about that i'd just go back and you know and do it
an example of that is i made this video i think we changed the title to so much for my son so he'll
always remember and it's just a sunday routine that my son and i did week after week after week
and i never really shot any of it because that was one of those things where you just you experienced that and then one sunday
we went back and i just had the main events okay this is what i want the i want the the carousel
i want the bicycle ride to through through atwater village i want glendale i want the you know just
so the earlier we had the earlier experiences sort of had been um like rehearsals
and then i knew what i wanted and then there were just surprises like the surprise of that walt disney bench being where i'm
sorry i [ __ ] it up i i told you the punchline anyway the bench at the carousel in griffith park
is the bench where walt disney conceived of disney world and
or disneyland whichever one came first and then it ends with how we end our sundays
um in the winter when it's not daylight savings time which was this bicycle parade
in um kind of in the dark in venice and it was called the electric light parade which is what
at if you ever been to disney world they do every single night at disney world they do the electric light parade and it's like light all these lit up floats
and all of this stuff and there might be fireworks maybe it's not every night maybe it's just saturdays or something point is i had experienced that many
many times and then one day i just brought a gopro and did a whole bunch of little recreations and you know
i knew what i wanted and that's that's sort of my balance now um
script things and then wild things and then recreate if i don't have the footage
in my whatever iphone or gopro oh look at all these comments i'm always worried that i'm not going to have
enough to talk about and then the comments are so great okay
so sam asked this very specific question um he's working on a documentary and he
asked me for suggestions and i suggested reading the sid field screenplay book which kind of it's the it's the sort of manual that
explains the hollywood format the format of all the movies basically that we've ever seen
it's like this structure you know when people talk about the movie's so formulaical this is the formula so he had a technical question about
sid field recommends that you before writing the screenplay that you know what you're ending
your opening the plot point at the end of of of act one and the plot plot point at
the end of plot two to know all of those um plot uh beats and i think i do that it took a while to like
have it become a natural thing i'm like from a family of natural storytellers i think storytelling is one of those things that maybe people everyone thinks
that they can do it but i can assure you they can't and um it's like one of it's just from my family i don't know if it's
i don't know i think i don't know i don't know i can't i every
tradition every culture has incredible um storytellers so i can't attribute it to
like i had a jewish dad and an irish catholic mom or anything it's like but every every single
you know ethnicity has incredible storytellers it's just like i don't know it's just something you get
maybe but my mom's side of the family are all great storytellers and you just being around great storytellers and my friends are all great
storytellers and being around you learn what to keep and what to hide and what the surprise is and what the big payoff
is and what you're doing and you you know the fundamentals and this book kind of explains it to you but if you're going into this
you're probably a natural at it and you're just unconscious of oh yeah that's how i tell stories and this is why sometimes they work and this
is why they don't it just kind of helps sharpen you a little bit um but yes i do sort of know
before i start one of the things of like cracking the story open is like okay how's it going to end and
the beginning is usually pretty easy you know you usually pretty know a lot of times you come up with something that you think is the beginning but it's really the end
francis ford coppola said this great thing he said you put the second best thing in the beginning and the best thing at the end and then you figure out
how to connect the two and the shorter the you know the shorter the
medium or the the you know the the shorter the duration of your
project the less stringently you have to stick to you know kind of a format that people can follow and then some people swear it off completely like burner herzog
swears it off david lynch swears it off but those guys are brilliant geniuses
who've been doing this since they were teenagers and they probably have just subconsciously
trial and error have you know just distilled you know the formula came from people like those like them they're just so in touch with their subconscious that that's what you're seeing and they just
know how to do it um but yeah i usually do know those four things the beginning the
ending and then the turn and then the turn [Music] and you know sometimes i don't get it sometimes it's not in there sometimes i just lead up to some little surprise at the end of a video or just like build
something and then the payoff is that the thing is done okay so paula asked about the diane fink
school which i've mentioned a bunch of times and um diane fink was the landlord of our building where we had a studio in
368 broadway in new york and then she was a landlord of the building across the street and so there were a lot of
filmmakers really writers and directors filmmakers who came out of who paid rent to this lady because we rented
little studios and offices in her buildings and the reason we were there is because after september 11th i'm pretty sure the
federal government subsidized below canal street so that people would come back because it was let's face it
full of mercury and poison so we were young and we did that and you could get a really it was the best deal
in town really in manhattan and so um some of the people who
i would consider in the diane fink school would and then there was also our gang you know the people that we hung around
with and like came to the studio and hung out with us and we would go hang out with them and we would all kind of work on our projects so
there was there's casey in me there's um ariel shulman and henry juiced and their collective
this or their partnership is called super marche and they made catfish they invented catfish and then there's their brother
neve who's the star of catfish and who did the tv show version of catfish because first it was a documentary
there's josh and ben safty they're brothers they made uncut gems among other great movies
lena dunham for a little while was renting a tiny little studio uh at 368 broadway and she
you know went on to make girls i mean i don't even know these people to me are so huge and famous but uh you know that's who lena dunham
is um who else um greta gerwig she i don't think she like
rented a studio but she was roommates with oscar boyson who worked with us and that little
gang we all hung out together there's a movie called francis ha and a lot of the characters in that
video i'm sorry in that movie are based on these people there's the kid who's making the kid there's if you're familiar with
francis ha there's there's like a roommate that is he's writing like the screenplay for
gremlins three and that character is based on our friend sam losenko who's like an award-winning like maybe an academy award nominee um
production designer i hope that's what they're called there's art director productions i don't know he makes what the the world
that the that you're looking at like all this [ __ ] this would be him like all the studio that would be sam lisenko and he's unbelievably great he did a move he
did this movie called eighth grade which is fantastic um he was you know he had a studio he was
part of this collective with josh and ben and alex calman who's a museum artist who did this wonderful show called with his
mother myra kalman the show called sarah byrne's closet and it was at like the metropolitan museum of art he's had
uh exhibitions at the at moma he's a very brilliant guy he was part of it um
uh mickey sumner who was like the buddy in in in france's ha
um she's is an artist in her own right and does she's been in lots of films i couldn't i could just if i imdb her
you'd be like oh yeah oh yeah um i feel like i'm forgetting major major people brett jetkowitz who's a
cinematographer um they'll come to me throughout this
throughout this um live stream so we all paid our rent and we all kind of grew up together and we all
a lot of us helped each other out on our on our own projects and it was just amazing because the likelihood of that concentration of
people becoming successful and being becoming professional you know creative people like that is i i don't know of
such a thing maybe province town in the you know 1930s or something but i feel like those guys got successful and then just like went out there
but this is one one building and i i don't know you could probably credit casey because he found the
studio tom sacks co-signed the lease because we didn't have good enough credit and
i think this guy this man named there's legends as to how we all were connected like how we connected
i believe it was probably carlton to woody who owns uh this incredible design firm
that's called i think it's called reunion is that what it's called
oh you don't know okay you know what i'm going to google that because i can't so i think carlton
dewoody watched some of our videos or went to our website probably after ipod's dirty secret
came out which was a viral video we made about the ipod battery
reunion reunion i was right it was reunion okay anyway so he that i think he's the one who like introduced us all he saw our website
sent casey an email and then like a whole bunch of dudes just came over they were all super young because we were probably i was
at least 10 years older than them all i think and they all came over i think neve was the youngest neve shulman and ben saftey
were probably the youngest two and we started working together and then people started doing their own projects
and that was incredible so that would have been from about 2004
until about 2010 or 2011 that era and henry juiced
um coined it the diane think school and um yeah people are like you should do a
documentary 60-minute documentary wow it's not as easy as it looks um
oh jake asked does the spirited man believe in god this one does but it depends what do you mean by god that's i
think that's the first question like do you believe in god well what do you mean um
but i i think even i have a friend who's a very religious jew and he said that the torah doesn't require that you
believe in god it just requires that you do all the all the stuff you follow all the rules like you don't really have to you can
question it but but i do um [Music] oh and then acid kawasaki asked me what my philosophy on anger management is and geez i really need to
get one because i have i just white knuckle it and um i don't know i've done like the
courses and read some of those books and it's just my default energy reserve
to like get me just get that little last burst of adrenaline to like get me through the thing
is anger and um it's terrible i really hate it it's the it's the chief source of
suffering i think in my life but i don't know i'm having i've tried i'm on it's like the demon
i've on this quest to vanquish my entire life and doesn't feel like i'm getting making any progress it just seems like
it comes in waves so i don't really have a philosophy on anger management i can't understand people who don't get
angry that is insane to me how the hell how the hell did you get anything done um
[Music] but yeah it's it's not it's not good um oh and phillip watch this film called the alpinist which i've seen about this basically genius mountaineer
and then i think the movie starts off with alex honold who's the guy who free soloed el capitan or half dome or he's a really
famous guy who free solos without ropes and everything alex honold talks about this canadian kid who's like alex is like you know i'm
not you know in tv land yeah i'm this big deal and everything but among my peers i am not the guy and he's like the guy is so and so this
guy in the alpinist super dedicated uncompromising you know would do this i had a documentary film
crew come to do this one climb and he just went without them and did the climb um but i'm not like that i'm not that
guy's a genius and from you know basically not day one but like
year 13 or something or younger that was he knew that was his drive and that was what
that's what you know possessed him so it's not really a fair comparison um
don't want to give anything away in the movie but uh yeah he he's different species than
most was the best you know climber in the world or whatever um
oh daniel asked me about my philosophy of cussing in front of kids i try not to in front of my kid you know
we just have rules he's a pretty rational guy we're just like you can't swear at school and you can't swear in front of your grandparents
and then you're allowed to swear in the workshop you're allowed to swear in the car and then he made up a rule like ins
and somewhere in the valley he's allowed to swear but just try not to acknowledge it when he does it don't we don't really react to
it because we don't want it to be like a kitschy little like precocious thing i find that very obnoxious but you know he swears like we
swear he just lets things out [ __ ] this or something you know it's a [ __ ] thing you know if it doesn't
work it's kind of not cool but again you know we're all just human beings trying to get through this
thing um oh jeffrey asked about organizing footage i guess i just talked about that but
date you dumped the footage and then the name of the camera and then
oh you know backup one is none wait two is one and one is none so just
back up i think one centrally located backup and then that's very well organized and
then you know the little mini these these things are great they're like 100 bucks you know and i do a bunch of projects on those but the footage it isn't i do it
all by project so i have a a um arc of footage archive
that's just sort of wild footage organized year by year and then
for projects if i have specific shots like shot list shots those go in the project folder they
don't get mixed in with the wild footage they don't get mixed in with like experiential footage those are just like composed shots and
those are organized by camera 1dx gopro 10 gopro 8 gopro 8 macro iphone super 8.
um yeah chronological order backup always have two backups none of that cloud stuff no no no none of the cloud stuff what are you gonna do when it's like
hundred dollars a month you know these they're not going to be filling these servers for free forever
i wonder about that i wonder about the just the sheer data the infrastructure i understand that hard
drives get um they have larger and larger capacities i understand that and with smaller and
smaller hardware but i can't possibly be outpacing the growth of just data in general
the billions of people getting online and uploading photos and you know it can't be infinite that that that the
the the the storage of all of our data is just going to be there like there's there's no way
i don't know i think that they're going to they'll probably tear it and it'll be you know we're in a golden age in a lot
of respects because we can upload anything we want and um it's almost free to do so
but i have a feeling they're gonna they're gonna make you like maybe even youtube will make you pay until you get a certain number of subscribers i don't
know i'm making that up maybe i'm wrong but or maybe blockchain will change that because it'll be distributed depending
on the network that you're in your stuff your public stuff will just be distributed among the whole network of
people yeah humans will figure it out but own your own data is what i'm saying and have it in your physical possession
um [Music] oh and miles asked me if i use the automatic settings on the camera iphone gopro i do super 8 i do but it doesn't have autofocus i just there's a setting that's automatic for the iris
and then when i'm doing studio stuff or composed camera stuff i um use this
canon 1dx or canon t2i and those i just keep on pure manual
except for did i say this backwards i think i said this backwards all the point-and-shoots the iphone the
the gopros those are all set to automatic and then the like dslrs those are almost pure manual except
um autofocus i leave it on autofocus especially because i'm just shooting myself kind of move that there's like a square that
it'll focus on on the lcd screen i just move it to where i'm going to be and you can hear the the camera focusing
sometimes with really close close-ups like click click click click i just leave it in there for i don't know why but yeah i use manual for the big
cameras and then auto for the little ones because you can't control what that the apple phones are pretty good
but or the upper cameras are pretty good but you can't control it's just like if you shot
and there's a if you're shooting and there's a light in the background it's just gonna stop it down but maybe you want it blown out and vice versa
if you want something really dark and just a little bit of light on it it'll just blow up as much as it you know these autos
will just blow up as much as you as they want and yeah i know there's a way to go in there with the gopros and then go through the little
teeny tiny menus and scroll up and i got screwed doing that with white balance
which they still haven't figured out but i got screwed up because the the lcd screen did not match what the footage ended up looking like and i manually set
it for this recent video and then i had to color grade it and it looks cool and neat and looks like old it looks like old student film
like from the 70s but um i should have just probably left it on
automatic it just looked really blue because i was using a combination of this window light here you can see
see this this window light coming in and then i have two lights you can see i'm reflecting off my hands
right here so that my eyes and my face are exposed and this this camera seems to be dealing
with it okay probably because it's an apple super computer but the gopro for some reason i don't have it i haven't like mastered that and it just went all
the way like blue and uh and i just have a preference for the warmer color temperature so i don't know you'll
see it probably come out hopefully today probably maybe monday um okay what's the next one
what's that all the questions yep that's all the ones from the last few and now we have these over here
from you guys from today what's my favorite perfume or scent
that's a great question from niles or an ils is that niles or nils a bit of a random question to start what
is your favorite perfume and or scent perfume i don't know what they're called i don't know the ones i like what
they're called i like the smell of like cedar i like the smell of gasoline i like the smell
of diesel i like the smell of tobacco smoke and i like
kind of the smell of the woods sawdust i love i love it when like a blade burns
wood like an like a you know a table saw blade like burns the side of the wood that smell
um [Music] i love the smell of topanga canyon smells really great i don't know what it is it's a combination of all this stuff
where i was in i was in um yesterday at griffith park and then i came home and i had the air
conditioning on the whole time then i came home parked the truck it was like night it was dark out and then opened the door and i just got this blast of depend i
was like oh my god i forgot how good this place smells so there's some um
okay this is a good question why don't you just make more expensive tiers in patreon for people who can afford to pay more just like that without an extra
give from you that's a good idea but you can just pay as much as you want you don't have to just pay the five dollar it's a five
dollar tier but you can pay like a thousand if you want so i guess
i don't know i guess i should do that i don't know i kind of have that weird i have that um
like market brain where you have to sort of you should offer something for the money but that's another thing we're
experimenting with is the patreon like i haven't really messed with it just kind of came up with this format and uh we haven't
played with the dials of doing that one thing i'm trying to protect myself from is too much labor i mean obviously this suggestion is just another tier that
more money and that will probably happen okay so andrew mack asks could you talk about what it was like
watching josh and benny safety grow into who they are today
okay i know them i've known ben since he was i think he was 19 and maybe josh i don't even know the age difference maybe josh was like 21 or
something like this and they are the one like if if you're in doubt if you want to like be
a professional feed your family professional like filmmaker or whatever and you're in doubt
they are the people that are the example of do not do it quit do not do it it's do it as a hobby
but do not be a professional if you're in doubt because they were never they were all from the time i know that
they were always making movies and not only always me all and doing all the other stuff all the
creating making physical object things but they were always making movies and they were always making narrative movies
they were always making story movies with characters that they created um always from the time and this you
know we're talking teenagers well ben was a teenager and i remember um and ben made these there was a while
where they were i think ben was still in college and josh was not in college anymore so they were making films independent of
each other josh and ben and ben would make these on i mean you had to like leave the room they would tear your heart out they were
so they had they just had the talons in them he made this movie called i
can't remember the titles of them i'm very sorry about that but there was a movie he made and this is when ben was training
was a bach he was training as a boxer he's he was boxing he might still and he made i can't i don't even want to
talk about it i don't even want to give it away um but
it's about a boxer i think ben plays the boxer and uh god maybe it was the two of them i don't know you see you see what this
is so i don't know i just watched them get more successful but they had their voice and it just
refined it just incrementally refined more and more and then they would meet more and more people they're josh is particularly gregarious
and he's also he's he's a he's not afraid of trouble and he's not afraid of dangerous people
so and he's very very likable super sweet guy and so he and he's from manhattan both
of them are from manhattan so development it was just the movies would
they'd just make them and then they'd get into can i mean it was like un it was [ __ ] unbelievable oh i have a great story
josh made this movie um [Music] when he was at bc right i'm sorry sorry bu boston university um god damn it van what the [ __ ] is the
name of the movie they're all one thing to me he made this movie and
i'm confusing 20 stories right now okay i i'm i'm confusing i'm confusing a
bunch of stories anyway all the movies they've made were always great and they were good i think the story is something like
josh and ben made um the pleasure of being robbed and it didn't get into the bu
film fest the boston university film school their alma mater i might this might not be right i might have this [ __ ] up this story but i'm pretty sure
it's this and then it got into the canned film festival and then
bu groveled and you know came back i don't really know what that what happened to the end of that story but
they're not very vindictive guys so who knows but yeah i mean
i saw ben on the side of a bus i didn't even know he's in licorice pizza but he
started out doing um stand-up comedy as like a character and that was really
fun to go and watch and they were just always making stuff they are right now right this moment what time is it
it's about like one o'clock in in new york they're making something right now and um developing they just got more
successful and that means they had more access to more people and then they just developed on an arc of
writing more sophisticated projects i was i mean the pleasure of
being robbed was really their tightest and best thing that they've made i think
and it was like so riveting and they they have that they definitely have their own voice
it's them it's i mean you can tell it's their movie but it's in it's goes all the way back to
we're going to the zoo i think is like one of the first ones and then you know when this what this is
one of the sad things we had that whole diane fink experience and this is one of the sad things about life is just
as you all get as everyone gets more successful and more busy you just see less and less and less of each other and
jesus i haven't seen those guys i don't know when since before covet i don't know 2018 2019 something like
that and just your schedule gets packed and oh no no that's yeah right before covid
i saw them right before kovid josh or ben i can't remember who invited me
to like the screening at you know some amazing hotel uh of um
of uncut gems and like you know all the stars in town were there you know adam sandler was there you go in these little
there's like a very glamorous side to this life that i don't really touch upon like there's like there's some fancy i've done some pretty
fancy ass [ __ ] and um one of the beautiful things about when your friends are get you know very
successful is you get like a little you get to be there in the little you get to be at the little party you get to be in the screening room with the big
plush couches and like just filled with famous people you know it's is kind of neat
but yeah they're just total cinephiles they've seen everything they have seen every
i mean i've sometimes i have conversations with people and i'm like have you seen blah blah blah have you seen people and then they don't know but like they're like that with me they've seen they must
watch i'll bet josh watches a thousand nah i'll bet you he watches 500 movies a year
like every year um okay what else who else that's that's
josh and ben those guys i love those guys peter asked me are there other crazy things you wanted to shoot like shot from a car bumper airplane dune buggy maybe even
from a dog cat or maybe a predator and prey i enjoyed the baseball catch video
no there's just people who are so great at all that stuff i'm more i'm more interested in like
you know stories um [Music] i used to i used to like all that stuff what is your dream for your you this is raz121 what's your dream for your youtube channel and how can we help you achieve it us patrons are here as day
uno's for you that's why you're helping me you're like on the team my dream for the youtube video
i think i'd like to have like five million subscribers and just have real um
[Music] sort of financial freedom and that would translate into a level of creative freedom that i've
never had and i think that would manifest in maybe longer projects like
40-minute projects or whatever that came out less often but we're more developed and deeper and like
better because like that's what this i kind of feel like this phase of this
like youtube patreon merch um [Music] brand deal phase is me sort of getting past the or breaking through the kind of uh financial limitation resource
ceiling because even i'm at this point now in my artistic development where
even with all the money in the you know with millions of dollars i'm too old to just take the
resources and go be like someone else and hire you know russian ark no russian arm
you know porsche cayenne camera cars and quadcopter aquacopter
drones and i'm still you know i it would still be all this handmade
stuff but it would just be on a different scale and it would be the stories would be bigger and the adventure you know which i haven't had an adventure in a long
time there'd be like longer duration adventures and maybe there'd be a book but
for the youtube channel yeah i mean i would like to do
i would like to have time off at some point to kind of you know uh
let the fields go fallow is that what it is i don't know um and then
just kind of put out things at my own pace um with more uh with uh less you know financial constraints
um yeah i don't know i just kind of go day by day here but i guess i'd like to work with
some more people that i'm really interested in like
talking talk to more people but the numbers is just what i'm concentrating on
the numbers i mean i don't know i'm like a creative person so it's i keep hitting this mic it really drives
me crazy so it's like a subconscious thing it just kind of takes over i don't
really know it's like a trance but i know i can get in that trance
if i don't have all these other outside concerns and money is the most powerful energy
that human beings can channel so money allows you to mitigate a tremendous amount of outside
concerns and also allows you to you know indulge in the trance to a greater extent but now i'm just
like it's so scheduled gang like after this i have to go and just sprint and do this
some other stuff just to get things out on time and um so you know for the for the channel
i would just like to go at my own pace and do my own projects without
having to sacrifice or having to make all the people around me sacrifice you know financially
i know that's a very boring answer but i just um yeah
um okay oh this is a good one josiah said how do you manage the fear of your home slash your life's work being destroyed in a
wildfire um well a lot of stuff is up online right and um [Music] it sucks when it's fire season i just kind of keep things packed and you just takes about an hour to pack you kind of
keep everything pre-packed and labeled and then you just throw it in your cars and you get out
so that you kind of save everything i have some i have a storage space with storage too
[Music] but the fear it's not really a fear i mean there's a fear when it's happening in real time there's like a fear
and it's i just channel it into what should i be doing at this exact moment like what is
the task at hand tom sacks on his studio i don't know if it's still there on the on the
exit door on the door to go out to the street in his studio there was a sign that said
and it was handwritten in sharpie and it said 20 of all artists biographies contain a chapter
titled the fire and i and it was a quotation from somebody i think it was from wentworth from
what wexler no there's mickey drexler there's wechsler wexler i can't remember his name it was from uh uh one of this like um a scholars one of
his books i can't remember um anyhow robert frost lost his
i'm sorry no not robert frost god my brain is rotten with names just rotten rotten rotten
norman rockwell lost like decades of his work in vermont
in his studio when his studio burned to the ground um ugh yeah i don't know what it is fire
um okay i'm gonna go and if in ten minutes i'm gonna go i'm just gonna randomly scroll down here um okay here's one robert asked as a soon to be industrial design graduate how do i go about finding a creative job that
doesn't suck well isabel is an industrial design graduate and um
i don't know that's a good that's a good question i don't know i think it's you have to
understand that all jobs 100 of jobs have a very heavy suck element to them you cannot win this [ __ ] about oh i love my johnson
those people are [ __ ] lying they're lying they're lying because or they're
being very irresponsible and it's going to come back and their job is going to crush them because they're they're being
very they're just concentrating on like i'm just you know on the music or whatever and they're not paying attention to the
what the money is doing and then they're going to get themselves into a hole with that and they're going to have to go back and pay attention to the money
and that's going to be their job and they're going to be doing their music to do that and that's going to [ __ ] suck and i don't know if anyone who's an
exception to this you have periods i think where you are an exception you have like long stretches where
magical incredible things happen but it's just sucking is part of work
that's why it's why they pay you so i don't know i don't even know industrial design
jeez that's like cad and all that and like 3d studio max and all of that i don't know i couldn't do it i couldn't
do that um yeah you just have to understand that it's parts of it are gonna suck and
parts of it are gonna be great um yeah you can't win
you can't win in life it's just hard just hard to do anything so they'll find something great go find
something cool i don't know go work at apple is that where everybody wants to work now
um oh here's one jet from jeffrey how would two gen xers me and my wife no kids move to l.a and survive come on no kids
just get in the [ __ ] car come on la go try in new york
and then uh yeah no la's it's not very difficult it's difficult but it's not like new
york new york is absolutely [ __ ] brutal absolutely
this the details that people don't okay you've gone through the absolute
struggle of finding the tiny box apartment not in the neighborhood that you want that you can absolutely barely afford if
everything goes your way oh unless oh no yeah survival this is a money question okay you get that apartment okay you
pack your prius or whatever blah blah blah you have to unload that prius where the [ __ ] are you gonna park that day hour one of moving into new york where
are you parking because you couldn't afford a building with a parking spot you're gonna park on the street hundred bucks cause they're gonna come and
they're gonna the if you park illegally in new york you get a ticket you're not mike gonna get a
ticket they've figured the whole thing out the whole thing is just like if there's just meter maids covering
you might have a five minute window here and there but you're getting the ticket in every parking this is just parking this is just parking
la la is fair also la you're car based people [ __ ] about that but guess what in new york
not being car based means you have to carry everything with you all day long and in new york there's 30 degree
temperature swings in certain days some days it's 30 degrees in the morning 60 degrees in the afternoon so you have to and it might rain so you got to carry
rain clothes warm clothes cold cold plus all your work stuff because you're working far from where you live probably
la the weather is the same every day so you don't even have to check the weather and you have a car there's plenty of places to parking you can have your
stuff you can have your car can be your like base of stuff you can have all of like your rain clothes warm clothes cold clothes in your car
um la i think you just find a very cheap neighborhood maybe in the valley maybe downtown and uh
yeah survival i don't know but la's not it's much easier than
than new york and the people are nicer and the people and i know it's superficial but so what so is 99.999 of
interactions you have with humans um uh yeah you know like when the power goes
the electricity goes out and there's the the the the stop lights break the the angelinos let each other go in
like order there's no honking there's no horns it's not it's just a it's just a matter of fact for instance you know people are you
know they're just generally a little bit friendlier too they give you a little bit more of a benefit of the doubt but
yeah i did how did i do it i don't know i got a big gig i got a gig that allowed me to just do
it but you know i'm [ __ ] financially irresponsible so i'm not like a good person to talk to about this but no kids
yeah you just do it just move move to la and then you'll probably work your way west
although isn't denver supposed to be fun i don't know but uh yeah i love la
i love it here but it took me a long time to move here you know
i think i first moved here in 2010 um all right two more minutes
oh all right here's a good one from connor i guess this will be the last one um in your opinion what is the first step to becoming a spirited man
i would say it's reading books read books read a lot of books
all right i gotta do another one that was too easy it's too fast
also there's a question do you have any thoughts on how do you approach making art for clients the challenge seems to be staying true to your own style while
matching someone else's vision no i mean that is really hard to do i think
this is what saks said and i think he's right just make presents for people and when you make just get in the habit of making
great presents for people and then when you make something that's really great just remake it and sell it to the
to whoever the the client is um but i haven't had any i mean i've had a very slight luck a little bit of luck in
that in the arena of making art for clients but just people like you guys patrons that really want me to do well
you know buying stuff but i haven't like gone open market gallery show and sold out and you know made
tons of money and all that it's an incredibly difficult and weird arbitrary
um rigged uh corrupt game so i don't know all right that's gonna be it guys thank you so much thank you for your patronage you're keeping me alive
and uh have a good weekend um i made a cool video today it should be i'm going to do my absolute best
isabelle's in atlanta so i have to watch x on my own so uh i'm going to do my absolute best to get this thing uploaded today but it
might be monday but it's a good one all right take care
Products & Tools Mentioned
- Canon 1DX uses — primary camera discussed
- Canon T2i uses — starter camera discussed
- GoPro 10 uses — action camera discussed
- GoPro 8 uses — older model discussed
- iPhone uses — phone camera discussed
- Super 8 uses — film format discussed
- iMac DV uses — original editing computer
- Sony (video camera) mentions — camera brand discussed
People Referenced
Casey Neistat, Tom Sachs, Braxton Haugen, Gray Sorrenti, Ariel Schulman, Henry Joost, Neve Schulman, Josh Safdie, Ben Safdie, Lena Dunham, Greta Gerwig, Oscar Boyson, Sam Lisenco, Alex Kalman, Myra Kalman
Books Mentioned
- Sid Field screenplay book
Films & Media Referenced
- documentary by Schulman/Joost discussed
- film discussed
- film discussed
- HBO series discussed
- film discussed
- film discussed
- Van's feature film with Tom Sachs