LIVESTREAM FRIDAY 7.15.22 9AM PDT
Published · 1:10:19 · 1,248 views
About This Video
A July 2022 Friday morning session. Van answers questions from patrons and works through the week's projects out loud. Summer in the workshop.
Transcript
i really want you to see the little logo on my thing but then it's like a ridiculous shot well
i don't know i'll fix it somehow uh good morning everyone sorry i missed last friday sorry there was no uh
post last week um i just was too tired to do it uh
oh okay so in keeping with the tradition of stealing an idea from david lynch the weather report today
while you guys are getting ready and signing on so you don't miss anything interesting the weather is perfect again it's a little warm this
morning uh i think we might have had built one fire in our fireplace this week
because it gets fairly and by fair i mean not unfair
uh fairly cold at night and i was in malibu with my son there's a great playground there that we
go to uh like last week and it was like a breezy perfect day and i
believe that this is the night this july here in los angeles is the nicest
july of my life and i think that includes a july spent in
berlin which is very pleasant in the summer talking weather-wise it's just it hasn't been there's been a couple burning hot
days but then you go to the swimming hole or the beach and it's like a real relief the mornings have been nice anyhow uh
that's the weather report okay so great questions this week and uh what i usually do is i go through
the comments section when i post the announcement for the live stream and usually i go to the
i go like first come first serve but today the late bird gets the worm because the first few questions were very excited exciting and then i went
down to the bottom and then i randomly just like scrolled and picked because i got i was late setting up um
so this is a great one from a great question from illy and he basically was asking me about
japan and my opinion of japan itself japanese craftsmanship japanese hardware
stores and um if i have any plans or if i'd like to do or what kind of project i'd like to do in japan okay
so japan i've been to japan twice and they were both like red carpet trips to japan because i went
with tom sachs and the trips were sponsored by nike and so i got to fly business class we got to
stay at the uh the park hyatt which is when we were in tokyo we got to stay at the park hyatt which is the hotel from
um lost in translation and i got to have tom sachs all to myself because on the first trip because it was a
riding trip and we took a bullet train to this little town called onomichi and i think it was really far away um
but it was on that main island which i think is called honshu and so my very first impressions
of japan of tokyo i'm sorry let's go with tokyo first
so i'm from a very um like uh like kind of a towny place i'm from a place where
almost no one leaves i think and my dad is one of these people he's never lived beyond until he retired he never lived
beyond 40 minutes of where he was where he grew up so he went to college like 40 minutes away
he grew up in new london connecticut and then he lived in new london connecticut basically his whole life and then moved eight miles away to gales ferry
connecticut where i grew up and then he moved to waterford connecticut which is like one mile away from new london connecticut
and so my default of opinions of what like americans are or what they're like are from that and this
is a completely stupid and parochial uh opinion uh is that america like general like
like i feel like my dad is the is the very center of america like he is the he is the
fulcrum upon which like american americans teeter and and like people from where i grew up i think they like things based on how familiar they are so when they have an aspiration to go
visit a foreign country they want to go to england or ireland because no language barrier it's like english we're
kind of we're like an english colony or they're of irish descent they want to go see ireland and they think it'll be this
is just my judgmental opinion and so um japan is like the asian country that all myself included that like regular american people always say oh i wanna i
really wanna go to japan and one of the things that was very stark to me
when i went to tokyo was oh this is like almost exactly because i've been to a lot of places
that are just like wacko different and i've been to a lot of the major cities of the world they're all kind of the same like paris is an
exception new york is an exception but they're all kind of the same and they're getting more and more the same but when you but when i visited japan
one of the the thing that really struck me is like oh this is just toronto this is just this is just
this is just people love this because it's so american it's so western it's super it's like more
western than america is western and i mean there's historical reasons for that in that you
know the allied forces basically burned tokyo which was a which was a wooden city before world war ii it must have
been absolutely magnificent all those beautiful little houses and then after the war america and the
allies rebuilt it so they just rebuilt it western and and japan um
uh became a western ally and they have western values like this they're they're basically the they're a western country from the east
so having said all that it's like it also seemed to me like a perfectly functioning west like the ideal western
city it functions perfectly the garbage is perfect it's it's it's not the cleanest city i've ever been to probably
copenhagen or oslo is maybe the cleanest cities i've ever been to but it's very clean and there's no litter and it's
quiet people are quiet there aren't horns and the people are very dignified i went and the last time i went was 1995 they
wore masks if they were feeling sick all that that stereotype of like
underwear vending machines and electronics craziness and everyone's into electronics and blah blah no no it's just i mean there's a couple
places and they're clearly tourist traps like there's a place where you can get it's like a robot sushi place where you have a little touch screen in front of
you and then a track like a conveyor belt in front of you and you like push what you want and then just like it arrives in front of you and
you take it off and eat it and it was just clearly like a gimmick a tourist trap the thing that felt very tokyo to me and
that i that i love and i don't really know of in america is like the noodle shops they have these
they're just they it feels like they're everywhere and they're on back streets everywhere and i'm told that they're sort of run by like the yakuza so
they're all kind of cash based that's right if i remember and you just go in and you give the guy
what you want number three number five and you sit down and then i think they maybe call your number and you go up and you get a bowl of noodles and they're
fanta of course they're fantastic one of them had a um an old cigarette machine the kind where
you pulled i mean if you weren't born in the 70s you have no idea what i'm talking about you pull the rod you put the money in
and you pull the rod and it like and it would like pull a pack of cigarettes down into the little well where you'd
take them out they had one of those except it was like a little card you'd put change you know they have
bigger units of currency in their coinage in in japan you'd put coins in and then you'd pick like you'd look on the at the pictures and be
like okay i want the chicken ramen with hard with the hard-boiled egg and you'd pull it and a little like card plastic thing would come out and you'd give that
to the guys and that was just like the default meal like if you're wandering around and you're hungry i just find that the japanese 7-elevens are among my
favorite like retail food place anywhere i've ever been and they have these things they're chocolate covered almonds and i
eat like five or six boxes of those a day they have these little triangle like i don't know what they are but they're rice things with a special way you
unwrap them like it comes with directions you have to unwrap it a special way and it's so that the seaweed is separated from the
rice until the moment you remove this special packaging and then in the very middle i think there might be a little bit of
chicken or egg or something so [Music] so that's tokyo and the heart what i do when i'm in tokyo is i try to find hardware stores and i try to find
hardware stores that have like japanese hardware is a specific term doesn't mean tools and everything hardware generally
means like hinges door knobs uh screws hooks and so the thing that i'm in a constant search for is these
very specific japanese hooks and they're kind of like just they're so beautiful they've been in my videos but they're just this little like
cartoon thing on a mounted on like a cartoon like like sort of a half circle with a section cut out of it or no three
quarter circle and then they're kind of mounted to a like an oval plate
and i go around just looking for like the the jackpot and sometimes i raid them and sometimes i you know it's
just like whatever i carry they also have amazing saws amazing knives the paint brushes i think they're just a regular paint
brushes and i think they cost like a dollar or three dollars but they are so beautiful and uh i was like i was looking for one
in my studio yesterday i was like oh no i lost my armor all paintbrush and then i was oh here it is and i found it and i hung it on the hook and braxton was like that's
a what the what is this i was like that's just a regular japanese paintbrush so beautiful but hardware stores in japan are like
hardware stores in manhattan like people and tok i'm sorry in tokyo i i don't think that people in tokyo are generally
handy people or hardware people i think they're like city people everywhere they're generally services people who depend upon services
so hardware is kind of hard to find and the people who work in the hardware
stores generally don't speak english and you know you're thinking oh it's japanese it's gonna be like a toyota or a honda it's gonna be like absolutely perfect but i remember i have one distinct memory of going into a hardware
store and it was just like piles of mess everywhere just piles of unopened inventory everywhere and having to like sort through it was just like
wasn't even up to you know it wasn't even up to like bronx standards
um but i love japanese hardware it's like saks and i used to sax
tom sacks said to me you know because i used to think jerks i lived in berlin and i love german hardware as well and swiss hardware and
he's like you know at the end of the day it's the japanese is really better it's cheaper it's less expensive and that tricks you
into thinking it's of lower quality but at the end of the day you know honda beats mercedes in formula one this
year and last year well they're winning right now but we'll see um when i went to the countryside when i went to onomichi with tom
i can't remember why we picked that specific town but it was the town where tokyo story was filmed the ozu the famous ozu
movie and the reason it was filmed there is because at the time tokyo had been leveled and he was looking for an old looking city
to take the place of tokyo so it's called onomichi beautiful little train station perfect
the trains are so beautiful oh my god little old-fashioned train perfect colors everywhere
and we stayed now sax had organized this he might have paid for this out of his own pocket but
he might have had the budget for from from nike and he he rented us this unbelievable
apartment in a triplex house and this was and i said to sax i said this is the nicest house i've ever been to in my
life not the biggest not the fanciest not the richest the nicest house and every single detail was absolutely
perfect absolutely perfect and it was sort of old fashioned style japanese style with the sliding
those doors and they have like you know there's like eight panels wide so you can open like three of the panels
and it's like halfway open or you open all the panels and it's a whole wall and it sections off like this big middle
area from the little like there's like an interior sort of deck that goes around the house with the that's where the windows are and that can be closed
off or opened up with these things and there's that little they had the little it's like a little room where you take off your shoes and it's a room dedicated
to that and then you like crawl through a hole after you take your shoes off but you have a beautiful bench to take your shoes off you like crawl through this hole and then it's like charlie in the
chocolate factory and then like the door poles they had like made these diamond pieces
of hardware tiny like [Music] this big with a hole drilled in the middle of them and then a a thin strap of like glove leather
folded in half that went through the door and was tacked with a perfect nail through the other side of the
the door and then you just pull this like it was like a drawer pole or whatever and there were all kinds of things like that one of the things i noticed was that some and i
still i've stolen this some pieces of wood that were
fasteners or hooks or something were just they looked like sticks from the yard they still had bark on them and they
still had like the y and the fork and they'd just been cut perfectly and like tacked in perfectly all in this house and then the house had a modern air you know uh air
conditioning um you know central air conditioning system it was triplex that our host like showed us all three levels
the walls there was no like paint there was no there was drying oils i think things were finished with drying oil and
there was there just didn't seem like anything was painted it seemed like all wood the walls seemed like they were made it was kind of it was it it seems
like half mud half um like concrete or stucco just perfect and beautiful in the trim
and the everything the windows slid perfectly open and that the very corner of the window where it slid open was a
tiny little perfect piece of like felt that would just keep the track clean
um and and that onomichi town was sort of still ancient japan because i it probably wasn't a target from the allies
so you know japan didn't have horses and didn't have cars when it was being developed and so
there were these roads that were like you know a couple humans wide that went to entire neighborhoods and these
like heaved up broken slabs of of of um of granite from the tree roots with an
abandoned house that was like a perfect sax i think might have even actually bought one i'm not sure i know he was looking to buy one of these things
these old abandoned houses that were perfect and maybe had some kind of person maybe a person was living in there and japan has like a negative population growth so all
of the numbers and they don't do immigration so all the the housing numbers and stuff were kind of coming you know are very very very very
inexpensive they one of the things i like to do in foreign countries is visit grocery stores because that's
where regular people are and i remember the grocery store in that town also had like a hardware section and i just rated it they had so much cool [ __ ] in there
um and they have great candy and you know it was always a little bit rainy it was a little bit hot cause i think we were there in the summer
um easy place to go to so you know one of the things i'd love to do is i'd love to
go with my son and with isabel and do a like a bicycle trip there's this it's called the eight bridges
bicycle something or other and uh there's these bridges that go to these little islands down there in onomichi
and it's this like trip that people do i don't know how many mommies a couple hundred miles or a hundred miles and maybe you do it i don't know over a course of a
week or something and there's all these like the chamber of commerce's and all these excuse me little towns
have set up like little hotels and there's little restaurants and so much character so beautiful little
tiny fairies you know it's all like super cool cars you know of course one of our guy one of our the guys we worked
with in japan had like a brand new um land cruiser pickup truck the 70
series which is the one that's a little bit smaller than the 60 series which is what i have and it's like they still make them you can get a brand new one it's like really
boxy and he had like the the front wheels were like the trucker wheels that are super flat
and they and they're radials and they're they're super flat they don't look like they have any knobbies on them and then they the
sidewalls just go like straight up and then tilt in a little bit and it looks like really industrial um
i also went to another town called kamakura which was beautiful which has little waves where you can surf and they had a terrific buddhist temple there that was hundreds
or maybe i think it was hundreds of years old like 400 years old made out of hand-hammered copper a giant buddha that
you could go inside and they had a great gift shop and i bought my son my son had just been well my son was like
less than a year old i think i bought him this little owl like cast iron owl ding ding ding like
bell that like a wind chime bell and he'll have that probably his whole life because his cast iron and he can't break it
um but yeah that and i would love to do some kind of project some kind of like video series i mean maybe spend a year there or something i don't know how i
would do that but i would be willing to and i would love to because just there the aesthetic and the care
and the just the the care i guess of the attention that
is built into the their just their way generally speaking i mean they're modern a lot of them are modern people and probably most of them are modern people
like us and but you can go off into the countryside and just find these little these little gems these little gold boxes oh my god that's
question number one okay so andreas asked if i needed pressure in
like sort of in relation to the routine video that i posted a couple days ago
um no there's this great david lynch he talks about like there's a myth of the artist in the
garrett suffering away that the artist must suffer in order to do meaningful work
and the opposite is absolutely true an artist does his best work when all of
the other needs are taken care of and i find that that is the hard that's the place to go like i know first of all some stress is good for you some stress is like physiologically good
for you but i think a constant pressure is it's not good for you so i think pressure at certain for certain
contexts or at certain milestones or to get over you know in certain um
phases of the game is probably important but i think generally you want to be like
especially during the writing phase during like the real creativity phase you want to have a real sense of serenity and
and like just that you have all the time in the world and that you know you're just in this trance and trying to capture as quickly as you
can all of the like sort of ideas that are coming to you from somewhere they're not coming to you from you but you want to be like quiet and nice and
that's why i think the routine is there is so that you can provide yourself with that you can prepare your body for that
um paradigm you can prepare your body for that paradigm on a regular basis and that the
routine allows you to provide the time you need for that paradigm that creativity
creative trance paradigm and um and then the execution of that stuff is
a different world because there's always time pressure because you're racing light or you've got somebody you're working with that that you need to like
let them go live their life because they're on the schedule too um or you know you got to pick somebody up or
whatever it is the schedule can add a little pressure um but you know one of the things i keep saying to
people around me that i'm talking to about this like sort of slow burnout that i'm going through is like what i
need time for is i need time to waste i need time to just
i don't know waste and get caught up and be like a little kid you know the little kids they
notice little tiny little details they don't notice the big picture they notice oh this
flower has a whatever bug in it or something and i'm sort of like my ambition is to work
to and i think i'll be able to pull it off is like to have a period of maybe a month or
two or three months maybe where i'm i have that in spades which
paradoxically what happens is when you have so much time to waste for me that's when i have that real
addict's need to make stuff and it's just and and i'm trying to um
i'm trying to prime that i suppose but i already like i have this mexico trip i haven't planned where i'm going i haven't planned a schedule besides
this sometime in december to sometime in maybe february but i am
thinking about what my routine will be when i'm on the road like i'm still going to have a routine i'm still going to do writing i'm still going to be
writing every day or five days a week um for you know hope for i'm thinking a three hour window somehow i don't know
how how exactly i'm going to do that i'm still going to be running there's this guy stefan sagmeister who's um it's actually a friend of mine's father
was his men was sag meister tibor calman who's my friend alex's father he's since deceased tibor has t wore
cowman was stefan sagmeister's mentor so stefan sagmeister is a pretty well-known
designer and every seven years he shuts his firm down and the entire firm takes a year off a sabbatical year and he says
that's where he gets his ideas for the next for the following seven years but he said the first time he did his sabbatical the first time he took his
year off he didn't have anything planned and he just stayed home and became his own intern
so he was just like filing stuff putting stuff like stuff that normally an office person would be doing he just took on those jobs because he didn't have
a big plan so you know i have an agenda with the mexico thing and then or a couple of
agendas like a couple of little light missions and then i'm gonna have my routine and i want to return with you know sort of the
ideas for the next season which will be season three or year three
2023 i can't remember what the question was so yeah i guess you do need pressure sometimes
it's helpful you can use it in a helpful way but constant pressure is like i don't know i put it on myself and it's
like i'm feeling that i'm definitely feeling like the you know the rotors need to be replaced
now the brake rotors need to be replaced not just the brake pads the rotors um
okay so i guess nate asked about uh gq magazine does 10 things
so and so can't live without you know 10 things george clooney can't live without and nate said what are 10 things i can't
live without okay let me see if i can do this don't hold me to this this is just what i'm thinking of the top of my head number
one pencil number two and these aren't in priority but these are just in the priority of how
what they come to me pencil post-its can't live without them that my world stops if i run out of post-its if i run
out of post-its the next thing i'm doing is finding post-its so it's pencil post-its swiss army knife
um and now we're getting into the grit and now we're getting into like [ __ ] i love but i might be able to live without uh
i mean live without you know i don't know but uh okay
bicycle i mean i live in la so car truck um that's five
um we're just we're not talking about like my children my friends not that [ __ ] i know what you mean material things
um cardstock probably that's cheap but um tape what's that seven coffee i mean i don't want to live without coffee diet soda i don't want to live
without it uh like the doctor said you have to stop drinking diet soda and it'll save five years off of your life i'd be like well
what's that gonna be 90 to 95 i don't give a [ __ ] i'm drinking them uh i bought nine cases of diet soda like last week and i'm down to like one and a
half left no no no i'm sorry i'm down to four and a half left um
so sorry i'm gonna tape i mean antenna just be like tools but that's like
where cover is motorcycle [ __ ] motorcycle i don't wanna live without it and i know there's going to be a last motorcycle
ride someday oh god jesus christ i hope it's when i'm 90 years old and i'd [ __ ]
crash into a [ __ ] fountain or something because the thought of that i know some people i know two people are
close to me who hung it up and uh just i i don't even think about it because man and i'll go long periods
without riding long periods i had you know in new york i had like i couldn't afford to ride
because my bike needed work and i went maybe a year or something but oh man that's
okay okay so brennan asked the role that social media has for creators
and i think it's probably coming off the heels of a weird week with um you know jordan peterson and uh that
david rubin being banned from twitter for dead naming somebody or whatever so i think we're all thinking oh and
also elon musk's kind of been attacking twitter um so it's probably in that context
we're all sort of thinking about about social media and we kind of see it as this incredible like mr rogers would
talk about how tv it was like destroying the american mind but also at the same time it was this incredibly powerful tool that could be
wielded to incredibly positive um effect and i think that guy probably
more than anyone has had the biggest influence on me professionally is like his world
his tv world was i mean for if you're of my generation man that's what we all have in common whether you're in prison
whether you're you know in the senate we all had that we all had that we all had mr rogers in common and that is like
part of our world is his world like part of our imagination and part of our like understanding his
one of his the like intellectual i think like the intellectual persona of him
in the neighborhood of make-believe each one of those characters is like king friday is sort of the control freak the little cat
is sort of his like inner child or maybe who he's most like but the like philosophical and
intellectual embodiment in the neighborhood of make-believe is x the owl and my son's name is x
so i think about tv in terms of mr rogers and then i think about because i kind of i've
always kind of hated tv it's always kind of really boring and i think about in in i think of social media in terms of well
what's you know what's the mr rogers um sort of version or quality of of of social media and one of the things that social media
of course provides is that it's available to all of us and i think what it offers people is that
if you have a ambition to do something that is uh you know spoken like sound or
motion picture you know i guess video or sound or or
or i guess media um writing you you know this is very obvious but you
have this global audience but you also have this workshop upon which you can forge
yourself into someone worthy of having a global audience and you can see with numbers
your progress and you can quantify or qualify your progress or your value to some degree to some degree of
accuracy by those numbers and i think people who tried who do it with
the aim of being a professional social media person they have the opportunity to
um allow it to build you know bring out their their
best potential to really work and really concentrate and it's just there you can take it for granted there's no
it's very obvious there's no gatekeepers it's just the quality if it's good it'll be if it's good and people connect with it
then it will be supported um i think the problem is it's a little bit too easy
and also the flip side of it being a you know accessible tool
and an easy tool is that the the undisciplined person can get a lot of attention from just their
vices from their weaknesses from you know being negative you know um
outrage clicks people click outrage more than they click you know positivity it's just
a gut level thing but i mean for my life jesus christ it's
totally it's com i mean i don't know what the hell i'd be doing without it so it's i feel like a really i have benefited to a
un imaginable to degree and you know i had this thought today
while i was um i don't know what i was doing i think i was going to the bathroom but uh i had this thought about
i listened to neil howe who is one of the co-writers of the fourth turning
um and he was on this is recent maybe two weeks ago or last week and he was on
he was on tony robbins podcast and they were talking about this era in american history and we're in this sort
of quasi-civil war and the way it's kind of manifesting at this moment
is that the states are being disobedient of the government so for instance you know states like california colorado
that they have legalized marijuana and the federal government says that's
illegal but the states are like no it ain't and it's like this little form of of
disobedience and then you have these two very divisive rulings and one was the um
the ruling in new york about you're allowed no you can you don't need special permission to carry a handgun you can carry a handgun
if you get the proper licensing and that we're not it's illegal for you new york to
uh discriminate uh who who gets the licensing um and then of course is the you know the abortion ruling um was it dab is that what it's called
it's like roe vs wade but this this particular case that
the judgment was that roe v wade is not a i mean i'm sorry that abortion is not a constitutional right just which means
that it's you know it's basically up to the state legislatures to decide whether it was legal or not so we have this
divisiveness and that with those two probably the biggest issues and we have like a real pressure cooker of weirdness and we're getting like our
inflation's going out of control and it's getting gnarly and there's lots and lots of talk of from very smart people about civil
war this civil war that i saw this jordan peterson podcast where his thesis was basically
and you have to watch this is one of the most succinct speakers in the english language and he talks about it for two
hours so i cannot sum it up i'm sorry but his thesis is basically that the
war in ukraine is also it might be often that in this
categorization is also the a western civil war it's a manifestation of the western
civil war so i'm thinking about okay we're going to go through this dark period and it's starting this thing about restricting any kind of
speech at all was when i was in high school when i was in it was absolutely unheard of our teachers i remember dr
madison my senior your um uh english teacher just saying if anyone tries to tell you you can't say certain
things you fight tooth and nail you die to make sure that you're allowed to say whatever you want whether you're right or you're wrong
for my generation it was just and there were no real there was like one case that where that
restriction was touched a tiny bit that i can remember there was just one tiny little case where that thing and it was supreme
court boom and what it was was i'm going somewhere with this i remember my original point but in the so and it was
um larry flint in hustler magazine did a back page um
like cartoon about jerry falwell who was a religious right leader who um was outspoken against larry flynn i think
and he did and larry flint did a cartoon about um jerry falwell losing his virginity and it was like you know it's hustler
magazine and so there's a movie about this called the people versus larry flint so larry flint was like i'm rich i'm going to the supreme court with this
because um the i think the ruling one of the the original ruling was that this was maybe
a criminal act or this was an illegal act because it was indecent and so larry flint spent millions of dollars to say hey [ __ ] you it doesn't
matter if it's indecent i can say whatever the hell i want and a lot of us are prepared to go to great
um to great lengths to to defend that into and to defend all the other things that
go along with that to all the other um all the other things that you lose if you lose your right to free speech
um you know jordan peterson was the first one and he's a canadian and he was the most he's probably the most famous one
and the most controversial one and one of the things i was thinking about about one about the my concept of
america having been to a lot of america and having been having been exposed to a lot of the different american subcultures
is that's kind of what america is is this place when they say freedom it's this freedom to have your
one of the freedoms is the freedom to have your culture so you have you know the rabbi up the street of my that runs the chabad where my son goes
to preschool his wife runs the preschool he has an accent right he has like an old world like czech like yiddish accent the guy's from
brooklyn and the multi-generation of those kids they have that you know that like uh that like stereotypical well
dude and they look like this and these the guy's from brooklyn he talks like that he talks like he's from eastern europe and his
grandfather's probably from brooklyn as well and then you have mormons and then you
have mennonites and then you have um the the pennsylvania the amish
and you know you have auburn fans you have alabama you know we all have our little
cultures and it was occurring to me as this thing is splintering apart that's what it looks like you know
that's the that's the story that's the exciting entertainment that you know
uh entertainers and maybe some news media people or most news media people
sort of like the narrative of things but one of the as this thing gets more and more chaotic and as people could there's going to be a culture of americans that are going to
their little mini culture is the american culture and that's what we are going to be and we will be maybe quiet about it or behind the scenes about it or and we built the internet americans
built the internet that's an american technology and it's built because we
for some of us it's subconscious and for some of us it's uh we're very aware of it but we have
this american sense that this place is special because it's the place where in the individual is sovereign and the individual is sort of the basis upon is the atoms
upon which we build our molecules and compounds that is this place and
that's absolutely spectacular and we try to do it to the best that we can and we've done some miracles
and america is the place where people when your country's bail your country has fallen apart you're probably your number one choice
is going to be to go to america i mean depends on the circumstance but that depends where country is falling apart so
you know i think that the social media stuff is just it's helping build the infrastructure to whatever the
you know whatever sections of this internet are going to be the posit most positive and then hopefully people all over the world will have access to it
and you know i don't know there's it's uh the future's dark and bright at the same
time but i mean look at us this is fantastic this whole this this thing this this patreon some guy's idea he didn't have
he had a band he made it put a ton of work into making a video he got a thousand dollars in adsense on it but he had tons of fans
talking about jack conte the guy who started this platform he had tons of fans and he said you know what maybe my fans would just like to throw me five ten
bucks every now and then and now he's the ceo of a four billion dollar company and his his he has a patreon he's the first
patreon ever it's still going his band's called pamplemoose and he gets makes more off of his patreon than he does
from his salary being the ceo of a four billion dollar company that he built from scratch with a partner that's
no one saw that coming that's not a very that doesn't fit in any capitalist model well no just people give you [ __ ] for nothing
or the kickstarter like that doesn't fit in any capitalist model like that it's never going i'm sorry it's never going to work you're
not going to put on little ads and just be like i'm not giving you i'm for 500 i'm going to give you a shirt that's worth 10.
it's just not gonna work i'm sorry but then there's all this stuff and i don't know i um so that's what i think
about social media i think it's tearing us apart and it's also our it's the thing that can save us
okay how do i allocate time for all of my tasks oh it's just a process uh how do i allocate oh who asked me
that sean how do i allocate time for all of my tasks it was just it's just a process um
i heard a long time ago jane campion said that you got to dedicate three hours
to writing because that's when you're after three hours the at around the three hour mark your subconscious is ready to come out and
play and that's where all the good ideas come from and so everything's kind of built around that
three free hours of like writing concentration and i've been i think over be in
trying to upload every week i had sort of been dipping into that three hours and then i interrupted it with my run so i would work for a couple hours
and then i'd go for a run at 6 20 and then come back and try to write and the whole thing fell apart and now i've made this
tiny little adjustment so that i you know after i do my workout and all that stuff and then i
write my i do writing for three hours and then in writing can also be editing
because if i've written them the video and then the following day i have footage i can edit and editing is sort of a form
of writing so anyway three hours of that a day i'm like protecting more more uh vociferously is that right more
aggressively um but how i allocate the time is just i went through a huge period i think
working at tom sax's studio taught me this i went through a huge period of understanding how long things take to do
like i'm pretty good at being punctual um i'm not good at remembering very important phone calls
but and remembering to do them and be available for them or to make them i'm i'm not good at that but i'm good at like punctuality
generally speaking and one of the adjustments that i have trouble with is being relaxed and enjoying life
and being punctual so like these last couple weeks i've been late to things and blah blah blah i've been late to you know pick i was
late yesterday to pick up or two days ago to pick up the kid from camp um and it's because i've
eased the i've tuned down the punctuality dial and turned up the uh
no freak outs relax everything's going to be okay dial so it's a matter of kind of adjusting
and it's a matter of experience and data and you know i had new york locked because it's like on a bicycle no matter what i
could unless i got a flat tire i could get on the bicycle from 94th and west end avenue to
you know where was i working let's say i was working at my studio broadway and
between franklin and white that was i don't remember what it was like a 30 minute you know no matter what 30 minutes fast
27 minutes slow 30 minutes uh and if i got a flat tire lock the bike jump on that subway i'm still
making it you know if i left 20 minutes early sort of had this rule in new york is like no matter where i was going no
matter how close it was no matter how far away not no matter how far away it was but almost no matter how close it was i would give myself 30 minutes to
get there and then the proximity sort of determined the mode of transportation i would take so if it was like a few blocks away i would walk there in 30
minutes if it was you know long distance away i would ride my bike there and i'd give myself 30 minutes if it was outer burrow i would ride my
motorcycle there and give me three and give myself 30 minutes um
and then in la it's different because the traffic and um
uh it's cars so it's it's different it's it's driving cars and motorcycles and so forth
but that was it just developing and then understanding uh you know having to make a lot of airplanes like catching airplanes
teaches teaches you i haven't taken airplane three years but it teaches you time management i think um
do workaholics feel failure i don't really feel fail i don't think i fear
failure it's just like another thing like you know you might get the red gumball from the gumball machine it's like you might fail
you know i don't really fear it but um i i put a lot of energy into
understanding where the failure points could be in trying to determine like a time
table for accomplishing whatever task i have i'm sorry to get kind of good at that um
but the thing about failure is that it just makes the whatever the thing is takes so much longer take longer i
mean failure is just i don't i think i mean true failure is giving up before you're accomplished before you've
succeeded that's like like detrimental failure and that's kind of up to us but you know you get these little
failure points along the road and it's just where your your your perception or your modeling of
reality did not meet the reality of reality and that's what intelligence is intelligence
is when your model of reality meets the reality of reality that's like your
degree of intelligence so the more you the older you get you get a little bit smarter i don't know if you
get higher i think your iq probably gets lower but uh you know you get a little smarter in certain ways and so
you've experienced more failure i mean i've experienced more i don't really fear it and then expectations just are failures waiting to happen so
really got to try to eliminate to some degree certain expectations like how people will react to things other expectations
like we agreed upon a price i expect to be paid that price that's a different story but um
yeah no i don't i don't really fear failure i don't think
i just i don't know no i don't i don't think so but you know that took work to get there um
okay dominique this is a great question i've been waiting for this question for a long time so dominique asks this
how do i use licensed snippets in my youtube videos so for instance in this last video that i posted on
wednesday i used a little like five seconds of the shining like that i had like ripped i think i just
filmed it off the screen with my camera and then i put it in the video and i didn't get flagged or in trouble or anything and i don't say this
in public and this is i consider like patreon semi-public but it's also semi-private so
what we're kind of in the i think we're in the golden age of youtube because
the robots the the algorithms the ai either permits or
isn't equipped to discern so i could dress up as jack nicholson right i could get the outfit i could do the beard i could do the thing i could make a set exactly like the shining and
i could get a camera and make the shot indistinguishable from jack nicholson right unlike music
with cinema you can't patent that [ __ ] you can't license you can't copyright
the framing you can't copyright you know i'm gonna get i mean you can copyright the dialogue you can copyright the dialogue but you can't copyright
you know you know all work and no play makes jack a double boy zinc you can't copyright sitting at a bar
with the light coming up from you can't copyright that stuff so my thinking and this is just amateur thing i don't know if there's no idea if this is true or
not but my thinking is that the robots they're not programmed to screen out clips because they they're not smart
enough to discern is that jack nicholson from the shining doing such and such or is that van ny said in his studio that he made imitating
jack nicholson doing such and such sound i think is how they can get you because those sound waves right those sound waves are identical no
matter what so if you're using audio from the shining the robots can just this is exactly the same audio as the audio from the
licensed by the universal pictures of a little and then there's a whole there it's probably robotic now but i remember hearing horror stories when i
first started making videos or when i started making them professionally there's like a whole law industry of people who track down
uh copyright violators and sue them and then get a piece of the money that they give to
um the the original artists and of course i think you got to protect i think you got to protect uh intellectual property but you have to
also we also sort of have to be in a war as to where that line is and you know
so far you know thank god youtube allows a lot of you can take i don't know how much but you can take
some imagery from oh and i also used a little piece of little miss sunshine too in the most recent video they're so far they're allowing you to
get through it thank god so i don't really know what the answer is oh the real answer like when people i remember have when i
was licensing films for the neistat brothers and i was i'm sorry when i was licensing music for the nystat brothers
and i was licensing for um a space program people seem to have this idea that like there's a there's a book
of rules and it's like well you can use two seconds of this you can use two seconds of a song that's fair usage or if you use it
case by case you want to use money green leather sofa i don't know how much that costs but when we had it in our original cut of
the nistat brothers we couldn't afford it just money green leather sofa so we had to switch biggie from his song
and we had to and we switched it so that casey said it because that was not fair use and
i think in that particular case um there was some kind of dispute with the um
with the estate with the biggie smalls estate and it was like really hard to license i know that for a while cameron crowe
that filmed her oh [ __ ] is it cameron crowe okay there's an actor something crow and he's an actor and he was in
gladiator and then there's a m it's camera crow okay cameron crow he made this movie called almost famous
right and he had um like a led zeppelin song in it and in the director's commentary on the dvd
you hear cameron crowe say don't bother trying to get licensing to you can't get led zeppelin
because i was on tour with them so i can but you can't and uh i think that's changed and a lot of these artists like bob dylan
and i'm pretty sure bruce springsteen and i'm pretty sure david bowie they sell the no david bowie sold futures he
sold his like a commodity he sells his intellectual property and he's dead now but um
springsteen they sold their library outright so the owners of that they're going to start putting all that music in you know
you're going to be born in the usa in in ford commercials and you're going to see uh you know um
blowing in the wind in like you know uh old spice commercials and they're probably going to be
extremely aggressive because they just paid 500 million dollars twitter sold for no no not twitter
instagram was a billion dollars but the bob dylan library is only what 250 300
million what what what twitter would have been or instagram would have been invented five years later three years later two years later
at the same time by engineers it'd be a little bit different and it's a billion dollars no one is
ever again gonna come close to bob dylan 300 million dollars but you know that's the way it goes but
golden age of uh youtube case-by-case basis and audio they're gonna get you however oh let me say this
i did an interview with sean avery who's a nhl hockey player and
it was the visual that audio was an hour of basically a podcast me interviewing sean avery the visual was me building a baby gate
for sean avery's baby at his house and at some point in the interview sean
avery mentions a of a particular fight that he got into and he shows me the fight on his
computer so i shot off of the screen a portion like i cropped with my camera i cropped all of the
the uh action out of the frame so it was just sean avery punching the [ __ ] out of this
other player right so it wasn't the shot that whatever espn or whatever it
broadcast it was i got okay i uploaded the thing to youtube right and now youtube does this
thing where before you go live they go they run checks and then they clear you or they say copyright infringement and
then they tell you what it is so with the sean avery video they i did the i uploaded it i went through
the checks gave me the thumbs up right so then i published it and then it's an hour long video which means a
lot of adsense in it and then i had like 50 000 views and it was like
copyright infringement and i was so i had to take the video down cut out those two seconds
or whatever it was and then put it back up and restart the count and i think it ended up there was
like another 60 000 or something views i don't remember but that pissed me off that [ __ ]
pissed me off because it's like just tell me that the first time or don't make me go through the damn check every time if you're not to check but i think
what ended up happening was like sean is a very shot this is the euphemism sean has a
strong personality and uh he talks an enormous amount of [ __ ] about the nhl in general and i
think they just like were picking on them i think maybe if it was someone else either that or
they the nhl is super strict about their um content and that's their content it's
their jersey you know they own the rangers looking jersey and even though it's just a white shirt with a red 16 on the back
or whatever so that's a that's an example of like i don't know maybe the golden age is
coming to a close but great question dominique thank you very much um
oh boy i'm kind of at the end of this thing here um oh here's another question i like so
diego asked me about the sledgehammer video which was like how to i have two of them
right next to my i'll just move it it's like how to make this lamp i made a video about how to make this
lamp for i call it a destroyer lamp because it's made out of a sledgehammer uh how to make one for father's day
and uh in the beginning i'm like i think walking along the roof and i'm playing that sledgehammer like it's
guitar it's like i'm the mattress man no i said hi i'm the sledgehammer man from sledgehammer show or whatever and i was like today i'm going to teach you how to
make a blah blah blah so this is okay on the there's a paul thomas anderson movie it's called punch drunk love it stars adam sandler
and it doesn't star but philip seymour hoffman plays a has a good part a great
part in it and he plays this character called the mattress man and he owns this huge like mattress warehouse like retail
warehouse in i think salt lake city utah and it was based i don't know if it was
based but there was a mattress man real mattress man and he did this advertisement like you
know shot on beta which is what the old tv cameras were and this must have been in the night this must have been in the 80s or 90s maybe 1990 and so the
mattress man the real guy mattress man is walking along the top of a semi truck and he's
playing a guitar a fake playing like an electric guitar and he's like hey i'm dan johnson the mattress man and today we have the deals we got king size we
got sealy we got serta if you come down here you're going to get the best deals on the mattress and he's like all right and then he jumps off of the
he jumps off of the roof of the semi truck the tractor trailer truck trailer on to like
he dropped he jumps and like lands on his back with the guitar onto a pile of
mattresses that are piled on top of a like lincoln stretch limousine like a 1985 lincoln stretch limousine so he
lands on this pile of like six or eight mattresses with the guitar in his hands and they they bounce him up this is unintentional
they bounce him up off of the off of the uh the mattresses and onto the concrete and
his guitar like snaps in half and the whole commercial crew comes running over like oh my god are you okay he's still miked up
he's like yeah man he he's like uh my guitar is broken he's like that i was just trying to do that [ __ ] thing he's like in that [ __ ] thing or
whatever okay so paul thomas anderson genius that he is he remakes it he gets the
same limo he gets the i it's it's not identical but it's identical enough he shoots it
on beta and he has philip seymour hoffman do the same damn add he's walking across hey he's dancing
i'm dan johnson the mattress man come down we go see who's there and he does the thing he lands on his back bounces off i don't know how they do i don't know how they do this stunt he bounces
on the concrete breaks the thing on the thing the crew comes over same line same line same lines so we just set it up shot for shot at my i just
wanted to keep the legacy going and we just set it up i was like oh we'll just do it for the sledgehammer thing and like the real cinephile nerds
will get the reference and they'll it'll blow their mind and then everybody else will just be like what the [ __ ] what the [ __ ] was that
but i had like knee pads on under my car hearts i you know the stunt i did i had a motocross boots so i didn't like break my ankles and i just tried to like jump
over the wall which i probably could have made no problem but i faked it so it looked like i fell down and then i had
bc slice who was behind the camera run over and be like you're all right and he did the same dialogue that that was on the thing and i had the mic
on and all that so that's why that and man i want to do more stuff like that it's just very time consuming but that was super fun um and
really like scary to like do the jump from the roof um what's that jack check out his side
project scary goldings if you like funny music legendary hammond organ player larry goldings is featured
so kent heckel says sub five seconds ish youtube won't catch it
uh okay i think i'm just gonna wind down [Laughter] uh great to s hear from you and uh you know like my hobby is checking my messages from you
from patreon that's my guilty pleasure so when you guys write me messages i try to answer all of them um not the comments
there's messages and then there's comments underneath the posts those i i i try to get to them but there's a lot of them and
maybe i have braxton look at them and then so uh it's been good to hear from you um
all right and uh i'm not gonna burn out i'm just the posts are gonna be a little bit less frequent and not as reliable
the youtube posts i'm just gonna work do my best post when they're done for the time being and
have have a great weekend everyone bye-bye thank you you
Products & Tools Mentioned
- Toyota Land Cruiser 70 Series recommends
- Twitter mentions
- Kickstarter mentions
- Patreon uses
People Referenced
Tom Sachs, David Lynch, Stefan Sagmeister, Tibor Kalman, Jack Conte, Jane Campion, Neil Howe, Tony Robbins, Jordan Peterson, David Rubin, Elon Musk, Mr. Rogers, Biggie Smalls, Cameron Crowe, Led Zeppelin
Books Mentioned
- The Fourth Turning