LIVESTREAM FRIDAY, APRIL 22, 2022 9AM PDT
Published · 1:19:02 · 793 views
About This Video
An April 2022 Friday morning session. Van takes questions from patrons and discusses spring projects. The workshop is waking up.
Transcript
they don't let you see the uh image until you go live so you just kind of
guessing how it'll it'll turn out i don't want my eyes to be more illuminated and these shields on
the side of the glasses sort of block the light out so i think that's better um
welcome everyone this is the part of the live stream where i um kill a little time
so that people can log on if they're uh running late and i don't say anything good
um i think it was last time i played music by um david lynch and of course it got like flagged and demonetized uh even though it's not a public video on youtube
uh and then i did i an homage to david lynch i did uh the weather report
and the joke being he's in a you know he did i think he still does a weather report and uh he used to do it david lynch used to do the weather report for
a radio station and now i believe he does it on his maybe on his youtube channel or he has a podcast or something and i think the joke being that the weather's the same
every day in l.a but last night it rained and isabel and x are away for x's spring
break visiting grandma and my job this week was to water the plants
and today i do not have to do it so okay uh i got in um
in the there's the comments right there's the comments that come in live here and then during the live
stream and then there's like also comments that come into the patreon page during the live stream and then there's like
um direct message or messaging that are all that are like emails that come into my patreon
account and so in the email type inbox on my patreon patreon account
um this man named liam who's a freshman in college asked me if he could interview me for a
um an assignment he has to write a paper and he has to interview someone so i said just you know kill two birds with one
stone i was like just send me some questions uh during the live stream on friday and i'll answer them and then it'll be recorded because you know
these these live streams automatically get recorded by youtube and then they're posted in the patreon and then you just
have a transcript so i don't know where over 303 into the uh live stream and i'll start answering
liam's questions i said ask me three questions and he sent me three like three to four part questions so
there's 11 questions in all fairness but i'll do my best
so the first question that liam asks is do you remember a time when you had to make an unpopular decision or stand up
to an authority figure what was it like did anything influence your ability to do this
and do you feel it was your decision all right so i mean not in really any significant
way like gandhi or mandela or these people that we find that are real
heroes or martin luther king uh these people who like like really went to bat but
i was twice accused of crimes that i didn't commit so i had to sort of stand up
i mean i don't know is that standing up to an authority that's just like basically defending yourself um i was like i was a very bad kid
and so when i was 11 years old i broke into my elementary school with a couple of friends and we vandalized it and broke the coke machine
open and stole all the money got caught for that um the next year i graffitied
uh f i'm sorry it's funny if you [ __ ] you [ __ ] on this on the
handball court at my elementary school in huge like four foot letters
with a window putty that i it was me and another guy that we peeled out of the the windows we just graffitied [ __ ] and
it faced the road which was the road i lived on i walked to elementary school and um my mom drove by it and obviously
she didn't know i did did it and she was like someone graffitied the the elementary school and then she handed me a
a bucket of like red-ish paint the elementary school was red brick and she was like go paint over it
i'm getting to the standing up to authority thing i painted over it i got caught by the cops i got in trouble it wasn't criminal
next year i or two years later i burned down the woods behind my house with a friend
that one i had to go to juvenile court year after that i um or two years after that i was with
some friends and we drove around my town shooting the windows out of random cars with a bb gun i got caught
for that had to go to court so i was a criminal suspect in my little town
and when things were bad or when weird kind of childish crimes happened or strange
crimes happened i think i was on a short list of people of like question this guy so
um my neighbor's house this was after my friend and i accidentally burned down
the woods right years a couple years later my neighbor's house the basement caught fire
and the police called me and said we have this recording and they played the recording and
um it was a young woman's voice like maybe a girl's voice maybe a high
school girl's voice i don't know and she was like yes i'm calling about the fire that happened at
on whatever hurlbut road and i heard somebody bragging about it and and it was and she named my fr a
friend of mine who lived down the street who's my best friend and van neistat and the police called me
i was a kid i don't know how old i was 15 maybe 16 something like this maybe 17.
please call me and play that and i was just like that's not me that is not me and then um
and then another time i was i was sat down and questioned
at the police station and i was younger i was probably 14
15 or something like this and i guess maybe the high school had been broken into and someone had stolen a
bunch of vcrs and they said oh you know so and so said it was you and that you did it with them
and you know i just stood my ground i mean i was a kid i this [ __ ] made me [ __ ] cry and terrified the [ __ ] out of me and i would like break down and be
like it wasn't me i wasn't even here you know um i don't know if that's really standing up to authority
but uh i did learn that the police use they lie to you when they're trying to get you to admit stuff because they were saying stuff that just wasn't true
trying to like coerce me into so forth and you know like we know it was you so and so said it was you you
um i guess they were just trying to get me to snitch if i actually knew who it was maybe i don't know
um and then you know i was living in berlin and and this is 2003 so how old was i i was 28 years old and the the i lived there for about four months and the
my peers in berlin were very like politically conscientious and they read a lot of
news and they sort of understood kind of political implications
um political influences upon their lives i had a friend named jesse ross
who was born in east berlin he was a lot younger than me but uh i think he was in something like when the berlin wall came
down he was in maybe he wasn't a lot younger than me i think he was in sixth grade or something when the berlin wall came down
and uh he um [Music] i remember he's like i've been through my country's been through three currencies during my during my lifetime we had the easter
east german deutsche mark we had the west german deutsche mark and now we have the euro anyway
after i came back from that the ipod had been out the generation i the generation one
apple ipod had been out for about 18 months or something like this because i think it came out in 2001
and so my brother had one and the batteries on these things
um lasted i think 3 000 charges or something no 500 charges like you could charge the battery 500 times before the battery was essentially useless and it wouldn't hold a charge
for more than five minutes and you however long and you'd have to keep it plugged in so it was no longer really a portable music player
my brother said he called apple and they said no we can't replace the battery you just have to buy a new new
ipod and apple i think one of the and to this day they still do this
like it's part of i can't i mean okay the reality of being in the apple universe and maybe the just
heart computer hardware universe in general is that the technology develops so quickly
that these expensive devices become obsolete in one way or another in a much
shorter time span than equipment of similar price goes obsolete so a camera you know goes does it ever go obsolete maybe digital cameras go obsolete
um but you know 35 charlie chaplin's camera you could go to kodak right now buy 35 millimeter academy film stock put it in charlie
chaplin's camera turn the crank and it would you could make a movie with it so
my brother told me this story apple doesn't honor doesn't you know they just told me to get a new ipod i said call him back record the phone call with tech
support and get them to tell you to buy a new ipod so he did that and then we made this little video where
casey went around new york city with a stencil that i had made that said ipod's dirty secret you know it said i'm
sorry i call it called the video is called ipod's dirty secret but the stencil said ipod's unreplaceable battery
um lasts only 18 months and it was this strange revelation of mine because
there were all these posters all over lower manhattan where our studio was and
there were hundreds of them and in a morning you could go hit enough to make it look like you hit the whole city if you're just making it for a
movie so it was this real kind of breakthrough where like citizen reporting breakthrough
where oh we can make this movie and like the advertising in in in real life doesn't really matter it doesn't
matter that these people are gonna see the posters going to work and stuff but when we put it on in a video and upload
it people will send it to each other there's no no youtube and that's exactly what happened it became a national story broke the you
know and i believe that apple these lawyers came to our studio like a year later
and they were filing a class action lawsuit and my god i wish i had had the wherewithal
because i i didn't really understand how the world worked even though i was like 29 years old
uh i wish i had the wherewithal to try to get a little bit of the settlement that this law firm was about
to get because i believe it was something like a 175 million dollar settlement class action lawsuit
they sent like 50 bucks to every single person who bought an ipod generation one and then two weeks after
our video came out on went viral on on the internet apple changed their battery policy and i
think for 99 i can't really remember i think for 99 they said send your ipod in and we'll replace the battery and then a lot of
little niche uh cottage industries that would replace your battery popped up and a little a bunch of
cottage industries that sold you replacement batteries with instructions on how to pop the back off and replace the battery also showed up so
i mean was apple in authority kind of in a way but um that was that's an example of of
standing up to him and then what are the follow-up questions uh what was it like it was awesome we got to go on the tv we
got like broke us that was our big break we got to go on tv we got to um it was there was a big spread in the
washington post it was when the internet was not yet a competition or the very very early days
before maybe the traditional media saw the internet as a competition as competition
and the internet was more of a place that outlets like the washington post could mine for
stories but in reality we had scooped the media because we broke the story with the internet before the media had a
chance to uh to break it so it was really fun steve casey and steve jobs had an
exchange uh like a a text message exchange and he was like come on steve don't you think it's a little unfair to ask someone to
pay buy a 300 ipod after 18 months and i believe jobs just replied no i don't period
yeah of course you don't man you were worth 150 million dollars when you're like 25 years old um
did anything influence your ability to do this yeah michael moore there's this there was this
magazine publication called ad busters which was i don't know if it's still any good but i used to be enamored with it because it
was it was kind of like what memes are today like they would do all these fake ads like a
they had this one ad it was really great and it was just like um walmart brick-a-brack
simply open and throw away it's in a magazine so that's that was sort of influential upon
that decision you know it's all for fun you know you're in your 20s it's all like being and i'm we're both gen xers casey and me
casey's on the cusp of gen x and the millennial generation and we were you know mad magazine and
we're rebels we're you know [ __ ] you punk matt you know we brought you punk we brought you hip hop that's who we are
that's who gener gen x is um okay so next question
what is a challenge you faced when you were younger that you overcame through developing new
habits you know i don't know i think i don't i never had any really
significant challenge you know we i came from a nice middle class family
um lived in a nice little neighborhood had good friends the parents are good friends there wasn't a lot of like drug
and alcohol and all that we didn't have that in our family um
[Music] got to go on vacations didn't get the best coolest stuff you know the best bikes and skateboards and every and everything but we did get um kind of the bottom of the barrel of that stuff
um so i didn't have any real challenges no you know i think my chief challenge i think like
fundamentally the challenge i have is my ambition is i think i'm more ambitious i'm just
a bit more ambitious than my talent can service and i think following my ambition or being driven by my ambition has been a challenge um a lot of people
they receive a diagnosis for something and then that is like a
i think they think that they can then say i have such and such disorder
therefore you know implicitly they say therefore please excuse this shitty behavior and i've you know three top three psychiatrists gave me the screening test for the adhd and i've been
prescribed the ritalin three times and you know i just
would take it for a while and it's very very very effective for me and then i would just kind of
you know get sick of like doing the like you have to meet with it because it's a controlled narcotics you got to meet with the doctor guy and get the
prescription like every 30 days or you got to call them and it's like you you fill it and then and you got to take it every day no no no there's that
inconvenience of it and then when i was in college and i was taking ritalin and smoking weed it made
me super i don't know if it was the weed or if it was the ritalin or both but it made me super
self-conscious and taking the ritalin on its own without the weed made me pretty sub self-conscious not
spontaneous and gregarious and crazy which is how i love to to be and sort of not taking it is in a
weird strange way almost a form of drug abuse i know that sounds so stupid but
not me not taking it is almost a form of drug abuse because the drug is probably adrenaline
and rage and all of these um you know endorphins these these these hormones that my body
produces on its own and maybe subconsciously i go off of this drug and
so that i can access those i can access those hormones with the frustration that being off of
those drugs inspires in me but they're all in service to my ambition
so the rage and the dru and the hormones and the drugs everything are kind of in
service to my ambition like so back to the adhd point is i don't really think it's
it's not calling it a disorder is kind of dumb it's like saying that oh i also i have um
uh uh you know left-handed disorder it's like i i i have left-handed disorder only 10 of the human population is left-handed
therefore it's a disorder it's like having attention deficit whatever that means is like it's just another way that
people's brains function and it's inconvenient in the face of
systems that require a great deal of menial tasks and this our civilization is one of
those systems and you cannot get away from doing menial tasks you can you can escape it for a little while if you have tons and
tons and tons and tons of money you can escape it for a little while but guess what you're going to lose that money if you don't keep an eye on the menial on
the menial tasks so i think learning how to use my brain or the qualities of my brain to advance my ambitions to realize my
ambitions was a way of kind of overcoming a challenge
but um [Music] but i think you i think that's what life is i i think that's what america is designed for like the american design is for you to
choose your shackles is to choose the the the really hard thing that you're
gonna attempt to do and and we all have inadequacies that we're going to have to overcome in order to achieve these ambitions
and that's what like growth is that's what being a human being a you know a fulfilled human being or a
spirited man as i call it that's what it is it's a go and i hate it i hate it i hate doing it now
you know i hate you know almost all the stuff that i have to do i hate and i'm like almost losing touch
with like what what is it that i like you know i mean i make it look all fun because that's the reality it really is like a beautiful world and i live a
wonderful blessed life doesn't feel like that it doesn't feel like it it just feels like every [ __ ]
day i'm taking not every day sorry every week when i'm leading up to like publishing a video every [ __ ] week i
am going in to take the sats and you all know how important the sats are and you all know how stressful that is
and it's every [ __ ] week and that's what it that's what it feels like um i believe that's just temporary i think
things are really starting to ease off now that i'm having like steady financial success this patreon is a very big contributor to
that to like the ease that like it's like there's still a lot of work but there isn't that franticness to it to
it um but yeah that's the challenge that uh to overcome maybe you never overcome it but my challenge has been my ambition
oh i was voted most in high school you know you do those superlatives like uh best dressed and class clown and all
that my the one the one i got was class individualist and most disorganized
that's another in service to my ambition i had to learn how to become organized and i think i learned that by living in new york city
because you just it'll just spit you out unless you have tons of money i kind of feel like all of the
challenges that i experience in the world can all be relieved with tons of money because money is the highest form of energy that
human beings can channel and i can't imagine the challenges that
people who have unlimited money who the the money resources isn't the challenge i can't imagine the mind [ __ ] of that
life and they have it too i mean that i'm sympathetic to rich people who
that that's not the problem because solving that problem consume is like
it's so straightforward relative to like the other problems you can have in life solving the money problem it's like straightforward you find something to do
and you just you know you just chip away at it and you feel progress but if you're starting there and then
it's i don't know i can't imagine it um okay which brings us to the final question which is what does happiness
mean to you is happiness the most important thing in life what makes people happy are some people happier than others well of course some people
are happier than others uh happiness is uh you know i'm kind of stealing this from jordan peterson though but happiness is
just a fleeting emotion that you sometimes experience um for a variety of reasons
comes and goes and i i very very seriously doubt i believe
that there is no human that just has an un adulter you know a continuous flow of
happiness i don't think like those monks those monks don't say hey i'm ha you know the buddhist monks they're not happy all of
the time i mean even the enlightened ones it's not happiness and even david lynch like he talks about
how his transcendental transcendental meditation practice is like limitless energy limitless positivity and and
happiness and i believe that but you can watch documentaries of david lynch on set frustrated and having a tough time and things aren't going well and like
snapping at people so happiness is just like you know that feeling when your team when max
verstappen wins the formula one world championship last year that was like the last time i was really happy i don't know maybe that was
earlier this year i can't remember if it was 21 or 22. but like i've been since that first season of drive to survive
came out on netflix which i think was maybe 2018 or 2019 i was like oh i like that guy i like the
red bull guy they're they're the energy drink company and they're they're competing against the race car company you know in race and car racing and
they're beating the race car company ferrari uh not this year of course um but you know that made me really happy
the time before that um i wanted to show my son he was like two
and a half or three i wanted and he loved smashing things with the sledgehammer and i wanted to get him a coconut
that he could smash open with a hammer now at the grocery store they have the big green coconut thing that you kind of chop the
top off and it has juice in it and stuff and we went from grocery store to grocery store to grocery store to find the like nut coconut thing the
the the like dark brown it looks like a softball with the hair on it i'm just getting stymied and stymied and stymied and it was really hot and he was
on a mission he's a little kid and we went to this place called sprouts and they had it and it was just like
oh my god i was so psyched and then we smashed it open and well no we drilled it open to pour the
drink out and my son didn't like it he was like this is gross and then he got to smash it open and i got to let him chew on the
coconut and he didn't like that either but um what makes people happy happiness is not the most important
thing in life no purpose is um and purpose gives you meaning and
purpose makes people happy okay so thank you liam i hope
i hope you found that helpful all right so i'm gonna go to uh i kind of go through the comments
when i do the the when i post the announcement people write comments i look at those and then
i also look at the comments from the previous posted live stream that i didn't get to
and then i look at the comments from that kind of come in
to the inbox email thing on patreon and i can't i can't i don't write them all
down but i try to get a mix of kind of almost a random sampling of stuff and then it's like the hour before the
the live stream i write them down and try to get to them and then when i
go through all of the ones i've written down then i look over on the right side of the of the feed here with all of the i
wonder i think you're looking at what i'm looking at is just me on the screen and then on the right side of the screen is just
questions going like this like that's what i'm looking at so you know i go through the paper ones and then i go look on these
ones that maybe you can see too okay so live live stream questions kurt what will the next oh okay so kurt watched my
the video i made that was a basically a book review or a book report of this book the fourth
turning which i talk about all the time and someone pointed out to me that on the bookshelf behind russell brand on
his podcast uh is this book on his shelf and i saw it in on one of his podcasts like last week
so in that book it talks about the four sort of um generations within a history cycle 80-year history cycle so this current
history cycle started in 19 probably uh 40 6 or so 1947 after world war ii this history cycle that we're in and it'll last about the length of a
human lifetime 80 or so years which means it'll end mid-2020s
and the history cycles end with a big crisis so the last crisis was world war ii
80 years before that the last history block the crisis was that was night that was 1865.
if you go back from 1945 end of world war ii 80 years before that 1865 civil war 80 years before that
1785 american revolution etc you can go all the way back to like the war of the roses in england because
we were founded by english and dutch the united states was founded by english and dutch so we are
so at the end of the history cycle the last 20-year blocks block of the history cycle which we are in right now is
called the fourth turning and it lasts about 20 years and it's generally categorized as a crisis
a time of crisis so the last one was the great depression in world war ii the time before that was there was a like a financial panic and
and the civil war and then the one before that was the founding of america and the american you know revolution so
this current fourth turning we're clearly in it now and uh the book actually was written in 97 but
it basically predicted the next world the next the this one that we're in right now which
began probably 2008 with the global financial crisis you know the catalyst was um
sort of the demarcation of the end of the last cycle which would have been called uh an unraveling
comes before the crisis um that's generation x that's what we're born into that was um
and that's what actually generics gen x grows up during an unraveling um
that sort of ended with um uh september 11th 2008 probably marks so
so 20 years from that is 2028 2030 something like that that'll be the end of this crisis and the crisis is
i mean it's pretty obvious you got another war in europe we got a potential global war with china
you've got um kovid 19 you've got the financial crisis and all the fallout from that
after the crisis comes a high so after world war ii
we had the 1950s all the way up to the 19 probably about 1980 is when it ended did i have that right no no no no no no
it was like 1945 to 63 when kennedy was shot that was a what you would call a high and that's when
the corvettes came out and the bikinis were invented and space program
um people you know you could buy a house with the money you made from working at a gas station there was the most there
was the most uh um egalitarian distribution of wealth the evenest distribution of wealth across the
civilization because it was the world war ii men and women the men and women who had fought world war ii and they kind of reaped the
benefits of that victory i'm talking about in america here i'm talking about the united states of america um yes we had our um
racial problems and our women's rights problems but the birth of those movements came during these during
this period the birth of the movements that you know led to civil rights and led to
women's rights were essentially in this period we get another one of those after this
after we survived the next crisis so they you know it's categorized as sort of a forest fire like a forest fire
burns all of this detritus that had fallen off the healthy trees all the leaves and branches and sticks and
uh weeds uh the forest fire comes in and burns all that out and makes way for the new growth
and so this man kurt said what will the next high look and feel like
oh my god what i'm so bad with predictions um but i think that
you know i think that it's we're in a sort of golden age of them
of like mom and pop media like with the internet like you have glenn greenwald and barry weiss and matt
taibi with their own sub stacks you know they're independent from big media companies
they're still doing maybe the most important reporting work that we have going um
[Music] i think that will be a big part i think that's we're we're kind of in a golden age of the mom and pop media like i'm a media company
you know uh obama's the obamas after they were you know rulers of the free world what did they do they started a
media company what is like prince harry and meghan markle they were starting a media company donald trump after he was president he
started a media company so i think that will be part of it i think that blockchain technology these
distributed decentralized networks are going to be a big part of um of the of the next high and i think
that the power the socio political and economic power will be sort of
redistributed among the the the technologically competent sort of
middle class i want to call them i think bitcoin technology and like i think to a degree those
bitcoin absolutists to a degree are right about you know bitcoin can do anything and i
think that that i think that that i'm saying bitcoin but
i mean also blockchain technology but bitcoin is the best way to talk about it and i
think and this is not my idea but embedded within the technology of bitcoin
are this are some of the essential core american values and phenomena
that our traditional institutions are sort of leeching that are that are there our traditional
institutions the political you know congress you know the the federal government the the values are sort of
they're they're they're falling away from these institutions but bitcoin blockchain decentralized networks they
are in essence uh a sort of um i want to say depository but there's the word escapes me but they're an embodiment of a lot of these american values that are migrating away from
the traditional institutions that preserve these values uh also i i mean there's going to be a lot
of autumn automation there will never be a machine that replaces the roof of a of a middle-class
house for most people there will always be roofers i'm telling you do you just roofs last too long
no one's going to develop a machine that you only have to use every 20 years or something like this so roofers are fine but
elon musk was talking about i was working when i listened to this this it was he was having a conversation
with the the ted talk founder and he was talking about um i believe this i might have the facts
wrong but he was talking about that tesla at their giga factory had invented a.i
that could automate um bipedal robots like robots that look
like humans to do to do tasks and that he for saw like maybe you could make one
of these robots for like 30 grand that could just do menial tasks around the house and more than any other technology then
i can think of what i would love is a robot to put my things away to put because i
have so much gear i mean i'm organized because i have so much gear like i just installed the solar power this is
what the video that's coming out today that's posted posting today uh
is about but a video where i put an air conditioning conditioner a solar an air conditioner in my son's playhouse
and it's charged and powered by a solar energy this company called ecoflow is like is a
brand partner a sponsor of the show and so they sent me all this equipment and uh i took a day and and and installed this
ac and uh power station essentially a battery that the that the solar panels
charge and there was so much putting away of tools and wood and
scraps and it's so it does i don't know unless you do it you cannot imagine how much of the labor
it is i would say it's 60 of the labor is the putting out and taking away in this tool and this tool
in this tool and i don't mind taking them out i don't mind oh yeah i need this bit and i need to say but the putting away and every single thing has
a little place to go for 30 grand i can get a little machine that i keep in a closet that looks like a human being that just walks around all day putting
things away yes please yes please yes that's what i want more than anything so maybe we'll get that maybe
we'll get little machines you know barcode on every single thing i own barcode on everything and this little thing or like a little
you know like the chip that you have in your um in your credit card that you touch to the credit card machine
and it and it you know you just tap to pay or whatever that in every single everything all your tools everything
just a sticker and the robot can just visit and then just eat like opening drawers putting little
you know even if it just puts a pile of like the scraps and little building materials that you're not going to put the sticker on
that would be fantastic i mean that's like a stupid prediction but you know they've been priming us promising us robots since the since metropolis in
like the 20s the 1920s um um i kind of i don't know i do i don't i can't see the american like like beautiful utopia that it seemed to be in all the pictures in like the 50s
you know where everyone where it was like if you go back and watch there's these videos sorry yeah films that have been
um transferred to 4k and colorized like downtown los angeles
1948 and you look at like downtown los angeles in 1948 it's spotless all the
trains are working very well everyone is dressed to the nines and beautiful clothes the cars there's not much
traffic the cars are all just moving it just looks like a beautifully flowing
uh civilization i don't know that we're i don't know if we get back to if we get to that um
[Music] i kind of think that yeah i don't know i don't know but you know maybe they'll be maybe it'll be more of the mom and pop sort of economy that we sort of lost with
neoliberalism over the last you know 40 years 50 years my lifetime
so mark asked do i sense a shift in new opportunities in meta nfts etc yes i do
i was thinking i was listening to some someone i can't remember who it was it might have been um
michael saylor talking about you know the intellectual how nfts sort of protect the intellectual property of creators and artists
and that and if i don't mean specifically nfts i just mean that kind of technology decentralized
um private network technology with verification um now it's nfts but you know you know you build smart contracts so every time your work changes hands you
the creator gets a piece of it i do foresee that that will be the that will be how things operate
um i have to check i asked someone out to oh he hasn't answered okay
um okay what lessons did my grandfather teach me about fixing things he never i don't
really think he gave me like formal lessons like i didn't see him that often maybe two or three times a year he lived in a farm in maine
but the just his overall way of living to me was really
attractive because he had this 400 or 300 acre farm in like the sticks of maine and he had a
house that was an old hunting cabin and then he had some rental properties that were these a-frames that were kind of scattered around
his little compound there and he had all of this equipment and he also had a job i mean he worked
at uh in portland maine at an nbc like a local nbc affiliate i believe he sold advertising or something
but he had this sort of gentleman's farm and he had eight kids oh my god um
[Music] and it was this mentality of just yeah keep this stuff working keep this stuff going it's called yankee thrift
and you know both sides i'm yankee all them you know new england all the way back to the old country so
that yankee thrift is just multi-generational heritage for some of us
and it's just this mentality of if it's broke fix it i guess
and yeah i mean i can't even remember a single thing that he could fix but the abil i think he taught me that you
you are able to fix things when they break okay paula asked me if there is a feature film i'd like to make if i was fully funded and
okay the fully funded thing is comes very late in the project in the process so like i'm not willing to
go through the process of becoming fully funded because i i have some friends who just had a watershed year they just directed
a big motion picture with you know not a studio film i think it's independent but that you know i had stars in it and they got a good budget which means they
got a payday but the i'm not doing that i'm not going through what they went through over the past
how long five seven years i'm not doing it again so if if it meant i would have to go through
you know youtubers don't just jump into making hollywood films it's too completely different skill sets like
being a filmmaker is not because you are a great storyteller that is not the chief quality of a successful hollywood
you know filmmaker you are an excellent manager and fundraiser
and networker those are your chief skills some people who have those skills also happen to be excellent storytellers and
i do not have those chief skills and without those skills it's maybe you get one made but it won't be any good
and the amount of effort and the cost to this medium to me would not be worth it but if i
were to make a film it would be a film like i don't know if you guys remember from the 80s there was this movie called lucas
that starred corey haim and charlie sheen and the i forgive me i don't know her name but the woman who played andy in the goonies who was like the cute cheerleader in the
goonies and she's a new gal moves to town lucas is cory heym and he's just this like weirdo kid that's sort of every he's poor and
everybody kind of makes fun of him but he's got this real spirit about him he's like really curious he's like joe rogan but without the tough stuff
and you know he thinks he has a shot at this girl because he he just like falls in love with her and she's older than him and you know he she doesn't know him
because she's new in school she doesn't know his status so he thinks you know you know it's just amazing it's sort of like the story of um
rushmores is similar genre maybe those are films that filmmakers make in their early career when they're first starting
out i'd like to make something like that like a kid whose spirit is crushed
ironically i mean not autobiographical but i've seen it happen before and um that's a story that's interesting to me because
it's like one of the worst things you can do as a human is to crush someone's spirit okay okay well my buddy kevin said he will meet me
for breakfast which is at 11 a.m which means i have to i got some time i can go till 10 15 and then i'll race down there on my
motorcycle um how do i deal with impatience on personal projects
uh this is from martin and i believe he's referring
on personal projects meaning projects i mean these are all personal projects for me so
i'm patience oh my gosh it's it's like one of my last
demons like i really really wish i really want to rid myself of that
impatience i really just want to be in flow state which is i can get there when i'm just building something without
making a movie about it but i cannot get there when i'm building something and making a movie about it
simultaneously it's just two very complicated phenomena simultaneously existing and my brain
will just not allow me to get in a flow state i'm sort of learning to manage that a bit i mean how i'm dealing with it now my
current strategy is to try to be have enough money to have help to alleviate
some of the tasks that occupy my mind and then also do the labor so i don't have to be
impatient so that the work the project gets completed by thursday or friday and i'm able to
be in flow while i'm i'm making it so by making money that's how
was there ever a project that made me sad and empty when finished and that's matias asked me that
not really i just want to get on to the next thing um there are eras where i go back i'm looking through my
i'm looking you know make a film and i'll refer to a time in my life or i make a youtube video and i'll refer to a time in my life when such and such happened so i go
through my archive and i find that the trip to paris i'm sorry the trip to europe to go to can
when josh and benny each of them had films that can benny had a short he was like i don't even know if he was yet 20 years old
and josh safty and benny made um pleasure of being robbed
so you know that uh looking back i mean i'll reduce me to tears sometimes
looking back because of the day-to-day life there's the day-to-day take it for granted
life of 368 broadway the air conditioning breaking the guys upstairs needing to borrow
something going upstairs after work which there was never really after work it was just you just were always working and you just kind of go upstairs late in the
afternoon going to the deli the deli every time i went there no matter what i was getting it was like 13 super expensive deli
um and just like kind of wandering around in the city with running into those guys and going to the parties and knowing all
the people and then that era was looking back on that era makes me sad but the project by project
there's just so many projects and there's and i want them done that there's no like remorse when i'm
done it's no i'm i'm ready to be done when i'm done with them um
okay so and then radu asked me how do i deal with lack of motivation people ask me this a lot and it's
and i don't mean any disrespect here but it's a it's this sort of it's it's oddly presumptuous because
it's it it presumes that there's ever a lack of motivation
and um the way that i deal with it is um i put my back against the wall so that i'm in a position that i cannot quit i have to like just financially you
know i i i have to make this youtube stuff i have to in patreon i have to make it a success or else
you know isabelle's gonna you know i don't know move us to florida or something or you know the tax man's gonna come and
just i don't know throw me in jail and seize everything that's part of it and then
so it's in other words it's no backup plan and or no fallback plan like i'm not employable i don't i mean i'm not
employable uh and routine and discipline so you just make yourself
there is no i mean the motivation is in service to the ambition again but it's routine that ameliorates the lack
of if lack of motivation is starting it's just you're up at four every day you're going for a run every day you're in the uh studio every day you're you know just routine routine just like
school like when you're a kid in school get up at this hour you did it you got to be brush the teeth you got to be at the bus stop by such and such an hour and then you get the home room and you
need to and it's just that but you i mean the freedom the the what liberty is is you get to choose all
that all that stuff that you hate to do because you're not getting out of the stuff that you hate to do but you get freedom means you get to choose what it
is you're not free when you're a kid because they make you go to school they make you take the math class they make you take physics
and then when you're an adult and you're free you get to choose the horrible stuff the you get to choose the stuff that you
hate to do you get to choose it like i hate to do such but i'm not you know but i'm gonna do this other thing i hate
you know what you know i i think and this is gonna sound flippant and like i'm bullshitting
and like i'm making a metaphor here but this is i'm being extremely literal
in that i think one of the major major reasons i think a 65 contribution to the reason why
i decided to be entrepreneurial as opposed to having a job is because of fluorescent lighting
i cannot tolerate fluorescent lighting for more than an hour a week
and um i mean i have it in my workshop but i also have these incandescents to light
things but and most jobs in like that that you're being um that you're being sort of
trained for in the american public education system they involved and the american public education system itself
is all lit with these fluorescent lights those blue lights and
i cannot tolerate that so i chose financial like a lifetime of basically financial
insecurity and humiliation so that i wouldn't a very big reason is so that i wouldn't have to work under fluorescent
lights and like that's yeah so so yeah i guess finding them part of the motivation is what do you not what am i
what am i hoping to spare myself from by being disciplined or by doing the work
okay oh and then here's the this will probably be the last one from well maybe i'll go a couple more
oh well maybe i'll look through here and find a couple more um ralph asks tips for an altar
um meaning i did an episode a long time ago i did a couple one i built a shrine
for my friend because i my friend garrett bradley i wondered she was nominated for an academy award i wanted her to win so i built a shrine with
candles and a fake academy award and stuff so and then i built one for because i wanted to i want to
restore my land cruiser so i built one for jonathan ward who's the greatest land cruiser restoration
phenomenon in the world and i built a shrine and put it outside of his office and he found it and then
hung it in his factory which is the the best land cruiser restoration
factory in the world um so ralph asked me for tips for alters
tom sachs calls it sympathetic magic like when you build these you like oh if you wanna you know let's say you want a jeep you like buy a toy
jeep and you make a little shrine on it you put little candles next to it and you write it something and it's just a shrine like when you go into
a buddhist temple and you see the shrine it's got the oranges and the incense sticks and the little buddha or if you go to you know the altar at a church and
you see the jesus and the cups and the the cloth thing or if you go to synagogue you know what a shrine is but you can you know sort of like a black
magical phenomenon and it's kind of a joke but it also focuses you you know you tom sacks would build these art sculptures that were shrines for him
to realize the thing that the shrine was encapsulating so for tips on how to make one i would say don't have it be bigger than
like a coffee table book like try to keep it hard to do you know like this don't make some big
giant stupid thing and then make it so that it hangs on the wall like you can hang it on the wall like it's a picture or something
and then the point of making it the reason you're making it like i think psychologically is so that you can
really think about this thing that you desire you're really fantasizing and go heavy with the fantasy and the dream and the
imagining yourself within that from my case like land cruiser um
within the whatever the shrine is embodying okay i'm gonna look for a lady to answer up okay rachel hello there was just the paula question i
don't really see any more ladies time is it okay okay joe kennedy what advice do you have for honing a filmmaking style
or about making personal films okay so there was i heard this
motor this guy said how do i um on a super moto which is like a dirt
bike motorcycle with street tires on it how do i slide the back wheel when i'm coming out
of a turn which is a very advanced it's called a controlled slide it's a very advanced motorcycle maneuver way more
advanced than riding a wheelie and what the racer said is don't try don't try to do it so
developing your style you know i'm sorry but the answer to all of this stuff the answer to um i'd say
97 of the questions about like how do i do such and stuff it's just work it's just 10 years of work it's just work
work work work target whatever your target is you got to have a target my target is to to live like a dentist through my
creative endeavors um meaning live like with the amount of money a dentist makes
with through my and earn the money through my creative endeavors so you get this target and then
whatever you can do to get there you do and so it's just time on task and
what steve martin said about developing your style and this is absolutely true is that your style is developed through
your workarounds right so you have things that you don't oh i want a 4k drone but
and i want to and i want this pieces of equipment and i want this and i want me and i want you know i wanna
you know if jennifer lawrence would just say yes i could get this movie no you don't have that stuff so your style
is just you working around your limitations so i'm trying to think of an example
i mean my you know i don't have any i never had any money to build any of to build any of this [ __ ] i couldn't afford it
c-stands and tripods and all of that stuff i could i could afford the quarter inch screw that goes
into the back of all the cameras that's in the that's the quarter inch threads in the back in the bottom of every
camera that holds the camera to whatever i could afford that thing and then you know to mount the cameras
to things it's part of filmmaking so you know i want to mount a camera to a thing so i can do this other thing but
i can't afford the whatever you know steady cam or whatever so
you know you just build you know you build it i built this like i don't know 10 years ago it's got a
date on it oh 13 years ago i built this is like a you know this is before they had those like store-bought cheap
equipment's a bad example because equipment is so cheap now but when i was starting out something like like the equivalent of this would
be like thirty thousand dollars it would be like a glidecam 99999
and um yeah don't try to develop your style just try to to make the thing that you're attempting to make the style
thing is so pretentious and so misguided and if you're and if that's what you're concentrating on quit because
[Music] because you're you're going to have no there's enough style in this world there's enough like there's enough style
you can just be you just don't okay my brother is this private maybe it is i don't care i'm gonna say it's patreon uh i was with my brother casey
okay and we were talking about there's this woman named victoria paris
and she's a successful tick-tocker and now she's begun making uh youtube videos
and very simple films that she makes and it's just her talking about her life and why it's why she's very very successful
i mean she's like 23 years old or something like this she's a very successful person
casey said he had this perfect metaphor we were at
the merry-go-round in um griffith park and there's two
he has two daughters one's six and one's three and
the six-year-old is a natural performer is you know and that's just who she is and she's been like that forever the three-year-old is not the
three-year-old is just is she's not she's just a three-year-old and
so my brother's taking video of the kids on their carousel on the he's on the merry-go-round and they're on the horses going up and down he points the camera at the six-year-old
the gregarious six-year-old she's hamming it up and being funny and then when he points the camera at the three-year-old she's just being a
three-year-old which is way way more compelling it's way more compelling than all of the effort and
that's sort of the analogy that casey used to hypothesize why
victoria paris is popular and successful is because she's the gal on the merry-go-round just being
and that is a that is a task that is very very very difficult to do because everyone wants to put on a persona everyone it's like a natural
thing to like hide behind something or oh i wanna and when and when you
when you hear someone like wes anderson okay and they are talking about the
ingredients as to how they arrived at their style someone with like very
signature style i think wes anderson is probably the best gen the best example from my generation you look at his stuff that's
a wes anderson film if it's a fake west anders i rip off wes anderson if it's fake west oh it looks like a wes anderson film
you hear him okay and this what i'm about to say is my hypothesis based upon my experience you hear wes
anderson say oh i you know um this comes from an emeric press burger
and michael powell film and blah blah blah blah but [ __ ] it's upon reflection that these artists are able to tell you the source i do not think it's conscious when
they're doing the thing they don't say hmm emeric pressburger i like his the opening shot uh it says sick transit
gloria on the on the tapestry and the camera uh uh pans out uh i'm gonna do that in rushmore no i think he's
i i it it all comes from the subconscious i think i think it comes from the subconscious and the the trick
to it all and why so few people succeed at it is that you have to be willing to submit
to the demands of your subconscious which is basically sitting in a quiet room
for hours in your discipline even when things aren't coming and jane campion says
three hours your subconscious is comfortable enough to come out and play so i mean i would say don't i never was
conscious of developing a style i think okay step one just rip off people that you like
just rip them off but don't be stupid and obvious don't take the you know don't
don't steal the like fundamental idea just steal the technique you know don't make a film about a kid
who joins a whole bunch of extracurricular activities but he's flunking out of the school that he loves and then set it in your
you know your farm town and blah blah blah you can't steal that but you can steal
um and you can't steal the music you can't use the same you can't use the the pulp fiction song in your thing
and and be like no it's just like [ __ ] tarantino man use the surfer music i'll use the surfer music no that's a concept so yeah just like anything else you just have to earn it and
i don't really know i don't think of myself as having a style or anything i just the process is uh
i found like these eems movies um and i found these movies that these corporations made
like general motors and stuff where they would explain uh how you know a a
um a limited slip differential worked and they would build all these models and so forth and i've always had trouble uh understanding
very simple um phenomena within a very complex uh uh paradigm and be like no no no i need to know about the i need to be yeah i understand michael jordan got
paid 40 million dollars for the nike contract right but like did he have to go how did the money get from nike to
michael jordan's bank account is there like a bunch of people is there like a is it a wire transfer do they give him a check
is it like does he does it does does the check made out to jordan and then he pays his manager is it made out of to the manager how does he make do you know
what i mean and so a lot of my work is just explaining all the little tiny
the things that i don't understand about the world and then it
my exploration into that and is is my thinking out loud and which turns into these
these little videos and i mean don't forget i mean 20 years i've been doing this and i'm not that successful for somebody working
at anything for 20 years i'm a [ __ ] loser like if i had worked at a post office for 20 years i'd be doing way better
than i'd be [ __ ] ready to retire with pensions and benefits and all this stuff and uh you know if i had been a mechanic
for 20 years i'd probably have my own shop with 10 people and like i would be turning away business so
it's very hard and you just got to put the time in but i would say don't try to develop your own style and
[Music] your style will be beget through your will and your work around your work arounds and read that book born standing
up by um steve martin because he gives the details as to why he had like a signature style
all right guys i love you very much uh we reached 900 patrons this uh week i think and um hallelujah that is
absolutely fantastic i can't thank you enough and i'm going to continue to keep trying to do my best i've just remembered that i
there's a couple details i have to take care of before i can publish today's youtube video and i'm going to go do that right now and then i'm going to eat all right take care everybody and have a good weekend
Products & Tools Mentioned
- Apple iPod mentions — discussed in context of iPod's Dirty Secret video
- EcoFlow uses — power station brand
- Ritalin mentions — ADHD medication discussed
People Referenced
Max Verstappen
Books Mentioned
- The Fourth Turning
- Born Standing Up
Films & Media Referenced
- Van's own 2003 film against Apple
- Netflix F1 series
- 1986 film mentioned