LIVESTREAM FRIDAY, JULY 1, 9am PDT
Published · 1:06:11 · 983 views
About This Video
A July 2022 Friday session for the holiday weekend. Van takes questions from patrons between projects. Summer tempo.
Transcript
good morning good friday uh start out with the weather report
my nod to david lynch while people you know log on get ready and whatever um
the weather is there's a slight breeze it's like an even 70. it's like room temperature it's
kind of what you're going for in your car when you're playing with the air conditioning and that's the weather today but i'll
bet it's going to be a furnace in the valley later this afternoon all right that's the boring weather so
hope everybody's doing well and um you know the format is usually i write down
the questions from the comments that come underneath the
announcement for this live stream so i made an announcement yesterday a bunch of you people wrote questions
and i i write them down with pencil and then i try to get to as many as i can
um don't feel offended if i miss yours patreon changed their like website over the last week or something like it's all
a little different it's like an update or something and which is something i really i hate it when that happens unless it's a
incremental and fantastic uh upgrade like from carburetor to fuel
injection like that i'm that i can get behind but when you're just changing it for i don't know why and it's a little bit more confusing and you're taking
things away that this is the complaint of all modern men anyhow my point is this is my excuse if i missed you it's because the way that
they cue now when you do add more i think it's backwards from the way it used to be and so i just kind of lost track and i
also waited a little bit last minute to write down these questions but let me let me get to them um
oh so james asked me do i wear glasses all the time um no they're i'm like they're reading
glasses and they're like a little bit magnification for reading
and i wear them on the show just i don't because sometimes i'm reading off of a teleprompter but also just for like the
look you know just to look like a like a shop teacher same with the shirt um
and do the guards on the side here limit my side vision um not really and if they do i kind of like it
and how long do they last i don't know i think these are probably these are decades old these glasses i bought them used from ebay
and i've had them probably for two years with the prescription lenses in them i think and i just brought like the
like i got them from ebay and then i brought them down to the optometrist uh at the bottom of the hill here and
then she was just like yeah we'll pop these we'll pop whatever lenses you're in you know she did my eye exam and then they put the lenses in
uh so that's it okay so this is a good one uh illy asked me how
did i fix my sunglasses and he's talking about these sunglasses and i want to see if i can i'm going to take this loop and put it over the lens and
see if i can zoom in on the fix no it doesn't real oh well
it kind of works so here's the little repair i gotta get really close to it in order for it to show up so here's the repair
let me try the 100 millimeter macro i know there's probably some gadget you
can buy on the and you stick it on your computer and it does exactly what i'm trying to do but i don't have that gadget and i don't want that gadget so i just have
this like two thousand dollar lens nope doesn't work but i have another loop let's see
if this one works and then i think this goes like this
and let's see if i can get oh this is pretty good still out of
focus there we go so there's the front side that faces you and then here's the
i can't do it because of the arms but here's the back side that like rests against my nose i can't do it
because the arms well if i fold the arms of the sunglasses maybe
and the way i did it this was hard this was very hard to do this might
have taken more than one day this is one of these projects that like we were like if you had a billion dollars what would you do i would do [ __ ] like this
my life away i would just do little tiny little crazy things like this my life away but
because you just get hypnotized and you get that thing where you have so much invested in it like you keep throwing good money after
bad or good time after bad and so this is like the hardest sunglasses
broken on the bridge like i usually don't bother like forget it but these were a gift and they're glass
lenses and the brand is barton perriera perreira they should change they should
just call them bartons or something anyway it's my friend's parents company my friend pat towersy and he brought a box these things are super expensive and
he brought a box of them to indonesia when we were doing this surf movie in indonesia and he like led us or it might have been japan he let us
pick out there was like it was me and tom sax's crew and he let us each pick out whichever ones we want and what is
remarkable about these is that the lenses are glass very very rare same with the old varnes which i also wear the lenses are glass
very rare so they don't scratch that easily so i wanted to save them
and i so what i did was i took a a piece of solid brass hardware i think it was a
hasp it was like um it was like uh you know like like you know i should just have one on hand you know
like a little latch thing that you put a padlock through it's called a hasp and so i think i just like cut it with an angle grinder so i
could get a good size chunk of it this part i might have even made out of a
key maybe maybe not though and i angle grindered it to
kind of fit the contour of this and right here and um
filled it with plumber's epoxy drilled through the the frame and then drilled through this little
thing i made this piece here i don't remember what i made out of but
i remember i had to use a blow torch and you can see the teeth marks from the um
from the vise grips that i used to hold it and i used the blow torch to like bend
that arch so that it matched the contour and then drilled through and i used number two
sheet metal screw right there and this one that when i originally did it i didn't have stainless steel so you can see it rusted and i just last week
fixed or this week fixed this one like stripped or came out from this side it like popped off and then i
replaced it with stainless steel which won't rust but sometimes these leave like a dirt mark on my on the bridge of my nose anyway that's
how i fixed it but it was a it was and then this is heat shrink tubing so that they don't slide off of my ears which
they do a lot they used to a lot um but yeah it was hard and involved but
the repair was repairable which is which you know makes it kind of worth it and i
don't really lose sunglasses god please don't knock on wood please don't prove
it's not hubris it's just fact i have a pair of sunglasses that i've had for 20 years i still have them um
okay pavel asks about milos foreman i love milo foreman he's one of the masters one of the greats
uh i saw i've seen i think two or three of his like czech movies i saw the one
i can't remember but it's like this party takes place at a party for like uh firemen in czech in the czech
republic and it's i think it's just really about the bureaucracy of living under communist regime and i of course i love the people versus larry
flint and then everyone loves one flew over the cuckoo's nest yeah he's a master i think he did the penis no no that's that's the other guy that's uh
that's uh rosemary's baby well it'll come up in the comments okay
p polanski roman planet who's polish and i guess rome uh polish and french and then i think milo's foreman is
czech um i can't remember anymore oh didn't he also do uh
amadeus he's got like a bunch of academy awards like two or three like best pictures
and i watched this documentary about the chelsea hotel this documentary must have came come out whenever they
some company bought the chelsea hotel and like turned it into luxury apartments or something and this was back when it was like kind of a scumbag
hotel which i lived in new york at the very end of the chelsea hotel
era like the sid vicious you know still junkies living in the building era
and in this documentary milo schwarman i guess lived in there and it really i when did this
documentary come out it must have come out let's say it was like 2004 something like this and he said that he was
i want to say three years behind on rent something like that something crazy like that like he hadn't
paid his rent in three years and you're wat and i was watching and it really gave me insight as to i always thought that like
if you've heard of a filmmaker if you've heard of an actor if you've heard of a musician they're rich you know especially a three-time academy
award-winning filmmaker he's rich he's from and he's living in a crap you know the chelsea wasn't nice it was just cool
um he's living in a crap hotel and he was like three years behind on rent it was like whoa
but yeah miles foreman is one of the greats [Music] oh nathan asks how do i balance using other people's rules for life slash work with my own
and how do i differentiate between copying and influence i guess it's a matter of like refinement
you know you start with your parents rules and you kind of have to follow those just because of the consequences of not
following them and then you kind of refine those rules or see wow that was kind of dumb and then
you know as far as like artists or influences i think the ones that i can remember
that make sense or that i've like been burned before and then someone says something like keep a list
you know or uh you know be on time those are pretty basic but um
you know i'll take those especially when they come is that just like free advice and then um
balance them with my own and then my own are like my little discoveries but they probably just match my
a lot of this stuff just matches my um weaknesses or my inadequacies like i have an absolutely abysmal
memory and it's a completely random memory and it's not functional at all
and if someone were to say to me there's a hundred and sixty million dollars waiting for you
but you can't write down these directions you go straight take a right on mcdormand street a left on james street go straight for a mile and take
another right on smith street and then i would never remember that the 160 million dollars would go to
somebody else it doesn't matter that that's why i have so that's why i write so many things down and that's and i've been burned
trying to be like no no i'll remember i'll remember i've been burned so often that it just becomes a rule like that's a specific
example um oh yeah i just was i had a psychiatrist meeting like zoom
and they're expensive and then they're once a month and it was on monday and i like did the alarms on my computer you
know google alarm for my computer and i also have an ipad in here and i also have the phone and i wrote it down and i wrote it down on my list that i carry with me and i wrote it down on my thing
and i in the meeting was at 11 30 and at 11 15 i was like don't forget the meeting don't forget the meeting don't forget the meeting and then i started
editing or something and just it was 11 40 and i was like oh
[ __ ] and so i blogged on blah blah and i just said to him look i'm not solving this problem anymore i've done my best
and i've had this for like people giving me money i've like missed calls like this person's going to give me 10 000 the call is friday
and i do the same protocol all this stuff and something is happening and i'm an hour late for a guy who's going to give me money for like nothing
and i just said to my psychiat i've just been battling it's so stressful and i put and i try to like i
i don't know how to incentivize myself and i've struggled in years and years it's not like i haven't tried and i'm like at the point of like you know what
i give up i don't care you know like cons opportunity be damned i don't care i'll pay the money for the whatever i lost
whatever however much 10 minutes of the 60 minutes of the meeting for the psychiatrist and that's kind of a new revelation but
i'm also i'm also like in a little bit of i'm having like deep burnout which is kind of what this next video that's not
coming out until monday um that's what the next one's kind of about
it's about to do lists but also like just like this i have this deep burnout
that i can't seem to sleep off on the weekends and i even though i get a lot of rest and everything but that's a different that's just a different thing
um oh so raphael asked me i guess in relation to the video i made about the gifts that my son that helped my son like that led up to my son being able to ride the
little motorcycle he asked me um about if i could remember any
excuse me any gifts that have transformed me and i interpret that to mean physical object gifts not the gift of life and the gift of patience and no like what's like a
physical object that has transformed me um i can think of the gift givers and i
can like once i had this computer i was doing my first casey and i were doing our like first
hired like to make a film film like video thing and the computer the imac dv the first
generation or second generation imac but the first generation that you could edit video on 10 gigabyte hard drive um
this was probably 2001 or 2002 um it just died i killed it too much data
on the hard drive and i didn't have an external i had things backed up on tape and the whole project the guy was coming to see a cut
of the movie the guy who gave us like the most money we'd ever been paid and it was an emergency and i casey i think was the sax's studio
manager at the time and i called him and i was just like dude i don't know what to do this thing is dead what should i do and then like a couple hours later
man this is so cool casey and tom knock on the door it's casey and tom
and tom has the whatever the best it was a g3 imac i'm not sorry macintosh pro tower
with a like whatever widescreen you know giant monitor and he was like why didn't you ask me
for this months ago i had a lot to do today and they'd like gone out sax paid for it you'd gone out and bought
like that machine and we did a lot of amazing [ __ ] on that machine and it was like part of the development was that machine it's one of the things that bums
me out about these computers is that they just turn into garbage and no matter what you've been through with them or you know
unlike a good car or something or unlike almost every other tool that i use including cameras cameras last forever
not the tape ones so much because there's so much gear ridge in there but i have all these old 20 year old you know point-and-shoots and
stuff so that was one that g3 that's what came to mind immediately it was also super expensive it must have been eight grand in in 2002
um [Music] oh this leads to the next one sodbuster asks i guess sodbuster had some vhs and films he maybe kept in a basement maybe they're his family i don't know how he came across them but he says tips on how to restore
film and vhs with mold or funk on them so what i would do is i would start with
the film because film is more robust and i would get like a microfiber cloth
and just sort of foot by foot mold there's a whole bunch of different kinds of molds but a lot of the mold is just kind of
like surface fuzz and i would pull the you know i just pull the film through the
through the microfiber and maybe get some kind of very gentle
um spray they make this spray that's for cleaning um
like plexiglas it's like a special kind of very gentle spray specifically for
i mean it depends how old the film is the film is probably made out of uh your thing i don't know but test like a couple
inches of the frames you know to make sure it doesn't pull the emulsion off which it probably won't also there's two sides to that to the
film there's one side that has like the photosensitive emulsion on it and then there's the other side that's just the plastic so
you got to figure out which side is which and then you can go aggressive with the plastic side but the the the
the the emulsion side which is the side that's down on the reel usually um that will
that will um that'll be a little bit more sensitive you have to be a little careful with that so i'll do a little test strip figure out the right chemical figure out
the right cloth similarly for the vhs tapes it's going to be oddly less robust
because now you're talking about like magnetic particles on plastic so i would
maybe use a lens wipe those like things that sort of look like tissue paper but they're specifically for wiping the lens of your whatever
the disposable kind that are like almost see-through i would use those and do bits of the vhs first of all take the you have to take
the tape apart forgot to say that take the tape apart the vhs tape apart on a table best thing to use is probably a big frisbee or some bowl so that you
don't lose all the little screws and stuff it's like five screws take the whole thing apart um
and then ugh just the thought of doing this stresses me out um
and then yeah wipe off you know 10 feet you know 10 feet of it or maybe
[Music] get off all the big stuff rewind it to the beginning yeah do that round it to the beginning because that's all just the just run it to the beginning and then take it apart and
wipe 10 feet of it or so with the the stuff i was just talking about then
put it back in the vcr put it put it back together put it back in the vcr rewind it and
then watch it and see what happened and then go from there i mean it's not going to be easy it's not going to be fast but it'll probably be worth it
or just could find one of those companies that do it they're still around there's probably restoration but they'll be expensive
um okay what's the next one um oh mosak asked me for an update on the
panama adventure and is it in the near future well i'm getting close i think this december i'm gonna
embark on the mexico trip i'm just trying to like you know the first step is to replace the engine which i think i'm going to do in september
so december january i think will be mexico and i'm going to try to build in a break i'll still be doing stuff on patreon and still be
somehow posting videos but i'm going to do a break from my weekly like uh routine because i'm my brain's
starting to get a little detached so um and that will be kind of a sabbatical where and i think i will
come up with the new format for the third year for year three which will debut in january whatever
or february and uh that it will be a test sort of a test of how to do the uh panama thing which then might be the
following year to drive down to panama maybe not this december because this december will be mexico but the following december
december 2023 and i might just kind of do that we're like two-month sabbatical every year to
refresh and like recover because this thing i mean it seems like it should be easy and it looks so easy but making this stuff especially with
such a you know it's just really me and then braxton's been working remotely he gets here today i think or tomorrow he gets to
he's taking the train down to la from oregon uh but yeah i'm a little burned
um oh so this one came from nick this really touched my heart he said he's 43
and he says how do i come to terms with the realization that some dreams are unobtainable i paraphrased what he said but
how do i come to terms with the realization that some dreams are unobtainable and this happens in your 40s this is like when you're in your 40s
the doors just go like the military stops i i'm pretty sure you can't get into the military
after 35 so that's the first one you're not joining the military and then a lot of the athletic stuff um
i know i so there's this race called the paris dakar and it's
arguably it used to be called the paris dakar i think it's just called the dakar rally now and i think now it's in saudi arabia it's moved all over the world due
to like terrorist threats but traditionally the race is from paris to um
what's the what's the i'll think of the capital but to dakar and it's like the most rigorous
incredibly difficult motorsport races in the world in your drive you know and there's
trucks cars and there might be like i don't know but there's motorcycles is the one that's the hardest one and you have to do it on your own and it's like if you
miss the stage that day you're out you can't take as long as you want to go from from the stages to the
stages people replace their clutches in the middle of this race and amateurs are allowed to
enter it with the best riders in the world and when i was getting successful with the
nicest brothers and stuff i thought i could put myself into a position where i could afford to do that to do it charlie um borman who was
um ewan mcgregor's partner on that long way around long way down he did those the series with bmw where they rode their motorcycles like all
over the world uh he trained and competed and was like sponsored by
bmw and did it with a factory rider but he broke his hands um but i thought maybe i'd be able to
organize something like that you know i was in good athletic shape i was a runner i was a marathon runner i had endurance
um and i thought i could just get in good bike shape and then the hardest part would have been for me would have been putting all the money together because
like the bike like the cheapest bike at the time god knows what it is now but at the time i think the cheapest bike
you could compete with would be like a 50 or 60 thousand dollar bike and then the um and then the fees were another 50 000
euros or something like this and i just and the time you have to put god's amount of time to the first
canadian to ever finish this race was in 2001 they've been doing this race for like 50 years or something
and the first canadian to ever complete it was in 2001 it's like one it's like one of the it's like everest it's like something like that it's a big
i wonder if fewer people have done it than i've done everest anyhow that's just something that i oh so the champions of it like at the time when i
was interested to do it the champions like cyril depray were um in their you know mid late 40s and then
the best guy at the time this guy named mark coma who's the only famous person i would ever approach
in public and say blah blah blah blah blah mark coma five-time champion of dakar
on bikes he was a factory writer for ktm all the gr i don't know if this is still true but all the the you know 27 25 of the
top 27 finishers were on ktms like they own that race um
he was born in 1975 just like me and he was like winning championship it's like you got to kind of be an older guy to do it
and um but that window is just [ __ ] closed man i can't do it no way it's impossible you know maybe my son can but
i'm not you know i'm not that kind of person where i'm like dude you gotta do this this is what you should know so how do you deal with it i think you just
have to be sad i think you just have to be sad about it that's it it's just the sadness and like it's one
of those things with life and i don't know when they close it's really it's a bummer it really is
um but you know time wounds all heals as uh john lennon said
oh this is a good one i like this so jonathan asked me what sort of lessons or techniques do i use with my
son to instill self-reliance and independence okay so this is
i had an experience on tuesday that has sort of shifted my brain
on this a little bit or i've learned something new on tuesday because of something that happened but
i had you know i've been thinking about raising kids since i was a kid like if i was a dad i would do this i thought i was a dad so and i got lucky because my
firstborn was a boy so i got lucky and i'm a gen xer and there is a big
difference between gen x and the millennials and the gen zers and the one of our chief one of the chief you know like qualities or
stereotypes of gen x is that we were basically you know that it's like the latchkey kid generation we're basically neglected by
our boomer parents and so we learned a lot of self-reliance and we're we're like you know
stereotypically we're tough and when we were and we're capable people and i wanted and i was always very scared as
a little kid and i think that's because i didn't have a father for like from two to like five and that's i think
you need a lot of reassurance and encouragement in that so i got you know it's all women it was all women it was my mom i have five aunts
and my mom and you know all their friends and so forth and i think that bravery wasn't taught to me
appropriately because it's a learned skill it's also genetic but um
it was important to me someone said i think it was it's either like maya angelou or nikki giovanni or um
or tony morrison i think it was maya angelou said that of all the virtues courage is the most important because with courage you can get all the other
ones but you need courage first so it's always been my agenda with my kid is these are the two things i'm teaching him i'm teaching him
strength and courage those are the top of my list and then like the world will teach him to like be polite and his mom will teach him like
compassion and sweetness and blah blah but what i want to teach him is strength and courage so
right now i'm just trying to help him find the thing that he's obsessed with that he will exert himself beyond his abilities
out of the sheer joy of doing it and he has that with the little dirt bike like i've seen him exhaust himself and just
drop it in the dirt and just say i'm too tired and i've had to like pick him up put him on my bike carry his bike and ride through the
woods mountains and dirt to get him back to the car um and then
the bravery thing teaching him bravery is a lot about me being brave and
i'm sorry and this is probably like illegal and nobody wants to hear this but like exposing him to potentially dangerous without neglect with you know
potentially dangerous um or allowing him to engage in potentially dangerous
activities you know where he could get hurt and you know last night he was playing on the hearth
by the fireplace he was playing with matches and doing all this stuff and you know sometimes he burns himself sometimes i burn myself sometimes i cut
myself i'm 47 years old i've been working with my hands my whole life and that's what i say to them but okay so on tuesday
so this is where okay so on tuesday he was with his friends at his friend's
house and our it's our friends from new york and um they live here in topanga new house at the the house isn't new but
they they just bought this house it's amazing it has an amazing view it's up a steep hill up at all these like i
don't know 75 stairs and isabel thank god we our son is up at the house a hundred
steps away from us we are on the street and we are walking up isabel's in front of me she's walking up the stairs
and she says oh there's a snake she said do you have your light it was starting to get dark do you have your light i can't tell if it's a rattlesnake or not and so i turned my light on and it was a
rattlesnake it was probably a five foot rattlesnake and it
kind of like whatever slithered away into a corner where it couldn't escape it coiled itself up and the corner was
right by the door to get into the house i'm sorry the door at the top of the landing eight step ten
steps up from the street you open the door you go up another 60 steps and you're at the house right so
we couldn't use that door it was two it was right there like where the door opens it was right in right there
eight inches away from where the door opens you're not and it's coiled up so we climbed the
thing we went up and got we climbed over the fence and then we went up they have another set of stairs we climbed up to the top of the set of stairs went to the house warned everybody there's a coiled
rattlesnake blah blah down at the bottom of your thing don't use the bottom date don't use the bottom door still there we all went down and then we
shined our lights on and we were looking at it and x wanted to see it and i said okay come on up and he got to the top of the
stairs and i let him get too close because i remember a reptile guy coming to our school talking about it was a cobra it wasn't a [ __ ]
rattlesnake he said a cobra can only go if it comes up if it's up on its hind it can only strike that distance but this
rattlesnake was five feet long in a coil in a spring and i think it could have and isabelle kind of freaked out she was like like that's too close that's too
close that's too close and so um i he i had him go down a couple steps
you know we were just looking at it we weren't provoking it but he was he was like not he was stupidly brave he wasn't
brave he was stupid in how willing he was to get close to it now there's a
there's a um [Music] i read in where i'm from by where i was from by joan didion she said that it's a california tradition that if you see and
this is from the pioneer days if you see a rattlesnake you kill it because you have to look out for the next guy
and we kill them here on the property i have the the grabber thing tom sacks just sent it to me for as a gift i have the grabber thing you get them by
the neck you chop their head off with an axe and um these people we're friends from new york
and so you know new yorkers we don't have a sense of of nature we don't have a we don't understand that nature is not
yosemite valley in beautiful waterfalls nature is trying to kill you all the time and nature is basically the enemy
that we've been fighting for our entire existence so i was saying i don't know if i said something i think i said something
effective we should kill this rattlesnake and the the husband says who's my old friend from 20 years
or something he says i know you're joan didion thing but we're not you know and i didn't engage i didn't engage blah blah
got a phone call text message a couple of nights later bit has been his wife just it was on the property somewhere
she was walking down the steps it bit and grabbed her like achilles she sent a picture from the hospital
of her two legs and one leg was like a normal woman size leg and one leg i'm not [ __ ] was like this was like a [ __ ] watermelon she's in the hospital
for a week and the point is i had to yesterday i said she's not going to die um
death from rattlesnake bites is very rare but you do have to be hospitalized it's super dangerous it's like it's a nightmare
but yesterday i had to teach my son to be afraid of snakes i said you should be scared of them i want you to be scared of them like i taught them
don't be scared of do not run away from coyotes you fight a coyote you scream you run you throw rocks at it whatever but
snakes i said i want you to be scared and i want you to come get me if you see a snake don't go near it don't poke it don't try to kill it don't anything i'm
trying to teach him to be fearful and it was a weird weird weird thing but you know that's a long story of like
what happened this week um and then my you know my buddy the husband he went
and hired a snake guy and they tried to hunt it and find it and they just they couldn't find it um
what time is it okay got plenty of time tyler asked um do i store my archival footage on a
solid-state drive or a hard disk drive hdd like the spinning kind i just buy the spinning kind for storage and then i
buy the solid state for work for like if i'm using software on that like final cut i use a solid state because they're
faster but they're way more expensive they said how much archive do i have i don't know i have like a lot of tapes i
have a hundred or more tapes that i haven't put on their digital video but i haven't
put them in hard drives i haven't they're like still on tape they're not on whatever the h2 whatever
apple format dot mov files so i have like a hundred of those i don't know how much that is and then i have an eight
gig or i'm sorry eight terabyte hard drive that's not full and that's all my archival because all that old dv stuff
the tapes the files aren't that aren't as big as like hi-def um paula asked me
what writing rules do i follow besides this story must have a surprise
uh um i wrote that down and i had a lot of ideas and now i don't
have them oh oh oh basic stuff like no one sees my writing until it's ready
to go public like no like what do you think of this how about no way no way never
not until it's like you know i'll talk about it i'll say i'm at this thing and it helps me think out loud
but no and i don't even do that ever i mean i've done that but i do not show anyone
to until it's done really until it's ready to be published another thing is i do
you know i write rough drafts with notes with pencil and paper and then i do the typewriter
and i do a lot of drafts and i try to get it i keep trying to refine it to you know just drafts you know but i start from
scratch when i write a new draft and i don't write on the computer um
it's too easy to change it's too easy to be non-committal and i don't like these things they're not they're not pleasant they're
not joyful to me um you know some i write down if i have to look something up how it's spelled i write it down on a little post-it and cut it out and put it stick it to the
top of my typewriter because i think it helps me remember how to spell it right the next time and then i can just look for it instead of going to the computer
uh i try not to describe things we live in a visual era so like if you read these old-fashioned books it's like i don't care i don't care what it looks like just tell me it's a house
i don't care or maybe it's a big house i don't care i don't care if it's red i don't care if it has unless it's you know if you have
to tell me it's a thatched roof because later somebody's gonna be playing with fire that's that's different but so i try not to be use
like a lot of adjectives and stuff because i'm writing usually for visual medium and then
don't be creative don't be fancy just get the point across don't try to be a poet um
[Music] just try to be kind of plain i think uh i don't know that those are those are some some of them uh who who's next anthony
oh anthony asked me this one how do you get through life's problems or life problems
that's also i paraphrased it oh my god i pray a lot and uh
i was at an a meeting and the guy's like i'm an atheist but prayer works even if you don't believe in it
and just the just the that act of surrender of under of just it's like an admission that like okay i don't have this
i don't have this please help me please get me through this and um
you know it doesn't work the way you wanted to but it does work um also i'm like a workaholic so i kind of
and most almost all of my problems are just money problems so by working harder at my job at this stuff then
in my mind it's like well that's at least effort towards solving the problems and then you know i have a a so i have a
whole like support group there to talk to people about i have a psychiatrist that i talk to once a month and i've got a wife
well we're not married yet but uh um common law i've got a common-law wife um
but really a lot of it is just white knuckling it it's just enduring enduring it and understanding that it's going whatever this problem is it's
going to end but yeah life is hard for everybody man and
i've got it very very good um oh so this one was a i don't want to
paraphrase this so i whoa whoa whoa so i uh screenshot it
and emmanuel said i'm tired i'm empty i keep moving myself and my fiance from
thing to thing thinking one day this whole will get filled and that i'll prove it to myself and everyone else
that this urge was justified and that i'm the artist engineer artist slash engineer slash business person i
always thought i was does it ever stop oh my god i think it
oh something just happened to my live stream i hope it's still oh there we go
does it ever stop i think it gets less intense i don't know how old this uh how old the manual is
um i think success helps like if you have a goal right if you have a target and you reach the target it helps a little bit and then you're a
little bit more patient with the next one but i don't know i haven't really i don't know i don't know how these
people become billionaires you know like how did you not stop at 750 million
think of the options but i don't know so i don't know if it stops but
a lot of those voices are right you know those things that nag at you and you just have to keep doing it the thing
about moving around a lot you know and aaa they call that geographics
and it's sometimes it's just a way of just changing the situation without solving the problem
whatever the problem might be so you have to be careful of that but on the same at the same time you know i'm from gen x and we're the
nomad generation and uh sometimes you're just trying to find that landing like where is the right place for me and like for me now it's
here it's like i don't want to live anywhere else i don't know it's really hard to live here it's very expensive there's [ __ ] rattlesnakes trying to kill us
but uh in other ways it's just absolutely perfect especially for me and like that's the one thing in life that i've gotten right
you know i know that that's the one thing i can wrestle is like i know that i know i'm not leaving topanga
and so i'm adjust other stuff but i don't know i never really
suffered through a job that i hated for more than like a couple months or something i never was in that i never had a life of just like
the j the fundamental job itself was like sucking me dry didn't i just was in jobs that sucked me dry
but they were temporary situations and i knew they were temporary situations and i just needed to like and by temporary i mean six months max
max you know um when i worked at scholastic i worked there for two years but you know i was developing they were
kind of paying me to develop as a writer to like become a professional writer and i was learning new york city at that time too and that wasn't a soul-sucking
job that was pretty fun it was the opposite you could kind of get trapped in there because it was like probably one of the easiest jobs in publishing because it was such a secure
publishing house and um you know they'd just done the second harry potter book and they were gone their way and
it was a very just a great great place one of the best places to work but you know
i can't imagine that thing about i can't imagine that thing about a soul-sucking job where you're just like
oh my god this is miserable but you know i'm not smart enough to have one of those i know it sounds stupid and
trite but it's really true like i just not capable can't do it unable to do it some people can't dunk a basketball
like i can't do that either uh so you know it's just a matter of like survival of finding some damn thing and
uh i don't know if it ever ends doesn't feel like it ever ends like this week i've struggled i don't know that i've
struggled to get a video done and this week's video isn't very good sorry but it just isn't even though i gave it my all i'm just
um you know i just like getting burned out or something so i don't know but the kind of the drive
is still there but it's like a survival thing you got to pay the rent you got you know i don't know so i don't know i don't know if it ever
stops probably in your 70s you just stop giving a [ __ ] i think that's what i'm told that's what ray dalio said
um oh emmanuel oh no sorry that was a manual jw asked honda rebel 500 or harley street 500 for his first bike i would say honda rebel i would say when in doubt go japanese i don't really know anything about harley's
i find them extremely annoying especially the loud ones that whole loud pipes save lives really really
i don't think so i don't think they do um i think you know the margins save lives helmets
being very careful um and the rebel the honda you probably there's probably so many parts that's
really cheap i think they sold 175 billion or trillion of those bikes um
there's probably a whole like community and uh you know they're the
current points leader in formula one honda and they won the formula one world championship last year so
honda go with honda um how do i allocate time and set
priorities throughout the day slash week i do uh i have to do lists and then i have a new
kind of they look like this that i carry with me and then i have a new kind of to-do list if you see wait let me see these things on the wall here
one of them i think this one i think is like my daily to-do list where i'll just write like monday
or friday july 1st and then underline the things that i and then write the things i have to do for that day but priorities i have a very hard time
with i have a lot of trouble with like there's like this intelligence test they made us take in high school or elementary school and that's like you're trapped on the moon and you have like
100 items and like which of the ones order them and most important to least important and like the first three or first
two or three are easy because like the first one's air yes the second one's like water third one's food but then they get
tricky because it's like well i don't know i'm pretty clever like i could use this seems more useful the gun
seems more useful than the hammer and you can use a gun as a hammer but you know like uh you can't use a hammer as a gun um
uh so priority's difficult for me i consult with people um
oh jesus you know i have a hard time with things that are very important and very easy that i've i've i struggle with that
like um go to your bank account and click the accept button so that the ten thousand
dollar wire transfer or whatever will go through like that kind of stuff i know it's ridiculous
um but yeah writing it down oh that's hard it's hard all these steps
um oh and then mark asked me when the manual the project i'm working with sax
is coming out i have no idea nobody does i don't know 10 years i don't know um okay so now
i got like five more minutes left i'm a little behind with this video this week so i got a heart out at 10 or 10 10.
okay eric vega asks when is a good moment to ask for help when making your artwork as an artist how do you know how to step
back and let others do the work i think if you think it's done but you can't tell
you know when you think it's done but maybe it's not i guess it depends on the damn art again it depends on the medium
so ask for help when making your artwork so in the beginning to learn the techniques you're going to need help for that
so when you're first starting out you know for the first i don't know 10 years and
like making a specific project i guess it depends on the medium
uh when is a good moment to ask for help when making your artwork i said you know how to
as an artist how do you know how to step back and let others do the work oh man i don't i don't know how i don't know
i'm too micromanagey i don't know how to do that because i feel like i'm making all these very important discoveries or you know decisions all the way through
the process and like a lot of times when i'm editing i have a whole new script change thing that i got to do and re-record and stuff and there's no way an editor is coming up with it i don't
care what they say mr b says all youtubers say the same thing but um emily chamberlain says the reason
i didn't hire an editor because editing is like my favorite part of this whole the whole reason i got into this thing is to be so i could edit my thing that's
what i like doing so i don't know how to ask cameras i'll let anybody shoot i don't care they're not important i don't like them i don't
care that all looks kind of the same at this point they're all great like this you know um
but i think you do not get help when you are writing
you don't get help when you're writing until you have a finished draft that you think is finished and you maybe need help to say is this
clear i'm trying to say this does that come across here like you want to be clear
but i think yeah finish it and then if you're uneasy about it you show it to someone
and then ask them what they think you know someone good and then i don't know about collaboration it's
something i gotta learn how to do i don't know yeah the only thing i know to do is with the camera and then ideas you know
if you're at the idea stage yeah okay how's this uh
oh braxton i thought he was on a train i don't know where he is okay
um oh this is a good one biaggio asked me hey mr van do you have fear for failure how do you face it i'm 25 and i'm frightened because i'm not yet sure what is my thing
um yeah i mean of course like you have the fear of um
yes but you know the more you go it's just part of the process man failure is just so
it's just to get used to it i think i'm not that afraid of it um i wish i was a little bit more afraid of
like i wish i could draw that when i draw the energy from fear to
keep me going it usually manifests in the form of anger which is like that anger energy which works
but i kind of am done i've exhausted that i don't want to do that anymore and so i'm trying to think about fear of
failure no no i don't know i don't think so i think i probably used to when i was 25 probably but either it's to keep you on your it's just what you do and the fear isn't the important thing right it's like what do you do in the face of it how do you behave and like
you just gotta fail i mean if you don't oh i have a one of the quotations that i wrote on my
on my wall here i have all these quotations that i keep meaning to make youtube shorts out of which maybe i'll
do now that braxton's here and it says losers don't fail
which is true because if you're just only doing stuff that you're you know if you're only trying stuff that you know you won't fail at you're a
loser man you gotta fail oh and uh ray dalio braydalio says pain pain pain plus reflection equals progress
so yeah just failure just fail that's why i mean the ones that are really that
i have a tremendous amount of respect for are the people who like go all in everything mortgage the house
everything and then fail that is incredible because failure is you know it's
education it's like a lesson it's a real it's it's a lesson and you you can't fail i don't know that
you learn the lesson if you fail not if you failed having not done your best which is different than going all in
doing your best and going all in people use that phrase a lot my brother i caught my brother using it he's like i'm all in on such and such i'm like you're
not all in you still own a house you still have the cars what are you talking about you're not all in you have a rolex you're not all in that's not what all in
means enthusiastic is not the same as all in um but i think you got to do your best
and then if you fail so what you know what could you do but yeah the fear
i mean it depends on also on uh on how long of a timeline like
oof yeah i don't know i don't know it also depends like what are the stakes
of failing and like who else suffers but if it's just you
yeah if it's just you it's okay to be afraid just do it anyway all right what else all right 1002 i'm going to do one more i'm just going to
scroll and stop um i've read zen in the art of motorcycle
maintenance yep [Music] uh what is my storage case brand the big ones are hardig cases you get them like army surplus on the internet the big
green things that i have um um um [Music] this is really fun by the way like going through all these questions x is not named after gen x
um oh this is cool read the mosquito coast if you are a lost artist learn from how too much passion can lead you to no success i never read the book but i saw the
movie and man it's [ __ ] good it's really good mosquito coast peter weir directed it
it's really good and it is about that whole follow your passion thing [ __ ] you
yeah you know who follows their cat passion serial killers um yeah the thing about follow your passion
that bothers me is that i think people doubt their thing because they don't feel feel passionate about it despite being
successful i'm talking about their job talking about their job like people are like well i'm not passionate it's like yeah i make 77 million dollars a year but you
know i'm not passionate about it's like okay well work it for the rest of the year and
then you never have to work again and be passionate about something else
uh favorite wes anderson film oh gosh it changes but rush more come on it's rushmore tenenbaums is great rushmore is like
perfect um have you ever been checked for add hd i've been three times in three different states by three
different psychiatrists diagnosed with adhd and i you know i take ritalin
um uh i think i'm gonna do i might do an episode about ritalin it's a tremendous help um now you're you're now describe a typical situation people with adhd and that was my psychiatrist's reaction was just like oh i can change your
medication i'm like nope no we can't we're sticking with this one and i'm just gonna deal with these consequences
because i don't know i'll just i don't know make the alarm louder on my phone okay
all right i think that's it i think we did it it's an hour and five minutes uh uh
okay have a good weekend everybody i'm gonna try to get that video done probably come out 9 00 am on mondays because it's better for the
algorithm they perform better when you release them then so that's the goal not done with this one this week i should be
done before i start the live stream but have a good weekend and take care everybody
Products & Tools Mentioned
- American Optical uses — glasses brand worn
- Barton Perreira mentions — sunglasses brand
- Vuarnet mentions — sunglasses brand
- Hardigg cases uses — protective cases
- Spyderco knives mentions — knife brand
- BMW motorcycle uses — Van's motorcycle
- KTM mentions — motorcycle brand
- Spectre mentions — Land Cruiser parts company in Chatsworth
People Referenced
Milos Forman, Joan Didion, Ray Dalio, Mark Coma
Books Mentioned
- Where I Was From
Films & Media Referenced
- Milos Forman film
- Milos Forman film