Let's Find Out - (Pt. 3b) Philosophy of Bob Ross: Industrial to Digital Revolution (A Bob Ross Deep Dive) ASMR

Starting point is 00:00:00 In our world, in our world. Ready for your bravery test? Okay, here it comes. There. Okay, let's give him a friend. Let's give him a friend. There. So up until now, we've seen that Bob has the quality,

Starting point is 00:00:22 a timeless quality of being an effective communicator, effective teacher, an effective, and an attractive personality that allows, learning to happen more easily. He draws our attention. He knows how to talk to the whole person and individuate the different learning styles, remain open, allow his message to be accessible to everyone. We've talked about the trend, the idea of leisure and how that used to be essentially non-existent in its modern form for the tribal and far ancient societies and how they used to be integrally linked with work and their time used to be taken up by deeply meaningful activities

Starting point is 00:01:20 whether it was work hunting family life and building community activities that were crucial to the survival of the group or he was even just downtime where they were intimately communicating and grooming and even the more trivial socializing that they would do was still very kept them very in tune and very attached and very apart their community all their time was meaningful and as time progressed and wealth accumulated in the hands of fewer and fewer people as technology and art and expression and spirituality was compartmentalized segregated into finer and finer practitioners more increasingly expertise experts and you know the sense of a Rite in ancient Greece where everybody of a certain status was expected at least the ideal was

Starting point is 00:02:53 that everybody was had a balanced self-development about them they were they paid attention equally to all the important areas of being in the world. We saw the disintegration of the Roman Empire and the emergence of Christian-centric Europe, likely as a result of at least partially the collapse of values and integrity and sense of duty to oneself and one's community of self-development on both the practical and spiritual, more philosophical, more abstract, more spiritual levels. The lack of attention to the deeper, more meaningful qualities of self-development by the Romans led to a general degradation of the individual that made up society.

Starting point is 00:04:25 It swelled too large, took on too many conflicting religions, which made all of them, which devalued all of them. Christianity emerged out of that as a single unifying vision of what was good and what was the ideal. It allowed the emergence, slow emergence. Over thousands of 8,000. years at least singular thousand of a of an ethic in a sense of morality a sense of who the ideal person was which was Jesus Christ and those who generally in Europe the ideal like Arete was in Greece was Jesus Christ and acting like him being a

Starting point is 00:05:13 Christian acting following in his footsteps and the way he acted it was values like truth, like respect for tradition, but also a respect for one's own intellect and one's logos and one's ability to be conscious of when and when you can't break tradition if it's a valuable thing to do if you've been paying attention to an injustice, if you've detected a sense of imbalance and inequity in your own self-development, being in tune with God and listening to your consciousness, your conscience, rather, not letting yourself get too arrogant, breaking the Ten Commandments,

Starting point is 00:06:17 theft and murder and unfa. in trades and in your time to hedonistic values like self-discipline were core to the Christian ethic and we see that out of that a general at least if nothing else through the unification of morals people were able to eventually little fiefdoms became counties became you know province and states became countries that were unified together over centuries of gradual elevation of the level of trust among communities through trades and communications and allies allies ships during wars out of that simultaneous with it possibly because of it science emerged the discipline

Starting point is 00:07:37 mind of the of the Christian specifically the Christian monks and the religious class in the monasteries were very disciplined and they weren't reading and philosophizing over their biblical scripts they were out they were encouraged to exercise physical labor and keep their mind and body sharp we see a parallel with a Rite paying attention both to all aspects of being but then as we got more and more technologically powerful we've noticed that spirituality waned or at least explicit religiousness the last 500 years until less and less people maybe revered or respected or the community aspect of religion that keeps communities unified and together and perhaps even maybe makes the

Starting point is 00:08:53 individual not as not as morally having a little less moral integrity perhaps we at least risk that happening if if not intellectual integrity but you know intellectual integrity of course is at odds with um christianity if you're reading the bible too literally. So the last 500 years has been a general secularization, a distancing of the average individual from a communication with God, which in turn is a lack of a communication with a communication with any sort of sense of divinity about them and their lives and the world. and there's been movements to reconnect and to at least recognize the importance of being close and in the proximity of nature in the therapeutic the essential closeness with nature

Starting point is 00:10:12 the essential value of not distancing yourself too much from both nature and from a centrality of a sense of community and common values with your neighbor. And through all that, that's the current tension that we're living through in the historical epic, is the tension between a lack of belief in the literal, a sense of, I would say a general sense of disillusionment, with the Bible as a as a historical and scientific source of authority. Because for so long, before we had refined and sophisticated our sense of what the Bible was really saying from a historical and technical and scientific point of view about the way the world works,

Starting point is 00:11:26 the way matter operates on a scientific level. Some people still try to interpret that and that disillusioned many people over centuries with the rise of science and the incredible ability of science, scientific methods and theories to, you know, mathematically between Descartes and Galileo and Newton and all these great early scientists like this

Starting point is 00:11:55 that were able to say, well maybe god isn't the reason it rains and isn't the reason for earthquakes and cycles celestial cycles of the planets and moons and sun um maybe biology chemistry are more under our in our control than we used to think and this uh this gives us a general sense of skepticism towards anyone claiming that the Bible has priority and precedence and authority over our scientific understanding of the world and what our own agency and independence and self-realization self-determination and being able to discover for ourselves how the world works without having to refer to a religious text but there's always the impulse of the individual

Starting point is 00:13:15 that's existed for ever to there's always the impulse of religious experience within the individual and it's deeply felt the closer generally the closer you are to nature it's felt in profound interactions between humans but it's also felt in the irrefutably belittling effect of standing in front of a vast landscape particularly large earthly structures like canyons mountains oceans but also beyond earthly like the stars that you're observing your being something larger than yourself and through through psychological experiences, whether they're drug-induced or not, hallucinogenic rituals or undertaking, or just they're good or bad. You can't often, it's harder to deny the existence of a sense of something beyond us and deeper than us,

Starting point is 00:15:18 or at least deeper within us that we're not aware of, and that, territory that we could still further explore that science hasn't been able to penetrate yet even if you think it ultimately will and this yields itself to the a sense of and the idea of spirituality bob was known to have a deeply spiritual bent to him he didn't profess it very much um but he did give us clues into what that how that manifested itself and that was was often in his awe of nature and the creatures within nature, animals and his fondness for rehabilitating and surrounding himself with not only nature, but a little forest critters, as he would say. Points to a lot of spiritual aspects of Bob that we can't ignore.

Starting point is 00:16:29 Touch upon Bob's spiritual side. And we're going to see how that connects with predecessors in the painting world and otherwise to him that also point out a deep connection between spirituality and nature between societal progress between what we do as societies with our free time self-development and all these again constellate around bob and what he chose to do with his life. I said at the beginning there is a unity and a harmony about Bob and what he did when he talked about what he believed What he felt about Life and how it should be lived and what he wanted his legacy to be what he wanted to mean to other people what other people meant to him

Starting point is 00:17:46 it's not exactly clear if Bob was a specifically a Christian fairly clear that he at least was raised in a Christian society of a background between his family and definitely had a sense of a God in a relationship to him in the article Alston Ramsey says that Steve said that he had a spirituality, but it, and he was religious. It just wasn't the religiousness that the priests were peddling, you know. There was a reverberation, a vibration of divinity within existence, everything about it, himself included, and others. In the book they

Starting point is 00:19:00 talk about him being a sort of secular priest almost a shaman a healer a therapist these are all aspects of his spirituality coming into play and I think it's a very important part of his popularity his endurance and his how he's so endearing how so many people find him so endearing in In chapter four, they say that the shaman upon this before is marked as an individual in among his, his peers. Often by an early trauma, an early sense of trauma. Bob's finger accident is at least to that. I wrote here, ancient tribal societies. Of course, everything was very mythically.

Starting point is 00:20:33 infused. All of existence was marinating in your tribe's mythology. Your life was dictated by the gods and the ancestors that came before you. The fate of the entire society was interly linked with yourself, your current individuals, the past, and future relatives of yours as well it's no leap of imagination to see that any individual um any major experience or occurrence or phenomenon experienced by an individual would be of course interpreted through this lens and shamans were if you were attacked by an animal or you had something serious happened to you you know having your finger cut off isn't exactly trivial it's not the same as you know, a near-death experience, although in that time it certainly could have been,

Starting point is 00:21:47 but it's some sort of traumatic experience nonetheless. And back then, there were experiences like that were considered a, having been chosen by the ancestors, a vision quest of some sorts. You were set aside as a person perhaps maybe more in touch with, divinity some spirituality some essence of the spirits that inhabit the community and are involved in the community than other people I think that still carries on into modern society we we have a tendency to feel a sense of fate and destiny when things out of our control happen to us or even things within our

Starting point is 00:23:06 control if they shift the direction of our life it's hard not to feel like your life is being led in a certain direction by an external force it's interesting that bob chose to become this healing figure you know this priest this therapist employing all these tens of thousands of YouTube comments in and of themselves reveal that therapeutic the therapeutic aspect of his shows and how how healing how comforting how encouraging how positive how impactful how liberating they are you can do it there's no mistakes this is your world it's hard to ignore even if it's not directly shot communism, the spiritual aspect of Bob, they make an interesting point about his fusion of conservation

Starting point is 00:24:32 and attention to nature, attention to the world around us, specifically nature, the world untouched by human technology, and returning to nature and being in nature. He often said he liked to walk in the woods and near his home in Fairbanks there and talk to the trees and he's, He said, and that's our secret. Don't tell anybody. But he communed with nature. He communed with nature, undoubtedly. And that's not exactly something normal that everybody does or will admit to doing

Starting point is 00:25:10 because it's not considered normal, even if they do. Anything was a way of him sharing his spirituality. Even if it wasn't a direct sermon of any explicit religious bent, he was certainly trying to share his the depth of his experience with nature that he felt and what Lao Tzu called harmony we find a similarity with Bob like I opened this video with or the previous depending on but they say on top of and they make another connection so Lao Tzu is Chinese philosophy, religion They have a apparently from what I understand a much more complex and hard to

Starting point is 00:26:09 to parse fusion between their philosophy and their religion in the East versus in the West where we have religion and you have philosophers but they stay very much bounded within that religion if they're Christian thinkers Christians and then you have secular philosophers that practice philosophy very distinct from religion. St. Francis of Assisi in the Christian tradition and history of Christianity, he labeled this what Bob called Joy, Brotherhood. Boss has a Byzantine icon, Christian saint. They say his afro is his halo.

Starting point is 00:27:30 Let's see right here. Good more than that. That's just a trivial observation. The landscape painting itself was his spiritual activity. Animal-loving St. Francis Assisi popularized. He was animal. It's mostly associated with caring for animals. And snow.

Starting point is 00:28:06 you know again it's a nice connection with bob any pet squirrels bob at pepod ppod junior bob's paintings which we can only assume he was the one who named had a spiritual bent to them like divine elegance divine beauty bob often anthropomorphized nature setting saying it's uh he was fond of you know to describing trees saying they need friends and clouds and all aspects of his paintings saying they were old young whether they needed some help needed a friend and another version of another member of their species next to them or animals climbing them of course he would give them actual emotions lots of things were happy like like he got from Bill Alexander.

Starting point is 00:29:31 Some were sad. Some were tired. Like him. The landscape itself, 100 years before him, there was a whole history, a tradition of, there's a whole school, the Hudson River School, based out of New York.

Starting point is 00:29:51 Painters painting the American landscape, which itself was influenced by a whole European tradition, much older, painting the European landscape, often with ruins, because America doesn't have many ruins, if at all. So we didn't have that aspect in much of American painting, but the famous Caspar David Friedrich's man with a cane standing over the misty mountains from the top of a peak, it symbolizes the romantic visions of nature,

Starting point is 00:30:27 depicting the natural world with having a deep source of misty, and beauty to it something that we haven't been pointing to a lack of science to have been able to explain and peel back yet we don't know anything about consciousness and science and there's a there's aspects of our experience that are obviously not yet able to be explained through just neurons firing We can't define very easily at least. Concepts like beauty, love and warmth and in the emotional sense. Rapture, awe of nature, hate. Can't experience negative emotions either objectively. You can't read the definition of hate and just understand it. You have to experience it.

Starting point is 00:31:43 And, you know, there's a lot of depth, there's a lot of symbolism, there's a lot expressed in landscape paintings. Thomas Cole, a famous guy we're going to be talking about shortly. His paintings are often known to have been pristine examples of divine perfection. And we're going to talk also about how Bob deliberately made his nature other than, I think, episode 2 of season. to he painted Mount McKinley. I don't think he ever painted a physical, a actual landscape that exists in reality. Everything was a idealization from his own imagination, even if it was loosely based off, you know, he was known to have gotten inspiration and used postcards and, you know, just pictures of general locations to influence and get ideas from. But, um,

Starting point is 00:32:50 They were all at heart, the creation of his own imagination. Henry David Thoreau's pragmatic and irreligious. He was outwardly atheistic or at least non-Christian. And even that depiction of his life of Walden Pond is contrasted with the, you know, it contrasted the transcendent simplicity of existence out there in such a natural place with the superfluous and trivial and shallowness of his busy daily life in the city before and after that transcending experience

Starting point is 00:33:43 that he had at Emerson's Walton Pond. Francis of Assisi's one of his writings was canticle of the sun. It calls out and praises the brother of the sun, brother of the wind and the air, sister of the moon and the water phrases that are overlapped with Eastern traditions and mythologies and art

Starting point is 00:34:17 and writings Bob tapped into all this after promorcizing his nature and importantly he in espousing the divinity the power the ability

Starting point is 00:34:37 the potential within all of us what he was doing was mirroring what St. Francis in particular was doing way before, you know, a thousand years before Martin Luther told us all to read the Bible for ourselves instead of just listening and taking good faith that the priests, the local priests' interpretation of it was the correct one, St. Francis of Assisi was impelling people to recognize that they had direct contact with God themselves, simply by the fact that they were divine individuals created in God's image, as the Christian tradition implies in itself, that you didn't need to go to an institution to feel a connection

Starting point is 00:35:37 to revere and feel that divine communication. Bob, well, St. Francis said anyone can have direct communion. We line through intimate, direct contact with reality. Specifically nature, though. Specifically being out in nature. In the book here, they say that against the hierarchical model of the Catholic Church and the art world, St. Francis and Bob because Bob supplanted the art world

Starting point is 00:36:29 he didn't he didn't you know discourage people from going to art school but he also wanted to encourage people to follow their own visions and their own agency and sense of beauty and not be not be blindly led at least

Starting point is 00:36:53 be aware of where your interest diverge from what any sort of art teacher is telling you your interest should be and uh both of these figures st francis and bob were against in essence any hierarchical model of at least in terms in the sense that as far as they were obstacles to connecting with your own abilities to create art or your own ability to commune with God. You didn't need a middleman. Respectively, they preached a message that anyone could participate in a simple life of communion with nature, with animals, with God's blessings.

Starting point is 00:37:50 I mean, Bob ended virtually, if not every episode, saying, God bless, my friend. Unmistakably, there is a spirituality, a deep spiritual. with Bob. His fundamental belief, his conviction, his dogma was that something he didn't question was that anyone could paint.

Starting point is 00:38:20 And they didn't need to earn a master's degree or fine arts or be touched by Michelangelo, as he often said, or go to a fancy school or be of a certain status or member of a class of society. To do it. There's an

Starting point is 00:38:39 idea about a happiness gap in life. Bob was clear that there is a connection between painting, between expressing yourself more generally maybe, and the happiness, the satisfaction, the contentment, not even if it's not necessarily joy. The, again, the meaningfulness, I think at its root, that's what all the positive experiences in life have in common is that they're meaningful they feel like they're not worthless in the final analysis and bob wanted everyone he didn't want there to be any institutional obstacles to accessing this experience and enriching people's lives i mean he went to new york central park and apparently there was a quarter a quarter million people

Starting point is 00:39:54 showed up at that event. Of course, you know, he didn't charge anybody for that. He was out there. I mean, maybe he sold whatever artwork he painted or maybe he auctioned it off, most likely. But anybody could stop by and see them, take a picture with them, paint along. Specifically, that's a very important part of that.

Starting point is 00:40:23 And Bob wanted to, again, just like St. Francis emphasized the the power and the ability of the individual to access these deep, deep, deep experiences for themselves without needing a metal man to tell them how to do it, when, and where. Mr. Rogers, of course, he's equally in, if not more so, a well-known public TV personality, He focused his efforts on children, but Bob also focused on children, you know, of all age groups. But they have a lot in common. And Mr. Rogers, interestingly, was explicitly. He went to seminary and trained to become a pastor, our priest.

Starting point is 00:41:17 I guess a Protestant priest. Or at least it says that he intended to go to seminary after college. But instead he chose to go into the next. nascent medium of TV after encountering a TV at his parents home in 1951. Remember this is only about six years after the end of World War II and I'm sure to someone who was so deeply religious as Mr. Rogers, Fred Rogers was, that was very impactful event and it probably made him reanalyzed just reevaluate. what it is that our society's doing to, at least ours in America,

Starting point is 00:42:11 to leading to such catastrophic devastation. In a CNN interview, he said, I went into TV because I hated it. So, and I thought there's some way of using this fabulous instrument to nurture those who would watch and listen. So he worked for NBC in New York City for a while. in his show Mr. Rogers' neighborhood spent fewer

Starting point is 00:42:46 they were distinguished from another public TV famous TV children's show Sesame Street and that he spent fewer resources on research but he did use early childhood education concepts taught by famous

Starting point is 00:43:04 intellectuals and psychologists in his lessons and he saw his responsibility as less academic intellectual rational you know reading writing and arithmetic and more moral more ethical focusing on relationships that and emotions the psychology things that children weren't going to explicitly be taught at that time in school he was interestingly very religious on a spiritual level but also on a physical and daily level

Starting point is 00:44:00 he was very regimented woke up 4.30 I said this in the last video but it's cool to know that he um he was physically fit he's not very physically in a muscular sense imposing but he you look at him he was never overweight and in fact

Starting point is 00:44:20 he swam he was a devout swimmer swam every morning swam laps which is a deceptively vigorous activity to do if you guys

Starting point is 00:44:36 have ever swam much you would know that and he he swam every single day made a point to do that kept his weight down he played piano he was artistic and in particular with his weight he kept it at 143 i don't know how many people know this but i

Starting point is 00:44:57 didn't because surely not only because but i'm sure it helped it added a nice layer of symbolism behind it um the phrase i love you the each word in that phrase corresponds to the order of numbers in the number 143. The number of letters and I in love and you is one four and three respectively. Pretty cool. Yeah, he knew, he recognized a need for attention to children's emotions and just deeper spiritual concepts that we, that science does not tackle and is not in the position to tackle yet has not reached a sophistication and a depth to to analyze with any with any effectiveness really he noticed that society is too noisy we talk too much and don't listen enough there's not enough pauses and there's too much noise and we'll be touching upon noise in a little bit

Starting point is 00:46:27 It's a very interesting concept and over-stimulation, over-saturation with noise, too much noise and not enough signal in the noise. They even talk about Joseph Campbell, a famous student of Carl Jung's, or at least a famous follower of Carl Jung's, psychology and philosophy. His Joseph Campbell's, one of his more famous lines was follow your bliss. Campbell, they say in the book, speaks about the connection between art and mythology, often saying that the work of the artist is to interpret the contemporary world as experienced in terms of relevance to our inner life. Carl Young wrote in his book, Aeon Researches into the Phenomenology of the Self. In a chapter that is tellingly titled Christ in the symbol of the self,

Starting point is 00:47:57 the self being a psychological concept Carl Jung often used and very thoroughly elaborated on, he wrote that no tree it is said that can grow. He didn't attribute the saying, but he was pointing to the fact that it wasn't him that came up with it. No tree can grow to heaven unless its roots reach down to hell. There's a nature, a mix between nature and symbolism and religious ideas all throughout history and all religions. There's the world tree of Norse mythology and a lot of native cultures. They all base the concept of reality around a, of experience in the world. itself around a tree or some sort of massive figure like the turtle with the ocean around it and

Starting point is 00:49:03 but was often known to as he was explaining and describing more literal concepts of you know needing dark of needing a contrast between dark and light all the all the time he often used trees as he was talking about the painting the technical artistic difference between light and dark and how you need a contrast of both to be able to how each feed off each other but he would also make the metaphorical connection as i've mentioned a couple times before it's just really important to recognize though between happiness and sorrow you know saying the you're really can't know happiness I believe unless you have a little sorrow in your life otherwise you wouldn't know when the happy times come and Bob we've talked about he had

Starting point is 00:50:03 chronic health issues aside from reoccurring bouts of cancer he had headaches he had a heart attack in his 40s he had cancer in his 30s and it came back ultimately killed him in his 50s early 50s he died at 52 and despite all that despite his parents' death his second wife's death um other less serious but still influential sorrows and tragedies in his life he deliberately chose to remain optimistic to see the joy to have gratitude in everything and of course he's only human i'm sure he had plenty of human emotions that he showed outside and offset but on the show show he deliberately

Starting point is 00:50:55 again sanitized his world he made it a place of respite he made it a place of of joy but a place in which joy can thrive of gratitude of constant sayings of constant you know encouragement for us to see

Starting point is 00:51:20 nature and experience nature and experience and appreciate that we can experience something as beautiful as nature when we have the chance and a relationship with other people. The book constantly makes the connection that Bob recognizes not only the healing effects of creating art, but landscapes and the painting, uh, the proximity to nature that you feel when you're painting landscapes. He knew there was a healing effect his words had on viewers and the comments. combination of this, his style, his words, his landscapes, his philosophy of environmentalism and spiritual, you know, finding a depth in experiencing nature, seeing the world through different

Starting point is 00:52:13 eyes when you pay attention. He, you know, he envisioned a future and he would sprinkle it in every now and then, not a lot, but he would talk about his vision. of his grandchildren being able to inhabit these landscapes you know like this was Bob's dream was to take care of the world so it was still beautiful still pristine for his grandchildren which unfortunately it doesn't appear that he ever his son Steve ever had kids so but that's okay because he touched enough people where he has, you know, in essence, a whole generation of children that were influenced and appreciate him for who he was. And the message he was embodying, really. The concept of the symbolism

Starting point is 00:53:31 and the psychological impact that landscapes in general have you know being in nature and what our valuation what we what our love of landscape paintings if we're not directly in nature reveal about ourselves show us about ourselves Bob's choice to paint landscapes points to his spirituality and we can see there was a as I pointed to earlier there's a huge development that preceded bomb bomb wasn't the first landscape painter there's a whole movement that you know relates to the in the 17th and 18th 18th um and even the that was really I think culminating maybe in the 19th century the 1800s there's a landscape painting movement that progressively got more and more popular because it you

Starting point is 00:54:42 used to be paintings of historical or mythological figures that were portraits and pictures of people, less landscapes. And there is a series of landscape painters that really wanted to elevate landscape painting to this status. Or the human, the landscape rather than the human was the central figure of the painting. and central subject matter and as these landscapes were elevated there's a philosophizing that the this symbolized a interesting correlation it has no interesting correlation with the decline in religiousness but the incline in spirituality more secular perhaps spirituality um so psychologically it's very interesting

Starting point is 00:55:45 that as a society we were more increasingly drawn to nature and to incorporate nature in our parks and be surrounded by nature and react against over over you know building into industrialization and surrounding ourselves with too much man-made things that at least the ones the man-made things that lacked beauty and Sir Kenneth Clark, the famous historian, he was often on BBC and serious civilizations.

Starting point is 00:56:27 He said that perhaps the chief artistic creation of the 19th century was landscape paintings, the dominant art, he called it. It said the painting landscape is a normal and enduring part of our meaning the West's spiritual activity and there's a whole history that Bob was the inheritor of between landscape painting like I alluded to earlier and social criticism and movements for social progress and change and you know marrying the utopian visions of society with the utopian ideal landscapes of the future. One of the greatest landscape painters up there with Thomas Cole and a very large influence on

Starting point is 00:57:37 social reform in the 19th century in America in particular was John Ruskin. John Ruskin importantly linked the aesthetic and the divine and he in that time and still is today I guess the emergence of the criticism of and reaction towards the devaluation of human labor that the industrial revolution really brought on

Starting point is 00:58:13 because it made the artisan secondary to cheap products massively produced in large quantities it devalued the labor of the individual it generally

Starting point is 00:58:31 because you didn't have to be as skilled you didn't have to be a specialist anymore you were just mostly on an assembly line you were only having to be good at one small particular thing you didn't have to craft an entire product from end to end like most artisans do you were just cap in the little string of a

Starting point is 00:59:02 shoelace rather than creating a whole shoe in and of itself and there's an interesting correlation there between the arete and the balance of virtues that you cultivate under that ideal and the you know degradation of society when you start to forget about that and not pay attention to that and there's an imbalance or a correlation at least between the self-development of the individual if it's imbalanced and the fate of society that is made up of all these imbalanced individuals and John Ruskin famously pointed out that and this is no access to the artisan's joy in creating free uh and in freely creating and and you know

Starting point is 01:00:07 developing himself as a as a as a as a being intellectually spiritually and physically and you know so much of factory work suppresses this you're not making money for yourself you're not you're a master of your own destiny you're not creating your own direction in your work you're you're a cog in a wheel he said that we want man to always be thinking we we want one the problem with a society was that currently in you know the 1800s the worker wasn't allowed to think and express his own personality and ideas using his hands rather than machinery says it's an issue that we want one man to always be thinking and another to be working and we call one a gentleman and another just a you know

Starting point is 01:01:08 simple operative whereas the workmen ought to be thinking and the thinker ought to be working physically moving both should be gentlemen in the best sense the mass of society is made up of morbid thinkers he says and miserable workers it's only by labor that thought can be made healthy and only by thought that labor can be made happy and the two cannot be separated with impunity without you know negative consequences this is both an aesthetic attack on and a social critique of the division of labor from industrialization and this had a profound effect a profound effect on William Morris a thinker that Congdon and company bring up later in the book and we will too the 19th and into the 20th centuries there was a romantic movement that intensified and

Starting point is 01:02:19 And Bob was no, he didn't escape this. He was a romantic. He wasn't a hard secular rationalist. The romantic movement intensified the existing interest in landscape art. And remote and wild landscapes now became more prominent. In the United States, the Hudson River School that we talked about, was prominent. In the middle to late 19th century, so around 1900 is when it disbanded in its heyday, is probably the best known native development in landscape art in America.

Starting point is 01:03:06 These painters, they created works of mammoth scales that attempted to capture the epic scope of the American landscapes that inspired them. And Thomas Cole was arguably its leader, acknowledged founder a kind of he embodied a kind of secular faith in the spiritual benefits to be gained from the contemplation of natural beauty

Starting point is 01:03:37 there's a great little self-made documentary you know like YouTube documentary but it's like 10 years old so it's cool to see stuff that old on YouTube but called the course of empire

Starting point is 01:03:52 Thomas Cole's warning to America and Thomas made criticisms of the American Empire Cole noticed the documentary says Cole noticed the cruelty of man's imperial dominance he was awestruck by the remains of Roman culture he had gone on a tour from America into Italy and Europe greater Europe touring the cities but also the out of rural landscapes and the the country scenes and saw a lot of the, you know, the ruins in both of those places. And he said none but those who can see an experience in person, the remains of antiquity can really understand what ancient Rome was.

Starting point is 01:04:50 They filled the mind with wonder. And we can't but contrast the energy of the ancients with the effeminacy of the modern. And what a difference between the builders of these great ruins and those modern people just engaged in their excavation. He's worried he reveres the greatness of Rome, for instance, but he also is very aware of the collapse of it and is trying to pay attention and learn lessons for America of what not to do. He said, traveling through the ancient ruins and landscapes, the documentarists set heightened his awareness of the cyclical patterns of empires and the vulnerability of the budding American empire to these deep historical trends.

Starting point is 01:05:47 Some of the later Hudson River school artists such as Albert Bierstadt created less comforting works that placed a greater emphasis and a great deal of romantic exaggeration on the raw, even terrifying power of nature. And I think Bob's decision to use more peaceful, tranquil environments

Starting point is 01:06:12 reveals something about his temperament and personality and his message. And like I said, a, the link between, there was a link between these, these popular landscapes, the overwhelming

Starting point is 01:06:32 and increasing popularity throughout the 1800s of these popular landscapes and social movements. And Congdon makes a connection there with Bob and clearly Bob as a landscape artist was at least partially if not

Starting point is 01:06:53 very significantly influenced by other American landscape painters and other cultures too European I'm sure but being an American I'm sure he was influenced by the Hudson River School

Starting point is 01:07:10 and they couldn't help make the connection between the there is a whole utopian education reform societal reform movement that was influenced by and led by in some cases painters of the hudson river school and other landscape painting schools um they say significant to bob's success on the television series series, the classes and the enterprise, is Bob's charisma. His charisma coupled with the philosophy of education that he employed, that informed, that was informed by a utopian impulse to promote the potential in all who participated. Daniel Trorticoff described the utopian impulse

Starting point is 01:08:23 as a response, quote, a response to existing social conditions and an an attempt and an attempt to transcend and transform those conditions to achieve an ideal. This impulse is evidenced broadly in culture and society, including the arts. And Barbara Novak in 1974 argued that this impulse is coalesced in American landscape painting around a belief in the redemptive qualities of unspoiled, pristine nature. This impulse was shaped by the writings of famous philosophers and writers as Rousseau, William Wordsworth, Emerson. In the United States, it contributed to the formation of an artistic identity group

Starting point is 01:09:23 known as the Hudson River Schools that express their love of nature through their paintings. Yeah, Thomas Cole, Frederick Edwin Church, John Friedrich Kensett. Among these artists and their admirers, contemplating the landscape, including the painted landscape, was equated with the contemplation of virtuous deeds. In this regard in 1830, a contributor to the North American Review noted that the beauty in nature and in the arts is nearly allied to the love. of that which is good. So close is the association that it's often been doubted whether beauty can be anything more than a visible manifestation of all those

Starting point is 01:10:16 amiable moral qualities of which the mere idea fills the heart with delightful emotions and confers a charm on every person and thing with which they appear to be associated. They say the landscapes produced by the Hudson River school painters depicted nature as a paradise on earth undefiled with few human traces it's important to note that the landscape painted landscapes painted by these artists despite the implied realism in their work because it wasn't abstract or um it was just very literal and abstractly painted at least the shapes were you know the subjects the objects and the like rocks trees all the components of the landscape impressionist that's what i was going to say it wasn't impressionist it was very

Starting point is 01:11:28 sharply defined lines very real very photorealistic despite this though these were often synthesized and idealized landscapes while sketches might have been done in the field the actual paintings were accomplished in the studio. So they were informed and they were elaborated upon and they were manipulated and transformed in order to gain a certain final image that more closely related to their vision, their utopian vision. And then they go on to talk about more social reformers when in particular was Bronson Alcott. and said among the transcendentalists influencing the Hudson River School

Starting point is 01:12:21 was some like Bronson Alcott who promoted the link between a transcendentalism which was a philosophy education utopian education and utopian change now transcendentalism

Starting point is 01:12:42 I don't screw up if I tried to So let's look it up. It's a movement from the early 19th century, the 1820s and 30s, in Upper East America, New England. A core belief is in the inherent goodness of people and nature. And while society and its institutions have corrupted the purity of the individual, people are at their best when they're truly self-reliant and independent. They often saw divine experience inherent in the everyday, rather than believing in a distant heaven.

Starting point is 01:13:44 In another world, they took the belief in heaven and kingdom of God on earth, serious. The realization of heaven on earth. They saw a physical and spiritual phenomenon as a part of dynamic processes rather than discrete entities. So it was a holistic view of reality. They felt that there could be divinity in any experience, whether it's work or play or any explicitly spiritual activity like actually going to church. Imagine that having an actual spiritual experience in church or at temple or at the mosque, rather than it being more a social gathering.

Starting point is 01:14:40 Imagine that. What if that was the norm? They emphasized subjective intuition over objective empiricism. Adherents believe that individuals are capable of generating completely original insights with little attention or deference to past masters. It arose as a reaction to or protest against the general state of intellectualism and spirituality. at the time. I think, again, with the decline of prominence as God in the church

Starting point is 01:15:22 as the central cohesive element in society became a skepticism towards spirituality more generally. And so, therefore, I think it wasn't taken as seriously. It wasn't revered as much. It wasn't respected. Its status diminished, as well as its practice, probably, and intellectualism and intellectualism was

Starting point is 01:15:46 put on a pedestal and this was an imbalance because of course you know as I was trying my best to make a point about intellectualism rational scientific thought is

Starting point is 01:16:03 very powerful very important but isn't in and of itself a complete picture and doesn't doesn't completely characterized the human experience the human mental field of experience and capabilities the doctrine of the Unitarian Church as taught by Harvard Divinity School was closely related to this transcendentalism and emerged from English and German Romanticism of the late 1700s the biblical criticism of

Starting point is 01:16:41 John Gottfried Herder Friedrich Leiermacher and the skepticism of the English philosopher David Hume as well as the German philosophers Immanuel Kant in the school of German idealism. Okay, so ONA may have also been strongly influenced by Hindu texts on philosophy of the mind and spirituality, especially the Upanishads, which especially in the 1700s and after were being widely previously they hadn't been widely translated in the west into english so they were starting to have an effect as well in order to you know you have to practice anything that you want to get good at and develop more finely and painting wasn't able to you can't paint

Starting point is 01:17:51 a complete picture without having the picture in mind first you can't just like you can't do anything without having some general idea of how to go about doing it and what the end product is going to look like you can adapt along the way but you have to have the vision in your mind to be most effective in beginning and completing it and just like having a utopian ideal of society you have to know the steps to get there you have to know what to change you have to know what you have to begin with and um there's a huge metaphorical there's a huge analogy overlap between the two because you know anything you do very often it overlaps and develops skills that translate over into other areas of experience in life and behavior, action, being.

Starting point is 01:18:54 For Bob Ross, the, you know, the scenes obviously weren't real he was painting because nature rarely grows as perfect as his, you know, perfectly landscaped his clearings here with a perfect vista of a mountain there and the trees just perfectly dead here in the front so that you can see the ones in the background and, you know, nice slope, just gracefully going up to the water's edge. with a perfect prominence out into the water like that. It would be nice to be sitting under those trees and make a nice little hammock there.

Starting point is 01:19:37 Have a nice picnic. Nature would have eroded all this out, no way. But it's still a beautiful scene because you could imagine inhabiting it. And just like that, you could, if you paint a beautiful enough, I could imagine that would exist at some point. maybe nature would eventually erode it so it has some sort of anchor to reality you have to paint a picture of so in order to you know translate that to something like social reform you have to

Starting point is 01:20:15 imagine well you have to take into account the rules of society in history the what history tells us human behavior psychology sociology um the patterns of history what works what clearly doesn't work what mistakes we don't want to make but what might be open for re-evaluation and you have to have a vision before you can complete it you have to have a vision of the possibilities of where the mistakes could be made, where they could be rectified. And with Bob, you know, he wasn't interested in social reform per se, but he was reforming the individuals, giving them a view of his philosophy of his world that he wanted to exist. You know, and that, for him, focused around environmentalism and conservation.

Starting point is 01:21:27 He even said multiple times that he used to hunt with a camera. When he fished he always put him back you know give him a little pat pat on the two-two and let him go so we can catch him again tomorrow So he wasn't a yeah, I'm sure he fished and ate fished but He he enjoyed and appreciated and he wasn't frivolous with his You know he wasn't extreme with his hunting and fishing if he did so this character Bronson Alcott here the link between the transcendentalism education and utopian social change any good social reformist knows you got to get the children when they're young if you want to indoctrinate them with your philosophy you know children are very they absorb information very readily they're very impressionable children can pick up bad as well as good habits and they could be lifelong habits that they form if they're

Starting point is 01:22:56 taught consistently enough bronson alcott famously um worked with elizabeth peabody i believe of the peabody awards fame and they Peabody opened the first U.S. kindergarten a term from from German because it was invented first over there thought to

Starting point is 01:23:27 put children in a social environment and a school like environment and specifically encouraged play and the word means kinder children and garden garden is garden so a garden of children

Starting point is 01:23:45 and it means it was a place for really instilling the values of these utopian ideals that Bronson Alcott and Elizabeth Peabody and many others were promoting. And some of these interesting and I think really positive, useful, practical, good concepts are a teaching style based on conversation against corporeal or physical punishment. I think if you're going to do that, you do it at home on your own time with your own children. And that's on you if you overdo it. I think the place, I think school is no place for physical punishment and luckily it's not anymore. But it certainly was at a certain time. He implemented things like he instead of hitting the child, he would offer his own hand to be hit. offending student to hit, saying that any failing was the teacher's responsibility. Instead of hitting the child, he would offer his own hand for that child who would normally be

Starting point is 01:25:22 hit to hit, and he felt the shame and guilt induced by this method, because he would justify it by taking accountability for the child's actions on himself, or or the teacher saying it was their fault. If they hadn't taught the child to behave correctly, he thought this was far superior to any method that, you know, instilling fear by punishment in them. When he used physical correction, he required that the students be unanimous.

Starting point is 01:25:57 And on top of that, unanimously in support of doing it, even including the student to be punished. So he is making the student who would hit him on the hand for acting poorly themselves or incorrectly, take accountability for deciding to hit their teacher on the hand. And in turn, also that would be an admission of guilt on their part, that they did something wrong to merit that sort of merit punishment of either party. Peabody, she opened the first kindergarten in the U.S., long before most educators.

Starting point is 01:26:47 She embraced the premise that children's play. This is really important here, because Bob employs play in a sense of high-spiritedness about him all the time. this wit, playful creative exploration of, and course correction and, you know, doing things spontaneously. Long before most educators, she thought children's play has intrinsic developmental and educational value. Again, the connection with Buddhism, she was the first translator into English of the most famous Buddhist scripture, the Lotus Sutra. very influenced in general is by Buddhism in Eastern philosophy promised joy he promised success in the paintings even to the beginner because he knew the intrinsic value of trying

Starting point is 01:28:00 things out of being creative and he didn't want to you know he wanted to encourage his business model was of course this would give him more money more customers but it would also in doing that he knew that his business model like I touched upon in part one was a win-win it was symbiotic they the more people he reached the more products he sold but the more people he knew would challenge their own creativity would experience something similar to joy if not joy itself in the act of creating and painting and they would they would learn something about themselves they would develop new skills they would learn that they could learn they would learn to appreciate nature to pay attention to nature based on how waterfalls or trees bend and lean and grow and

Starting point is 01:29:07 in what groups and what size and how mountains the contours of mountains yeah this is really really uh it just it's an onion it just peels back layers and layers of it aspect of this it was the called the the temple school temple school um in boston founded by ronson alcott and elizabeth pepottie and the core tenant was that under the right circumstances Everyone could reach their potential. They thought education is intrinsically connected with the utopian. You know, because you can't have the end result you want unless you plan it out and impact the people who become the end result at a young age. And they say, I guess Michael Peters and John Moore in 2006 argued that,

Starting point is 01:30:25 indeed utopias can be thought of as fundamentally education in the sense that they are designs for living designed explicitly for encouraging the development of certain kinds of habits dispositions and attitudes you know towards each other in the world and this connects Kongden connects this with leisure time it's telling like we touched upon before what people do it's telling of a society and the people who make up and are made by it's a two-way exchange you know of influence their society about what when we consider what they choose to do with their free time what what people are inclined to do how magnanimous are they how you know connected to their community are they how interested in self-development are they there was a stephen gelber in

Starting point is 01:31:35 1999 argued that in hobbies leisure in the culture of work in america that a basic distrust a basic distrust and discomfort of leisure or free time encouraged americans to engage in hobbies in the 1800s when the industrial revolution while it devalued individual creativity and labor it also you know and made them made work simpler but less interesting less creative more monotonous you know the skill level reduced dramatically to be able to make a product you just had to have a bunch of people know how to do one thing very well but you know and together they made a complete product but individually no one was that creative only the business owner structuring and creating the business and the inventor of the product or crafter of the

Starting point is 01:32:42 initial design of the product I guess engineer was the one of being creative there while that was a negative aspect the positive aspect was a general and you can't deny this a very rapid rise in wealth and therefore surplus goods a no longer a need to work yourself to the bone to be able to make ends meet so therefore there's more leisure time and there is an emergence of a craft industry you know with the christian work ethic we touched upon Christians they thought very poorly of they thought idleness was the devil's workshop they looked down upon laziness you know gluttony these values that very prevalent in roman society right before its collapse dishonesty corruption um they they put all those in the same basket and so especially in america there

Starting point is 01:34:12 although there was a decline in Christianity in Europe. In America, there was a corresponding decline in some areas, but in other areas, and there was very influential religious movements, revivalists, people trying to revive the religious fervor. And you can imagine if you're on the west, on the frontier, not in some civilized, mostly peaceful European village, but you're on the American frontier.

Starting point is 01:34:44 You're, you know, you're, you have the genocide committed against the Indians and Native Americans, and they want constant retaliation for that, of course. You're constantly infringing on their lands. So you're constantly at war with them, with other European settlers, colonizers. You're constantly just at war with nature. There's wild animals, bears, tigers, you know snakes crocknows down here you're constantly fighting battling the elements battling famine starvation if your crops you're settling new frontiers nothing is established nothing is

Starting point is 01:35:30 guaranteed you need a deep belief that you're doing that you have god at your back just you know to put it simply and all that is a um informs the american spirit and the american perspective in the in the dedication and discipline perseverance courage and you know um just hard work just just belief in success and the you know future rewards that they'll be able to re reap if they sacrifice metaphorically spiritually physically here and now with hard work and a disciplined mind and body you know to achieve their goals so there was a deep spirituality about America that Europe didn't quite have in on the whole and this has carried over until the present day but definitely in even definitely World War II after

Starting point is 01:36:47 words you know there's a huge unity among nations in particular um there's a basic distrust and you know people wanted to stay busy the whole craft industry emerged uh in the beginning of the 19th through the 20th centuries painting was among these activities and um yeah bill alexander in the 1960s he combined landscape painting with an educational program for hobbyists. And he opened the door for a bill in this way, making it a business model. And his purpose, Alexander's purpose, was, quote,

Starting point is 01:37:45 capturing dreams and putting them on canvas. It wasn't long after Bob retired from the Navy, like we found out last time, that he started being a teacher, being an instructor for Alexander and his educational enterprise to all these new hobbyists. especially after the war you know think about the 60s were only 15 20 years after World War II

Starting point is 01:38:14 70s only 30 were in 2022 we're only 30 years removed from you know I don't know Bill Clinton's presidency the Gulf War the 90s general Bob Ross's death I guess that's pretty relevant all this

Starting point is 01:38:45 leads to there's a huge philosophical movement or movement um there's a lot of philosophers paid attention and still do to consumerism and in leisure you know lack of leisure lack of proper use of leisure time i guess and um you know the with the rise of the industrial revolution came just a surplus of general goods and products and a lack of appreciation for what the old artisans used to really offer the quality products and until there was a reaction against it and in consumer society in American history a reader in the introduction it's a series of essays about consumerism you know the reduction of work of the work week from 1850 to the 1930s went from 64 hours to 40 hours

Starting point is 01:39:59 it's a massive reduction you have 15 extra hours a week and what do you do with it what is a as a society what does that do when you have more money and less time and more time yourself this one result that happened was more consumption There is also a reaction to that and a reaction to the devaluation of labor with these DIY movements. And, you know, there's a lot of people that recognize that it's a negative, it's a ailment of society. To have too many people not, again, not acting for their own best interest, not developing themselves, not applying themselves, not applying them. themselves learning new hobbies and trades and you know being extending out reaching more of their potential when you have too many people passively consuming and material products and

Starting point is 01:41:28 entertainment you don't grow you wither Dallas Smith in 1972 says the basic myth of modern American culture is that of consumption And that consumption is the goal of life. The Ford's Model T factory, 20-20 terms, paid about $160 a day. Maybe that's more like $200 now with inflation. But it reduced the typical work hour from workday, from 10 to 11, 10 or 11 hours to 8 hours. So you earned about $20 an hour adjusted for inflation. you know so there was a rise in pay in general and he he did set a massive trend in a standard

Starting point is 01:42:29 for factory work he was famously not overly exploiting his workers the way most factories were and that with this rise of wealth this rise of consumerism um for instance that came with it For instance, the number of malls, the proliferation of malls and shopping stores in general tells us something about this trend in 1945. There was only eight malls in 1960, just 15 years later. There's 3,840 malls in rapid expansion of our economy in America. Anybody who I don't even really remember this. I mean, maybe I've seen a few in my life when I was younger.

Starting point is 01:43:48 I was born in 1989. There used to be the store seers, which is, you know, I think almost about defunct now. It used to be essentially the Walmart of shopping malls. And there was a catalog, a physical, thick catalog that they, you know, mailed out. And Franklin D. Roosevelt in the 40s said that if you could give one book to the Soviets to teach them about the West, it would be this Sears catalog. And so that said, yeah, we have plentitude. We have surplus. We have access to luxuries. But the downside of industrialization overconsumption was that you lack individuation, you lack individuation, you lack.

Starting point is 01:44:41 meaning when you don't engage with yourself and others and develop and grow together and God yeah just the price on advertising you know people were companies were rampant with just trying to obviously consume with this growing economy came people preying on people's psychology through marketing advertising until it became a real big deal a real big problem In the 1979 crisis of confidence speech, President, President Jimmy Carter famously warned Americans

Starting point is 01:45:27 that too many of us are now worshipping self-indulgence and consumption. Human identity is no longer defined by what one does, but by what one owns. We've discovered that owning things and consuming things, though does not dissatisfy longing for meaning in the long run we've learned that piling up material goods can't fill the emptiness of lives which have no confidence and no purpose people were becoming really gluttones of materialism not just fast food but fast products cheap merchandise and cheap

Starting point is 01:46:11 fashion sigman freud's nephew edward bernays famously a little learned from his uncle and was a psychologist in and of himself really because he knew how to tap into the desires to make people want to buy products and manipulate them. In 1877 was the first year an advertising agency came onto the scene and less than 30 years later corporations were spending 95 million dollars in those dollars a year This was a linchpin of the new corporate economy and a crucial purveyor of the American dream. By 1919, you know, about 50 years later, World War I, advertising in America was $500 million a year a year. Okay, this guy, so there's a guy who famously inspired the Wukowski and Wachowski's to the Matrix series.

Starting point is 01:47:33 and they put his book he's it's Jean-Baudreard they put his book in the one of the early scenes in the first movie of the Matrix it's where Neo stores his illegal

Starting point is 01:47:49 disc drives and thumb drives and what not it's called a simulacra on simulation I haven't read it I've heard about the guy for years um I don't want to pretend that I'm able to interpret what it was, but he famously wrote about consumerism

Starting point is 01:48:09 and it in society more generally in the, you know, he was a philosopher. He tried to understand what, how we're being changed as individuals, as a society, through overconsumption, through digital media, which is really insightful into social and society and, society and culture in general. And according to the Stanford and Cycliaclopedia of philosophy, he continues to be of use and interpreting present social trends too. There is a concept. Him and Vablin came up with it called conspicuous, or at least used, Vablin came up with it and he used it conspicuous consumption and a display of commodities. He analyzed in his book theory of the leisure class. Bodriard argued that it's become extended to everyone in the consumer society.

Starting point is 01:49:24 What used to be the aristocracy, the royalty, you know, pissing contest for how much wealth you have now that everybody had access to at least some level of wealth and products that were cheap but could symbolize wealth by looking more expensive than that. really were. Think about like all the fake wood shells, UCM Publix or Publix Home Depot. Bodriard sees violent eruptions and sudden disintegration of society on the horizon for this vacuous stand-in for actual social status. He posits that the exploitation of workers' time and labor and their subsequent alienation from communities, because, this wouldn't result in their work is rarely a source of pride but only as you know monetary compensation is going to lead to the end of transcendence where the individuals can neither perceive their own true needs or another way of life they're they're becoming removed from our own

Starting point is 01:50:43 biological instincts and our needs our desires we're being manipulated we're being over saturated with cheap pleasures. We're not cultivating deep sense personhoods and senses of identity. And we're not in tune with mythology and spiritual narratives, overarching narratives of society that we used to be in so in tune with. And that used to inform the motivation for our every action used to help us get out of bed. we didn't even think it was so ingrained in the world uh we lived in everything was alive everything was had a purpose everything was towards a an end a heaven a paradise everything was progress

Starting point is 01:51:35 but now we get so confused over stimulated we don't know we're disoriented we have no orientation we have no direction we have no purpose no meaning and it's a huge problem if we if if we choose to partake in this over overly vacuous consumer society and he thinks at its core bodriard thinks that it's human creativity and potentiality that's at risk here in a media consumer society culture and consumption also become homogenized depriving individuals of the possibility of cultivating individuality and self-determination. For Bataya, another famous late 20th century philosopher, human beings were beings of excess with exorbitant energy,

Starting point is 01:52:40 fantasies, drives, needs, desires, like unique desires, not all the same. And this is, he's one of a key figure in post-modernism, which is another thing. don't understand, but I love exploring and just trying to see the overlaps and correlations with these ideas and ideas in history and how we interpret history and trends and historical, cultural movements. And Boudriard's postmodern universe is one that he calls hyper-reality. if anyone's ever watched

Starting point is 01:53:25 Rick Roderick, the philosopher long since dead, but he actually died in the late 90s, I think, but his videos he has videos on postmodernism, Nietzsche and philosophy in general.

Starting point is 01:53:42 Really interesting if you guys want a you know just a really entertaining but very deep thinker and communicator of deep ideas I highly recommend watching Rick Roderick

Starting point is 01:54:03 but that's where I learned about all these guys initially so this idea in this postmodern universe of Bodriards this idea of hyper-reality is one that entertainment information communication technologies they provide experiences that more and more intense and evolve and involving than the actual experience of life to the point where we get detached i guess we get snipped off from all we get untethered from reality we get ungrounded

Starting point is 01:54:45 and all work and no play it doesn't pay juliet shore um i said that the in the last 40 years or so years. The work week instead of decreasing has actually started to increase now and we're not really sure why but it's undoubtedly and Bob Ross this is from

Starting point is 01:55:13 1969 to 1989 a study was looking at this and over that period I'm pretty sure it has continued a little bit but I don't think it's gone down from 19 roughly 70 to 1990, American work hours has increased, and they're only topped by Japanese work hours,

Starting point is 01:55:38 from about 1800 to almost 1950, adding almost a 13th work month to the workforce. And Bob, I think, represented an antidote to all this. He wanted us to get grounded, get back in touch with nature, get our feet on the ground, out in the wild into reality. Because if nothing else, nature represents reality. It's not fake. It's not man-made. It's not a facade.

Starting point is 01:56:11 It's not a simulation. It's not anything we can deceive ourselves about navigating. You have to be wary of animals. about, you know, be wary of physics and the laws of nature and biology and, you know, toxic plants and poisonous insects and animals that might eat you. You have to be able to navigate the real world.

Starting point is 01:56:46 You have to be exposed to the elements. But then you can also feel the vibrancy, the vibration that we talked about Bob feelings of God, the vibration of God and spirituality and the spirit that's alive out there. You just let it in. And I'm not advocating New Ageism and, you know, telling you have to force this view on yourself. You just have to go out there and experience, experience that you, unlike being in the supermarket and you have the, what is it, supermarket, Dr. Darren Stalehoff said there's a sense of supermarkets.

Starting point is 01:57:29 he had a cool phrase but basically it's the delusion we get of being removed from the actual process of procuring meat raising animals on a farm slaughtering them putting them processing them putting them in packages shipping them to stores where we just you know drive our car getting a nice shot um go in some air-conditioned store and pick them out of a nice display of frozen meat and in our minds were so removed from the actual reality of what it takes to get that meat there how many you know it's so far away it's shipped from maybe up to hundreds of miles away in some cases it's um makes us out of touch with reality and you know all this are things that are hurting our psyche, our sense of, again, unification with the world.

Starting point is 01:58:39 And this increase in the work week that Shore is talking about in a 1991 Gallup poll, there's an indication that 43% of working parents experience a great deal of stress and conflict between work and family in personal life or happiness, you know, the satisfaction of your personal life, there's the burden of this. The work ethic and leisure activity, written by Morehouse, the work ethic and leisure activity said that

Starting point is 01:59:18 there's a huge correlation and we need to pay attention to the purpose given by one's job. And just how core and how integral to social stability it really is for people to have purpose. in what they do. They say clear he says clearly work not only serves to produce goods and services, but it also performs an essential psychic logistical function. Psychologistical. It operates as a great stabilizing integration, ego satisfying, central influence in the pattern of each person's life.

Starting point is 02:00:03 If the job fails to fulfill the needs of the personality, it's problem. whether man can find adequate substitutes provide a sense of achievement purpose justification for their lives and as a suggestion an ideal job would give you a sense of pride a sense of real contribution to you your family your community you're just like in the tribal setting we talked about leisure wasn't wasn't frivolous leisure was still purposes all activity all time spent doing something whether it was just you know horsing around with your friends and cousins and whatnot neighbors you are still engaging in your community you're reinforcing bonds and social ties everything had a purpose and we're realizing that the importance of that and the ramifications of ignoring that you know this wasn't just a single slice in time that that our time was

Starting point is 02:01:21 purposive all the time it was essentially the entire evolutionary history of humanity and if not the billion the three and a half billion years before we became you know before seven million years ago

Starting point is 02:01:39 when we diverged from jampanzees and it became our own homo genus it was at least in the last you know 500,000 years or 300,000 years whatever the current estimate is that we became homo sapiens that we were acting as a unified tribe community very much integrated into whatever group we belonged to another couple aspects of an ideal job or are a sense of affirmation of identity that you get with a belonging through, you know, connection with the end product.

Starting point is 02:02:24 You're not just another level in a pyramid. You can see the whole pyramid. You can see the whole building, the whole product, the planting and harvesting of the food. And that it's another aspect is that it's a. source of meaning and purpose because it contributes again to the overarching goal of society. I alluded to this in my intro that there was with this sprawl like we said it went you know we built thousands of shopping malls in just the first 15 years after World War II well that also the housing market also correlates into that we had to have we had you know baby boom we have we have an

Starting point is 02:03:18 entire generation we call we label baby boomers based on the booming increase in the number of births after World War II the economy was great there was surplus of everything there's no reason not to have children and there was a ton of children and there still is for you know a short while more at least but um there was new suburban sprawl new development happening left and right but with this suburban sprawl there was also more social ramifications people weren't in in dense cities or they had to interact with multiple people all the time just on your way out of your apartment building or down to the corner store you could live in a house in a, in a neighborhood,

Starting point is 02:04:21 without seeing anybody all day if, you know, you so choose. Or you just get in your car and you only have to interact with the cashier at the grocery store, the gas station. Go back home and you're back in isolation. And I think Bob, it really reached its peak in the late 80s, I think, right around there. And that's, interestingly, when Bob was on TV. and interestingly he was very popular very popular what correlated with all this is the tv you know consumption went from material to digital material didn't go away but we added a whole other complex layer of digital to it

Starting point is 02:05:06 but just as um as fred rogers recognized that the medium wasn't necessarily bad it was how you use it. So did Bob. I think he used TV the early symbol of American affluence and leisure. The symbolic and literal replacement of the family hearth as a place to gather around, to befriend and suggest to others a means by which they could achieve true individualism. And this was by a creative challenge as opposed to a super official, superficial appearance of you know individualism through consumption bob wanted to not only you know be keep uh give you a companionship in his personality and maybe some entertainment because of the gimmicky nature of just doing something cool fast but um he wanted to of course encourage us to be individuals and not

Starting point is 02:06:26 be victim to the fast pleasure, instant gratification, which is more and more rampant with the internet, TV 2.0. That was so tempting. Fred Rogers recognized the problem of modern over-stimulation, and I thought it was interesting between TV and cinema and action, and then music. I heard an interesting example recently. about pointing to this the negative effects of popularity um in action cinema from

Starting point is 02:07:27 erin bergstrom writes from three brothers film dot com jump cuts shaky cam instead of tracking you know uh the long like in good fellows yeah good fellows the the famous long scene tracking tracking camera they go all the way through the back of out of the car across the street into the bottom of the clubs you know back door of the kitchen all the way through the kitchen out of the kitchen through the um a lot the dining hall towards the stage weaving through the tables and finally landing at the table it was like a impressive shot all one take all one one one shot no cuts but nowadays you know transformer movies the most emblematic I guess of this shaky cam jump cuts Jason Bourne the Bourne series did this they did it well but

Starting point is 02:08:31 they still did a lot of shaky cam lots of very short jump cuts to simulate an actual the intensity of an actual fight Hong Kong filmmakers going back to the matrix they the wakowski's famously used uh long takes as well they had keanu reeves and laurence fishburn and kerryan moss and all the actors there use um trained for months to actually become proficient in martial arts enough to the point where they could use stunt doubles for you know to take a couple grabs of the stunt doubles back of the head and um make it more convincing but for the most part when you see their face it's them fighting uh you know choreographed fight scenes and it's very um it holds up to time too you don't just have this

Starting point is 02:09:37 whizbang cutting um he's like that's why 15 years out we remember the matrix action scenes but not Iron Man 3 is barely a year afterwards. He says, Bergstrom says Hollywood may be where the big money is, but big money doesn't buy imagination. The Wakowski's knew that an action scene was just, was more than noise and velocity, that the camera couldn't,

Starting point is 02:10:13 or maybe they're talking about Hong Kong filmmakers here. There's a revival, I think, of these long, steady tracking shots East Asian cinema He said they knew It's just more than noise And high velocity The camera couldn't be just doing something

Starting point is 02:10:38 Couldn't just be the camera Doing some superficial effect but they had to be capturing Something actually happening on screen too And maybe one day soon We'll you know we'll get the idea again And um In America here

Starting point is 02:10:53 He says At the moment though American action seems dead. It blew everything up too big and killed itself in the process. And I listened to the founder of Wisecrack, you guys probably know him if you if you don't. His name's Jared Bauer. He founded Wisecrack a philosophy YouTube channel essentially very very well done. And he makes compared to my content short. YouTube videos but they're about 20 you know 10 to 20 minutes long tackling in very efficient very entertaining very interesting order the deep philosophical concepts

Starting point is 02:11:40 often tying it into entertainment somehow TV movies and he is a a huge fan of the matrix but he also I was watching one of his videos recently where he was talking about John Wick and of course that's Keanu Reeves too and um it's very cool that Keanu is able to because like I said he trained in martial arts uh to do a lot of the action scenes in the matrix and and he does a lot of his own stunts in John Wick if not all of them but I'm sure you know there's a couple scenes where he doesn't want to be jumping off a building or something But it just goes to show you the success of John Wick proves that there's still a hunger for art quality, not just the cheap knockoff, you know, the imitation of quality.

Starting point is 02:12:54 The actual quality still holds up, holds its value, and hopefully there's a revival of demand for it in production of it. And another YouTuber I follow is meme analysis is the creator. His name is Chris Gabriel. And he was on a panel with the lead singer of Edward Sharp and the Magnetic Zeros. His name is Alex Ebert, who I guess his parents were actually a psychologist. And he's a really, he's an interesting character in and of all. They both are. very interesting

Starting point is 02:13:35 just fascinating they have they're fascinating people but also have very fascinating and I think insightful things to say about society and culture and psychology

Starting point is 02:13:52 and history and along these same lines in one of their talks he he brought up he was in a band before Edward sharp in the magnetic zeros called I'm a robot but it was in the early 2000s and there was this thing and it's actually on Wikipedia you can look it up called the loudness war and it was where I mean there's a whole he has a really cool interpretation of it now it connects with his view of

Starting point is 02:14:25 history and the evolution of culture and all that but essentially even since the 1940s we've been compressing music and I think the simplest explanation is that where there's peaks and valleys compressing is essentially closing the distance between those and so you're taking all silence moving it up you're taking the loudest peaks kind of tapering them off until they're all a consistent stream of stimulation He said that we need more negation, less of everything all at once, so that we can actually experience one another more deeply. There's an oversaturation of information

Starting point is 02:15:15 and we're not able to distinguish between peaks and valleys anymore. In music, this trend since the 1940s is, I think it might be starting to come out and not be as aggressive as it was in the 2000s, But he says if you took a record from the 60s, even a Led Zeppelin record, and compared it to a record from the 2000s, Lincoln Park or whatever, he said that you would be shocked at the difference in the waveforms. So if you took the whole album, you would notice a ton of individual variations on each song

Starting point is 02:16:01 and the album itself, you know, the image of waveforms, would look like it has a unique, you know, it would be a unique image of, of wave forms. Very distinct. The 2000s record, the Lincoln Park record, almost all of it would just be a single line. Not across the whole song, not only across the whole song, but across the entire album. It would just be, you know, from a certain distance, you would still be able to make out the uniqueness of the Led Zeppelin album?

Starting point is 02:16:44 Maybe that's a bad example because they are rock and a lot of others. No, but that's... They do have tons of quiet parts. But yeah, the rock. The Lincoln Park is just this uniformity to it that doesn't have

Starting point is 02:17:02 leave any room for the crescendos and the drops, the the slowing of and speeding up of the tempos and you know the character the thing that really gives depth to music so yeah it just looks like a flat line and then Alex Ebert of course I say of course because I've watched a couple of his videos now and he's very articulate and he says all you do is see you look talking about the difference there and they can park and all

Starting point is 02:17:41 you see is a flat line and what's a flat line death there's no more dynamism. And he elaborates that, speculates, extrapolates that to the wider society, saying, if all we are is just a bunch of noise on Twitter shouting at each other, that's death. There's no dynamism. There's no listening, being quiet so you can hear and interpret. It's just loud, flashy, impulsive, instant. ratification, all reactionary action.

Starting point is 02:18:23 There's no thought, there's no meditation, marination, there's no, yeah, there's no thought put into anything. There's no time for depth. And as I'm sure we could see, I'm not going to do it, but I'm sure if we took a waveform of Bob Ross's video, I may be well, but we would see tons of, of dynamism. Tons of it. The over-compressed music doesn't allow it to breathe. Even Bob Dylan apparently condemned the practice as just atrocious. He's like these modern records, they have no, he says there's no definition, they just

Starting point is 02:19:19 have sounds all over them. There's no vocal, no nothing, just static. Static. In the book they point to this, this, the caller, she's an artist, but she, she, she, she's an artist, she well she she's a performer let's say and uh there was one thing in new york where she sat in a chair and a line a very long line formed to have i mean guess technically you could sit there as long as you wanted but as social pressures work um you know you just sit there for a few minutes and you sit in front of her and she just had a she just her the whole

Starting point is 02:20:15 point of the performance was to feel the depth in nothingness. It was to sit there and she would deliberately not respond, not react, no minimal body language, no words. Apparently some people, I think, speculate she was wearing diapers so she didn't have to pee. And she would sit in a chair in the same posture and just look at you in the eye. That's the important part. I think it would have been drastically drastically different if she was just staring off you know up at the ceiling or even over your shoulder she was staring dead in the eyes of someone whoever was sitting in front of her really bork james franko marissa tomey lou reed um so there was a you know celebrities that came by and uh this points to the infinite complexity that you can feel in the present

Starting point is 02:21:19 presence of another, even in silence. And, God, apparently in just, you know, one event, over a week or so, she logged 700 hours sitting in that chair. I think Bob Ross is the antidote to overstimulation with noise, to fast-paced entertainment, negative views. We need silence. I think we need silence. So I love these, you know, book sounds.

Starting point is 02:22:04 I love these peripheral noises that ASMR mostly creates. Page 82, he says, We're drawn into his meditative presence. Watching Bob is like a lava lamp or a Christmas tree, slowly twinkling. It's patterned, but not quite predictable. So we watch. Think silence. I think to,

Starting point is 02:22:46 digest information is important and it's especially important to as a prerequisite to being inspired creatively exploring your dreams your values reflecting on them and ultimately finding purpose on page let's see 76 they touch upon the importance of landscapes to elaborate further on the psychological significance of landscapes. When writer Sarah Maitland wanted to develop her creative potential, she went to nature to seek silence. She equated landscapes that she relished with landscapes of her mind. I think it's very human to make analogies and metaphors and it's not, I don't think it's very abstract to take something that happens in the real world in nature and transpose

Starting point is 02:24:04 it onto meaning in our lives and maybe smaller different things and experiences that we have. Bob understood this and repeatedly pointed his viewers to the landscape's ability to open oneself up. I listened to Lex Friedman's podcast and sometimes neuropsychologist Andrew Huberman's podcast. Andrew, was it called Huberman? Huberman Labs? And the other day it was interesting right as I was writing this.

Starting point is 02:24:43 He said that he discovered in his lab, or at least he knew a study that did, discovered that tall ceilings make people work more creatively. and think more expansively. So simply being in an outdoor, so what that means is that you extrapolate that to nature in the open sky and then extrapolate that to nature and the open sky at night

Starting point is 02:25:13 where you don't have the atmospheric blue dome above you. You have the infinite, infinitely far away celestial plane. that you're exposed to and it's no you know it's no wonder that people get inspired when they have these expansive environments that they're in and landscapes are an analogy when you're painting them to encourage that 98 interesting like how many times have I said that it is interesting though a scientific study by Melamid and Comar apparently confirmed the popularity of the landscape, or at least they wrote about the study, that people like tranquil blue landscapes that are realistically depicted. They don't have to be real environments, but realistically depicted.

Starting point is 02:26:18 They're biologically appealing. They transcend. That means they transcend social, not only social class within a culture, but they transcend. cultures, their species, they're universal across, human, humans. You know, going back to industrialization and, you know, what creating the Central Park, the movement, the impetus to do that, signaled, our connection to nature is changing over time. The suburban sprawl, we're being more isolated from it, isolated. And it's accelerating, too. You got to be careful. about these changes because they're happening more and more fast.

Starting point is 02:27:10 Landscapes in the pristine nature they represent are an antidote and a reaction to the increasingly digital leisure activities, whether it's TV or internet of the sprawling suburbs and concrete jungles of the urban sprawls. These landscapes remind us of what it's like to be more fully alive in the wilderness. as I was pointing to earlier. Your mind can exist in and in these you again they're curated, sanitized because in these landscapes there aren't snakes, poison, avalanches, storms. There is a place where the mind can rest,

Starting point is 02:28:00 where the mind can experience freedom in a space of open possibility. I thought Bill Alexander's view, and again, I want to emphasize how much of an influence on Bob Bill Alexander really was. He's quoted as saying maybe one of the reasons that landscapes are so popular is because living in the country is the most natural thing. Even city people like to go back to the country. It's a kind of instinct. The country is still the beginning of people on earth. The earth smells fresh after a rain, and has a sweetness on its breath.

Starting point is 02:28:46 Every day is a joy with a special kind of color, bursting oranges of autumn or green, laughing with you in the spring. You can put your seed in the garden, and you can harvest what you plant and make the tools you live by, and you repair the things you create. this is an instinct of being human

Starting point is 02:29:09 I thought that was a beautiful quote and that was by Bill Alexander Bob's mentor The magic of oil paint He wrote the Bob was simultaneously constructing the landscape of the mind where life slows down and becomes peaceful

Starting point is 02:29:34 and dreams have an opportunity to take shape and he said Bob often said you know that's how I made it through the military I'd come home. He said, I don't have any power over anything. You know, all I have is the power to take out the trash. I have power over the trash. I can take it out.

Starting point is 02:29:53 It lets me take it to the curb. But Bob knew how much power creating painting you had on canvas. You can move mountains. You can move trees. Create trees. He's professing his belief in the psychological need of this freedom to explore with total creative control. At the end of the book,

Starting point is 02:30:25 they talk about the importance of envisioning something better for whatever reason. Painting acted like, you know, Bob's instruction acted like a literal and metaphorical lesson in the practice of envisioning our future. The painting, the instructions during the process of painting and the TV show as art in itself. Being a painter, you know, him on the show, his persona being a painter, an instructor, a friend, a mentor, a healer, a guide, another human being, really.

Starting point is 02:31:12 Going back to that American distrust of leisure and its connection to the development of DIY movements, A link it and I think there is an important link you know I know this is just me on a YouTube channel I'm not an academic I'm very interested in these things though and from what I can tell It seems like there is a link between our Progressive isolation Our absorption in the internet and TV and Suburban sprawl and cheap products and

Starting point is 02:31:52 Overabsorption of over-stimulation and gluttony You know cheap food terrible food for us fast food sugar and all this processed preservatives in our food fast fashion quick you know our short attention span this all link is linked to together and I think it's linked to movements that are happening right now and we'll talk about those between farmhouse or live streaming relationships, parasocial relationships we have. It's very I think prussian. And

Starting point is 02:32:38 at the root of this change in these reactive social movements is the Industrial Revolution on the Wikipedia page itself well the Wikipedia page of leisure it says more than any other factor

Starting point is 02:32:55 the Industrial Revolution changed the way people live. It also had a major effect on popular patterns of recreation and leisure by the early decades of the 20th century leisure was more freely available like we talked about so there's more leisure brought about because we have more technological progress the beginning of the industrial revolution was let's see the late 1700s science and capital combined increased production

Starting point is 02:33:42 as businessmen invested in the industrial expansion made possible by the new machines newly invented machines into industry moved from rural areas to metropolitan or not metropolitan necessarily but urban city cores big factories from homes and small workshops to mills and factories with mechanical instead of wind or water, power, invention of spinning jenny, the water frame, the weaving machinery, the the Jakard machines, loom, the steam engine, all during the 1760s, by the way. Some rapid, expanded explosion of inventions happened during the 1760s. They drastically altered the production methods and, of course, increased the output. I'm not sure why, but it also mentions that economists aren't sure either, but Americans for some reason work longer hours, like we mentioned earlier. But even back then, 1800s immigration was really happening in the U.S., especially from Europe.

Starting point is 02:35:04 The U.S. had a reputation in Europe for providing much less leisure despite our wealth. immigrants to the U.S. discovered they had to work harder than they did in Europe. And I think it has something to do with the sense of the religious individuality in America and making it self-determined destiny. You know, the American dream. So the point is that leisure gave freedom, but with it

Starting point is 02:35:51 to those pursuing positive progressive and not you know to those pursuing individual individualism and healthy individuals in accordance with the

Starting point is 02:36:11 principle you know the ancient Greek principle of orita not dependent I don't know infantilized coddled individuals that would

Starting point is 02:36:25 you know just suck off a large welfare state they're talking about a the danger of not recognizing when you have increased leisure if you are lucky enough to have leisure they think the

Starting point is 02:36:45 wise thing to do these utopian idealists these transcendentalists these landscape painters these philosophers trying to understand what we should do, how we should change society, they wanted to change it by making better individuals, better components of the society itself. They said we need to recognize with greater freedom comes greater responsibility. sort of a tweak on Peter Parker's Peter Parker's advice from uncle uncle what's

Starting point is 02:37:33 his name well the latest one at San May so I'll just stick with that I wasn't gonna let that go don't worry guys what else where are we so that leads us to a pre a predecessor of the farmhouse movement that we see today I'm slowly trying to make a case as we move up chronologically through history from, you know, tribal to modern. The values that we see occur over and over again. The pursuit of certain values and interests, you know, of humans and activities and endeavors. There's a style called American craftsman that developed in the... the early 1900s that it developed in the early 1900s and I guess I won't go into it but it was

Starting point is 02:38:52 essentially a reaction against the overly ornamented ornate architecture of the Victorian era in England and America both or just fancy elaborate columns and you know swirly designs everywhere which could be definitely an act of artist, artistanship, artisanry, artist, craftsmanship. But there was also an American offshoot of, well, let's see, there was, especially around 1876, around the centennial of America's founding 1776, there was a celebration. of colonial American architecture, which was very plain because we didn't have the leisure back then. Most people were, you know, if not frontiersmen, we were in small towns, you know, poor, just hardworking people, farms, lots of farms. There was a streamlined plainness to the architecture. The Gothic Revival, the Victorian,

Starting point is 02:40:21 architecture was could be a mark of craftsmanship in and of itself but it had a tendency to be overly embellished overly well overly copied to it was to um there was a whole kind of a smeared view about it for the people who were proponents of this american craftsmanship because it had um you know it had the tinge of the devaluation of human labor over dependent on machines and disbanding of the guilt systems that through its it's it's its closeness I guess to the overall Victorian aesthetic which was cluttered rooms with mismatched faux historic goods and an attempt to convey a sense of worldliness just a sense of falseness a sense of excessiveness really that didn't play well in the American people, in the American mind. So this American craftsman movement I'm talking about emphasized handwork over mass production,

Starting point is 02:41:42 a return to traditional simplicity over gaudy historical styles, use of local natural materials, the elevation of handicraft, and the people teaching and learning the handicraft, equating moral integrity with the ability to create something beautiful. beautiful out of simple things. This naturally had social reforming underpinnings in that it recognized the plight of the industrial worker

Starting point is 02:42:12 who, again, like Arita, it wasn't, it was an imbalance of skills, you know? You didn't want to be just a politician who couldn't tell a wrench from a pair of pliers. You know, you wanted to be a worldly man, a worldly individual, a cultivated, a renaissance individual, you know, a physically and intellectually and maybe even spiritually imposing figure, or at least going back to John Ruskin and William Morris, who I briefly

Starting point is 02:42:55 mentioned earlier, we can see in their writings, they were both, again, highly influential thinkers to both the Hudson River School landscape painters, the utopian thinkers, like, uh, Bronson Alcott and Elizabeth Peabody, but they were also influenced this architectural movement too, the American craftsman in the more general DIY movement of the early 1900s. Ruskin and Morris sought to elevate their ideas, sought to encourage the elevation of the status of art forms that adhered for being seen as mere trade and not fine art. And this found

Starting point is 02:43:52 likely came out of British reaction to Victorian's ideals and all that. He's overly ornate, overly showy, ostentatious

Starting point is 02:44:06 ways of and then style in art and architecture of the early 1800s. The American Arts and Crafts movement got its blueprint from this British reaction to this over-consumption and cheapening of human labor,

Starting point is 02:44:34 and cheapening cheap products and, you know, quick, fast machine-produced products. They were more adept at the business side the Americans were of design and architecture. There was a guy that the Congdon mentions in the book here. Gustav Stickley, in particular he hit accord with American to the populace of America with his goal of ennobling modest homes for rapidly expanding American middle class from the early 1900s after the first World War around then.

Starting point is 02:45:10 A kind of precursor to the post-World War II boom and this was embodied in the craftsman bungalow style. This was reacting to the Victorian architectural opulence and increasingly common mass-produced housing the box homes. This incorporated visibly sturdy structures of clean lines

Starting point is 02:45:39 and natural materials influenced and inspired by specifically American antecedents around the colonial times, Shaker furniture, the Mission Revival style, and even Anglo-Japanese style. The arts and crafts movement more broadly first emerged

Starting point is 02:46:01 in the United States in Boston, in the 1890s. Remember, this is where we were talking about earlier, influenced by Emerson, Thoreau. This was where Alcott and Peabody started their school, Kindred, first kindergarten, the temple school as well. The area in general was very receptive to the ideas of the arts and crafts movement,

Starting point is 02:46:28 to one of its two most famous thinkers, philosophers, activists, Ralph Waldo Emerson and his student successor, almost, friend Henry David Thoreau. Emerson famously wrote the title, the essay titled On Self-Reliance, self-explanatory in terms of what it was promoting.

Starting point is 02:47:01 And one of the recurrent themes was the need for the individual in that essay to avoid conformity and false consistency and follow their own instincts and ideas. Self-reliance emphasizes the importance of individualism and its effect on individuals' satisfaction in life. And lastly, the Boston Society of Arts had a credo to just really drive this point home that read, This Society hopes to bring designers and workmen

Starting point is 02:47:38 into mutually helpful relations and to encourage workmen to execute designs of their own. It endeavors to stimulate in workmen and appreciation of the dignity and value of good design. To counteract the popular impatience of law and form in the desire for over-ornamentation and specious originality, copying, clunky, useless designs.

Starting point is 02:48:08 It will insist upon the necessity of sobriety, and restraint of ordered arrangement of due regard for the relation between the form of an object and its use and of harmony and fitness in the decoration

Starting point is 02:48:25 put upon it aka its beauty is due more to its harmony with natural durable practical aspects than useless ostentatious complexity leisure now we

Starting point is 02:48:48 go into how Bob predated the internet more and more modern trends. That was a little primer. Those past seven hours were just a little primer. We're talking about now. I think Bob was ahead of the curve on a lot of trends, and I'm going to elaborate on these now. I think what he said, let's see.

Starting point is 02:49:18 I don't think this is what I wrote. what I this is of species originality let's see page 157 because a lot of this I did you know copy sections from the book and then found elaborate it upon it so some of the things I'm not able to attribute directly to Congdon and for that I apologize but they wrote a really good book so I just I found so much of it useful and sometimes I forgot what I didn't didn't take from it Kongden and company says that what he said when he said it and how he said it is of great historic value and I'm trying to really emphasize that a great way to emphasize it is in how he predates technology

Starting point is 02:50:29 the the the what I am a small part of education online education 2.0 as we talked about briefly earlier education 2.0 is not only the use I mean it's far more than the use of technology it's knowing how to educate how to do it more effectively as we talked about with effective teaching it's how to it's how to create take into the into account the whole individual

Starting point is 02:51:22 you know create a sense of camaraderie teacher and student and a take into account their learning the different learning styles a lot of students have

Starting point is 02:51:40 what you know what methods students are most receptive to you have to cater to interests you have to take into account how student self-development leads to personal meaning you have to give really give students more access

Starting point is 02:52:03 to more subjects understand to understand what their affinities are we all have to learn things we don't want to but we don't have to pursue careers in things we don't want to and it's futile to try to do that I mean, you're spinning your gears doing that. You need to...

Starting point is 02:52:26 I mean, the ideal education is one that taps into a student's proclivities at an early age and cultivates that and fosters that. You have to target individual strengths and weaknesses, recognize the importance of different teaching styles. So a reimagined education is what, Bob he's not doing it he's not uh you know

Starting point is 02:52:57 he's a significant contributor and he's a good gauge of the importance different methods of teaching different styles of teaching different different subjects of teaching different

Starting point is 02:53:21 depths different layers different aspects of the human experience just like Fred Rogers he added breadth to the academic more reading, writing, arithmetic, more rational education of children by paying attention, targeting their emotional growth development. We have to take into account all aspects of existence and being in what it means to be a balanced well-developed individual in multiple areas of one's life. What do we do when AI replaces most jobs?

Starting point is 02:54:26 We have to find purpose with our leisure. I mean, that's the least, that's most benevolent, you know, the least, what's the word, malignant least, that's the most benignine instance of a possible future, where we would have to, we would have just too much leisure time and not have to work if we had guaranteed income. On page 62, they suggest that work may become obsolete, so we have to discover some non-financial incentives to pursue.

Starting point is 02:55:12 Apparently, John Maynard Keene, a famous economist, said in 1930 that he thought by 2030, 30 hundred years from then, eight years from now. We might live in a world where labor is distributed more equally, equally, and people work only 15 hours a week. That's for that theory. But condens thesis is that leisure time, regardless of how we get there, if we do and how much we have,

Starting point is 02:55:47 leisure time spent painting can lead to a good life. so she begs the question what would we do if we you know what would make a good life what would be a good use of leisure time obviously painting is what she's suggesting but what does that mean what activities would fall would also fall under that category we have health care you know food and water dwelling uh basically tools and appliances basic access to technologies that make our life easier transportation lodging entertainment if all those were satisfied taken care of freely available if we had plenty of them you know if we all want to drill to you know build something we'd have to have plenty of them for it not to be or at least

Starting point is 02:56:55 mostly plenty of them you know for that not to constitute for that to constitute free access and availability well this guy Skidelsky writing about leisure says that it's our culture's poverty of imagination that leads it to believe that all creativity and innovation needs to be stimulated by money and have a direct you know profitability but you know hobbies don't often yield income and if they do it's not until years of practice because you have to develop and refine the skill subtle effects of developing skills

Starting point is 02:57:37 carry over into other areas of life too like we've talked about learning begets learning we get better at learning the more we learn a skill we get better at learning other skills and bob said very importantly I can't think, he said, I can't think of anything more rewarding than being able to express yourself to others through painting. Exercising the imagination, experimenting with talents, being creative.

Starting point is 02:58:15 These things to me, they're truly the windows to your soul. He said, go, make mistakes, learn from them. If you're not making mistakes, you're not learning. You're not challenging yourself. He pursued, he encouraged people to pursue their passion. to answer callings they might not never known they have. He himself wasn't a hypocrite because he was a demonstration of this. He was a successful hobbyist turned painter, a professional painter. His example, his example taught us all not to undermine the value of a sincere and steady application of effort towards our inclinations. He showed us how a passion can tangibly become a source of both satisfaction through creativity and a source of income.

Starting point is 02:59:23 You know, there's an article I read and said, I wondered if it was an actual trend. Maybe it's a fad, but I said Gen Z and millennials would rather be unemployed than be unhappy at their job at work. 2011, Etsy is still very much a thing. We trace this example in Etsy, they said. Etsy vendors who sell their crafts online and boast about it under a blog called quit your day job. And I think creativity, you know, developing a skill takes creativity and especially painting, especially an artistic skill. Even a craftsman skill, a trades skill takes creativity.

Starting point is 03:00:14 It takes, you know, creative thinking, thinking outside the box, finding new ways. is innovativeness and innovation. Envisioning a new reality, like we said before, is the first step to make that possible, and you get better at something you do, the more you do it. I know I've already said that, but it's such an important point.

Starting point is 03:00:41 We often don't realize, like, these incremental, minute gains that we're getting in return, for doing something and practicing things. If you think about the 10,000 hour rule, think about how many tens of hours before you even see, you know, a fraction of that final development of your skill over the 10,000 hour period.

Starting point is 03:01:13 It's very subtle, and oftentimes it's actually far from linear, too. It's very exponential. It's a very rapidly accelerating, gain the more you work at it the more gain you'll see so I was thinking about how creativity relates to meaning and what I could come up with was that most of our daily lives you know if we have a a smooth flow a consistent day-to-day type of routine we don't get a chance to exercise much creativity you know you got small little pockets

Starting point is 03:01:58 of creative things you can do but um you know between your career your housework chores child care other social obligations can't be very creative in what you do lends itself to bob's painting giving us a sense of control of our lives I think that when we learn the value of learning and we start applying learning to learning more and more and more things, so not only do we get better at learning one skill, but as we learn other skills, we get better at learning a range of skills. We become more adaptable. Creativity in one area then bleeds over into other areas of life. so this it allows for expression of abstract psychological feelings when we paint when we express ourselves

Starting point is 03:03:03 and we create we impose a vision onto the world onto a definite physical concrete medium because reality always gets the last word doesn't it like that sublime song this reveals our values in the measure of our ability to adapt because when we try things in the real world. We get slapped down if we aren't in alignment with reality. So new skills, for instance, if we take Bob's example in painting, correlates to our wider abilities and to their limits. Because as we test ourselves, we test what we can do in the real world, and we test what our innate biology allows us to do, whether it's our mind or our physical limitations. I wondered if values were indirectly discovered this isn't original to me but it is interesting

Starting point is 03:04:17 to think about it's like there's clearly limits to what we can do and we can't do what works as a mode of being in society what what morals we can exercise for how long how long can we avoid self-development before we either individually deteriorate and integrate or we deteriorate as a society so anyways I really think that just the more we try the more we do the more we reach out extend our abilities the more we learn the more we learn our limitations we learn what we can and can't do we're able to refine our skill sets within those limits that we discover because before you see the limits

Starting point is 03:05:10 You don't have a real grasp on where they really are. I think with all this, you get a sense of general competence within your own body and how you can carry out your visions in the world. Increased action leads to increased exposure to the reality of matter, the reality of other minds, other people, and their goals. they in turn become, they can become obstacles if your goals conflict with theirs. So this leads to a more definite series of decisions, commitments to future actions. This commitment then to future actions becomes a growing direction.

Starting point is 03:06:12 We let the walls of reality that we bounce off of continually orient us through a series of successive approximations about what we're able to do what we can do with our not only our finite existence or our finite physical existence but our temporal existence how long we actually have to live that we can have children allows us to think even longer how long can our society our species you know our civilization live um this gives us The direction that we get from this gives us purpose. It's not just us. It's not just our children. It's our friends in the future.

Starting point is 03:07:02 Our families weigh in the future. The wider society, ever and ever expanding concentric circles, it seems hard to avoid the really penetrating concept of harmony, whether it's in your own life and your own skills, having an imbalance of development or an imbalance of societal development. Is a society too greedy? Is it way too conservative? Is it changing way too quickly without being properly cautious

Starting point is 03:07:46 about what their negative repercussions, unforeseen negative consequences might be? Is it moving too slow? Is it way too slow to not adapting to change quickly enough? We don't know. But we find out more and more about these limits. The more we act, the more we do, the more we create, the more we creatively explore ourselves, our environment, our world.

Starting point is 03:08:15 I think this directly ties in to essentially a summation of competence created through action and purpose created through competence and way we develop a deeper sense of our place in the universe through successive attempts to carry out our vision from within and you know the two-way road I was talking about earlier how we develop we influence society and society in turn of course influences us the constant two-way communication between all of us and between us and nature This ultimately ideally is towards the goal of creating a better existence otherwise. Why are we doing it? It's pretty easy to just create hell and you just Stop doing anything ever and just do what you think will cause people most suffering pretty simple

Starting point is 03:09:33 the hard uphill battle but one that I think we're having a grasp on we're tackling even if we're slipping a lot is towards the good and I think that's what Bob was aiming at

Starting point is 03:09:49 I mean it's clear he was aiming at that but I think it was effective the way he was doing it I think he was pointing to something that was effective when something that worked and you know I think

Starting point is 03:10:09 maybe perhaps the most ideal utopia maybe could be one that allows for the the harmony of everybody's experiences of experiences that would allow for the most profound joy in almost every moment of everyone's life so these can't conflict you can't be greedy in a society like this because that would conflict with someone else's joy it's it's And that's all well and, you know, good and well to think about on that abstract level. It's how you, rubber meets the road, how you actually do that. What's the details to that? It's just a platitude right now.

Starting point is 03:10:56 But, you know, is perhaps, if we really want to get to the ground of it, the meaning of life is perhaps the maximizing our ability to creatively explore. but as a necessary caveat also simultaneously maximizing the ability of others to be able to also creatively explore and creativity necessarily implies a a lack of confinement a lack of arbitrary bounds the bounds are created again by reality by by what works over individual lifespans and societal civilization time periods time scales so if we could somehow be maximally open we could be maximally creative I really wonder what world that would be what that would look like Herbert Spencer a famous philosopher of the 1900s or 1800s or 18

Starting point is 03:12:19 1900s said that the ultimate result of shielding men from the effects of their folly is to fill the world with fools Bob was he was using just as Congdon said earlier well maybe in part one he was using painting as a as a an excuse to practice joy well he was also using painting as an excuse to to encourage us to be better people to encourage us to challenge ourselves to be larger expansive in our goals and desires and the things we take into account inside those goals and desires he wanted us to look at nature to see it really see it he always said that and when you do that you can't help but again applies to it applies to it applies to

Starting point is 03:13:22 across multiple areas you can't help but really pay attention to other people see the good in them see the bad just be more aware and then hey maybe you might start seeing being more aware of yourself see the good see the bad you might not be able to force other people to be better fix them but you can fix yourself you can focus on what you know as bad about your yourself Bob said you can have anything you want in the world once you help people around you get what they want this is his domain of competence he was an expert painter he was an expert teacher he was a empathetic human being he was perceptive very I think pretty self-aware and he was aware of

Starting point is 03:14:28 the tragedies of life yet still had the courage and the discipline the dedication the all these very virtuous characteristics i think he practiced arite mostly you know i think he was he was able to see despite all his proximity to tragedy the good in people and have gratitude for life really beautiful was teaching people he was reaching people he wasn't teaching students he wasn't teaching young people wasn't teaching old people he was teaching as many people talking to the whole person and many people as he as he could and trying to teach on a as deep of a level as uh i think he could you know along with education 2.0. or education 2.0 there's also web 2.0 which is a much more technological aspect in the book

Starting point is 03:15:55 David David Gauntlet talks about the new creator economy and again I don't want to sound like a broken record but this is 2011 so this is ten years ago and they were talking about they were talking about social media influencers education DIY online and I think Bob for shadowed what we call web 2.0 this guy Gontlet wrote a book called Making is Connecting the social meaning of creativity from DIY to knitting to YouTube to web 2.0 during the previous century the production of culture he argues is predominated by consumption like we talked about you had this titanet elite community in Hollywood or YouTube or TV cable TV only a few people got on relative to you know the hundreds of millions of Americans and billions of global citizens versus YouTube and I essentially just use that as a stand-in for the internet everybody has a voice now Sure, not everybody is heard, but the platform is open for everybody to speak on now. Gaunt argues that today a vast array of people are making and sharing their own ideas and videos and other creativity, creative activities.

Starting point is 03:17:52 And they're not only talking like me, but they're also creating. They're also in communities where they develop arts and crafts, trades, other skills. He finds that there's a shift in culture. This is to me the interesting part here is a shift from culture of a culture of sit back and relax and be told what to do to making and doing. You know, you're consuming but you're also participating. you're also interacting your voice your comments are heard your criticism your feedback is taken into account and he thinks people are rejecting this towards their own learning and entertainment instead and this is just confirmed you know it's like it's like being able to read the book in 2011 and hop into

Starting point is 03:18:59 10 years into the future now that we're in it he drew upon psychology politics philosophy, economics, and he saw that this shift is necessary for the essential happiness and even survival of modern societies. And what evolution tracks with general culture, the cultural evolution of the overall trend toward a desire for active creation over passive consumption. That's my comment thread. I'm trying to weave. through this narrative web 1.0 web 2.0 they're referring to areas in the history of the internet web 1.0 refers roughly to the period between 91 and 2004 when you had all these static non-interactive web pages most users were consumers of content but now

Starting point is 03:20:11 after 2004 YouTube Facebook my space Twitter social media in general smartphones with cameras and increasingly more and more storage and data in receiving and transmitting capabilities increased bandwidth web 2.0 is from 9 2004 until the current day web 3.0 there's It's not exactly a thing yet, but it's predicted to be maybe perhaps centralized, centered around a decentralization, either directly on a blockchain or having to do with some sort of distributed network that isn't controlled through a central corporation, you know like Google Amazon etc so this web 2.0 that we're a part of is it centers on user created content to form social media and it's it's very very significant for the development of really of human history

Starting point is 03:21:34 it has its fingers in all aspects um yeah think about like Amazon owns Twitch Microsoft They own all corporations And they have the Xbox Facebook Owns Instagram And WeChat

Starting point is 03:21:57 Google owns YouTube Twitter You have TikTok You have sort of relevant Sony owning PlayStation and being a major movie producer company production company you have a you know only a few dozen other major players but those are

Starting point is 03:22:19 the core four and five and then when the first time in history technology's liberated access to information knowledge even wisdom which is much deeper and broader than and complex than just knowledge and facts. Wisdom is integrated into personalities and you know philosophies of show not through words only but through actions now people carry themselves and how their lives evolve now online so it's so interesting what this is doing this two-way interaction to us yeah i think bob predated all of this He broke the boundary of the cost of tuition, the proximity, because he was on TV now. He was able to reach people. Like we mentioned before, the art director of National Geographic, he didn't have access to any art culture.

Starting point is 03:23:24 He initially got his feet wet through Bob. Most articles, even if they kind of denigrate his actual art, they always talk about how many people he reached. and there's one quote I think I used before but basically Bob got letters and he got one in particular saying that and of course he was proud about this so he remembered it for the article quote art professors were

Starting point is 03:24:00 writing him telling them that hey even if they're not creating fine art you're encouraging thousands of students that otherwise wouldn't have ever even thought about joining the art world and entering into art schools and they were thankful. We're really grateful for that.

Starting point is 03:24:28 Even further, well, in addition to elaborate upon the Web 2.0 aspect that Bob is ahead of was the audience engagement and participation. He not only spoke to them

Starting point is 03:24:43 and it was novel to speak intimately. Really, like the way I'm doing now, I really wonder if I would have thought to do it. I mean, I don't even know if it's still it's just what I like so I don't even know if it's ever going to be really popular or whatever

Starting point is 03:24:59 ASMR in general but it's what I enjoy I consume a lot of stuff at night when I just need lower stimulation and you know I know I get jazzed up sometimes

Starting point is 03:25:15 when I'm talking I'm sure it doesn't come across as relaxing as much as I intended to at times but I really personally just like it that that aside Bob was

Starting point is 03:25:33 talking to one single person and that's kind of what I try to do here because I used to be a tutor for you know as a part-time job and I tutored kids from elementary to high school occasional college student but I had

Starting point is 03:25:49 I found you know I just liked again I kind of have an affinity I have a yeah with with Bob because I I love his I appreciate his speaking style and his teaching style

Starting point is 03:26:07 how he talks to the person he doesn't just you know he almost puts his whole being into how he talks and teaches you don't feel like he when the camera shut off he's just you know starts talking about the things he really wants to talk about

Starting point is 03:26:33 I'm sure there's plenty he didn't talk about on the show but the core things that he really cared about he he chose to share with us and Bob was you know he again he was a cog he not cog he was a link in a chain as we all are we all have predecessors and hopefully if if we maybe if we do enough with our life we'll have many but at least we have some um people that we influence too you know, antecedents, I guess. So Bob, I think his engagement with the audience was very, it was ahead of its time at the very least.

Starting point is 03:27:29 You know, there's a lady called Grandma Moses. She was born at a time when self-broadcasting wasn't quite possible, as Congdon and the gang say. But they say she set the stage for the everyday painter. and television made it possible for us to learn from a talking screen. They think Bob really had an audience. And Bill and Bob both, you know, they had many predecessors, but Grandma Moses, who didn't start painting until 78,

Starting point is 03:28:05 creates an interesting connection between all three of them. Grandma Moses, she was born in 1860. Bill he was born in 19 was it 17 something around there Bob was born in 1942 so they're all generations apart Grandma Moses predated Bill Bill predated Bob they all were you know influenced each other respectively and Grandma Moses interestingly didn't start painting until 78 years old in the way she did

Starting point is 03:28:45 Bill didn't start becoming famous to the extent that he did until in his 60s Bob not until his 40s so it's cool that they

Starting point is 03:29:02 you know they further back in time the older they were just a little bit of trivia but yeah grandma Moses she had you know not fine art by any means but it was sold in 2006 one of her famous paintings sugaring off sold for 1.2 million dollars so it goes to show you anyone can paint if they want to she said all

Starting point is 03:29:29 they have to do is get a brush and start right in same as I did and that's all she said Bob did the same thing he challenged the artist as genius she's interesting in her own right want to talk about the parisocial aspect of modern media and Bob kind of really predated that. He wasn't the only one, but he talked and he listened to some of his viewers. They called in, they sent in a lot of pictures. A lot of people painted pictures and sent them in and Bob displayed them. He, again, he talked to us as though he was on a live chat and he recorded as though he was on a live chat.

Starting point is 03:30:22 um he responded to previous feedback he had gotten from earlier you know when he had recorded he talked as though he was talking to a single person he also was very like we mentioned earlier he was proud of the fact that he recorded it all live very little editing was going on if it was it wasn't generally to cut out any mistakes it was because of some technical issue and so in those in that respect Bob was really a live streamer he set up a camera you know he was recording himself doing something artistic in real time it wasn't playing a video game but there are so many people that Bob was way ahead of there in that respect and it's no doubt that

Starting point is 03:31:20 Bob has cultivated a parisocial relationship with his audience meaning a relationship that yeah cultivated a sense of really knowing the presenter a closeness and intimacy that you only get through the you know live streams nowadays Bob encouraged participation submission of work yeah he encouraged us to paint along didn't even mention that like in real time.

Starting point is 03:32:10 They mentioned that Bob had a time before the internet the deliberate push towards interactivity was like a form of proto-social media. I think it's really interesting that Tim Berners-Lee invented the first web browser

Starting point is 03:32:30 in Bob's joy of painting had already been seven years into its run. It's 11 year. And even that, It wasn't until 2000, 10 years later, before even 30% of the US had computers in their house. And Bob, this is where we're fleshing out Bob's, really the complexity of his performance. He demonstrated that an artist could be way more than just a lecturer or genius demonstrating their talent passively to audiences, or to passive audiences in a very,

Starting point is 03:33:18 just a very simple, you know, non-personable way. They think Bob's real art to really, Bob's real artwork was the dialogue between his paintings and his performance. It was the experience, you know. It was the joy of painting, the experience of learning about him, learning more about painting, watching him paints. painting yourself communicating with him sending your painting in feeling like he's talking to you responding to you um letting letting the aura he was crafting just wash over you it was cool it was really

Starting point is 03:34:31 something the way he developed that i didn't want to not mention davy turner this guy who's really nice and answered a couple questions through email he was featured in this book here they may have a whole chapter on Bob's network and that's pretty important about the communities Bob encouraged to create you didn't have to again you didn't have to be work for his company you had to um you just had to pay a few hundred dollars take the class and become a certified instructor and you could go out on your own and teach and you know that was up to you how big you wanted to create your community and uh davy turner was a guy who's he entered um he responded to me i was just curious about his life story had a tragedy of his own and um he found solace

Starting point is 03:35:44 in Bob. Let's see, 96. Here he is right here. Davy T. He said basically, he said he was 100% influenced by Bob. He thinks, uh, I thought this was very clever. Painting has the largest creative freedom to startup cost ratio. Meaning you could try to build, uh, you know, build a barn or I don't know, weld something, but relative to painting the actual startup cost and especially Bob specifically designed his products to be few in number and good enough quality but low enough cost to be able to not be intimidating for the beginner you know who just wanted to dabble get their toes wet and um i was such a cool way of phrasing it the largest creative freedom to start up cost ratio so

Starting point is 03:36:56 Davey said that he was he said quote basically I was home sick in 1997 came across Bob on an obscure cable channel at the time and was wowed wowed it he's producing a fantastic landscape painting in just you know half an hour I loved his style loved his presentation his anecdotes about his critters I just wanted to learn more about him and so we did he became a he actually sent me a picture of a pan maybe I'll hopefully I'll remember to put it in here but it was cool like he painted his own pan in a nice cool Aurora landscape

Starting point is 03:37:37 and Bob on the Netflix documentary I hadn't heard about it before this he said that there was a 93 old woman who came took a class with him and next year at 94 she called him back and reached out and said she had started

Starting point is 03:37:56 selling her paintings at 94 years old and Davy similarly taught an older gentleman to paint and the guy said and Davy said to Gondon in the book the man painted every day until just before he died four years later the older man had tinkered with many things in his life but really importantly here he confessed that of all the many things he had done the wet-on-wit technique the painting technique brought him and I think Davy sums up Bob's approach to how he wanted people to interpret his at least the way he was teaching painting Davy says that's that's what Bob wanted not for everyone to copy is but to learn the skill of the brush and the pallet knife and then go out and create your own composition and Davey again

Starting point is 03:39:13 he's super nice he said he holds paint alongs rather than teach. So I love the status he gives himself. He puts himself on par with the students, the people he's teaching, and doesn't hold any sort of authority, doesn't put any prestige on his position. He, you know, he's, yeah, he just makes it a level playing field. And he's there as a friend, not a lecturer unfortunately he had a bad experience

Starting point is 03:39:59 I mean he was he loved it so much that he decided to start his own I think in the early 2000 something along there late 90s his own Bob Ross fan letter and old

Starting point is 03:40:11 Walt from Bob Ross Inc sent him a legally threatening letter to stop it's just very very uncalled for Book page 102, they say that Bob, Bob left the Air Force with its focus on hierarchy

Starting point is 03:40:45 to pursue the development of an egalitarian community of painters. I think this is a great example of the, like I said here, of opposites. From leader by compulsion to leader by inspiration. As far as online influencers or live streamers, even the article on Daily Beast say he's a smash hit on social media. he feels more like a Gen C influencer. The director of the Netflix documentary, Happy Accidents, Portrayal and Greed. He says he was the right size for the era.

Starting point is 03:41:32 There was no Twitter, you know, back in the 90s, there was no Twitter. There was no Instagram, no Netflix. So to see Bob, yeah, think about what that meant. That meant you had to tune into a show when it was programmed. and he had a huge following, a huge following. If you fast forward to around 2015, you know, with the streaming platforms, he's reached the whole new generation.

Starting point is 03:42:07 Ben Davis ofartnet.com says, you know, as much as he is loved for his paintings, his true resonance is with the screen. And Karen Patel talks about pressure to presence, saying that now artists feel that they have to engage, you know, with their audience more. People don't necessarily, you know, they want to see things being created. They want to see behind the scenes. And Bob did that.

Starting point is 03:42:39 Definitely did that. I think the Internet is evolving us. It's exposing us to our human nature, our interests more clearly than ever before. We have data, we have views, we have people who are personalities that are being, followed. There's a growing demand for information delivered by authentic people with creative personalities for every type of community to even the most niche community. In the book, the 153, they point to Susan Boyle. I don't know if you remember her, but she was the lady on the British

Starting point is 03:43:25 American British Idol or whatever it's called the singing contest show and she she was this very plain looking older woman but when she opened her mouth she had a beautiful singing voice just beautiful and it dropped the jaws of everyone in there

Starting point is 03:43:46 everyone was astonished and it was cool the way the Congdon and company wrote about what that that and the fact that it went viral on YouTube meant so she had an amazing voice

Starting point is 03:44:03 from an unassuming appearance but our reaction also surprises us and causes us to question ourselves the judges and audiences reaction are unusually odd they reinforced

Starting point is 03:44:18 the emergence potential from anywhere even the most unassuming people. They say it was our recognition of her as a star in spite of her dowdy looks and unpolished presentation that made her

Starting point is 03:44:34 that helped us make us love her. They say Bob's joy calls us to question our values of art because and people are paying attention to him in the fine art community because of who he was

Starting point is 03:44:57 and what he did beyond the art and what he did with his instruction they have a huge section or I made it into a huge section called um about relational aesthetics and about the about the engagement of people I think maybe probably predating live streaming and so there's some overlap here that uh you know the more we communicate the more That two-way avenue I've talked about opens up. The more we can communicate back and therefore have a two-way influence on each other.

Starting point is 03:45:45 And apparently there's art, and there's a whole movement called relational aesthetics in the proper art community where it encourages action and interaction, interactivity with museum displays and things like that. They say in 156, that as a cultural phenomenon, let alone a teacher and artist, Bob, is clearly more than his paintings. Emerging terms like relational aesthetics are now legitimating diverse practices such as cooking, talking, teaching, in specifically artistic contexts. His work and his example of a highly considered relationship between artist and audience. not just a one way I'm gonna do this film it and whatever it's a I'm really gonna pay attention to what I think my audience wants what I think would be most accessible what would help them absorb it best most effective in communicating

Starting point is 03:46:57 they say to that end bomb was ultimately a mediator a lens that offered his viewers a unique vision of the world they say that You know, they think it's really, they think it points to important aspects of both cultural transformations and just human behavior. Sky Boryard, who wrote about relational aesthetics, says art doesn't transcend everyday preoccupation. It confronts us with reality by way of the remarkable nature of any, you know, any of relationship to the world. it comes as no surprise that Bob's work is popular at a time when meaningful relationships in community are in short supply and people crave something

Starting point is 03:47:56 that will help them connect both to nature and to others things where you like in Tampa meditation sessions at the Tampa Museum led by a Buddhist monk visitors could play basketball on a court that was also an arborate abstract sculpture.

Starting point is 03:48:22 You could canoe, row a boat across a lake to a visit art students who were living on a floating sculpture at a $25 million dollar 100-acre Virginia Fairbanks Art and Nature Park. Virginia Beach, I guess. No, no, sorry. I guess that's the name Virginia B. Fairbanks in Indianapolis Museum of Art. 143. They have a section called

Starting point is 03:48:54 the decentralization of art. And again, this book was written the year or two after Bitcoin was even invented, let alone any sort of widespread thing. The decentralization of art. Bob's philosophy was fundamentally democratic, not a centralized one. Page 142,

Starting point is 03:49:22 Bob understood that his work and teaching flew in the face of the establishment. Jackson Pollard, as I mentioned earlier. When you make a decision about what goes on your canvas, he said, you gain control of life. You recognize that you are powerful. And this can manifest itself in other parts of your life too. Again, it's like a seed that he hopes will grow and flourish in a balanced way within us all. created a community as we talked about with Davy and all that he you know this relational

Starting point is 03:50:25 aesthetics is more about the emergent social experience often of interacting with people who are interacting with the art and it's adding that other layer to it it's pointing again a lens at what we what we are how we behave as humans the art is whatever invites the action action in response from participants. They touch upon Bodriard a little bit of postmodernist again, and they said works, said everything is necessarily a reproduction. What we choose to reproduce, though, indicates what we value. So when you think about really the wider context of, you know,

Starting point is 03:51:14 art isn't just something that comes about in nature. It's something we create because we feel, if not nothing else, that we feel that someone will value it. And when people do value it, there's a whole slew of ways to learn and interpret that and how that influences other future art, how it's been influenced by the existing culture. You know, I was thinking about how previously obscure social psychological concepts are increasingly just, like a part of everyday speech we say I often say I'll be like hey maybe maybe I'm projecting too much you know sorry maybe I got it wrong because I'm just projecting or you know people matter of factly label things as virtue signaling or gaslighting like it's just

Starting point is 03:52:06 understood nowadays whereas I feel like 10 years ago that wouldn't have been as prevalent so these are evolving this is an example my example of how people in societies evolve how we communicate you know Bodriard is you know pointing to context the primacy of context creating and creatively copying to him becomes as important as the finished product so we see the art as the image but we also simultaneously see what it means for it to be you know for for people to appreciate it and value it or devalue it but it generally gets spread more if it's valued and you know what does that tell us about its status its value um what does it tell us about the medium

Starting point is 03:53:14 it's created on was it film or canvas or whatever the artist the art world friends uh in wider cultural's response to it how it was disseminated how we it reached us to begin with how we engage with it and all those other aspects so this is all to say that this is stuff we need to take into

Starting point is 03:53:42 context when we're again maybe I'm just using Bob Ross as a excuse to look deeper into one particular phenomenon that hopefully ideally will relate and

Starting point is 03:54:00 translate to other aspects that I learn about in life. I think that might be what I'm doing here. Bodriard says power is not in the real, but in the reproduction, which is manipulated and readjusted to new contexts. I think about, I was literally listening to this artist,

Starting point is 03:54:30 Com Trues. It's a, you know, best play on Tom Cruise. And I was listening to his album. He's recreating, not reusing 80s synthesizer sounds so i mean he is i guess he is using old analog synths but the sounds he's creating it's interesting in that we have this 80s revival aesthetic you know it's kind of dying now but it was you think about thor ragner rock and all these um you know uh what's that band's name

Starting point is 03:55:07 Paramore, their latest album or one of their latest albums is very 80s sounding. Lots of cultural, artistic things of the last, up the 2010s were at least. And when you think about it, they, they aren't, they're recreating. They're, they're like an image of an image. They're not the exact same thing, even fashion. If you really wore something from the 80s or 90s, you would look stupid but because it has a the vibe of the 80s and 90s married with the actual you know more modern um cuts of fashion whether it's a shirt or shorts it's uh cool you know it's funny how that

Starting point is 03:56:02 trends are cycle they're cyclical but they're not repeated exactly So, nowadays, I think we're the artist and consumer is being blurred. And Bob was clearly the artist, but he encouraged you to also be the artist. There's a little section about how, you know, sexual and even food, sensualism was kind of infused there. Bob's ability to watch teeters towards the erotic. I used that in my opening a little monologue of part one, joking around. But they literally do say that. They say, they quote them as saying,

Starting point is 03:56:57 make love to the canvas or big old brush, or it makes me feel good. Caress her. Yeah, there's just so many obvious examples of him encouraging others to Democratic participation. He didn't want to be the monopolies. on wet-on-wet techniques which is why I don't think you can really blame him and think poorly of him for using Bill Alexander's entire you know entire business model and method

Starting point is 03:57:42 of painting because he like Bill freely shared it with the world and not just freely shared it he encouraged people it's cool that Bob all you know I love that he stuck with a small PBS studio too so that it just reinforces the DIY self-published kind of ethos that you know YouTubers have and again he was way ahead of his time he stuck with a really tiny studio probably because he liked the people but also because it gave him creative freedom that he most likely wouldn't have had at a larger studio as well there is a trend more people are beginning to create for an audience a few of you know a niche audience there's um he had an intuition about his style that greatly resonated with his own niche audience

Starting point is 03:58:56 this was remember they were comparing it to youtube movements and um general DIY they called it proto social media they didn't this was 2011 so the whole YouTube persona you know Twitch and TikTok didn't even exist then but they were the riders congden and Blandy and them cooemen were smart in predicting that you know Bob emulates or they emulate Bob these new age these contemporary personalities, influencers, streamers. Towards the end, they say Bob found a way to navigate the dehumanizing tensions of TV. They found he made an image of his personality, but he made one that almost in a reverse of what most people do,

Starting point is 04:00:12 creating an image that's different. He created one that's exactly almost the same as who he really was. instead of applying the usual show host persona and bob phil donnie who a famous tv uh daytime tv host said that he spoke so lightly and so gently that people noticed him i think all this it made him more relatable made him connect with audiences he had a hyper sincerity about him and this is the whole thing i was touching upon postmodernism there was a whole new thing that actually jared bowlerd the guy I mentioned earlier, the creator of Wisecrack. He was the first person I heard this philosophical and cultural system of ideas, I guess,

Starting point is 04:01:12 about this called meta-modernism. So it's kind of a play on words in that meta-means it means it's beyond post-modernism, the next phase of cultural evolution. but it's also meta in the sense of the Greek, I guess Plato's word metaxi, which meant between

Starting point is 04:01:38 so it's like a bounce it's going beyond modernism postmodernism but it's also a bounce between both of those areas and I thought it's pretty cool I guess I'll have time to mention it here

Starting point is 04:01:55 they in the book they equate him with David Foster Wallace, the guy who wrote Infinite Jast, who famously put like hundreds of pages of footnotes in his book, they think, argue,

Starting point is 04:02:14 they make a claim that it was an attempt for him to be genuine. It was his need to be genuine, making an essential aspect of his work. In Dolly Parton, she spoke candidly about her artificial appearance. I'm sure a lot of you have seen it, but it's cool.

Starting point is 04:02:32 She's so, she's so, you know, flamboyant in her looks, but she's so humble as an actual person. And those distinctions right there tell you, it's like everybody has that persona, but dollies is just so exaggerated that we're able to easily identify it. Most people you can't. I mean, I'm kind of putting on a persona now. I mean, I'm not always talking this softly. but I'm trying my best to I'm doing it because I personally would watch it

Starting point is 04:03:09 and it's it's how I personally engage most I guess intimately with content it's most true to who I am so there is an authenticity to it but of course you know I'm not giving out my zip code and address and you know details about my private life too many I guess at least other than the occasional sound my baby girl makes out there when she's hungry but um right on cue i uh it's just so interesting to learn about you know just peek behind the scenes of things we engage with every day whether it's tv or more younger generations like us or i say us like me even though i'm not so young anymore.

Starting point is 04:04:03 Watching, you know, just other less traditional media figures on, you know, as we're watching people on YouTube and like myself and making videos ourselves. It's so interesting to see how Bob, he navigated that just so effectively. They say he's self-stereotyped. He never gave any winks, though, of irony or being above the audience. he kind of leaned into how corny he and wholesome he came across he often giggled at himself when he said happy little bush or you know whatever but someone calls him a ben davis and artnet dot com calls him the avatar of edgeless culture meaning the opposite of edgy interestingly he probably didn't read this book but they made a comparison to andy in this book like we did last time and he says that he thinks spot is probably more well known at least than Andy nowadays and to cap our historical journey that we're

Starting point is 04:05:31 making our trajectory into the contemporary sphere of culture and history Molly Fisher describes the millennial aesthetic in art and design as a return to sincerity after the, you know, in 80s, 90s, early 2000s, hipster irony that was so pervasive. In the millennial aesthetic of hyper sincerity or just, you know, return to sincerity is an invocation of a lot of self-help, self-care, slogans of affirmation, the domination of soothing colors, soft lines, unthreatening subject matter. This tendency towards traditional sincerity in a way, from sarcasm in the irony of the 90s is increasingly becoming a thing metamonorism

Starting point is 04:06:29 so this is a reaction like I said to postmodern skepticism about all grand narratives including religious and political ones too won't get into the whole history I wrote a little I wrote I copied and pasted a little I wanted to you know just say a little more about it because it's an interesting concept that I feel is very well it's it's very apt in describing what it is that is going on in culture vermilion and acker say metamodern sensibility can be conceived of as a kind of informed naivety a pragmatic idealism characteristic characteristic of cultural responses to recent global events such as climate change financial crisis, political instability, and even the digital revolution that we've been referencing.

Starting point is 04:07:49 They see, you know, the postmodern culture since the 70s of relativism, irony, pastiche, obvious imitation, is over. It's been replaced by a movement that stresses engagement, emotion, storytelling. if through even if through an ironic sincerity metamonarism is both above and beyond modernism above and beyond and between like we said modernism and postmodernism so we need to know what modernism and postmodernism are to understand what created metamodernism and how it's reacting to those two this also between these two movements modernism and postmodernism must embrace doubt as well as hope and melancholy sincerity and irony affect and apathy so it we feel feelings and a indifference the personal and the political

Starting point is 04:09:09 the technology in the technique modernism generation grand narratives are as necessary as they problematic hope is not simply something to distrust and love not necessarily something to be ridiculed and David Foster Wallace I thought and I and I think metamodernism was in the metamodernist manifesto from 2011 Luke Turner talked about the metamodernist spirit describing it as a romantic in reaction to our crisis-ridden moment and that was after the you know 2008 financial collapse. But again,

Starting point is 04:10:01 this book was written in 2011. And so maybe they had heard the term, but it didn't have as much cultural weight, so they didn't use it. But they say a 2013 issue of American Book Review

Starting point is 04:10:16 dedicated its issue to metamodernist authors, David Foster Wallace, being one of them. They just compared David to Bob. I think Bob fits right in this category. Yeah, that's the gist of it. I have quite a bit more, but I really think it ties into what I was saying earlier

Starting point is 04:10:51 about meaning through creativity and action and success of approximation. That was a concept I remember a lot from engineering school in differential equations. You and engineers do this a lot. they just find two bounds in which they know the answer lies and they just keep bouncing between them until getting successively closer and approximating the answer more and more finely and that almost you know i i know it's not that simple and it's probably maybe it's maybe it's wrong ultimately but it's how my brain

Starting point is 04:11:31 based on my experience interprets it saying hey maybe the bounce the oscillation between straightforward progressive positive ideas about the progress in ultimate you know word utopia of history versus of modernism um basically modernism is saying hey look at all this that science and technology this technology that science has given us seems like we're really marching towards a better future. Postmodernism says, hold on, let's analyze all this. There's a lot of corruption,

Starting point is 04:12:22 there's a lot of deception, a lot of, a lot more layers of complexity to human interaction, humans in general, the works of humans, and the narratives of history, than we realized. And maybe we're not in,

Starting point is 04:12:43 going in the right direction. But metamonarism is saying, we need to take all of these into account. We need to approach it from as many angles as possible and not to loot ourselves and be a ship of fools like Herbert Spencer says. But walk forth with courage and faith that we can do better.

Starting point is 04:13:10 Like I said, the, You know, the spiritual characterization of tribal cultures, how they were uplifted by a closeness to their ancestors and the spirits and the gods around them into nature. And the laser-sharp, incisive rationality of post-enlightenment science and academia. and if we have these two together feeling and intellect and rationality you know we we have at least two things that if they're in harmony maybe we're closer to reality than either one of those

Starting point is 04:14:09 in and of themselves by themselves more encouraging friend than an authoritative father you know he was again like davy turner modeled himself on bob bob was a peer node rather than an impenetrable authority. He managed to promote a truly generous message in the midst of public popularity and economic gain too. He wanted people to paint it, of course, buy his products and become painters themselves, but only 4% of his viewership ever actually painted. That's okay. He knew it. He was a friend. He was authentic. That's how he came across as a friend. That's a huge part of um you know the gen z is apparently a huge characteristic of you know on average of gen z people a sense of self-deprecation or at least publicized sense where they um self-deprecating humor on

Starting point is 04:15:38 social media is becoming more popular and it's like a metamodernist reaction to you know distant being ironic it's like being overly authentic saying oh my god I'm too depressed to get out of bed today and that's something you choose to share if you would have said that 20 years ago it would have had a much different effect a much different reception let's say but um yeah I think authenticity is a balance between being truthful about our flaws and our virtues because you don't want to be too ironic too detached You can be untethered and ungrounded, like we said. You know, Bob, from an ASMR standpoint,

Starting point is 04:16:32 he didn't distance himself from his art or his TV persona. He leaned into it as an identity. He gave us a sense of certainty, of predictability, and that allows us to drop our guard. And Beyond the Pale, he made numerous this guy, Jones, in 2015. so ASMR wasn't really as nearly as big as it was. It was around though, of course.

Starting point is 04:16:57 But he says he didn't say anything about ASMR. He was talking about Bob saying, you know, whether he was much good or not at art, it was hardly, at that hardly mattered. He promoted relaxation and sleep. And he still does, you know, on TV back then, and he still does on YouTube 20 years later. he says I often watch Bob when I can't sleep

Starting point is 04:17:24 and if you look closely at some of Bob's paintings and you know some are pretty poor stuff but he says it's only if you resist being seduced by that voice and smile he did a lot of the like I said ritualistic repetitive repetition

Starting point is 04:17:45 beat the devil out of it you know I talked about his two inch brush and his easel every time give the same chuckle with his little jokes he always repeated it always ended it with the same just wholesome encouraging phrase warm goodbye it was relatable he was humble restrained honest authentic straightforward direct predictable practical hands-on industrious he was god-fearing that lets us know that he didn't assert himself as the highest authority he always subordinated himself to a higher ideal and that to me if it's genuine says something

Starting point is 04:18:41 about a man's character friendly peaceful vulnerable till next time happy painting and god bless my friend that was his phrase yeah everything we see reinforces our sense of knowing him deeply as a human being they say I think it was real way ahead of his time lastly I just want to talk about the millennial aesthetic those that Davis talks about nostalgia cycles you know every 20 or 30 years like we mentioned has about the time it takes for new generation to see cultural landscapes of their youth through rose colored glasses in 1995 so that fits right on time but this isn't why he's popular right I think it's only helping with his already solid rapport with millennials on page 150 they say that Bob's ethos they say Bob's ethos

Starting point is 04:20:39 especially with its emphasis on participation it mirrors other movements both past and present and that got me thinking well you know what else how true is that and what are these movements. And his re-emergence as a cultural figure actually says something deeper about cultural trends in our culture. His affinity to the DIY arts and crafts and American craftsmen movements mirrors our turn away from overconsumption of cheap goods, the de-valuation of our labor, the Industrial Revolution brought on, and maybe our attraction to his integrity and the wholesome character even says something about us and are growing unease with impulsive pleasures and lack of purpose at least in the west maybe you know we've become a culture of impulsive pleasures

Starting point is 04:21:35 cheap fast food same-day shipping we scroll thoughtlessly through reddit facebook instagram for hours and wonder why we're unsatisfied with ourselves bob hasn't lost popularity i think because his message hasn't lost popularity. It wasn't just Bob's subdued fashion and landscapes that were timeless, but his character and his sincere spirituality. He urged us to work hard towards something worth pursuing. He told us to clear our minds and begin painting from a vision in our hearts. He had an appreciation for nature, conservation, a real belief,

Starting point is 04:22:19 in making the world a better place. Not just for us now, but for future generations. Even the simplicity of his painting style and the paintings themselves call back to a more traditional, less abstract, less almost arrogant style, self-important, maybe, or less ironic. He's not hiding behind his irony. They make a point.

Starting point is 04:22:58 Pretty good point. He's leaning into who he was and how he comes across. you know he always smiles I was on Kathy Lee and Regis and they said oh you know Regis says oh Bob you're a happy guy aren't you as he said now we're just gonna paint happy little sky and he says yeah yeah I think I am this current so we talked about the DIY trends of the 1800s early 1900s well I think it is not only re having a resurgence a revival but there's a whole other constellation of other you know many other things coming along with it as well and I think they're all tied at least in

Starting point is 04:23:49 part I'm not claiming to you know be able to I don't know reveal the underlying mechanics of real human history here but I think these trends have an important connection at least to what Bob was doing and who uh and to how Bob influenced them so we talked about Ruskin and Morris and they had the American values of industriousness entrepreneurship self-reliance individualism community romantic connections with nature it rejected um they rejected the dehumanization of the industrial revolution the mass produced items without individual expression in them. There were a reaction against deteriorating quality,

Starting point is 04:24:51 devaluation of human labor. And now we have outsourcing in the 21st century in America. That's the new invention, innovation. So Gustav Stickley in the book, they say, he helped the movement progress when he published the craftsman. He published that in 1901, to 1916. And they revived the concept of open source.

Starting point is 04:25:20 And that others should be free to use and improve upon ideas. And I thought this decentralization really tied in with Bitcoin and the whole internet DIY trend, just a blockchain, new education 2.0, web 2.0, um, on just DIY YouTube channels and, and how to videos. Gregory Cholette even calls on 151 here. He says he calls the DIY category of creative work, dark matter, because it functions in relation to the institutional art world in a way similar to the mass of individual substance

Starting point is 04:26:11 that a Korean cosmologist makes up over 90% of the universe. However you think about it, Bob and his teachings, say they clearly filled a relevant space for millions and the momentum doesn't seem to be dying down think about this was written 10 years ago Bob's still just as relevant if not more so has the u.s and huge portions of the rest of the world become more economically unequal and politically estranged questions questions about who we are what we value are bubbling to the surface. And I love that.

Starting point is 04:26:58 The response to that is these kinds of discussions should give us hope. We're talking. Talking is better than fighting. Internet DIY trends such as, well first of all, we got blockchain, Bitcoin,

Starting point is 04:27:16 NFT, well, fundamentally it's Bitcoin that introduced the blockchain technology, which all other cryptocurrencies are mostly based upon, mostly based and then open source coding

Starting point is 04:27:31 has been around for a long time we have on 2009 I think and on social media mostly YouTube though you have you have traditional arts and crafts quilting knitting sewing but you also have home life you have family vlogs you have news

Starting point is 04:27:52 by independent sources you have booktube film analysis which I personally love You have, you know, video game. I love that. I've been watching this guy, cartoon buffoon. This guy, Cruton, he calls himself.

Starting point is 04:28:12 Speed Run, a very obscure video game, which is a ROM hack of a ROM hack of Mario 64. It's called Super Mario 74 Extreme Edition. Anyways, it's fascinating. But he's extremely skilled at writing at playing this game. And it's just fun to watch someone at the edge of their creativity,

Starting point is 04:28:37 literally playing. You know, science, technology, math, education, you have philosophy, literature. You have podcasts like the Huberman Lab podcast. I mean, that's not to mention art. Man, you have home improvement, auto mechanics, teaching you basic,

Starting point is 04:28:58 how to work on stuff. you know how to construction how to fix your house electronics cooking gaming we said style design interest on Pinterest we have farmers markets local markets are becoming a thing we have farmers markets which are a trend the number of total markets from 94 until today has grown by about 400% over 400%. Then we have modern farmhouse. Which I was surprised to learn. I mean, farmhouse is one thing.

Starting point is 04:29:44 Then we have modern farmhouse. This phrase actually wasn't invented until 2016. New York Times article used it to, I guess, describe the work and aesthetic of a Jersey of a company called Jersey Ice Cream Co. According to forms, that's the exact year that millennials became the largest living generation. I don't think that's a coincidence. Gene Kim writes in the psychology of Rostic Sheik

Starting point is 04:30:23 that shows like Fixer Upper in hometown, Chippy and Joey, if you're an insider, have encapsulated the modern farmhouse look the defining fashion and design trend of the 2010s. In the food and wine scene has also embraced the Rootsie Farm to Table cuisine and earthy American beverages like craft beer and bourbon. She says recently America has turned inward. The aftermath of the 2008 financial collapse.

Starting point is 04:31:00 Increased flexibility of online work. This is written before COVID, so it's just a. accelerated and the better cost of living in inner more traditional cities like Nashville Denver Austin all these factor in to shift in value to a shift in values in accompanying appearance so this trend is this return to less you know future less you know even retro this is like very retro this is very salt of the earth craftsman style this is a turn away from industrialization, cheap plastics,

Starting point is 04:31:42 the artifice of quality and style and class and, you know, Tate, high society. This is, hey, we want to be back to the basics. We want to use raw materials like wood and raw metal, not plastics and synthetic materials. and we want to be obvious about it we don't want to paint it in white necessarily you know some do but you know because you can paint plastic to look like painted wood but when you have raw wood it's very hard to you know have a print of wood grain that looks convincing this is saying hey

Starting point is 04:32:28 we're proud to have built this or have someone local build this or you know this trend of course can be manipulated. As I posted on my Instagram, that picture of the huge, like absurdly large farmhouse sign, which is, you know,

Starting point is 04:32:50 that whole store, home goods is meant to give the illusion, which is, it's like old industry trying to keep up with these trends, the illusion of handcrafted, locally sourced, raw materials,

Starting point is 04:33:05 but it's all manufactured and overseas let's say This trend is so I'm so interested in what it says about Culture or modern history in America some of the farmhouse's most character you know modern farmhouse's most characteristic traits is simple decor sturdy furniture quality Traditionally made from readily available wood around an actual farm you know these things were actually used and they're just being kind of replicated nowadays but back then when you lived on a farm and maybe you didn't have that many trees around you literally would have to reclaim the wood from an old barn door make a bench make something make a window sill um you got butcher block countertops we have some of this in our

Starting point is 04:34:09 house you have porcelain apron sinks farmhouse sinks they have a clean look and a practicality you have vintage furniture bonus points if they have weathered look in perfect looks traditional fabric prints you know floral and paisley secondhand furniture this trend seems to imply our cultural desire to look back toward a more traditional a simpler time and extract the best, not all of them, but the best American values. And then we have the ethical, sustainable conservation, local, handcrafted, unprocessed. I think Bob's values resonate with our growing awareness of like toxicity in our foods. And really in all our products.

Starting point is 04:35:09 His message always stressed that healthy, physically, spiritual individuals have healthy relationships to their environment. As a millennial, I can personally attest to this. We're a generation whose education spoon fed us, compassion for the environment. Even if it was with a side helping of processed food at lunch, you know, we care more about where our products came from, who produced them under what conditions, was it sustainable, was it ethical, was an ethical, We anthropomorphize, you know, him anthropomorphizing trees and clouds and mountains. It encouraged a stewardship of nature, a connection, a relation to nature.

Starting point is 04:36:01 He helps better recognize the importance of the environment as living systems of individual living organisms. He emphasized our dependence on protecting finite natural resources. In the 2020s, I go around. It's impossible to walk into a store without running into a wall of organically green marketing slogans, responsibly produced, consciously crafted. We want pillows sewn by women's collectives in an impoverished community. We want furnishings constructed with ethically sourced wood, whose proceeds benefit farmers, go towards replacing.

Starting point is 04:36:46 the trees it destroyed, we like our barista to point us toward the handmade, the handmade artisanal accents with the local focus while we wait for our single origin, you know, frape latte. I had some fun. According to architectural digest, the fair trade and sustainable movements have redefined the retail landscape in years, and the millennials again are the driving force behind it we have been since 2016 we've been the largest living generation and since recently we've been the largest um generation influencing the american economy and therefore at least as of now the global economy the largest and we're the largest segment of the labor force so of course the modern marketplace is listening to our aesthetic choices

Starting point is 04:37:51 and the values that create them. You know, Amazon, yes, in 2020 it received, it got a 38% growth. But the booming handcraft good sector, too, is jumping from, in 2017, it was $160 billion. In 27, sorry, it jumped $160 billion in the last four years. In the next six years, it will jump probably, Another 800 million?

Starting point is 04:38:33 No, more than that. He'll jump over $900 billion in the next six years, topping $1 trillion. The handcraft goods sector. And especially now that's Etsy and similarly artisanal, locally produced, single handcraft. especially now that we've been at home since COVID. This video again is in 2022.

Starting point is 04:39:10 In COVID in inflation, we're recognizing that the marriage of aesthetics and function are more crucial than ever. Casamorosa put it on their website. Many have come to a realization that our homes need to be a place where we feel safe, cozy, relaxed. Nobody wants to live in and off the shelf. shelf environment anymore this is so interesting this is so it's just so it makes modern trends make so much sense and we see how Bob effortlessly fits right into this he had a timeless sense sensibility and aesthetic and perspective and way of being and I don't think he's gonna get old

Starting point is 04:40:08 I think with each new generation he's going to be appreciated and with the reaction of the previous generations and the endearing endearment that we give him that will be of course taken into the context

Starting point is 04:40:27 of how he's viewed by future generations Casamorosa says we want real wood shelving holding real glass mason jars with unprocessed natural food in them were more inclined towards more simple, more local, and more practical. Not only is sustainability and ethical consumption on our minds, but a taste is a reactionary craving, I think, against fast fashion

Starting point is 04:41:01 and cheap plastics that were produced with planned obsolescence in mind. So, BR's value was the experience he gave not just the art obviously at this point the art was the instruction the message found in the painting and the delivery

Starting point is 04:41:25 of the message so from here's paintings again like they say they become props whose formal qualities are really besides the point his paintings are really an excuse to practice joy

Starting point is 04:41:41 Bob to Congdon and crew can't be evaluated without considering this experience as a whole. Good art can raise more questions than it answers, and Bob's work does just that. We have our psychological reliance on experiencing nature, our need for companionship with people on digital formats, mediums. Our connection with his profound message of love and painting with our hearts or caring for others nature. And the book, the book ends. I'm going to end with how in this video with how the book ends.

Starting point is 04:43:01 They sum up Bob in their view of him and his art, his paintings, in his show. They may be excused as kitsch, but Bob's paintings aren't paintings. They're an excuse to practice joy. And that's where future generations are going to detect the art in Bob's life, the art. He created meaningful, complicated art practice, a meaningful, complicated art practice that supported a simple, accessible vision of happiness. It's an Emersonian, back to nature, rigorous notion of simplicity as goodness. Bob could have been a despot. it could have exploited those who bought into his comforting vision

Starting point is 04:43:49 but from all we learned in this book here he used that power to heal and inspire rather than repress and deny he could have hold himself up in a happy little place of self-delusion much like Thomas Kincaid did but we feel he felt compelled to engage the real world complexities of life with incredible intelligence It was all done to share one possible way, just one, but that was his way, of being joyful,

Starting point is 04:44:27 and connecting with others and caring for them, leaves behind hundreds, now thousands, of artists who will navigate other worlds crafted by their own sensibilities and their own desires. Whether they treat self-expression as ironic or incomplete or invaluable, Bob taught them that painting is an occasion for joy that's Bob's legacy joy it's sublime seductive inspiring cannot be owned cannot be ironic it's healing it's connecting it's beautiful and most of all when it's sincere joy is always radical thanks for watching guys

Let's Find Out - (Pt. 3b) Philosophy of Bob Ross: Industrial to Digital Revolution (A Bob Ross Deep Dive) ASMR

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