The Rich Roll Podcast - Van Neistat Is The Spirited Man

Episode Date: June 21, 2021

A mysterious artist on the cusp of breakthrough success walks away from it all. Beyond the public’s gaze, he spends the next decade pursuing purity, beauty and truths both personal and universal. Then, like a Jedi returning from parts unknown, the artist resurfaces as ‘The Spirited Man’. And this ‘Spirited Man’ goes by the name Van. Van Neistat to be precise. The elder half of The Neistat Brothers, it’s a name that will ring familiar to many, a name typically associated with a superstar YouTuber, OG vlogger, and friend of the pod, Casey Neistat. In the Neistat Venn Diagram, Van and Casey overlap on many traits. Both are artists with an utterly distinct aesthetic. Both are exceptional filmmakers who honed their skills in the days before YouTube even existed. Both have a preternatural aptitude for storytelling, perfectionist dispositions, an appreciation for the analog, and extreme respect for detail. The list goes on. And yet, Van and Casey are also very different artists with disparate sensibilities. Back in 2010 after the Neistat Brothers HBO show wasn’t picked up for a second season, Casey went on to become, well Casey Neistat. Van on the other hand, embarked on a very different journey. An artistic journey of self-discovery—outside the public sphere—until recently. Now re-emerged by dint of his recently launched YouTube Channel, ‘The Spirited Man’, Van muses philosophical and explores questions large and small with a curious, introspective flare that is totally unique, utterly compelling, and just-so-perfectly Van. I was (and continue to be) thoroughly entranced by this series—and so curious about Van—that I reached out to Casey to connect us. Today Van shares his story, and it is wild. My plan was to unfurl ‘The Story of Van Neistat’ in a relatively linear fashion. That’s not at all what happened. And this exchange is better for it. Fluid and conversational, this is an excavation of the artist life. It’s as much about hardship and survival as it is about creativity and productivity. We discuss curiosity, sobriety, discipline, the value of being meticulous, and his commitment to preserving an analog life. We talk about why he didn’t continue making films with Casey and Van’s many collaborations with artist Tom Sachs. Finally, Van spins a few epic yarns featuring Werner Herzog, the Safdie Brothers, and the lore of 368 Broadway—a building in lower Manhattan that birthed many an amazing creative career in the early 2000s. FULL BLOG & SHOW NOTES: bit.ly/richroll609 YouTube: bit.ly/vanneistat609 Van is super awesome. I love this one. Hope you do too. Peace + Plants, Rich

There's a problem with art and with filmmaking and with acting. And the problem with it is that it's cool and it's perceived as cool. And that's a problem because sometimes it's cool, sure, but that's not what it is. It's a job. You don't go into it because it's cool. to it because it's cool. Artists are not people smoking pot and staying up all night watching movies and being pretentious in cafes in Paris. Artists are up at the crack of dawn.

They work harder than everyone. They're all broke, but some of them are rich and it's extreme discipline. To me, the worst advice I've ever gotten, I think, is do what you love and the money will come automatically. That is fucking preposterous. I wasted 15 years doing that. And it's not the fuck true.

Everyone needs money. Everyone needs to have money unless you're born with it and you still need it. You really have to prioritize and understand that making money is a skill and is a craft that's not automatic. It's very intentional and you have to go after and do it. It is an incredible blessing to be able to make a living out of the things that you make with your hands. I'm Van Nystad.

I am a spirited man. And this is the Rich Roll Podcast. The Rich Roll Podcast. Greetings people. It is I, Rich Roll, an aspiring spirited man who today convenes with a true spirited man, a spirited man, generous in spirit, sharing thoughts and ideas, spirited man, a spirited man generous in spirit, sharing thoughts and ideas, spirited in nature.

This spirited man goes by the name Van, Van Nystad to be precise. The elder half of the Nystad brothers, an HBO show of some years back, it's a name that will ring familiar to many, a name typically associated with one superstar YouTuber, the big dog OG in the vlog game, personal friend and friend of the pod, Casey Neistat.

But Van is the older brother. And in the Neistat-Van diagram, Van and Casey overlap on many traits, both are artists with unique and distinctive aesthetics, both are exceptional filmmakers who honed their skills in the days before YouTube even existed. Both have an extraordinary aptitude for storytelling, perfectionist dispositions, an appreciation for the analog.

What else? Respect for detail. The list goes on and on and on. And yet they are also very different, different people and different artists with different sensibilities. Back in 2010, after the Neistat Brothers HBO show was not picked up for a second season, Casey went on to become, well, Casey. Van, on the other hand, embarked on a very different journey, an artistic journey, a journey of self-discovery,

a journey for the most part outside the public sphere until recently that is when Van suddenly reappeared by dint of his recently launched YouTube channel, The Spirited Man, which is a very cool and curious unlimited series that explores all kinds of questions, questions large, questions small, things like home repair, all the way to critical thinking with an introspective and philosophical flair

that I think is utterly unique. I'm totally compelled by this series. And I was so curious about Van and his particular sensibility that I reached out to Casey to connect us and here we are. This one is really fun. It's really different

and it's coming right up. But first. We're brought to you today by recovery.com. I've been in recovery for a long time. It's not hyperbolic to say that I owe everything good in my life to sobriety. And it all began with treatment and experience that I had that quite literally saved my life.

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I've been in recovery for a long time. It's not hyperbolic to say that I owe everything good in my life to sobriety. And it all began with treatment and experience that I had that quite literally saved my life. And in the many years since, I've in turn helped many suffering addicts and their loved ones find treatment. And with that, I know all too well just how confusing and how overwhelming and how challenging it can be to find the right place and the right level of care, especially because, unfortunately, not all treatment resources adhere to ethical practices. It's a real problem. who created an online support portal designed to guide, to support, and empower you to find the ideal level of care tailored to your personal needs. They've partnered with the best global behavioral health providers to cover the full spectrum of behavioral health disorders,

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go to recovery.com and take the first step towards recovery. To find the best treatment option for you or a loved one, again, go to recovery.com. Okay, Van, Van Nystad, the story of Van Nystad. So I plan to kind of go through his life in a relatively linear fashion over the course of this conversation, but I gotta tell you, that's not at all what happened.

But honestly, although we're kind of all over the place over the course of a couple hours, I think this one is all the better for it. It's a very fluid conversational exploration of so many things, what it means to pursue the artist's life. It's about creativity, curiosity, sobriety, discipline, the value of being meticulous, appreciation and respect

for preserving the analog things in our life and so many other topics, including some pretty great stories about Werner Herzog, his brother, Casey, the Safdie brothers, and also 368 Broadway in Lower Manhattan, which is a building that throughout the early 2000s birthed many an amazing career. Van is awesome.

I love this one. So let's do it. This is me and Van Nystap. Such a pleasure to meet you. Thank you for doing this. I'm so excited to talk to you. Likewise, thank you for having me. You're like this mythic, mysterious figure.

I mean, I've known your brother for eight or so years. He was an early guest on the podcast. I think he's been on three or four times, although not all of those episodes were before he started vlogging, they're way back. So I've been familiar with you and your work for quite some time,

but you are this kind of question mark in the sense that in the wake of the Nystap brothers, you kind of went your own way and left all of us to make up stories about what exactly happened, like project some notion of what you were doing. And in my mind, you were like this out of the public eye, off the grid dude who kind of walked off the mortal coil,

like Kung Fu to pursue like purity and art and truth and answers to questions of the universe. And now you've resurfaced with this beautiful channel, which made me think like I really wanted to finally meet you, so thank you. Well, I'm so psyched to be here and I'm really glad that that myth is what it is because that's the best case scenario.

But I think in reality is I just find it really difficult to earn a living. Yeah. And I think that the 10 years between the 11 years between the Nystat brothers and then this channel, I've just spent exploring all the different options of making a living and with my craft and then working at all the different sort of aspects of being a writer director.

Cause there's so much to the, it's such a complicated art form. You have to be a writer, you have to be a director, you have to be a cameraman. And then in our case, like with Casey or with me, you're also the personality on the screen. Sure. But mainly I was trying to learn how to like tell stories

from technically what is going on with storytelling. And I work with this artist named Tom Sachs and he was like almost a patron because he would hire me to do these projects but he gave me an extreme level of authorship with these projects and it really helped me to develop. And it was 10 years of almost exclusively working with him. And he would go out and get money.

He would get sponsorship from Nike. He would get sponsorship from Nike. He would get sponsorship from Hurley. And we travel all over the world. And then at the same time, I would write my own projects, but really trying to learn like the technical storytelling process. Tom Sachs is a very interesting, curious, unique artist.

I've been a fan of his for a long time. He inspired these glasses. He wears, I don't know if he still does, but he used to wear these exact frames. And I went on a search for like a year to figure out where he got them from. And I finally figured it out. And these are the glasses that I wear

and I just get new ones from the same place. Yeah. So I've been following his career for a long time and it's interesting to see the genesis of this DIY aesthetic that shows up in your work and of course in Casey's work and how it all traces back to Tom. Like when you look at Tom, like a lot of the kind of details that show up

in both you and your brother's videos, really there's plenty of evidence in the Tom Sachs catalog from where that came from. So I'm interested in the influence that that guy had on both of you. You know, I really, I distinctly remember going into his studio the first time ever You know, I really, I distinctly remember going into his studio the first time ever

and his reputation had preceded him. And a friend of mine told me about this guy, Tom Sachs, and he was like an artist and he was like a famous artist. His work was in museums and galleries and collectors paid thousands of dollars for his art. And in my mind, people who reached that level of success in the art paradigm, it was always a very thick degree of inaccessibility. Like I took art history classes in college,

but there was always this really, there was this thick, thick mystery as to why, okay, okay, I get what you're telling me about Mark Rothko and these big blurry red splotches. I get that. But why, why, why, why? I don't feel it. I don't feel like why that is art.

I don't feel why that is going in a museum. And when I went into Sax's studio, it was this unbelievably familiar feeling when I was looking at some of the pieces on his wall and I thought, oh, I get it. I get it. I get why this is art and in a museum. And I also get where it comes from and what he had,

what the piece that is in my mind that is etched, he had one of those handheld like from the 80s, defender video games, I guess is what you'd technically call them. But really they were just L-E-D dots that you could move around and then like figured out how to make it it conceivably. Like the little football, remember the NFL football game.

One step above that, those are like the digital watch kind of displays, but this was like the light displays. And it had, let's say it had eight buttons on it. He had made linkage with armature and little hinges and pennies for thumb buttons He made linkage with armature and little hinges and pennies for thumb buttons to control those buttons on the thing mounted to like a frame made out of police

barricades that he had stolen. Like that was one of the pieces that was in there. And then I got to like look through the catalogs and beautiful, everything in the art industry is the highest. The art handlers are the best movers, the most expensive and most careful movers you can hire. The people who clean art are the highest custodian, level custodians that exist. And so the books are like,

there's this company called Steidl. Have you heard of them? I think they're in Austria and they're like very limited edition catalogs and looking through his and he had like this Chanel guillotine that he made that was in the permanent collection at the Pompidou Center. And it's like, wow, I've been to Paris. I've seen that building.

He's in there. And then to learn from him, it was like almost the complete opposite. It was like the whole thing was flipped in like, no, artists are not people smoking pot and staying up all night watching movies and being pretentious in cafes in Paris. Artists are up at the crack of dawn. They work harder than everyone. They're all broke, but some of them are rich

and it's extreme discipline and extreme. And like the thing I learned from Tom was all this like meticulousness. Like it's an incredible illusion that his work looks like it was made by a 14 year old kid that's in prison. And he just has his own resources and that's what it looks like it was made by a 14 year old kid that's in prison. And he just has his own resources and that's what it looks like.

But it's all very carefully refined over, he's been doing it for 50 years or 40 years or something. 50 years. There is a feeling of chaos, but when you drill down into the most micro aspects of his work, the attention to detail is unbelievable, unbelievable. And, you know, I mean, I don't even know how to describe his genre

or what it is that he does specifically. I mean, he takes artifacts from pop culture and reformulates them to make a statement about whatever it is that he's interested in pursuing. He made a Sub-Zero freezer, refrigerator from scratch. He like got the copper tubing and like sweated the joints and it's all beautiful and it's made out of plywood. And I think the name of the piece is Darth Vader,

but oh, okay, the sort of hidden soul of his work that to me is everything, the hidden soul of his work that to me is everything, the hidden soul of the work is that all of those little artifacts that you see everything, they work. And they look the way they do because they work, they function. That refrigerator, his standard was,

this thing is not done unless it can freeze ice cubes. And we made a McDonald's from scratch, like a street cart McDonald's from scratch. And it looks like a work of art, but when it was in the Guggenheim in Berlin, every Thursday night, we opened that McDonald's and we served hamburgers and we served Coke out of the Coke machine.

It was a functioning McDonald's, right? And that was a two year process of putting that show together, wasn't it? Let me see, I started in 2000, yeah. I started in 2001 in April, and then it was in at the Bowen Foundation in Manhattan, I think in February, 2003. Yeah, and then in summer 2003, it went to Berlin.

What is the obsession with NASA all about that he has? I don't know. It's like unreal. I hate space. I hate the space program. You made the whole documentary though. I know, Mark Parker is to blame for that. Mark Parker went to the show.

He's like, you guys gotta make a feature about this. We're like, okay, we did it. Well, there's an interesting story in how you met him and started working with him. Can you tell that story? So I worked at Scholastic, the publisher that publishes Harry Potter. They also make the little classroom magazines

that you would get when you were a kid. And I worked on a magazine called Super Science, which was for fourth to sixth graders. And one of my jobs was I had to do a science experiment every month that the kids could do with just supplies they'd find in their classroom or in their house. So my desk would have all of these like little,

solar ovens on them and the little coffee can with the rubber band and the weight inside that rolls and then rolls back to you. And a friend of mine, Joe Torxon, he worked in marketing and I had lunch with him every day. And one day he brought in Tom Sachs and that's how I found out who he was. And I just kind of met him,

oh, nice to meet you, blah, blah, blah. And then when my job was, I had stretched my internship into a five day a week, like basically full-time job. And my editor was like, look, for legal purposes, you either have to become like dedicate yourself and become an associate editor here for a salary and all that stuff. Or I have to fire you just for legal reasons.

And I was like, I was like, I don't really wanna do this. And Joe said, go work for Saks. He's doing a job. He's doing a big project. And so it was around that time I came down and on my bicycle, I had mounted this for an old DV video camera. I've mounted this bike mount to record myself riding through the Holland tunnel on a bicycle.

And he was, Sax was examining it on the street, like in the wild. And I was just like, wow, that's my- He's like, I found my kind. And so when I went to apply, I'm the guy who did that thing. So it was sort of like, maybe this guy has the rudimentary ability.

And I think what he liked about me was that I didn't go to art school. I was unrefined and I'm kind of like, I can get the thing done, but in the like really in a, just a terrible way that he loved. Right, uncorrupted by the fineries. Uncorrupted by education and technique.

Right, so you start out as like a formulator cutting like foam board and stuff like that and spend two years putting together this gallery piece that then ends up in Berlin at the Guggenheim, right? Yeah. And then in the meantime. But you're Guggenheim, right? Yeah. And then in the meantime- But you're making films. Yeah, yeah, yeah.

I brought my video camera to work and I made an unauthorized movie and I was on the clock and I was measuring foam core and there was a tape measure and I finished my measurement and I put the tape measure down and on the tape measure, it was a Stanley Powerlock tape measure. And where it normally says Powerlock, it said Kubrick is dead.

So it was the Stanley Kubrick is dead tape measure. And so I made a movie about that and then about how weird the space that we were working in was. And then for the soundtrack, I just lifted the Berlioz music from the shining. And then the monologue of the head of the hotel saying, he killed a family and stacked them

in the North hallway or whatever. But this isn't part of why Tom hired you. That was like a little moonlighting thing, right? That he ends up seeing. And then he saw it and he was like, okay, keep making these. You still gotta do the fabrication. You still gotta make all this stuff, but keep making these videos.

And then he helped refine my process because he would give me viewing assignments and he would say things like, okay, this work is about the sculpture. So get really, really close, as close as you can. Show the hot glue, show the screws, show the burrs. And he showed us the Eames short films that they- Powers of 10.

Ray and Charles Eames made in Venice. Powers of 10 is one of them. There's one called Introduction to Feedback. And then they made, in my opinion, what is the greatest industrial film of all time. And it's called the SX 70. And it's about the Polaroid SX 70. And it was just made for the employees of Polaroid,

which I don't really understand why. Maybe they would show it at a party or something, but it's this miraculous movie about exactly how the Polaroid SX-70 works. But there's also a humanity in it because the things that they're photographing for the movie are children pushing over a whole stack of cardboard boxes or flipping over rocks at the beach. And then the Polaroid is taking pictures of those. And then they show you like the three layers

of Polaroid film and how the light meter closes the iris. And it was just unbelievable, the humanity and the technical virtuosity of the film combining. And that is sort of, I think in essence, that's the thing I'm subconsciously making all the time. That with a combination of like Mr. Rogers for adults, like that's my ambition. Well, that was the original idea behind,

well, maybe not the spirited man, but you had a pilot, right? That you were pitching that was basically that idea. The idea of like fix it man for adults kind of show. Yeah, I made this pilot called, we can fix it. And it wasn't good enough cause I was smoking way too much pot at the time. So it had that, it just wasn't good enough,

but I've been able to, you know, I steal from it and put little bits of it in the spirited man. Like there's this episode called sobriety where you see me like chopping down a door and then it cuts to these little dolls in the same hallway and it's stop motion. And when I posted that video,

Isabel, my wife said, did you just make all that? And I was like, no, no, no, no. That's from 2011. Yeah. The archive is unbelievable. I mean, that's one of the things I've noticed with Casey, like in making the videos, like you guys created this incredible library

that then informs all the videos that you make, that you're able to tap into all of these memories and access all of these events throughout the course of your life. Do you mean like the library of movies that other people made? No, no, no, the library of home movies of you guys growing up.

And then just the way that you've maintained like a catalog of all the work up to date so that you can access it and weave it into the new projects that you're making. That's crazy you mentioned that because this week I was confronted with some of the limitations of that and things fall away. Like no matter how careful,

unless you stay in one spot, I think, like Kubrick had that big mansion in England and he just stayed there and he didn't leave. So I'm sure he had everything. But I'm a Gen X or nomad generation and I'm moving all the time. And so I've been moving hard drives around with all my footage on them.

And then I had this studio in the South Bronx and the hard drives went from the size of like an encyclopedia Britannica to the size of a pack of cigarettes. So I could take six 500 gig encyclopedia Britannica hard drives and put them on one pack of cigarettes hard drive. And I did that and then something happened

that they like got corrupted. Oh no. And I was just, and now we're in the process of trying to rescue a lot of footage. Like it's like from 2007 to 2013 or something, like a whole bunch of raw footage. It's horrible, but I have a lot of movies. I have a movie archive with that I have a movie archive that I can pull.

I can like completely edited videos that I can pull footage from that way. And then I have the tapes that go to 2007, I think. And then 2007, I think we switched over to card-based video. So I've been going and taking tapes down to like this company that can like turn them into, cause I don't have any of the gear to play the tapes anymore. Right, but with your appreciation for being meticulous in every regard,

it's amazing that this has been a blind spot. You gotta get on top of this. What's horrible about it is that I've been like, I've been crazy about it. I've been like focused and yelling at people and making sure things happen and don't forget this and I put tremendous amount of effort in.

And then despite that, like certain things just kind of, you just lose them, but I'm confident we'll get, I'll get that one hard drive. It's just one hard drive, but it's three terabytes of like really small video. Somebody ought to be able to figure that out. Yeah, I think so. Well, let's take it back.

I wanna go back to the origin story a little bit. You growing up in Connecticut and we're, in looking at your work and reflecting on your brother's career path, the overlaps, the differences, like there's a shared appreciation for not just detail and precision in the work that you do, but also this unbelievable capacity and understanding of storytelling

and the importance of telling stories that are meaningful. Like where does that come from? I think, well, I think my mom and my dad who are no longer together, like they're two hemispheres of the brain. And my mom is like the right hemisphere of the brain, which is like very creative and artistic. And she is an unbelievably gifted natural storyteller

with no technique. Like she would, I'm sorry, with no discipline. Like she doesn't write. I mean, she writes, but not as she should write. She doesn't do, she takes pictures, but not as she should. She, you know, she doesn't make films. She doesn't blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. But her natural gift, like to just sit should. She doesn't make films. She doesn't blah, blah, blah, blah, blah.

But her natural gift, like to just sit and tell you a story, unbelievable, unbelievably good how she can weave. And she'll put a little, she'll put like a little seed over here that just seems like an interesting little detail. And then it comes back at the end of the thing and it's unbelievably great. So that's mom.

And then my dad is like the left hemisphere of that. Like he, if you ask him like was his favorite movie in the last five years, he'd be like Caddyshack. You know, he's seen like eight movies in his life, read like 10 books, but he's extremely orderly and he's very responsible and he works really hard. So I, you know So I think it's- The meeting of the mystical with the rigor.

Yeah, and I think those probably mom and dad are responsible for why. But, and my mother's entire side of the family is they're Irish, Portuguese, and they just have that storytelling gift. But my dad is also extremely funny and extremely charming. Everyone loves him. So, so by osmosis filters down, right?

Yeah. But the original plan was to do what? Like writing? Yeah. So, you know, there wasn't, filmmaking was this thing that you need in order to have access to, it seemed, you had to go to film school

and there were like really two film schools. There was USC, which was like the West Coast guys like Spielberg and Coppola and those guys, I don't even know if they went there. But, and then there was the East Coast was NYU and they were just both prohibitively expensive. That was just, it was not an option. I didn't know about Werner Herzog.

I didn't know you could just get a camera and do blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. So when I was in high school, a friend of mine who read a lot, he's told me to read Hunter Thompson and I read Hunter Thompson and I was just like, okay, well, this is something I would love to do. I would love to do this.

And then I said, okay, so I'm gonna go to school and I'm just gonna learn all the liberal arts stuff and try to go out and be a writer. I'll move to New York. And like, back then writers made a lot of money. Writers did well. You could write for magazines and have a nice awesome house.

It's so crazy, right? Yeah. That's no longer. And I just didn't, I don't like writing. I mean, I do now, I write every day now, but back then like sitting down and I did it professionally and just the revisions and the revisions and working with the computer,

just doing it all on the computer, it just- Offends you. Oh, I hate it. It offends your analog sensibility. Well, it's not pretension. It's like I developed from zero to like 20. I sent my first email when I was 23 years old. So I developed without any of that computer stuff and computers to this day,

like people talk about how, when they hear the ding on their phone, it gives them a small, like endorphins rush. For me, it is the opposite. When I hear it on my phone, it is dread. It is like, oh, this is another damn thing I gotta deal with. And I gotta go through this device

that's probably gonna break or malfunction or not work somewhere along the way. And the typewriter, like I love the typewriter because the typewriter is just, once you get your fingers knowing where the keys are, it's just direct thought. And you can type the way that you think and talk because you can't just go back.

You can't just like, if you start down a path, you'd just be like, and Tim and I went down to the, no, no, it wasn't Tim, it was Billy. You have to write that. Whereas if you were with the computer, you'd be like, oh no, it wasn't Tim, it was Billy. And you go back and it's so, and then when you're done with the typewriter,

let's say you get, dinner's ready, you just stand up and go. You just stand up and go. And there it is. You don't have to remember to save it either. You don't have to shut it down or any of that. I mean, I'm a little older than you, but I'm also Gen X. And there is something profound

about being the last generation of people who were reared in an analog world. My first exposure to a computer was in college and I typed papers on the first Apple Macintosh. And it was many years later before I sent my first email. Like there was no internet throughout most, all of my formative years. And, you know, we're gonna, in the same way

that we would talk about our grandparents, like, oh, they didn't, there was no, the television didn't exist. Like there's something really profound about that. And I think there's some wisdom in that as we age, in terms of like how we communicate with the younger generation. And your work is infused with this idea.

Like there's a nostalgia to it, but also a reverence for the practical and what it means to roll up your sleeves and get your hands dirty and, you know, connect with your environment and your natural world. Yeah, one of the things that like creative people who have an audience, one of the things that they do is they preserve the things that they found valuable. They say to their audience, who's invariably going to be younger than their influences, they say, oh, this is important.

Remember this, here's something, look at this. And I don't know, to me, it's natural. It's part of being very, very stubborn, being like, there's certain lines that I've drawn. I remember when in high school, they went from Mac to DOS-based machines. And I just, it had been Macintosh and I could get my head around that and you click the thing around and you double click. And then DOS was machines. And I just, it had been Macintosh and I could get my head around that and you click the thing around and you double click.

And then DOS was typing in these codes. And I just said, no. I never did that either. I said, if this is going to be the thing, I'm not doing it. And you can fail me in whatever, but I will not do this. With the floppy disk that you had to put in and the whole thing.

I mean, that was fine because Apple had those floppy disks and so forth, but the code typing in C, colon, slash, and everything had to be exactly right and do all this work just so it would like, a zero would come up on the screen. Like, no, nope. Yeah.

But I think, yeah, I don't, I'm afraid of that word nostalgia because it does sound like, I mean, it is nostalgia, but it's also like, this is just kind of how I live. I have an old truck and I put so much energy and love into it, but like, I love driving it. I love it, I do. Well, it comes across in the videos.

The reverence for this truck is unparalleled. But I think on top of that also, and I heard you talking about this in another interview, another relic of our era being Gen X is that we grew up in a time in which we just weren't exposed to the truth of possibilities. Like I remember going to,

I went to a really nice college and I was unclear on what I wanted to do. And I went to the campus career counseling center and it was just brochures on consulting companies and applications for investment banks. And I was like, is this it? Like, is this all that is available to me? There was no, as you had mentioned in this other interview,

there was no YouTube. You couldn't pull up videos of the people that you revered and respected and have them tell you exactly how they did it. So there was this sense of these people are inaccessible. What they're doing is not possible for the average human being. They were baked as geniuses from the get-go

and I'm just gonna have to go, you know, pursue this sort of mundanity. Yeah, they leave out the story of the geniuses, right? And so wait, you went to Stanford? I did, yeah. Yeah. But now don't you think Stanford is kind of the opposite, right? Like, I mean, I was there at a transition period, you know, it was this great institution,

but it was right on the precipice of it becoming like the tech place to be, you know, Palo Alto at the time was still a pretty bucolic little college town. And of course there was Intel and IBM and things like that. And a lot of my, you know, friends were studying computer science and the like, but there wasn't that sense of like Silicon Valley and this is where it's all happening. That came later. And I have lots of friends that went off

to make billions of dollars and do that. And I just wanted to read books and do other things. Like, I sort of wasn't plugging into that sensibility at the time. But yeah, I'm sure it's different now. I mean, now it's like a giant metropolis. It's completely different. Did you know how much work you were going to have to do?

That was that, I guess to get into Stanford, you have to do what? To do anything. To do it. That was a thing that came as, and to this day comes as a surprise to me, is the amount of, I don't care how smart you are, the amount of, just the crazy amount of work.

Like, you know, I don't know. I just, that came as a surprise to me. I didn't know it was gonna be to do something of consequence or to do like, oh, follow your path or whatever was going to be, I can't believe how much work it is. And how long it takes, right? It takes so long, even though you're doing all this work,

like every waking hour. Yeah, well, I look at it like that. I mean, I was never super talented in anything that I was doing or that I continue to do. I'm a grinder. So I'm never afraid of the hard work. Like I relish that. And I see that as my advantage long-term,

like cause I'll outwork anybody and bridge that talent deficit gap to the best of my abilities. And that's the way I looked at, that's how I got into Stanford. And that's how I tried to keep pace with these students that were much smarter than me and talented in ways that I couldn't possibly imagine.

But yet, I think on top of that is this patience and appreciation for the length of time that it takes to do anything well, right? And I look at your path, I wanna talk about the sobriety aspect of it, but it's been a 10 year period of you kind of figuring out who you are and what you want to be until you get to this point

where you can synthesize all of these experiences that you've had and deliver them in a way that, you know, I think you're hitting a certain stride right now in terms of what you're doing and how you're communicating with the world. That's a reflection of that 10 year period of work that you've put in. And the things that I, I'm 54,

like I didn't start figuring out who I was or what I wanted to do until I was like 41, 42 years old. And I've spent the last nine years doing this thing. And I only feel now like I'm starting to understand what it is exactly. It takes time. And I think everybody, particularly now in the way that the culture is with this, kind of hack your way to success

and this priority on trying to find the shortcut, we're missing the bigger picture. It's in that struggle, it's in that journey that you develop the resonance that will make you great in whatever field it is that you're trying to pursue. So you went and you went to law school, right? Yeah, I mean, that was a giant mishap all to get. Yeah, so I grew up in Washington, DC. I was a swimmer, went to get, yeah. So I went, I grew up in Washington, DC.

I was a swimmer, went to Stanford, swam there, graduated, lived in New York City for a couple of years, went upstate to law school for a couple of years, but spent most of my time in Manhattan, getting into trouble and screwing up my life. Moved to San Francisco, was a lawyer there for a couple of years. Moved here in 96, was a lawyer for a couple of years,

bottomed out on drugs and alcohol, went to treatment, got sober, sobriety was my job. I still worked as a lawyer for many years after that, but sobriety was the thing, you know, and that was my introduction to tools and new principles for how to organize my life and live. And that's still the lens through which I, you know, process everything that I do.

But that was, I mean, I got sober in 98 and I feel like only now I'm starting to really feel like I'm expressing the authentic version of who I am. Whoa. Yeah, I mean, the brutality of sobriety, it is- Slowbriety. It is unbelievable how hard it is. Are you comfortable talking about that?

I am, you know, I called a friend before I did my sobriety movie, because you know, there's the traditions. Sure. And one of the things is, there's this quotation about, in something, something, something in television and radio.

And it's like in one of the traditions. Yeah, we're anonymous at the level of press, radio and film. So it's always a tricky thing. And as a sort of public facing person myself, I struggle with the tension between wanting to speak about these issues. Cause again, it's sort of like that campus, you know, job center.

Like there wasn't a lot of information. And I think the downside of that tradition is that there's a lot of people who don't really understand what's available to them when they're in pain and struggling. So I try to walk that tightrope and share my, it's always experience-basedrope and share my, it's always experience-based. I just share my experience.

I try to steer clear of being specific about, you know, the 12 step program itself, but you know, it's everybody has different opinions about where that line lives. Yeah, I mean, lucky for me, like, if you like stories, man, that is your place that you go and you will hear the most incredible things, the most incredible stories. And then when you hear someone tell your story, that's like, that's the biggie. That's the one where you're like, okay.

Because I think people don't feel like, you know, they call it qualifying when you sit at the desk and tell your story, right? And I think a lot of people just are like, no, no, I don't drink like that guy in the gutter or whatever. And that's how I felt. I was like, no, because I'm not like so-and-so. I'm like, blah, blah, blah.

But like, really, when I sat in there, it was like, okay, I, blah. But like really when I sat in there, I was like, okay, I got to restructure the whole way, the whole way of thinking, my whole way of thinking. And then you don't have the thing anymore. You don't have the valve, the valve's gone. And the valve is the meetings. And like when you start to go,

you just, okay, drop everything and go to a meeting and it'll be okay. And that works. I had a lot of trouble living in New York. I lived in New York for like, I moved in 98 and I'm still keeping an apartment there. And in my forties, just, I was never, I never lived, I never had enough money

to like live like a New Yorker. Like I never made enough money, never made enough money to like go to a Broadway show or take tag, take taxis. If I wanted made enough money, never made enough money to like go to a Broadway show or take tag, take taxis. If I wanted to go somewhere, I had to do the subway, which is almost non-functional. It's the worst subway system I've ever been anywhere,

including like Lisbon, Portugal or Mexico city. It's the worst subway system I've ever been on. It's horrible. Highly offensive to the spirited man. It doesn't work. It doesn't work at all. And so I rode a bicycle or walked. So navigating around that city is very, very important.

And there's just, this is another reason why attention to detail because there's no margin for error. There's no margin. You can't leave your bike unlocked ever, never, not once, or else it's gonna be, it will be stolen. And that wore on me, that really wore on me because I don't have that.

I'm not naturally inclined to be that kind of left-brained person who's like careful with keys and wallets and stuff. Thankfully, New York City beat that into me because I think you need that degree of functionality to do things. But that stress like really, really wore on me. I had to go to get from my apartment to outside.

I had to go through five doorways, five doorways to go from my room and my apartment to outside. And one of those doorways was an elevator, two of those doorways were elevators. And just, and being stoned, I didn't mind any of it. Right, so that was great. To bring it back, this is the introduction to drugs and alcohol as a coping mechanism

for dealing with being flat broke in New York City and trying to just fucking make your way. Yeah, and the thing is like, I tried to get it across in the video very subtly when I was like, there's this amazing shot of me like riding in the sunset in Maine. And it just says, sometimes it was like this, before I was sober, sometimes it was like this, you know, before I was sober,

sometimes it was like this riding my motorcycle in Maine. That's what we hang on to. And well, the point I'm making is that like, it wasn't all bad. It wasn't a hundred percent bad. This thing was used, these tools were useful at the time. They got us through like you got through law school. Yeah.

That ain't no- No, they work until they stop working. That's right. There's a reason why we do it because it's actually serving a purpose for us. And then when it stops working- There is a functionality to it. It is hell when it stops working, it's horrible.

It was pot for you mostly though? Yeah, that's what took me out in the end. It was, I couldn't function without it. I was just full of rage. I was horrible without it. And yeah, and God, I quit. Was the reckoning out here or what was the moment? I was in Yosemite.

I've had nothing but bad experiences in Yosemite. Something about that place in me don't mix. And I was in the last beer I ever drank was in Yosemite. And yeah, it was, I didn't bring any weed on me. I had been looking forward to this trip for so long. I've been working really hard and I went up there and I just cracked. I just lost all control of all my emotions.

And it was, and I just called a friend of mine and he was like, you know what? Try going to a meeting, man. He was like, he had been sober for a few years. And I was like, it was like a total, I was like, whoa, whoa, whoa. Like that was the last, my last suspect. I thought I was had mental illness and all this stuff.

And it was like, oh, whoa, whoa, whoa. Okay, really? It can't be the pot. And I was like, okay. And then I just went and it was just like, the first one was in Atwater. And it was like, I was like, yeah, that I've been to before.

The one where you sit outside? No, no, it was like in a little just nondescript room. And man, I went back there. I went back there for like, I was out here for a movie premiere thing for a space program. And I went to that meeting and then like, I saw this gal

that I like kind of went out on a date with in New York that who's like kind of a, she's a famous person. I'm not gonna, obviously I'm not gonna say her name. And it was just like, how, this is so random, but this is what this thing is. It's just tons of these running, the people you run into. Another thing about it is if,

I don't know, I could just go on and on about it. In my mind, it's a magical thing. It's something, I don't believe in magic, but like magic is sort of an adjective we use to describe things that we can't explain. And so any kind of like people that I run into, that's important. Like if I run into someone from the past,

that means something, there's something to that. That's into someone from the past at one of those, that means something. There's something to that. That's not just some random thing. Do you know what I mean? Yeah, 100%. I mean, I believe in the magic of AA like no other. I mean, my life, it just, it bears zero resemblance to what it was like before now.

And it's purely a result of doing the thing the way that they tell you to do it. But the people, and I think there's something really special about the recovery community in Los Angeles. The people are unbelievable. I've met so many incredible human beings that are so important to me now

that are the most meaningful people in my life. Yeah. And just where else, I mean, on that subject of magic, like just generally what other institution exists where you could walk into a room, utterly broken, alone, lost, desperate, broke, and be embraced by a group of people who truly want nothing from you other than to just help you and support you.

And the only requirement is that you have a desire. You can go in drunk and high. You just have to have a desire to stop. Yeah. And when you start to get it, the only obligation is you start paying it forward to other people. But do you have to bring a dollar?

Bring a dollar, bring a $1 bill. But if you don't have a dollar, ain't nothing but a thing. You don't have to have a dollar. But you might feel weird if you're like, man, no one told me to bring a dollar. I mean, I think it's one of the most miraculous things of modern times

that it hasn't imploded either. Yeah, yeah. No, it's unbelievable. It's unbelievably miraculous. And I also love the like, I love the like secret handshake thing about it too. Like that you meet people out in the wild. Wherever you go. And like, it'll help you meet people out in the wild. Wherever you go.

And it like, it'll help you. Like it'll help you. And if you're in a new town, you can just pop in and then you're instantly dialed into some, you're instantly dialed into a community. Yeah. I'm in this, I'm, so I ran into an old friend in New York and at a meeting

and he had been sober for a while. And we started going to this one meeting on Sundays in the East Village, I can't remember the name of it now. It was one of those big, like not stadium, but like the size of a big venue meeting, like it was in a playhouse or something. And so they would do, cause it was in a playhouse or something. And so they would do, cause it was once a week, they would do like anniversary,

like anyone with five years. And then there'd be a big line of people that would come up. And this friend of mine pointed out, he said, now watch between five years and 10 years, watch how few people go up. So the person at the front, the meeting chair would be like, okay, anybody with six years of sobriety and then like 11 people would come up.

Anyone with eight years of sobriety and like three people would come up. Anybody with one year of sobriety, line, 40 people. And he said, he's like, I went through it too. There's a trough between five and 10 years where you stop engaging. And I'm at the like, I went through it too. There's a trough between five and 10 years where you stop engaging. And I'm at the very, I'm doing that. I'm like, cause COVID is year eight for me.

2020 would be year eight for me. So I'll be nine in September, God willing. And I didn't do any of those Zoom meetings. My last meeting was in a church in Topanga and I'm really, I'm paying a price. I mean, I'm really crazy. It's been hard. The Zoom thing's been rough.

There's some great Zoom meetings, but my meeting attendance precipitously dropped off. Like I really struggle with trying to stay connected in that way. And how did it manifest? Just all my character defects coming out and me just being generally not happy. Fuck, that's an insane boat.

Yeah, and I'll tell you this, and then we can kind of move off of this a little bit. At 13 years, I went out for like a day and a half. Oh no. Yeah, I came right back, but I had to reset the whole deal. It was the most humiliating, embarrassing and kind of pathetic, it was a super lame relapse,

but the good news is I came right back. And that was a reflection of what you just spoke about, that like lackadaisical attitude towards sobriety that for a lot of people just becomes a thing after you've accumulated a number of years. And I just found that I never questioned whether I was an alcoholic and I didn't stop going to meet. I still went to meetings.

I went to meetings. I mean, when I was newly sober, I was going to two a day for a long time. I went less and I got really interested in these other things that I was doing. And what I didn't realize is how much I'd made them And I got really interested in these other things that I was doing. And what I didn't realize is how much I'd made them my higher power and how I started to think I didn't need, like I've been doing this for a while, like I get it.

It's cool, I'll check in. And when I did check in and show up at the meetings, there was an ego to it. Cause it's like, I've been around here. I know what's up. You come to me for the answer. I got, you know, I can give the share that, you know, people wanna hear and that's just, you know, you're toast.

So it was a reckoning and a reset that really helped me appreciate just how fundamentally important it is to make it the first thing, even though I've still been struggling with the Zoom thing and all of that. And really helped me understand like that, this is just something that I have to do.

It's so much, it's the foreground. It's sort of like the first, it's like the top priority. It's like the number one thing. But we forget, we wake up every day and we forget. I forgot until you said, until you just said I was making other things my higher power, that hit me like a, I was like, oh my God, I've been doing that.

So this is an interesting moment for you because the spirited man is blowing up. You're getting all this attention, all these subscribers. A lot of people are interested in what you're doing and they wanna talk to you. And as somebody who's been pursuing this art form relatively anonymously ever since the Nystap brothers, I would say that there's, you gotta make sure

that you keep your ego in check and remember what your priorities are so that you don't get derailed by it. I mean, on my way over here, I was just like, okay, this, you are not going to therapy right now. Do not go in there and unload your shit on this guy. That's not what this is.

No, this is what I, this is the stuff, man. We can go through the chronology of all of that. My last therapist was over here in Agoura Hills. I was just like, wait a minute, where am I going? Yeah, but none of that stuff is as good as the meetings. Yeah. I haven't found any that have been as good as the meetings. But yeah, the ego thing, I mean, it's so,

I just feel so overwhelmed with work and I cannot, I can barely, barely keep up with it because I didn't realize the vitality of doing two videos a week. I can't do two podcasts a week. One a week is what I thought I might be able to do because the first six that I launched my Kickstarter campaign, I made six. And I said, okay.

But you spent a year making those. That's right. I spent a year, but I didn't have, it wasn't my full-time job because I had to have a full-time job to support making them. And then I had a kid, a little kid that I had to watch. And I thought my bet was that, okay, if I am doing this full-time

and I'm not having to do all these other jobs for money, then I can do one a week. And it was just a hunch that I could do it. And then I called my brother like a day before I was gonna launch the Kickstarter. And he was like, can you postpone it? Cause you gotta launch the Kickstarter the same time you launched the channel.

And then he said, and you gotta do two a week. And in my head, I was just like, okay, well I've got six. That's three weeks, it took me a year to make them. You had to do 104 this year. And then- That was one of the first, because the quality is so high. I watched, when you first launched,

I watched a couple of them and I was like, how is this guy gonna maintain this pace, even at one a week? But there's some that I throw in that I'm like, I can do this in one day, but it's a hard day. I don't know when I, there's only one person on this planet who could do what my brother did, that 800 and 800 days straight, that's it.

I know that kid, no one else could do it. No one else could do that. I don't think people appreciate what an unbelievable feat that was. It was so, he's an iron man. He's done the army, he's climbed, he's summited Aconcagua, he's summited with like a steel femur,

he summited Kilimanjaro. This kid has, and he's smarter than everybody. So he's got the two things you need. He's got conscientiousness and intelligence and him a hundred percent can do it. Yeah. Nobody else. And he's been making films since, you know, he was 17 years old. And it almost broke him. Yeah. And he could barely do it. But you look at some, like, I haven't watched them all, of course, because there's so many. I've only seen a very few because he is so influential. Like I'll subconsciously so many. I've only seen a very few, because he is so influential,

like I'll subconsciously just steal. I'll just, I'll take one of his ideas, I'll think it's one of mine, and then I'll go and do it. Well, part of your magic sauce is that you are, you're uncorrupted by being a consumer of this type of content. You've been doing your own thing. That's the facade.

And you're not on social media, and you're just, you're living your life, and you're pursuing your art in your own thing. And you're not on social media and you're just, you're living your life and you're pursuing your art in your own way. And that freshness that you've brought to the work that you're doing, I think is a big reason why it's connecting with people because it is so, I mean, you could see details and elements that trace back to the Nystap brothers

and a little bit of overlap stylistically with your brother. But overall, like this is completely unique and different. And I think that's why people are embracing it and really appreciating it. So yeah, you should stay away from watching other stuff. Well, I hope that's true. But in my mind, I'm just like, I'm just ripping off this person and this person.

But like these are the people that nobody or very few people know about. You're ripping off rendezvous from 1962 or whatever. That's true, yes, that's right. But so it's just coming from a different source and what was nerve wracking about, there's another thing about YouTube is there's like guts involved in it

because you're not getting paid. You're only getting paid based on your appeal. And your appeal is measured in numbers. It's not like eight people got tattoos of your thing because they love it so much. Doesn't matter. You're not gonna make a living off of that. And so, these things cost money and they cost time.

And if you're gonna just put them up there, you're taking this risk of like, they're not gonna be enough people for me to make a living. And then I've shown my hand so that I can't go out to Fox or Netflix or Hulu or whatever and get the deal because they're gonna say, look at this thing. And then there's, but, but, but two things, YouTube right now, I think is approaching this incredible golden age. And so that's the first thing.

And the second thing is people are coming from the mainstream stuff are coming into this. Are coming into this YouTube thing. And so there's this, do you know this comedian named Andrew Schultz? Oh, he's so great. And he was talking about during COVID how he had this podcast set up

and it was like a living room and all this stuff. And then he said during COVID, Jimmy Kimmel and the other Jimmy guy that does the late night thing, Jimmy Fallon, that's right. They had to do like what he was doing. He's like, oh, it's a home game now. Right.

Yeah, that's exactly, I went through that same thing. I'm like, also when everybody started doing Zoom, you know, I was like, oh, we're just all making videos of Zoom calls now, that's what we're doing? Like, I don't want, that's not the game that I signed up for. Like, I don't wanna play that game. No. I'm happy to go toe to toe

in the one-on-one conversation thing. But if we're all just doing Zoom calls and putting them up on YouTube and in podcasts, like it's phone calls. You know, I'm like that, I need to sit across from the person. Yeah. I'd rather not do it at all.

And I did a bunch of Zooms, but you know, it's just not the thing. But I think what you're saying is correct. I think YouTube is at this, you know, point of maturation, this inflection point where mainstream culture has intersected with this, like, you know, I hate that word, like influencer culture or whatever, where the powers that be have to reckon with it

in a way that they kind of dismissed it previously. And I think that's different. And maybe that's only happening now, like in the past year. But I don't think, but it is true. Like the stakes are high for you. If you do it and the numbers are low, then how does that impact your long-term career prospects for other projects? Like, oh, people didn't like the thing that he did and they can and the numbers are low, then how does that impact your long-term career prospects

for other projects? Like, oh, people didn't like the thing that he did and they can see the numbers. It's completely transparent. But luckily it's working. And thank God it's working. Thank God it's working. Do you ever listen to Jordan Peterson or any of his things?

I've listened to some of his stuff. Yeah. I love, he has really great, like simple insights that have kind of like profound implications. And one of those insights is, he talks about the sensationalism of the news media now. And part of it is because of it's so much cheaper

and more profitable to have just someone spouting opinions than it is to have a team out in, I don't know, Bosnia, reporting and satellite trucks and so forth. And that YouTube and the internet is totally destroying And YouTube and the internet is totally destroying that system because that system is so incredibly expensive to maintain that they have to, in order to compete on the profit side of things with all of their overhead, they have to just go for what sells the most.

And what sells the most is anger and disgust. And so that's what they're trying. That's what these, you know, opinion-based news shows that get the ratings, that's what they're doing. And so it's a symptom of their death knell. And whereas people are going to YouTube, the talent is going to YouTube

and people who are maturing and people who are new and like I'm astonished that I'm able to have this popularity with this. I mean, basically I'm just stealing Eastern European filmmaking techniques, very quiet, lots of Foley sound, very slow. It's not hyper cut. I was really nervous.

I was like, are people just gonna like click the channel and be like, I'm not like, this is too boring. I need, my stuff is not driven with music. It's more driven by sound. And sometimes music will kind of help you along a little bit, but it was really astonishing because there was some comments that I don't read the comments.

I take Joe Rogan's advice. I don't read the comments, but I have Isabel read me comments that she thinks I might find encouraging. And it was amazing to read that people were like expressly being grateful for these things I was a little bit insecure about. They're like, oh, I like that it's quiet.

I like that it's slow cut. And I think that, there've been some like copycats, like people who've made their own like spirited man things, which is unbelievably, that's the whole point. The whole point. And I think the thing all came, I think Isabel just asked me one day, I was like super stressed out.

This was a couple of years ago. And she said, well, if you could do anything and money was no object, what would you do? And I was like, I would just walk around the house, tinkering and fixing stuff and putting up coat hooks and making these. And then I just points to stuff around the room. I'd be making this, I'd be making that

because my house is just full of little things. But what you, and I did a movie called D, I did a episode called details that was about that tendency. And I get to do that now without having to worry about like, dude, you gotta pay that mortgage. You gotta pay that mortgage. As long as I'm shooting it, as long as I'm shooting it. And as long as-

Which is the other thing that you love doing anyway. Not really, I hate that part. Really? I hate the cameras. I hate them. I hate the computers. Do you like the editing? I like the editing. I do like the editing that, yeah, I do like it.

And my favorite part of the process is grading, color grading. Like I think people call it color correction, but I think that's a different thing. But my brother, bless him, gave me like, my brother's like hand-me-down equipment is like professional grade. Like he gave me this camera, it's a Canon 1DX.

Unbelievably cool thing. But he's like, these Sony alphas are like state of the art, cutting edge, the most, the best ones. And that's what he shoots on. But he gave me this big Sony. And I, you know, I did yesterday, I started, I had like, I started to kind of start to love him again. Started to, I've been using the same camera

that Canon T2i I've been using for 11 years. And the one I got, Casey gave me as a present for my birthday. But now I'm graduated and I didn't make any big deal. I didn't even announce it. But for one of these most recent videos, I don't even remember which one it was. I just switched over to 4K.

So now everything's in 4K. Well, the shooting, the editing, the making of the videos is the price that you have to pay to do the tinkering that you love, right? Like that's the rent. That's right. And it's, that's not so bad. I like the writing, but if that was all it was,

I would hate it. The writing is amazing. That's where your true voice comes out. Like the intentionality that you put into the monologues is exceptional. And I think that's a huge differentiator in what you're doing. Well, thank you.

Because it demonstrates the level of thought that you put into this. Like there's a reason why I'm telling you this story. And you see the arc over the period of time on the details. That's the one that ends with Isabel saying, that's what I love about you, right? It's like, it's a very emotionally resonant moment.

Yeah. Cause, okay, so for Christmas and I think it was 2019. So I had it for a year. Isabel got me the masterclass suite so I could watch all of them. And what I would do is I just put the headphones in cause I'm always tinkering and the headphones, the headphones and listening to smart people talking

for me is Ritalin. Like that stops my mind from racing. I can really dial in. It's like what pot stops my mind from racing. I can really dial in. It's like what pot used to do for me. I can really dial into what I think it relaxes me. I really help. Like I listened to your podcast the other day while I was doing my most recent movie.

I listened to your podcast with Brogan. Oh, Brogan Graham. Yep, and then there was another one about periodicalizing your life period.. Oh, periodizing your life. Periodizing your life. Okay, so I listened to the David Mamet masterclass and he said, I've listened to all the writers masterclasses

and they all kind of say the same thing. And it's, you gotta sit in that chair and it's, you've got to sit in that chair and it's, you've got no idea. And then when you do have the idea, you have no idea where it came from. Didn't come from you. It's something that came to you because you put the three hours in

or however many hours in it came to you. And the language that Mamet put it in was he said that if the writer didn't go through what the character went through, it won't resonate. It won't be good. And so when you have these surprise, it's the irony, it's where like inevitability meets surprise. It's because the author, the person writing that thing, the author, the person writing that thing. I just made a movie. Today I finished a film it's called Breakthrough. And it's about that.

It's about that point that you get to where you need the breakthrough. And that's the point every time. And I've done over a thousand of these short films, every time you're just like, I quit. This is it for me, this is it. I'm just, I could be a diesel mechanic. This doesn't happen when you're working on a diesel engine,

but it does happen when you're working on a diesel. And so if you've been doing it for years and years and years and you've been making these things and you're starting to get conscious of these things. One, you can do them, you can get more of them more quickly. You can get these breakthroughs more quickly, but you have to sit in the chair.

And also you recognize them and you feel them coming. It's very hard to articulate. I do a job of it in the video. You develop a trust and a confidence that you will have that breakthrough because it's happened so many times prior. Even when you're experiencing it, you're like, I know, yeah, I'm feeling it again,

but I just have to keep going. And then once again, just when you thought it was never gonna work out, you figure it out. That's right. In the video that I finished today, when do you think this will come out? I don't know, not for a little bit.

Okay, good. So then it won't, cause this video I did will probably be out by the time this is out. So I do this thing where I say, you know, like you hit the wall, you hit the wall with your project. And I say this, I said, thousands, thousands of walls, every project has this wall since day one.

And then it cuts abruptly. The music cuts out everything, hammer cuts to mini DV footage, New York City shaky camera. And it says day one, May 1st, 2000. And then that wall, that's May 1st, that wall, the breakthrough is November 17th, okay? Now the breakthrough that I needed to make this movie

that you're watching, I had two days to get that breakthrough and I did it. And to your point is that they come faster and you get accustomed and you understand that. Right. But I think David Mamet articulating that for me and listening to it and all of the writers saying that, Judy Blume says the same thing.

And there's this, and that's what you're seeing when you see a good piece of writing is you're seeing the struggle that this guy learned that, this guy didn't know that going in or this gal didn't know that going into writing this thing. And that's what you're seeing. It's, I don't know. It's such a relief to hear that coming from David Mamet

because you just think this guy, you know, is gifted in a way that I can't connect with. But if he's talking about this struggle, there's a sense of comfort that can come over you when it's visited upon you. And just to hear him say it, right? Isn't it incredible how many people are doing this stuff and how by the stuff, I mean, podcasts and making things

and putting them out for everybody and how good it all is. Not all of it, but how much of it is good. It's, do you ever listen to Sean Avery's podcast? No, who's that? I was on that. He was an instigator on the New York Rangers. So he was a hockey player, but he was like, I asked him if he was an enforcer and he said, no, no, no.

I was, I think he was, I think he said an instigator. I can't remember, but he was like a tough guy. And I've known him for a dozen years or something. And he does this podcast called No Gruffs Given. And he's an NHL hockey player. And he's just got it. Yeah. It's like really interesting.

I think this is like the first podcast I did. Oh, cool. And he's just got it. Super cool. But there you go. So many podcasts. I know. As somebody who's been doing this for a long time, I'm like, oh the first podcast I did. Oh, cool. And he's just got it, super cool. But there you go. So many podcasts, I know. As somebody who's been doing this for a long time, I'm like, I don't know.

When did you start? Like 2012, end of 2012. Wow. Yeah. How many have you done? 605 or something like that. Yeah. Yeah. But I mean, when I started, it wasn't cool.

It was for Radio Shack tinkerers. It wasn't a career path. It certainly wasn't cool or the thing that people were clamoring to do. So why'd you do it? Because I love the medium myself. Like I was listening to Marin and Rogan and Corolla. And at the time it was mostly comedians.

They were the ones who were doing it and they would have their friends on. So although I was an early adopter, very much so, I wasn't the first. Kevin Smith was an early pioneer. And I just love the medium, but you had to work for it. Like you had to go on your desktop computer, figure out what you wanted to listen to,

download the MP3, bounce it to an iPod. You had to be very intentional and committed in order to be a listener. But I was just curating my whole listening experience way back in 2010, 2009, and was flabbergasted that nobody else I knew was doing this. And I just thought this is unbelievable.

The amount of information that's available. I can like listen to these incredible conversations with the same thing that you're talking about. Like people would come in and share their journey. Here's how I did the thing that I did. And it's free, you know? Yeah. And nobody I know is doing it.

And it's like hours long. Yeah And nobody I know is doing it. And so- It's like hours long. Yeah. Like an hour with Robin Williams? Yeah, I know exactly, right? Mark Maron was the one who did it for me. I started listening in 2012, 2011. And I was just like, this is, before that you did not, unless it was a documentary film.

You were never ever gonna hear anybody talk for more than five minutes about anything. Uncut. Yeah. Never, I mean, sometimes that may be on Howard Stern. Sure. But even then those were segments. Those guys couldn't, they only had 20 minutes.

And there was Charlie Rose. Yeah, okay. Right. Sure, 30 minutes. At the same time, it was when I was getting into like all this ultra endurance stuff that I was doing. So I was spending an unbelievable amount of time by myself on a bike or running on a trail.

And you know, I would bring podcasts with me to a company. So I would listen to hours and hours. So my 10,000 hours was first as a listener. And then I had a book that came out in 2012. And then I started thinking about what I wanted to do next. And it was just a whimsical, like, hey, let's take a, why don't we, you know, we have some mics, let's just my wife and I had a conversation.

There was no plant, like I'm launching a show. It was just, that was fun. Like, let's do it tomorrow. It started like that. And it's just built from there. But it was very uncrowded at that time. So, you could go right to the top of the iTunes charts because nobody was starting podcasts.

Yeah, it was like digital video in the 2001. And there was no, like in the topics that I was interested in exploring, there wasn't anybody doing anything all that compelling. There was tons of comedians and there was news and stuff like that. But talking about kind of self-improvement or entrepreneurship or health and wellness,

fitness, stuff like that, like nobody was really doing anything all that interesting. And I just thought, I know some cool people, like I've learned a few things, like let's just do this. And it's just grown organically from that. Don't you, aren't you so appreciative of that like 10,000 hours discovery? So much so. Don't you, aren't you so appreciative of that like 10,000 hours discovery that like someone,

I know Malcolm Gladwell gets the credit, it wasn't him. No, it wasn't him, but whatever. Okay, so we all read it in. I forget his name, but yeah. Was it Outliers? It was in Outliers. The theory comes from this research psychologist who I think just passed away.

His name escapes me right now. And that theory has been put to the test. There's a book called range by a guy called David Epstein. I read it. Yeah, he's been on the podcast too. So him and Malcolm have these like little tete-a-tetes over that stuff. Yeah, I watched also like a symposium

of those two guys on stage. Right, they're funny together. Yeah, but well, since you symposium of those two guys on stage. They're funny together. Yeah, but well, since you brought up the 10,000 hours thing, it's like I got the 10,000 hours editing pretty, you know, seven years probably. And then just recently, so I'm 20 years in now doing this, making every day, making these things, some form of it,

either shooting, writing or editing, 20 years of it. And then there's the craft stuff of me, like kind of the subject matter. Or if I need anything, I have to make it myself for the thing. And recently I tried to like, I'm working with this guy who's new and I'm tried to like, I'm working with this guy who's new and I'm trying to like, I'm just like, okay,

just shoot this. And then I have to like really explain that, and then it's occurred to me. And I said, you got 10,000 hours of camera now, cause it's been 20 years. You've got 10,000 hours of camera. There's camera stuff that you don't know you know. There's, you know, and that comes as a surprise

when you realize, oh, no, no, no, no, no. It's not just one thing. You might have. You don't know how much you know. Yeah. You've forgotten more than most people have learned. But you have people helping you, right? Like when you're making,

there's somebody else holding the camera and a bunch of this stuff. Yep, there's BC's Flace, who's, it's just him and me really. And then Isabel. He's the guy from the catch video. Yeah, yeah. Then there's Isabel, who I just make do stuff.

Like if the kid is asleep or something. Who'd you get to get up at five o'clock in the morning and go running with you? BC, yeah, he was on a bicycle. He was on an electric bicycle because a bicycle, the pumping, you would see the pumping, the camera wouldn't be a smooth shot, but the electric bicycle, you can just go real perfectly.

And then those GoPros are really incredible. We mounted it to the thing. I almost, like listening to you guys about the endurance stuff, I'm like, yes, I am impressed, but it's, how can you do it? How do you do it? How do you, like the amount of time, the number of hours a day, how many hours a day do you put do it? How do you do it? How do you like the amount of time, the number of hours a day, how many hours a day do you put into it?

I mean, now, you know, it's at a super low boil. I mean, I haven't raced in many years and my life was a lot simpler when I was really doing it hardcore. Like, and that was a spiritual journey that I was on trying to figure out what I wanted to do with my life. And the training was really a template for exploring myself, I think.

But I was in a lot of pain and had a lot of confusion and I have a capacity for that kind of thing. And I enjoy doing it. So I don't dread it. I actually look forward to it. It's like the highlight of my day. But it's just like anything else. When I watch one of your movies,

I'm like, how the hell does that guy do that? Oh, good, thank God. That just looks like, I would never be able to, yeah, I don't understand, like how is he putting the camera there? Like that just seems like it would, that would take me months to figure. So the endurance stuff, you just,

you go out and you run four miles every day. So, you know, next week you're running four and a half miles a week after that, you're running five and a half miles and time becomes malleable. Like you're, you know, what's hard and what's easy changes and what you get used to, you know, the body can adapt to this stuff. But like the motivation to keep it,

it just, it takes so long. It's not like running. Yeah, but look at what you do. Just replace endurance for filmmaking. Yeah, I guess. Look at how hard you've worked for how long. And a lot of people would look at your path and say like, why are you still doing this?

Cause it's there though. But the thing I'm doing is there. It's like still there. You can go watch the Holland tunnel right now. Right, but does that make it- It's gone. But does that make it any less real or meaningful? Also, I have to do it because I need to pay.

There's no other way for me to make money. I'm totally, I'm not going to Stanford. I'm like- Well, forget about all of that. Like the endurance stuff, there was no way I was getting paid for that. Who would have known that it would have ever led to anything beyond the simple doing of it.

Yeah, no, you're not getting paid for that. That's what I mean. When you're compelled. There's even less motivation. It is, in some ways it was my version of being the spirited man in my own way. Okay, okay, okay, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. Yeah, yeah, yeah, okay.

I'm understanding something new here. Walk me back to, I'm really interested and curious about the decisions that you made after the Nystap brothers was canceled. So walking up to that moment, you and your brother get together. I grew up with Tom Scott. I don't know if you knew that.

I've known Tom since we were in school together. Unbelievable. So I first knew who you guys were because Tom was like, you should check these guys out. Wow. So I was on that, like, you should check these guys out. Wow. So I was on that. Oh, and I brought these two. I actually have, I've got DVDs.

Wow. I have two left. Casey gave me these. Oh yeah, 2000, he dated it of course, 2012 gave me that. And then gave me another one in 2013. Wow. I've got the pen from his studio. Whoa. So yeah, I've been the pen from his studio.

So yeah, I've been like hip to, you know, your guys' vibe for a long time. The Nystap Brothers thing happens, you guys are on HBO. It kind of was a thing where like, nobody really watched it though. Yeah, it was on at midnight on Fridays. It didn't get picked up. Casey decides to go and do what we all kind of know he did. And you make this decision to go in a different direction.

I think there were a lot of people out there who were like, did they have a fight? Like what happened? Like, why is he going over here? Why didn't he continue to make movies with Casey? Like what was that about? And what was your mindset at the time? So I thought I had, okay, first of all,

I was on drugs and drunk all the time. So I was a completely unhinged egomaniacal nightmare because I, from scratch, from a video camera that was the first thing I ever bought on eBay, I got an HBO show with my brother who turns out it's like a fucking genius. And so I started not, I just wanna blame it on drugs and alcohol,

but you know, that's not fair. It's just, but if you were, I haven't been through what I've been through. I had asked at you know, that's not fair. It's just- But if you were- I haven't been through what I've been through. I had asked at the time, I'm sure people were like, why aren't you still doing this? Or what would you have said in that moment? You know, Casey sat me down and he said, look,

you know, and at the time you gotta remember, okay, what is this? He's got like a 12 year old kid. Right. Okay. And he said, I have to prioritize money in my life. I have to make a lot of money. I got a kid, he's gonna be in college soon, whatever. And we all have to do that.

And I thought we were on this path that would continue and we would just keep doing the thing that we were doing, which was not really understanding what we were doing, but following these little impulses and turning it into this really successful thing. And what I didn't realize at the time was how much work Casey was doing on the business side of things,

how many meetings he was taking, how many things he was writing up, all the numbers and things and all this stuff. I just thought that we were these two super talented bohemian dudes and everything was just working out for us because I wasn't doing any of that stuff. And so he put together some work for us to do,

like some jobs that he and Tom went out and got. And I was just like, no, I'm not doing that. Let's fucking keep doing what we did with the thing. And it was just like, we gotta keep, this studio costs a lot of money to support and blah, blah, blah. And so I was just like, well, okay, fine. Then I won't be a part of the studio anymore.

I'll just pack up and I'll move out to Los Angeles because that was what I wanted to do. New York was like I said before, it's just like really grinding on me. And that's what I did. And I was like, and then when we didn't get a second season of the TV show, it was just like, okay, keep going. And I had that arrogance to just keep going

and keep going and keep going. And I've heard this story so many times. There's this guy, I can't remember his name. I think Wayne White, the guy who he does the paintings. The cartoonist guy? Who's a musician? Pee Wee's Playhouse? Yes, that guy.

They made that documentary about him. Yes, called Beauty is Embarrassing. And his story is very similar to mine. And it's just like grinding yourself to the bone until it's just like, no, this isn't right. So I came out to LA and I thought the whole thing was like make feature films, learn this whole thing of making these.

I didn't realize we were pioneering anything. I thought we were just in the minor leagues trying to get the bigs, the guy to, pioneering anything. I thought we were just in the minor leagues trying to get the bigs, the guy that, what's the guy from the Brooklyn Dodgers who signed, it's the greatest name of the guy who signed Jackie Robinson. Branch Rickey. I don't know.

Branch Rickey is gonna come down and sign us and we're gonna get the thing and- But you can't be blamed for having that idea. I mean, that was the idea of the time. I mean, Casey went through that as well with, you know, producing that Safdie Brothers movie and had that experience. And I know those guys are part of your like,

sort of creative collective. That was the path. There was no, people forget when the Nystap Brothers came out, there was no YouTube. There was no, and you were making viral videos before there was even a means for something to go viral. The pipes, there was no distribution channel at the time. So how would one know that this was this impending future

that would create a career path? Like you'd have to ask Casey Neistat. Yeah, only somebody like Casey. And so the way I think about this and tell me if this is fair or way off base, like certainly both of you guys are artists. I think the differentiator is there's a little bit more of purity in terms of how you think about art and creativity.

Whereas Casey is this entrepreneur business person who's figured out this perfect combination of art and commerce at just the exact correct cultural moment for him to ignite a wildfire. When I, you know, over many years of knowing Casey, what gets overlooked in terms of how people think about him is the fact that he's a fucking genius when it comes to marketing and business.

Like he understands that side of things in a way that very few people do. And he's able to cast that sensibility with great foresight. Like he knows what's coming. He understands what's important and what's not. And he melds that with, you know, an expertise in storytelling, like his vlogs, you know, it's not just that he made 800 movies in a row,

like they're all really good and they all have three act structure and they're extraordinarily well edited and conceptually coherent in their own regard. Like that's a feat that I don't know that anybody else on earth could have accomplished. And so I don't think that, yes, people love his videos, but I don't think they understand why they love them

and why they're so good and what makes them work. And it's that engine behind the scenes that fuels that whole thing from that very specific sensibility that he has. But when I look at you, I see somebody who thought, I'm an artist, I'm gonna continue to be this bohemian guy and I'll figure it out as I go. I think in the end,

we do different emotions. Like Casey does exuberance and comedy, he's hilarious. And I do, I don't know, introspection and I don't know, insight or something, I don't know. I think that's correct. Yeah. And comedy and fun is way more fun than. Well, that's gonna travel.

Yeah, on the internet. You know what I mean? Like, and that's, but as far as like, I mean what he's done and doing, trying to do this thing, what he's done is a really significant artistic feat. And I know that, you know, we have friends that say that stuff to, you know, our close friends,

you know, we have allies, you know, old, old friends, like from the neighborhood and stuff that like, this was my old friend. And he says what you just said to me, he says that to me. And then Casey has his old friends and they say whatever they say to him

and Casey has the success and the thing. And the, and the thing. But the way I look at it, it doesn't feel like I'm an artist and blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. It feels like I can't do it any other way. It's not that, it's like, okay, fine. Put Michael Jordan behind the wheel of Lewis Hamilton's Mercedes.

He's not gonna do it. I don't care how good Michael Jordan is. He's not going to do it. I don't care how good Michael Jordan is. He's not going to get it around the track as fast as Lewis Hamilton. And that's really what it feels like. And it's like, maybe because I worked with Sachs and his instruction, he is an incredibly good teacher. And one of the things he taught you, he taught people who listened was this, okay, we're writing a studio manual, Sax and I for his studio. And one of the chapters is called

how to avoid it and how to exploit it. So he would- Is it like the human resources manual? Part that, it's a lot that, So he would- Is it like the human resources manual? Part that, it's a lot that, but there's this thing where, there's a problem with art and with filmmaking and with acting and the problem with it is that it's cool and it's perceived as cool.

And that's a problem because sometimes it's cool, sure. But that's not what it is. You know what I mean? Like it's a job, you don't go into it because it's cool. And a lot of people do go into it because it's cool. And when you say, oh, I do it because I'm an artist and I wanna do it this way. Like that sounds cool, but that's not really, that's not what it feels like.

I just feel like I didn't prioritize. I was like, I'm always hoping people will say, will ask me what's the worst advice you've ever gotten. Right? And to me, the worst advice I've ever gotten, I think, is do what you love and the money will come automatically. That is fucking preposterous. I wasted 15 years doing that.

And it's not the fuck true. Like you really have to put, everyone needs money. That's everyone needs to have money unless you're born with it and you still need it. You really have to prioritize and understand that making money is a skill and is a craft. That's not automatic. It's very intentional and you have to go after and do it.

Casey learned that at 16 when he got his girlfriend pregnant. I was there, man. I was there when he- Well, he left home and moved in with you, right? Yes, I remember that whole thing coming- That had to be insane. What was going on with you when he was like? I was just like, I mean, yeah, I mean, it was like.

And then did he follow you to William & Mary? At ease, yeah. And lived with you when you were in college, right? Yeah, Rich, he was so at ease with it. Wow. He was just like, yeah. He was like, yeah, so yeah, we're gonna, I'm gonna have a baby.

I'm like, you're 16 years old right now. My God. Like, are you kidding me? And then like, I can't, I mean, I can't believe, okay, so on top of all that, he's a dad. On top of all that stuff he did, he's also a dad. And he's like a high school dropout. And so I just think that, I mean, I don't know.

It's not intentional. I wish I had made more money. I wish I had, I would have been, I think what he did is more pure than what I did because he just unconsciously did it. And look at how much work he has. Sure, but then he had to take an entire year and a half off. Yeah.

Oh, if I could do that, I'd never make another video. Well, that's interesting that you say that because we just got off this jag of you talking about the disconnect between the romantic ideal of the artist, the person who thinks it's cool to be an artist. You look at Tom Sachs and you're like, wow,

like huge, you know, cool lofts and like lots of cool stuff. It's like, it's sexy. But the artist is the person who creates because there is no other choice. There is something inside that person that is yearning to be expressed. It's a specific lens on an experience or an event that in the expression

says something more broadly about humanity or the world that we live in. And that person cannot rest until that exists in the world. And so when I talk about purity, like that's, I sense that in yourself. So it's interesting that you would say you would never make another video again. Like, I don't believe you.

I don't think that's true. That's what it feels like. It feels like it. Ever heard, I heard David Spade once say, if I had my brother's money, his brother's Andy Spade, also a friend, he's a friend of mineade once say, if I had my brother's money, his brother's Andy Spade, also a friend, he's a friend of mine. He said, if I had my brother's money, I'd throw mine away. But-

That's funny. I don't know, I just, oh wow, the work is really, it's very hard. And I made that, I made a video or an episode called gratitude because it is so rare and so, it is an incredible blessing to be able to make a living doing out of the things that you make with your hands.

That is another thing that came to me as a great relief is I heard Jordan Peterson talking, he's advising kids in college So another thing that came to me as a great relief is I heard Jordan Peterson talking, he's advising kids in college and he was talking about how impossible it is to be a professional artist. And he just goes one after another, after another, after another. And these are rational, rational, correct reasons.

And hearing him say that and then knowing, I've never really been able to pay all my bills, but I'm still doing it for 20 years. I've been doing this thing and I do have a tremendous amount of gratitude for it. And at the same time, I'm wrestling with the resentment of the reality of how hard it is. And I just wish I was more, I wish I would just lie and just say, Oh no, it's unbelievable.

I wake up, I pop out of bed. It's unbelievable, but really, and I hope that this is just a phase and maybe when I get older, it'll ease back. But it's as if I'm in a house that's on fire and I have to just grab all the passports and the thing and the kid and the stuff and try to put some of it out.

And it just feels like a terror and a panic all the time. Oh man. Yeah, there are sustainability concerns with what you're doing, in terms of your overall wellbeing. Yeah, I'm trying to develop these families of videos that I can make in one day and I've had some success, it's a hard day, but I've had some success of doing these videos

that take one day, like the one about the lock in the Tacoma that would unlock. And then the one about the bike rack in the Tacoma, those took one day and I'm trying to develop a family. And I came up with another one, that's a one day thing yesterday that I'm gonna to develop a family. And I came up with another one. That's a one day thing yesterday that I'm gonna try to make tomorrow. And those save me

because they give me more time to work on the longer ones. And then I also, see, I also don't know how much business you're supposed to talk about, but maybe this isn't business. But I also want to be able to dedicate more time to brand sponsored things. So like if a brand is paying me a bunch of money

to do an episode, right? I wanna be able to do, you know, six of the days of that week or five of the days of that week on that video, which is what I just completed today with this breakthrough movie. And that today was satisfying finishing that movie. Can I just tell one technical thing?

I just wanna say, I just wanna tell. So I had, I had to make a wall that broke, that snapped and broke away. And I was like, oh, you can't make it out of cardboard cause cardboard doesn't snap, it bends. Can't make it out of paper, paper bends, it tears a little bit, it doesn't bang, snap.

So this is the best thing that happened on this movie is I figured out, oh, and the thing that needed to break this wall were little puzzle pieces. They needed to shatter the wall. And so I figured out how to make a wall by taking a angle grinder and putting a sanding pad on it and then sanding the paper off of sheet rock, off of both sides,

and then carving the little bricks with a Dremel with the rotor with the bit and you can draw with it. And I drew this perfect wall. And it was so amazing. I had one take, it took an hour to make this thing. And like, and I had to pull a puzzle piece through a string with a string through this,

through a hole in the wall. And it's super, super close up, super close up. And like a puzzle piece is almost full screen. And it just snapped the wall and I shot it in slow motion. The sound was perfect. And those that's satisfying. Right. That's satisfying. Right. That's wonderful.

This is why you're never gonna stop making videos though. Right? Like the exuberance and the enthusiasm with which you just shared that story. Like you're toast dude, cause you're all in. But it's the pace, Rich, how do I get around the pace? I don't know man, talk to your brother about that. I don't know what to do about it.

My brother said you suck it up. Do you really have to do two a week? He said, that's what you gotta do, right? He just said, he's just so good at like, he's also like such a great salesman. He's so convincing, cause he has all the tactics down. Cause he's just like, yeah, right.

He's like, you know, I know. He's like, it nearly destroyed my family. He's like, you know. But here's what you gotta do. And he's just like, yeah, right. He's like, I know. He's like, it nearly destroyed my family. He's like, look. But here's what you gotta do. And he's just like, and he's like, and then he's just like, look, if it's just like a fun hobby thing for you, that's fine. But like, if you wanna support your family

and like get a new engine for your truck and stuff, yeah, you gotta just suck it up. And then he's funny about it. And he's like, yeah, he's like, yeah, yeah, yeah. I mean, but yeah, the pace is very- It brutal, right? It's brutal, it's brutal. But I'm gonna get faster, I'm getting faster.

Doing it all yourself. Well, you're in the doing of it, it's informing how you iterate on it to make it sustainable for you, right? But you don't wanna destroy your life in the meantime. I bet meetings will make me faster. Going to meetings again and like that reset, I think. And then I got some equipment that makes me faster.

I got a big like iMac with the big screen and like the 10 core, they don't get faster. They don't get faster. Just the software gets bigger. Cause I'm shooting 4K now, it's just as slow as the other thing. Right, cause the resolution increases in lockstep with the limitations of the actual computing power.

Lightning speed, how come I'm waiting 40 minutes to render this two minute, seven minute movie. Well, that's another video idea right there. Thank you. Oh, another thing about's another video idea right there. Thank you. Oh, another thing about being in my like late 40s now, like ideas used to be so important to me. Like I had to be in a, I take them all. Right.

I take, people are like, movie clips, this is that. I was like, okay, sobriety? That wasn't my idea, that was in the comments. So I was like, make a movie about it. I was like, okay. But you say like you're, you know, Casey does action and drama and comedy and your introspection,

but there is a droll kind of self-referential comedy, like low key in your videos. Like when you're like, it only took me seven days, or something like that. That you also put little Easter eggs. There's a self-awareness around that. There's a self awareness around that. There's a bunch of little Easter egg jokes too that you have to really,

and when people get them, I'm like, oh my God, thank God. Like in the, did you see the one I did for UNICEF? Yes. About the flag. You just put that up today, right? Or yesterday? Yesterday. I was like, it took two days to make this 15 second video,

but that's okay. Cause it was for the kids. It like, it took two days to make this 15 second video, but that's okay. Cause it was for the kids. It might've taken you two days. I would have never been able to accomplish that in a million years. I'm more likely to get an invitation to come to the white house and create what you created in that 15 second video.

But the only dialogue where I said, it took two days and I was like, I said something like, but that didn't matter because it was all about the kids, which was I stole a line from Casino. And the first comment on that video is like, is this line from Casino?

But then Joe Pesci is talking about his kid in the little league team. I was like, oh my, I wrote right back. Oh my God, this is the first comment. Unbelievable that you got, that's really satisfying. I also put in, no one's gotten it. I don't know that anyone's got it. There was this thing where I'm doing the running thing

and I'm talking about the dad and the kid and the son that I run into on my run. And I said, I hope they're training, or maybe they're training for something. And I go some kind of racist song like that, which is this very subtle reference to Linda Mance, I think is her name, who does the narration for Days of Heaven.

Did you ever see that movie? Yeah, forever ago. And she's talking about how the farmer was getting better. He was supposed to die, but he was getting better. And he was like, maybe the doctor gave him something, some kind of medicine or something. No one's gonna get that. I put that in there so Josh Safdie would get it.

So for one person, I put that line and I'm like, Josh will get this, but I don't know if he's got it yet. Quite a career those guys are having right now. Oh my God. Have you met these guys? No. Oh my God. These, I love them so much.

Oh my God. Well deserved. I mean, talk about an original voice. Oh my God. It's unbelievable that they're brothers too. Like Ben doesn't, like Josh gets, I feel like Josh gets more like, he gets lauded more.

Maybe not, maybe I'm wrong. Cause I don't know. I don't know. But Ben is unbelievable because he has the performance side. He's like an unbelievable performer. Did you see Good Time? Yeah, of course. When he's like.

Yeah, that movie is crazy. Don't count your chickens before they hash. What does that mean to you. Don't count your chickens before they hatch. What does that mean to you? Don't count chickens. That's like the first line of the movie. And they wrote it, they came up with that. Yeah, those guys. Don't they also, did they found

or do they own that little tiny museum where you did a thing? Okay, Josh and this guy named Alex Kalman, who's another one. I mean, do you, has Casey talked to you about the Diane Fink School in New York? No. Okay. Someday we will know about this.

Someday this, maybe this is something for me to make. Maybe this is something for me to make. Maybe I should do this. Maybe I should take a year and make this in little YouTube videos. So there was after September 11th, 2001, there were all these subsidies for buildings south of Canal Street because the air was poisoned

with mercury. So nobody wanted- How do we get people to go back down there? How do we get to make the rents cheap? So we got this amazing deal on this building and 368 Broadway. Oh, that's how that happened? Yes, and the,

cause I think we got that building in 2004, I think, or 2003, I think we started renting that little space. And so our buddies started renting spaces in that same building and then across the street, And so our buddies started renting spaces in that same building. And then across the street, like directly, we can look into their window, Yaniv Shulman and his brother, Ariel Shulman and Henry Joost, Henry Joost and Ariel Shulman

are directors. They just directed the Power Project with Jamie Foxx. They're like big Hollywood directors. Yeah, now they are. People listening who those names don't sound familiar, they're the guys behind Catfish. That's right. That was really established.

Yes. And Lena Dunham was in the building too, right? Like there was all kinds of people. We all had the same landlord. Her name was Diane Fink. And Henry Juice said, yeah, that's the Diane Fink school. That's not all. Greta Gerwig,

And Henry Juice said, yeah, that's the Diane Fink school. That's not all. Greta Gerwig. Sam Lisenko, he's like a production designer, art director. Josh and Ben Safdie. Alex Kalman, who did the little museum, who's had shows at the Metropolitan Museum of Art. Yeah, Lena Dunham rented a space.

Carlton DeWoody. That's crazy. So many, so many, and we were all there. That's like the quintessential New York, like factory, you know, like cauldron of creativity. If you've ever seen that movie, oh, what's the movie with, it's black and white, it's Noah Birnbaum and Greta Gerwig is the star. Bambach.

Bambach? Noah Bambach. Noah Bambach. He wrote it and directed it. Greta Gerwig is the star. It's black and white. I can't remember the name of it. Do you remember the name of it?

No, let me, I can look it up. Okay, well, I'll just tell you what I'm getting at. That movie is that scene is I can tell the guy. No. What's it called? Oh, did you find it? No, hold on, I'm looking it up, keep talking. So that movie is okay, so the guy who's from Star,

I can't, I'm so bad with names. Adam. Adam Driver. Adam Driver, that's a combination of Yaniv Shulman and Ariel Shulman. No way. Okay, so the guy who's writing Gremlins, Gremlins 3, the guy who's writing the script for Gremlins 3, that's Sam Lysenko.

Wow. And all those people are people from that little world, from this Diane Fink school. Right. Francis Ha, how long ago? Francis Ha, that's right. Francis Ha. I remember watching it.

And then Mickey Sumner, she's one of us. She's also in the movie. And I just remember watching this and being like, oh my God, we're like this community, this like little gang of people. This is like, they're gonna talk about this. Somebody should write a book about that or make a documentary.

Yeah. Just like called 368. I mean, that's an amazing thing. It's super cool. It's super, super cool. Yeah, I didn't know that. I mean, I knew there were some cool people in the building, but I didn't realize the full extent of it.

I mean, I'm leaving people out. There's Brett Jukowicz, who's a cinematographer. There's, I'm leaving people out. There's, I mean, if there was one other person from there, if Casey was here, he'd be able to name. I'm sure people out. There's, I mean, if there were one other person from there, if Casey was here, he'd be able to name. But it was astonishing and it was all. And everybody's hanging out and going into like, is that what led to the wall of Polaroids

with all the people in the studio? Yeah, that was, I don't know. I don't remember where that came from. I think that came from when you would go to like, our friend, we have a friend named Cynthia Rowley and she's like a big fashion designer. And you know, when you go to designers, when they're doing their looks, they do the Polaroids

and they put them on the walls of all the different like outfits. I think that comes from that maybe. I don't really remember, but that was a cool idea. But explain that museum. Like it's a museum or something. It's literally just a closet that goes out, that opens to an alley.

Yeah, I think it's 80 square feet. It's like 10 by eight. And it's filled with all these incredible, it's still there. It's filled with all these incredible, it's still there, it's filled with all these incredible artifacts. Like the shows have, now they have like really kind of tight themes. It's mmuseumm.com.

It's really unbelievable by the book. The book is unbelievably great. And Alex Kalman, his mother is Myra Kalman, who's an artist who's incredible. And she did like New Yorker covers and writes books. And then his father was, oh gosh, his father was something Kalman. And, oh, I can't believe I can't remember his name.

I'm so embarrassed. And he is a very pioneering, innovative designer and advertising guy. And you know who he is because he did, I think he did 100% of the Talking Heads album covers among other things. And he also is responsible. His company was called M & Co

and they made these umbrellas that had blue skies and on the inside. Oh, wow. And so that's his project. And it was started with Josh Safdie and Alex Kalman. And then Alex took it over and yeah, it's unbelievable. They did a show where it was all artifacts smuggled in from Syria, like from Syrian refugees.

It's incredible. You did a thing there, didn't you? Where you would sit down and talk to people for like a half an hour and then like carve a word into a Swiss army knife. Okay, look, so I, so here, this, I took, I did this for, so I take a Swiss army knife and a wood burner and I engrave with the wood burner, I melt the plastic.

And so I have one in my hand here and it's like, I wrote V Neistat on one side and then on the other side, I wrote a date, 10, 03, 12. And that was the date that that show ended. And I did this for a picture because one of my rewards for my Kickstarter campaign was one of these knives. Right.

So I have to make like a hundred of them or something. Anyhow. The burdens of being a YouTuber. And then it's real gold leaf paint that it's embossed in. And so I did, I set up this little desk, which I made that was all compartmentalized and it held all of the equipment inside of it

and it had a handle. And I set it up in that little museum and I wore a suit and then people would come in and I, you know, for a while I was giving these out as presents, the Swiss champ, which is like the Mac Daddy, Swiss army knife with the pliers in it and the magnifying glass and everything. For people that are listening, that's the super thick one.

Yeah, and so I would do the first initial and then the last name on one side of the knife. And then what I called the golden word on the other knife. And it was just some word that would resonate with the person I was giving it to. So I should give an example, but I can't think. I have a whole list of hundreds of them, but I can't. So I just did this show and I donated a bunch of the proceeds

to the museum so that they could pay their rent for like the year, because the rent is like a hundred bucks a month or something, it's just a closet. And like, I had all these people come and they would just, they were buying it as a gift for someone. And then they would talk about this person

and I would just throw out words. I would say, how about, like one of them I came up with a person was like, that's perfect, was breadcrumbs. And so, yeah, that went on for a month. And so it's 10 or 312. My sober date is September 8th, 2012. So I was less than one month sober.

My hands, cause I developed this stoned and I would be steady as a rock. I could do eyeball surgery. My hands were so steady, so dialed in when I was stoned. One of the reasons why I loved getting stoned is I was so good at making things. The whole world would disappear and I would just be that, I would just be so present.

So a lot of it was about productivity and being able to like do the thing. It was all in service to doing the work. So did you have that crisis when you were newly sober of like, I'm never gonna be able to do anything creative again? I just- That big fear that- No, because it's just, I didn't, I was in the storm.

I didn't have a choice. Yeah. There was like no other way for me to make a living. So it wasn't, it's like, there's this scene in Hearts of Darkness. Have you seen this? Yeah. There's this scene where France,

it's about the making of Apocalypse Now and Francis Ford Coppola, who's like 35 years old and he's like mortgaged his house and everything to pay for this production and the monsoon has wiped out the set and the studio stopped giving him money and like Marlon Brando is not cooperating. Everything's going wrong and he's in the Philippines and there's a civil war going on.

And his wife secretly recorded with an audio recorder, his like evening conversations and you hear one of them and like La Traviata is playing in the background, he's making spaghetti and you hear Coppola and he's saying, he's like, yeah, so-and-so said, you know, am I gonna quit? He's like, how can I quit? I can't quit.

He's like, I can't quit. There's no way. He's like, I could put a bullet in my head. And I mean, that's what it comes down to. There is no, there is no, there's nothing else, it's worse. I mean, of course it's better. It's like a good news, bad news thing.

Yeah, of course it's better. And this is what, you know, they all tell you this, like Sax told me this, Sax is like, you know, when you're starting out, he's like, the first thing you do when you make a little money is spend every penny so that you have to keep going. You have to make the another thing. And yeah, I don't know.

So I was, my hands shook really badly when I was making the knives. Wow. That's a story though that makes me feel nostalgic for New York though. Like it's a romantic New York story. The thing about New York is most people's opinion of New York, most people who've been to New York,

their opinion of New York is based on visiting New York. Living on that, how long did you live there? I mean, it was two years right out of college. So yeah, it was like four guys crashed out in a room and a half. That's the golden age. Yeah, where you can get away with it and it's just a good time.

And your apartment is just basically a locker. Sure, 17 to 35, there's no other place like it. It's fantastic. Also, if you have a thing, I don't know if it's still like this cause the internet is New York now, but if you have a thing, a mission, and you're like, I'm gonna do, even if it's vague,

I wanna make a lot of money. I wanna become an artist. I wanna, even if it's vague, go there and don't stop. It's the best place in the world for that. And you will do it because it is so hard to live there. And nothing else matters anyway, if you're on that, if you're driven in that way. Yeah. It doesn't matter what your apartment looks like,

or if you're only eating, you know, dollar slices of pizza. But to live there, and I've never lived there rich, and I'll bet living there rich is amazing. Like I think Casey might move back. I'm sure he's gonna move back. Because his life there, like, I mean, it's no secret that that kid has like a lot of money and his life there is like luxury apartment,

Battery Park City, which is isolated from the rest of Manhattan by the West Side Highway, but it's also its own little village with a movie theater and a mall that has all of the greatest stores and restaurants in existence in it. It has views of the Statue of Liberty. It's clean.

They keep all the homeless people out with private security. It's got a park. It's got the West Side bike path that runs through it. It's perfect. You can keep your car your like land rover in the basement

in a heated thing you don't need to take your slippers off you don't need to leave like yeah that is cool and you can get on the private plane you can charter a private plane and fly to your house in Nantucket yeah that's cool

but if you're a regular guy if you're a regular guy, if you're a regular like middle-class person and you're living in New York and you're doing the grind and you're dependent on the subway and you have a family, it's not worth it. I'm sorry, it's not. Yeah.

And I think past like, and in my forties, it very nearly killed me. Very difficult place, very difficult place. So here to stay in LA. And LA is the greatest city in the world. And Werner Herzog in person said to me, "'Los Angeles is the most vital city in the world.'" When did he say that to you?

This was in 2018 or 19. You gotta walk me through how you ended up in a conversation with Werner Herzog. Okay, so. And like maybe a little background on like, you know, the fan boy fascination with this remarkable human. With Herzog?

Yeah, he's the best. Okay, so this is what it is. How did we find out? I think Tom Sachs told me about Hertzog, I think. And we were making this piece for Sachs called Toyens. And it was the largest boom box in the world. And I think it had 100,000 watts of amplifiers. And it was 220.

It wasn't 110. It was like, there was so much amperage that they had to use a different, they had to use like the kind of voltage that you use in a washing machine. Or maybe it was 110 and then somebody connected it to 220 and the whole thing, anyway, the thing was huge. It probably weighed over a ton. And we had to move it from Tom's studio

to this amazing warehouse on Hester Street that's now luxury apartments. And it was like two or three blocks, but you have to negotiate traffic. And this is the legend in my mind. It's probably not true. This isn't probably what happened, but I think Tom put on his required viewing list

to watch this movie called Burden of Dreams. And it is a Wes blank film about Werner Herzog making Fitzcarraldo. And in the making of Fitzcarraldo, I believe Werner Herzog making Fitzcarraldo. And in the making of Fitzcarraldo, I believe Werner Herzog was 35 years old. And he was making it the way that we make films, like just a few people, camera guy, blah, blah, blah, not all the trailers and stuff.

And he was in Peru and sort of the central theme of the movie was this man with this dream of bringing opera to the Amazon rainforest. And in order to do it, he needed to bring this gigantic ship over a mountain to a different river so that he could get rubber and bring it down to,

it was like when the, during the rubber boom and that's how he was gonna afford to buy the opera house. I believe that's the premise of the movie. And it was based on a guy who actually did bring a movie, a boat over a mountain, but he took the boat apart, the guy who did it in real life. And the mountain wasn't as steep as the one that Herzog did.

So Herzog, it took him 10 years to make this movie. And with just rudimentary levers and so forth and rope and native people, they brought this like, I don't know how many, a hundred ton ship over a pretty steep, mucky mountain. They really did it for this film. And I think Saks had us watch it because it's like, okay, look guys, if you're gonna get into this business,

this is this business. This is what this business is. And this guy is doing something that is impossible. It's not impossible, you can't do this. And I made a movie called Toyin's Burden and it's about, and it takes audio from that, from Burden of Dreams and it's about us moving this, this boom box down into the thing.

And in that movie, Herzog talks about the jungle, working in the jungle and he's like, people talk about the harmony of the jungle and he's like, there is no, you know, the harmony of the jungle. And he's like, there is no harmony. But if there is a harmony, it's the harmony of collective murder. That's such a classic, you know, in his droll deadpan, you know, and so my whole like voiceover,

cause I write all those sax movies and I wrote all those voiceovers and I, you know, I delivered them, but I'm just channeling him, his style, his, he's just such a master at turning the, making little ironic things and, and putting in these little incredible jokes, but with such reverence that it could, you could miss it. And so we made this movie, Tom Saks and I,

we had been writing, we made a movie called 10 Bullets, which is basically about how to behave in a job, on a job. When you have a job, these are the 10 things that you should do. Be on time, keep a list. There's 10 of them, 10 bullets. It's incredible. And we made a sequel to it

that was written by Alex Cholas Woods and it was called the fear bullets. And it was for managers. And it was about like one of those bullets was like never yell under any circumstances. And so Tom and I, it took us years to write the sequel. And we wrote part of it and we went to Japan. We went to this place called Onomichi in Japan and had like a very peaceful time.

We took the bullet train there from Tokyo and we very slowly teased out this movie. And one of us had this idea is like, oh, it's not the fear bullets, the bullets with these, what we're getting at in all these bullets is that when you get to a certain level with your work, or when you get, there's a certain level that you get to in your endeavors,

where your skill is so good that you reach these paradoxes, where you are entrapped in a paradox and you have to pick the left versus the right. And they're both right and they're both wrong. And so we made this, we wrote this script for a movie called Paradox Bullets. And I can't remember how many there are.

I don't think there were 10, I think there were six. And like one of them was like, never give up, know when to quit. That was one of the bullets. Do the hard thing first, do the easy thing first. And so I did the first voiceover and Mario Sorrenti, who's a photographer, he discovered Kate Moss,

but he's a photographer and he's a friend of Tom's studios. And I consider him a friend of mine. And his common law wife is Mary Frye. And she's also a friend of the studio. Anyway, Mario Sorrenti said, you should get Herzog. You should get Herzog to do this. And we're like, how are we gonna get Herzog? And he's, they're just, and Mario's like,

just figure out how to pay him, just figure out. And so Tom got Nike to pay for the movie. And so I don't know what the deal transpired, but we got Herzog to do it. And at the end of the movie, he added a line and it was to the bullet that was, God, if I was my mom, I would know this detail. I could remember this detail.

Is it online? Can you find it online? Yeah, it's online. It was something about how we work in, it was something about how we work in, how we work in, oh, it was something like follow irrational ideas with as rationally and logically as possible, right? And so we get to the end of that bullet

and then Herzog in the studio, in the booth, doing the voiceover, says something like, otherwise we are no better than the cow in the field. And that day was unbelievable because I had, you know, when I do my voiceovers, I am channeling him. I am channeling, I'm like, okay, that is the pen, that's as high as you can get with voiceover. The spirit of man. Yes. him. I am channeling. I'm like, okay, that is the pen. That's as high as you can get with voiceover. The Spirited Man.

Yes. And so to hear him, he's reading my words and it sounds exactly like a Herzog film. And I don't know, it was, I don't know what that is. It can't be anything else if he's reading it. Yeah. I don't know. It's just, I don't know, but I wrote the words. You know what I mean? That's unbelievable. It was really, it was like a, I don't know. I felt like a little kid or something. I don't know.

It was really, really, really cool. For people that are less familiar with his work, I love the stuff about the Werner Herzog Film School, which is basically like, you know, with no money, find your way across Europe and get a job, like all this crazy stuff. Like this is your film school, basically like go live a life of adventure and hardship.

Yeah, yeah, he said the application process is you have to walk a tremendous amount of, a tremendous number of miles to me, keep a journal every day. And by reading it, I'll know if you were lying. Because there's a famous story of this. He was in, I can't remember. He was in like Munich or something.

And this is a very close friend of his who was a film critic. I think her name was Lottie something was dying. And she said, I have two months to live Werner. I have cancer. And he said, do not die before I get to you. I'm coming to you. Do not die.

And he walked. So it took him months and months and months. So she kept living. And then she went on to live years and years after that. And he wrote, and it's called like, I think it's called Walking Through Fire and Ice is the name of the book. And it's like- That's crazy.

I don't know, he's just, he's unbelievable. He bought us fish and chips. Yeah. He scheduled four hours for the voiceover, but his game is so tight and our game is so tight, it took us 30 minutes. And so after he showed us a cut of his film without music, and then he talked to his editor, he was like, I want you to look up.

And then he was like, Georgian wedding hymns. And the kid's just like, and he looks it up and he plays it and he's like okay plug that in and we're watching this movie and I'm watching it and I'm like you know without the music it's like I'm like looking at sax I'm like what this is her sax and he puts the music in and you're like

holy shit and it was just amazing I mean I got to see the guy you got to see him doing the thing, but. That's cool. You know, he's still doing it, he's still doing it like the YouTube way. I know, right?

Suitcase with cameras and just he shoots and no permits. He says, you know, one of the film, an essential filmmaking school is the ability to forge documents, to make counterfeit documents. Yeah, that's his whole thing. Yeah. And he had one, he was shooting in Peru.

He had it signed by like the president of Peru. He just like forged his signature and he hands it to the Colonel or whatever. And they're just like. I know, what a gift that guy is. Oh my God, he's so good. I just watched some, oh, I watched my best fiend. I had never seen it.

I haven't seen that. That's about his relationship with Klaus Kinski, who was the star of Fitzcarraldo. He played Fitzcarraldo and he was an absolute maniac. I'll check that out. Well, let's round this out, but I can't end it Well, let's round this out, but I can't end it without a few thoughts on just this idea of the spirited man, like where does it come from

and what does it mean to you personally? Okay, so where it comes from is this book by Matthew B. Crawford and it's called Shop Class as Soul Craft. And Matthew B. Crawford is a writer and he started out, he had a PhD from, I can't remember, I think maybe University of Chicago in philosophy. And he worked at think tanks,

made a lot of money consulting, like I think big corporations and executives, but his real love was working on vintage motorcycles. And he was like, he raced his Volkswagen Beetle when he was a kid. And he wrote this book called Shop Classes Soulcraft. And it's about the kind of like intellectual significance of working with one's hands,

of making things with one's hands. And I read it, I think I read it in two, I think it came out in 2009. I might've read it in 2011 or something like that. And it was an incredible relief to know that there were people out there that were like bookworms and they were tinkerer people like me who like to mess around with machines and stuff.

And this was it. And this is like the book about it. And in it, he has a chapter where he's talking about how the new cars, you just, you need millions of dollars worth of diagnostic equipment to figure out what's wrong with them. And you plug in a USB into your seven series BMW and all this stuff comes out.

And he said something like, the spirited man needs to know exactly what's wrong with his car or something like that. Or like the, you know, and then he went on to talk about basically that the spirited man is a man who can take care of his own stuff. And so that's to me what it is, is, you know, the spirited man is the man who,

I said it in one of the episodes, is a man who takes care of his own business. So that's what it is. It's also, it's this discomfort or intolerance for asymmetry in the universe, right? When there's something off, like you walked into our studio and immediately gravitated towards this corner where we have a bunch of stuff stacked and you're like, that is universe, right? When there's something off, like you walked into our studio and immediately gravitated towards this corner where we have a bunch of stuff stacked

and you're like, that is unacceptable, right? Yeah, it's not so much- It's very expensive stuff. It's not like, I'm sure a lot of people would call it like an OCD. It's more like a hypervigilance and a sensitivity to this idea that there's a right way of doing things. Yeah. You know what I mean?

Like, and it's not okay to be, to slack off on that. Like there is, there is valor in doing things properly. You know, we live in this very, in this era, this era, have you read the fourth turning? Do you know that book? No, but I saw your book report. It's so good. Yeah.

Cause these guys are financial guys and you can trust these guys. I know it sounds weird. These financial guys, they make these predictions. They say, okay, these trends exist and then they make money off of it, which is the hardest thing to do. So in my mind, you can listen to these guys.

These guys, these words have weight like Ray Dalio. Yeah, he can predict the future. He's good at it. He's been doing it for 50 years. So one of the things that this guy says is people in our generation, Gen X, and we also line up with the lost generation. That's the same generation in that history slot.

Hemingway and all those guys, they were Xers of their time. We grew up in a time, a post-war, very rich unraveling time where kind of anything went right and one of the conclusions that i drew with anything goes is no that's not true anything goes provided certain things are perfect and i don't know this. To me, my whole being able to wrestle my craziness into something productive was all because of me learning disciplines,

learning techniques and learning things that aren't negotiable. Sometimes as a creative person, you think, oh, I can re blah, blah, blah. I don't need the three act structure. I don't need plot. I don't know. No, no, no, no.

What? Thousands of years of innovation and you're not, and you're an exception to thousands of years of Plato and Socrates and all these people being, you know, having to follow these rules, but you don't know, no, no, no, no, no. And I think, I don't know, maybe this is, these are sort of the little, these are the little things that are just the residue of me learning that stuff the absolute hard way.

But how does that square with the fourth turning in the sense that, you know, you're perceiving yourself as a cog in a machine that's kind of progressing towards this dismantling as we progress towards 2028, right? Like we're in this age of basically, an unraveling of sorts, right? A destruction, a reckoning.

Crisis, we're in the crisis. Unraveling is what we grew up in. We grew up in the unraveling was 1984, maybe 1988, end of Reagan to 2008. That was the unraveling. Now we're in the crisis. But before the unraveling is the awakening and that's the six starts in 63 with the assassination of,

but one of the characteristics of our generation throughout history, you can go back to civil war, is that we are a repair generation. And we are the ones that say, no, no, no, no, no. You have to save this. You have to save these institutions. This is a value. And that, you know, and reading that book, reading that book and reading the other one,

the, the spirited man, the, you know, Matthew B. Crawford book, uh, shop classes, soul craft, and frankly, listening to certain Jordan Peterson lectures, it made me very comfortable with the fact of like, Like it would be artistically rewarding and valuable to isolate, to like really narrowly focus on your like propensity to like repair in a very literal sense. And if you are literal and precise enough about it, it'll have a universal resonance with people.

And so I try not to be self-conscious or perceptive. Like that's all subconscious stuff that I learn after I've made the thing. I try to just really dial in like, you know, these little details. I just try to really dial into them and then just trust that in writing the words that I'm gonna narrate, that it will have some kind of universe,

there'll be some universal power in it. But the thing I'm trying to, I think the thing that I'm consciously trying to talk about is that there are things that we have to preserve and there are very valuable things and many great people gave lives and stuff to bring us this thing that we, this civilization that we live in

and it's unbelievably great. It's unbelievably good. And look, I hate it just as much as everybody else. And I bitch about it. And I hate that my fucking AirPod pros do not sync up every time. It's like you are a trillion dollar company. Solve that problem please.

How about when you publish a podcast and it doesn't show up in the fucking app for like 40 hours. Yeah, that's hospitalization for me. Yeah, yeah. Well, it speaks to you, reading that and seeing that must have been like, I've never felt so hurt in my life. Like now I can fulfill my destiny as a repair man

and preach and speak to this idea of preservation and appreciation for the tactile and the analog, because these things do have meaning, especially as we hurdle towards this disposable culture where everything gets thrown away. I mean, and it's almost not, like responsibility doesn't always fall on the individual shoulders.

Like my daughter has a record player and she said to me the other day, like, can we go get this fixed? It's broken. How old is she? 13. Okay. And I said, like, can we go get this fixed? It's broken. How old is she? 13. Okay. And I said, yeah, of course. I said, why don't you, I want you to go online

and I want you to find a place that will repair it and then call me. Good luck. Right, yeah, yeah. So the reply is Guitar Center. I know Guitar Center is not gonna repair a record player. And I said, I want you to call Guitar Center and ask them that question. Figure out like, we did find a place in Woodland Hills

that does audio repair. Wonderful. So we're gonna go have this experience, right? So we take this record player that's probably worth $65. It's not a high end thing. It's intended to be disposable, right? But we're gonna try to repair it. The repair shop requires $50 just to look at it

and then 10 days before they actually give you a diagnosis and tell you whether they can even fix it and what that is gonna look like. So we're in the waiting phase now, but my prognosis is that they're either not gonna be able to fix it or the cost of fixing it is gonna so exceed the value of the thing itself that it doesn't make economic sense to do it.

So you think. What? The cost of fixing it will exceed the value of the thing itself. That's where I think. I mean, that's where, I mean, that I wrestle with. That's basically like my life is wrestling with that. And the truck, my truck is the embodiment of that.

Right, but your truck is- If you wanna be rational about it, you're right. And if you wanna be rational about it, throw that thing in the garbage can and go get an iPhone. But this isn't a rational thing that you're doing. It's irrational to do that record player. That's not rational. That makes my point that it're doing. It's irrational to do that record player. That's not rational.

That makes my point that it isn't the individual's fault for not adopting a sensibility like yours, right? Because you have to be irrational to do it. Not at all, not at all. No, this is, it's a gift. It's a gift, I have a gift. I've been like this always since I was a little baby, I've been like this, it's a gift. And've been like this always since I was a little baby, I've been like this. It's a gift and I'm grateful for it.

And I don't know, I don't know what to say. I don't know what to say beyond that, but I've exploited it. And it's, yeah, it's- I don't think you're exploiting it, you're expressing it. Okay, sure. And you're doing it beautifully. And I think that's probably a good place to end it. Anything else you wanna say?

Any final? Well, no, but nothing but thank you for having me and thanks for the coffee, it was very good. Yeah, super fun talking to you. Everybody definitely go check out The Spirited Man on YouTube, subscribe immediately and enjoy two videos a week. How many do you have now?

Like 16 or 17 or something like that? I think I'm in the twenties, maybe 24. You're on your way. Yeah. You're on your way. Let's go to a meeting in the meantime. Okay, sure. All right, cool.

Thanks, man. Appreciate it. All right, thank you. Peace. Thanks for listening, everybody. For links and resources related to everything discussed today, visit the show notes on the episode page at richroll.com. If you'd like to support the podcast, the easiest and most impactful thing you can do is

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