I'm two weeks behind on this video and it's making me very uneasy and the reason is not writer's block i've actually written too much. The reason is plot block, which is to say that i'm struggling with the structure of this video. I know the conflict of this video and i know the resolution of this video and i know the middle bit of this video. But what i'm struggling with is how to connect the middle bit to the conflict and resolution, and the middle bit is usually what videos and movies and books are about.

The conflict and the resolution are just tricks to get you to watch the middle bit and the middle bit of this video is about influence and i'm having trouble connecting it to the conflict and the resolution. This is my 10 bullet smock. This is tom sachs studio, uniform. I learned this trick on the new yankee workshop, which had a huge influence on me as a kid and influenced my filmmaking or video making career, and the trick is if you're, using wood glue, use this kind and wet both surfaces to be joined because it draws The glue into the fibers of the wood - please please, please, please, please, please please! This is the best thing that happened to me today.

It clamps perfectly i've just heard something from brother cornell that i think i'm going through and i'm gon na play for you anytime. You give fully of yourself, there are elements of your old self that are dying because a new self is in the process of emerging, and i think that's part of the reason why i'm having so much trouble writing this episode, something's dying and something is being born And the conflict is this: is this whole thing pretentious and narcissistic this talking into a camera, calling myself a spirited man uh? Is this a real job? That's a real job, preparing power lines for the santa anas, so the canyon doesn't burn down. That's a real job! This youtube business, it's more like a hobby gone feral gone rabid. So it occurs to me that i captured a moment when some part of me died so that a new point, a new part of me - could emerge.

I captured it. It exists, and maybe that's why the goldfish movie is so important to me year 2000, probably summer i was riding down mercer street i never took mercer street home and void was a bar and they had this sign with a falling d. I think it was a lowercase d and i think that the v was the only capitalized letter, but i'm not sure i'd never been there before, and i don't know why. But i went in by myself and there was this film festival going on and it was maybe 40 people in the bar.

It was probably just the film makers and their friends, and they played maybe 20 films, short films, one to three minutes long back, then internet video barely worked. So there was almost no internet video and the only things that regular people, i'm a regular person ever saw were tv movies, commercials and music videos on mtv. But these films were none of those. You could call these films, art films, but they weren't boring.

They had at the core of them some kind of narrative, some kind of embedded, subtle narrative. They were films, they were shot and projected on film. I believe one i remember particularly, but not vividly. This is a three minute or so long video that i saw once over 20 years ago, but it is it's burned in my mind as a turning point.

This night at void might be the original influence that begat this compulsion to go in a certain unknown direction. The whole lot of them all the films left this impression on me, but i remember this one specifically and i'm gon na describe it to you now. I understand that my description can't possibly convey to you the weight that this film had on me and i'm gon na throw some images in here that i shot yesterday, so that my description is less boring. But this video at void the whole frame.

What you're? Looking at is fog or a mist, it looks like you're in a we're in a cloud and a pretty woman in her 20s appears in the right of the frame. I think she she wanders in and this thing's shot documentary style, the camera's locked off and it's i don't think it was set up. So there's a woman standing in the fog to the right of the frame and you can see her head to toe she's kind of far away and the fog is coming from somewhere. But it's also the atmosphere of the frame we're in the fog and from the unseen source of the fog.

These little kids keep running into the frame and then running back to the source of the fog, and these are african-american kids, so the brown skin and the white mist it's just beautiful man, the music. There was no sound just music and this is going to ruin. It for a lot of you, but the song was relatively new at the time, so it was okay, but the music was sweetest thing by you, two, so the kids run in and out of this fog, elated they're elated and the woman, the pretty woman. At some point turns to the camera as if to say, are you seeing this she's a stranger to the kids? We think, but one of the kids runs up and he throws his arms around her waist, and this puts her in hysterics because he's soaking wet because it turns out what we're looking at is the mist from a pulled fire hydrant and these kids are running in And out of the mist and the ladies just watching i to this day, i have no idea how they shot it, because the whole thing is just a white cloud, but it was happening in real life.

Do you know these things just mushroom in your mind, and i and sometimes it's sublime, you know so the influence that those films i saw at void had on me begat, a video i made. That was a turning point in my life and i think in the video in this goldfish video. We see the exact moment when the filmmaker or the video maker emerged at the time of seeing the videos at void and making this goldfish video. I had a job at scholastic publishing writing for a kid's science magazine.

I wanted to be a magazine writer like hunter thompson or tom wolf back in the day, and the videos were just a hobby. Each issue of the scholastic science magazine would publish and answer a science question sent in by the readers and somehow i got my hands on a list of a hundred of these questions sent in by high school kids and one of the questions. I think it's the one that they ended up publishing in the magazine. The question was: can a goldfish live in mountain dew thought it was hilarious and i thought the other questions were kind of sad and beautiful.

So i made a video to see if a goldfish could live in mountain dew and that's what this is. I'm shooting i drained the water with a turkey, baster filled the glass with mountain dew and when the goldfish was floating there seemingly dead. I panicked, though, a veterinarian would later tell me that the carbon dioxide had simply knocked the fish out and that in that school students would knock out fish with co2 for some reason so chill out peter. So the fish is floating there.

Some kind of divine inspiration comes over me and i remember this legend from high school, wherein dave reynolds defibrillated a dead frog with a 9 volt battery, so off camera tape still rolling. I tear the 9 volt out of my telephone. Answering machine touch it to the goldfish and bang the fish comes out of it and then that particular fish lived just as long as the understudy fish i bought in case this one died, i think um. I think i bought five fish for this video just in case, but i had not planned to shock the thing back to life.

That was just it just came to me during the shooting. I don't know that i've ever felt that high. Before as when i touch the battery to the to the to the goldfish - and i think that moment of the battery touching the goldfish was the moment, the magazine writer died and like cornell west talked about the filmmaker video maker emerged. That was uh 21 years ago, and not long after that i made my first internet video and sort of established the two families of videos that i would continue to make for the next 20 years.

I didn't know until this project that you had to season a chalkboard before you used it. The background noise is rain. Six months after making the holland tunnel, i turned pro, albeit at ten dollars an hour tom sacks hired me as a fabricator, and i made a bunch of videos with him too. Sax has been my biggest professional influence.

He taught me how to build things. This is around the same time that casey and i began working together. Casey made some of the saks videos too, after working at sac studio all day casey and i made as many videos as we could all the time we were working all the time. One of saks's collectors, a man named tom healey, commissioned casey and me to make a video series that we called science experiments and, like the saks videos, these science experiments, videos played in museums all over the world casey, and i made a video about the first generation.

Ipod's crap battery the video went viral. This was before youtube, so it was a corporate media story and that was a big break for us publicity-wise from then on. We were making videos all the time figuring out how to hustle to make a living at it. Okay influences, we were watching dvds all the time, dvds of anything we loved, mostly cinema over and over again during lunch, during breaks in the background, while we were working and a lot of the dvds at the time had what they called director's commentary.

So you could watch the movie and listen to the movies, writers and directors talking about their experiences making the movie. Also some dvds had behind the scenes stuff you could watch wes, anderson's royal tenenbaums had particularly good directors commentary and a particularly good behind the scenes. Little featurette um and i think the first person filmmaking stuff what they probably call vlogs. Now i think for us it came from the director's commentary and behind the scenes featurettes, there were also two documentaries masterpieces about the difficulties of making movies.

One was called hearts of darkness by eleanor coppola about the making of apocalypse now and one was by les blanc about the making of werner herzog's fitzgeraldo and that one was called the burden of dreams. The burden of dreams, burden of dreams sent us down the herzog, rabbit hole he's in many of his own documentaries and i believe he does the voice over for all of them. So there was this very delicate idea that you could put yourself in your own work. So long as you were careful enough not to be narcissistic and to this day i struggle with that line between narcissism and universality, this video you're watching now.

Yes, it's about me shamefully, but really it's about my work and hopefully the struggle of creative work in general. A brave man, a third tom tom scott financed what would become the nystat brothers hbo bought it. We made it first, but then hbo bought it. It took two years to make and another year to get it aired.

I think uh. I became an egomaniac after that, or maybe i was always an egomaniac, and the hbo deal gave me the confidence to be a shameless egomaniac, but it was incredibly fun. We had so much fun and you know that journey of up to making that is the life. You, when you fantasize about oh i'm gon na, be a professional so and so and go on all these adventures.

That was that that that was that part of life. But i hurt a lot of important people around me and i got deep into drinking and drugs and i just generally went crazier. We shot a second season of the nystat brothers which hbo did not buy. Thank god, because, looking back on it now it's embarrassing and mortifying, and when i see the footage i cringe, i split from casey went broke tom sacks bless him hired me to make 10 bullets which he wrote with john ferguson.

Sacks continued hiring me to make more and more videos about his studio. I was happily getting away from myself. These videos were not about me. They were about tom's work.

I made a pilot for my own show, which probably would have worked as a youtube channel, but i just wasn't thinking in internet terms. In those days uh in 2012 saks and i began making a feature. Film called a space program. I quit drinking and drugs and began the brutal process of growing up and becoming a man.

I was so old at the time when we wrapped on that i went to mexico. I had just had it with the first person stuff. I had it with the. I me mine, bullsh, a space program went to south by southwest and it was released in 2016.

that year 2016 for fun. I made a video that i called the spirited man. I hadn't made a video for fun. I don't know five or six years this.

It was a third person, omniscient video it wasn't about van. It was about my favorite part of myself, the spirit, and i was really just watching and reading the serious filmmakers at this point, the giants of contemporary cinema sax and i wrote this video called paradox bullets. It's about using your intuition when trapped in a paradox and wouldn't you know somehow sacks figured out how to get werner herzog to narrate it. This is what distinguishes us from the cows in the field and um.

It felt like we made a werner herzog, film, sax, and i and his team went on to make this fun surfing video in indonesia, and then i quit. I read this book when i was 20, went through a vonnegut phase and read a whole bunch of vonnegut books. I have analytics for this channel, so i know that a lot of you are between the ages of 18 and 35, which means that a lot of you are trying to figure out your purpose. What you should do - and i can tell you from experience that figuring out what to do - is the hardest part of the adventure.

But if you don't know your life's purpose, then your life's purpose is to find your life's purpose. Elon musk says: if you're trying to find your purpose, read books books present you with options, you might not have known existed. I reread this book when i was 40 about 6 years ago, and i was astonished to realize that in the 20 years since first reading it so much of my fundamental thinking had come from reading, vonnegut's books had come from vonnegut's ideas, for instance practicing in art. No matter how well or badly is a way to make your soul grow for heaven's sake, and we have contraptions like computers that cheat you out of becoming what you can become is the miracle you were born to be through the work that you do.

Maybe he was wrong about the computers, but that's how i feel about computers in 2018. I started making these pieces because i was sick of computers, sick of screens. I called tom sachs for advice about selling the pieces and he told me just keep making the movies. I wrote a feature: film began, lining up financing and i began making spirited man videos continued.

Making them sax gave me a job co-writing a book with him. God bless him covet hit financing for the movie, i wrote evaporated. I continued writing uh the saks book and making the spirited man videos, but i did not publish the videos investigated doing a kickstarter campaign for the spirited man youtube channel. During my research into successful kickstarter campaigns, i came across the kickstarter campaign for a documentary called unstuck in time about kurt vonnegut march 9th 2021.

I launched the kickstarter and this youtube channel and they're both successful. Thank god. Thank you. A few weeks ago, i was feeling a little uneasy about some of my recent videos and started to wonder: is this endeavor just narcissistic unstuck in time the kurt vonnegut documentary from the kickstarter out in theaters? I hadn't been to the cinema.

In two years, the documentary was made by a man named robert whitey, took him 40 years to make he was friends with vonnegut. Originally mr whitey did not want to be in the documentary, but to not put himself in would have been to sacrifice essential themes of the film. The documentary was a masterpiece. Had mr whitey not been in it, the documentary would have suffered and we would have been deprived of a gift and, having experienced mr whitey's gift, i made peace with.

Yes, you can be in these videos and make them universal, and i had the resolution to. My. Is this narcissistic conflict during the middle of making this episode when i was stuck in forlorn, i got this letter from a guy in kansas city. This guy had to think about what he was going to write, write it down.

The guy's got two little kids. He had to drive to the post office, wait in line to buy a stamp put the stamp on it, mail it and just to encourage me - and it says here i have enjoyed watching your youtube channel. You have been a positive influence in my life. I want to learn more and be better each day it didn't occur to me that i would hand down my influences, but yeah.

That's what my influences have done for me. Essentially, they've made me want to be a better man each day, but now i'm a little sick of me. Somehow i got ta begin, including my friends in these videos. My vonneguts, you.