For the patreon, i met up with eb solace last month to come up with an idea for this video. I'm always really fascinated as to whether there's a moment in an artist's career where, like that journey from innocence to experience, is fully realized. You know like was there an exact point when you're like wait a second i'm not like a grom anymore? You know like oh, my god. I know how to do so to experience.

The question is: is there a moment in an artist's career where the journey from innocence to experience is fully realized and when eb said innocence and experience, i knew exactly what he meant, but maybe you don't maybe you're too young. I think what he meant by innocence is your fantasy of what your adventure will be and what he meant by experience is the reality of what the adventure actually is or was so eb wondered if there's a moment in an artist's career when the journey from innocence To experience is fully realized like oh, i thought it was going to be this way, but it turns out. It's really like this. I find my career and life is a series of those experiences again and again and again when hunter thompson was asked why he drank and drugged so much.

He said it was so he could withstand the constant barrage of punches to his innocence gland. I want to talk about three career adventures when a journey from innocence to experience was maybe not fully realized, but was certainly real and the first adventure from innocence to experience i'll talk about is the story of when susan bought me my first professional video camera susan Is my friend's mother and when i was a kid susan was my intellectual and educational mother. She taught me how to love books and reading susan is and was a beautiful woman, so picture meg tilly in the big chill now susan and her family had thrown a 90th birthday for their father, grampy paul and susan's son sam. My friend had shot the party on video in those days this was june 2000.

There was almost no non-professional editors and i was one of them one of the non-professional video editors in the world, so i edited the footage that sam shot, i set it to nice. Music bjork benny goodman chopin, made sure all the kids and grandkids were in the video, and i ended it with a touching speech made by grampy paul himself about a year later. Susan bought me my first professional quality, video camera, a canon, xl1, there's more to this story. She was protecting me from a dangerous debt that i had incurred.

I can't go into the detail, but she she was protecting me. The xl1 was a video camera with which you could do professional work. Cootie simmons shot a lot of the footage in the new kanye documentary genius with a with a canyon canon xl1. You know at around the same time: 98 2000 around there.

So here's my innocence. My fantasy, i'm gon na get this xl1, this professional camera and i'm going to make it and to me this is what making it means making. It is two things number one earning a living from your talent and number two. The living you earn from your talent allows you to live like a successful dentist.

Successful dentists live in nice houses. Successful dentists, live in nice neighborhoods successful dentists send their kids to good schools. Successful dentists, drive nice cars. Successful dentists pay their bills on time.

Successful dentists have ten thousand dollars in pocket money at all times. That's what making it means to me, making a living from my talent and earning a living that allows me to live like a successful dentist. A successful dentist, in other words, has made it now. When i say susan bought me, the camera, the x01, i don't mean she went to circuit city, picked it out and waited in line.

I mean i went to adorama found a used. Xl1 told her the price and she sent me a check, a physical check through the mail i deposited the check and in the interim, between the funds clearing and me withdrawing the cash to buy the x01, the entire world changed and all bets off. The check was for two thousand dollars. My rent uh one bedroom on 13th and 8th avenue in manhattan was eleven hundred dollars a month and nobody knew what the hell was going to happen to us, so at about 9 30 a.m.

On september 11 2001, i rode my bike to citibank, withdrew the two thousand dollars, basically all the money i had and returned to my apartment on 13th and 8th. So in my innocence i was going to buy this camera and live like a successful dentist, but my experience was terror. My experience was a dilemma inside of a dilemma: stay in new york or leave new york food in rent or xl1. The second adventure from innocence to experience, fred's birthday party, the most important night of my career casey and i were hired by a man named tom healy, to make a birthday video about tom, healey's, husband, fred.

The video was to be shown at fred's 50th birthday party to a room of about 200 people, a lot of rich people, a lot of people from new york's art elite tom sachs was there and andrew cuomo pre-disgrace senator bob carey, senator john kerry, no relation. Hillary clinton and bill clinton to name a few. This was our first paid gig thousands of dollars. Tom sachs had vouched for us tom healy, the man who had hired us fred's husband was an early champion of sax and a collector of sacks work.

So if casey and i pulled it off, we were set, but if we didn't casey - and i were screwed tom sachs was screwed for vouching. For us, tom healy was screwed for hiring us and fred would be embarrassed and screwed out of his 50th birthday video. This was the era of the dreaded dvd, which never worked well good riddance. We had a dvd in the house dvd player that the professional av company had supplied.

We had a backup dvd in our own dvd player, which we had brought to the party, and we had two backups of the video on tape. In two video cameras, you could connect the video cameras to the projector with um something called rca cables and play the video through the camera into the projector. If need be, we had tested each backup with the very expensive professional av team earlier in the day and no matter what happens for the rest of my career. This was the most important night of my career and i knew that that night, so everyone is seated at a very fancy.

Restaurant called leserk picture like a 19th century ballroom, it's right before dinner is served, so everyone is hungry. An announcement is made we're going to show you a video that we made for fred and casey, and i are told to play the video push play on the house. Dvd player boom screen goes blank doesn't work. We connect our backup dvd player to the projector press.

Play boom screen goes blank doesn't work. We connect our camera to the projector to play. The video from a tape. Boom screen goes blank, but the video is working.

We can see it playing just fine on the little lcd screen on the camera. It's the projector, the projector keeps going out, projector goes out, video plays, got ta, stop the video rewind. The video play through the blank leader at the beginning of the video glasses are starting to clink. Voices are starting to rumble uh fred's mother, a very successful businesswoman named lillian vernon who's, throwing the party paid for it.

Hundreds of thousands of dollars probably comes over to us and says the movie plays in one minute or it doesn't play at all. The projector is old, so each time it shuts off, it goes out. It takes 15 to 30 seconds just to boot it up, and we discover that the outlet that the expensive professional av team has plugged the projector into is not only a floor outlet, but it's also about 50 years old cracked broken and the the plug won't stay. In it, so the projector keeps turning off all the other outlets in the room are taken up by.

God knows what casey runs over to the band unplugs someone's amp plugs our projector in, and you know, gives me the thumbs up. I boot up the projector casey makes his way back to the projector rewinds uh the tape and pushes play on the camera. Video comes up on the projector screen, starts playing videos like 10 minutes long, so for 10, solid minutes we've got to suffer through the possibility of the projector crashing. The room loves it laughing at all.

The beats we put two big jokes in there saved the biggest for the end, delivered perfectly by bill clinton himself and it brought the house down everybody loved it. Tom healy, the man who had hired us ended up becoming a huge patron of ours. Uh instrumentally helped us develop our early careers, getting us paid gigs one after another, but the success of that night. The innocence was that we were going to make it, but the experience was that sometimes success is merely relief and the third adventure from innocence to experience.

Just got off the phone with casey in belize, we sold the show wow, that's unbelievable andy slipped up yesterday and he was like yeah tom's doing something with hbo and i was like you mean the knives are doing something. I thought the hbo show meant that we had made it that i was set and could live like a successful dentist for the rest of my life. That was my innocence. For me, it was maybe a year or so of living like a successful dentist, but like a new dentist who hadn't built up his wealth yet and was still paying off his student loans.

Now i must say that the kindness extended to me during this adventure has been astonishing, but the experience is that i don't know if anyone ever really makes it, and now about a dozen years after the hbo show aired. My temple is starting to get cracks in it, i'm still fixing projectors and buying cameras. I can't afford so to speak for fred's 60th birthday. 10 years after the big party, i made him a sort of candelabra with 60 candles in it and each subsequent year i've made him an additional tiny, candelabra sconce, with a single candle in it to commemorate another year.

This is the 70th candle and i'm a month late. Sorry, freddy! I think that my innocence now that i'm nearing 50 has been just about completely extinguished by my experience, but sometimes when i'm with my little boy, a boy who was born into these hands, i catch a glimpse and i can feel some innocence just a little bit Through my mirror neurons, i guess we've got hats like this in the merch store now and this week on the patreon, a live stream. Answering your questions. The link is right.

There.