To me, creativity is that trance. You are not really conscious.
You are just the thing that you're making. What you're describing is my
favorite fucking thing in the world. How many hours of my labor
will it take to save me $500? I kind of think I'm in it
for the edit. That's the part where I get in a flow.
That's the part where just the time, the pace makes
you better, the quantity makes you better. Van Nystat is an
artist, filmmaker, and creator of the YouTube channel the Spirited Mandev, which has gained
almost half a million YouTube subscribers since he started the channel a
little over a year ago. He is also the brother of the one and
only Casey Neistat. And he and Casey made a tv show for HBO
in 2010 called the Neistat Brothers. This show is about
my brother and me, but this is not a reality show.
Casey originally went the YouTube route, and Van went on to make tv commercials and
work with artists like Tom Sachs, exhibiting his work around the world. Van's YouTube
videos are unlike any other videos on YouTube.
He wondered if his detail fetished was harming others.
And I was so excited to sit down with him and talk about what makes
his voice so unique.
Okay, I want to start with something you said in an interview earlier
this year. You were talking about wanting your own kingdom,
and I very much feel like you now have your own
kingdom. And so my question,
first question for you is,
how's your kingdom? How's it feel? It's good.
The court has not revolted. The kingdom
is good. I need more subjects, I think,
because, as you know, when you're a DIY person,
you kind of take on the whole operation.
And I have a very extreme weakness of not being able to
delegate. And so, you know, there's so
much going on. There's the family, and then there's no. There's two things
going on. There's a personal life, and then get a video made every week.
But, I mean, they're so complicated, these videos.
And yet, I don't feel like I can delegate
any part of the process, including, like, taking out the garbage.
Cause I'm like, well, nobody wants to do. They're gonna be insulted. These kids all
went to USC film school, you know. Yeah. So the
kingdom's great. And Tom Sachs, we're working on
a project together, and we're doing these am,
like, 06:00 a.m. phone calls. 09:00 a.m. for him.
And he brought up the kingdom thing
the other day, and he's like, you're doing it, man, and it's real, and it's
good. And I was so happy. But the reason I said that
is because I had been a collaborator for so long, so late
into my life, and then finally I, you know, I don't
know how, but somehow I was like, you know,
this will be my own thing, is the delegation thing because
you're so. You care about the details
so much, and so if somebody does the details differently, you don't like that,
or is the delegation thing something else? Why? Yeah, this is a great
question. You know, I think it has something to do with.
It's, like, my disposition. Like, I am a maniac. I'll be all nice and
sweet on the, you know, in my personal, professional life, but I'm,
like, a crazy maniac, so I don't want to, like, unleash that guy.
And it's a sk. Like, delegating is
a skill that I've never really developed.
And in the edit. Okay. Yeah. So I'm very
careful to usually write everything ahead of time, and then
I just shoot a shot list. Shooting, to me, is like,
you know, I don't really take it that seriously. Really seriously. Yeah, yeah. No,
I don't. It's. The fastest way to do it is essentially the way I
wanna do it. So you script the video first. Basically.
Not 100% of them, but almost all of them, and then you speak it through.
You hold up a mic, and you basically monologue the video.
And I try not to start unless I have the breakthrough.
Like, oh, this is the thing. This is the little hook that people
are gonna, like, see, it seems to me like you couldn't delegate the
scripting. I can't delegate the script. No, the scripting is
what I have to say. That is like, me as an artist.
Yes. To go to somebody else and say, hey, write a script for me about
what I believe, like, doesn't work. I can't. It never comes back. I've tried
it a thousand times. Yes. I can't. I can't. Scripting, I can't delegate.
But have you. I guess after that shooting,
post production, like, anything else shooting, I don't care. Just shoot it. I don't
care. But editing, sometimes there's
a breakthrough in the editing. Sometimes it's like, oh,
because you're so far into it, you've been sleeping on it and sleeping on it.
Sleeping on it. Whatever you're making, that in the ending, editing, sometimes just
a turn that, I'm sorry, no one's gonna get. And my brother
made me feel very good about this because he said he was giving some
gigantic lecture in front of 10,000 people.
And someone said, after you hire an editor, who's the first
employee you hired? And he's like, who said I hired an editor?
And I also heard on the Colin and Samir
show, I heard them talking about Emma Chamberlain, how she
said I could delegate editing, but that's what I'm in it for.
And I kind of think that that's true, too. I kind of think I'm in
it for the edit. Like, that's the part where I get in a flow.
That's the part where just the time. Yeah. And it's
also, like, the sculptural parts. It's what
everything's leading up to. It feels like the same thing as the
crafting of a Toyota logo or whatever
it is. I feel the same. That's what editing is. It's the detail orientation,
the polishing, the maneuvering to get it just right.
And I definitely feel that from your edits. So you don't
work with an editor at all. Have you ever worked with an editor for your
channel? Sometimes I'll have. I work with a guy named Braxton
Haugen, who's great. You should check out his channel.
Sometimes I'll have, like, the pre editing stuff, like,
save all this in the different folder, you know, in the folders according
to what camera it was shot on, and then load it all into the timeline
and cut it down. Cut obvious stuff out.
And some, like, a few things I've done. Like, eight things
I've done that way. But no. Yeah. Not, like, narrative cut.
I waste a lot of time. Yeah. In a bad way. And I
want to feel like it's actually a bad way. Is it actually a bad way,
really? Yes, but doesn't like it.
Reminds me of that video about detail
orientation where you basically said, I am. I think I forgot
the exact quote, but you said something like, I'm willing to suffer the consequences
of my obsession with details because I want them
to be right. And so, I guess,
is it a bad way if you get it just the way? Is it bad?
Is it a waste of time if it's just the way you want it?
But that's not what I waste time on. What do you waste time on?
Wasting time on things that, like, a 16 year old
intern could do. So, like, I don't know, washing the truck,
vacuuming the studio floor. One thing I would love
to have a professional do, but you'd have to be so smart to do this
that this person doesn't exist. Put my tools away. Put my stuff away.
Cause I don't know when you're working. I think this is what
creativity is, and I think this is why people want to be creative people
is because to me, creativity is that trance
where you are just. You are not. It's like being on drugs.
You are not really conscious. You are just the thing that you're making,
and blah, blah, blah. And you're. And, oh,
wait, I'll use the soldering iron and then a whole
mess and stuff. But everything has to be exactly where it
always is, because you won't be able to be in that trance if you have
to stop. Where's the resin?
Where is a toothpick to stir the resinous?
How much of your time do you spend in that state?
Because what you're describing is my favorite fucking thing
in the world. Yeah, it's the best feeling in the world. What does it,
for me, is also editing. It's post production storytelling through
post production. The jigsaw puzzle of assembling a story and revealing
the thing. It just is a puzzle. It is a puzzle.
It's a puzzle. It's a puzzle. It's a puzzle. That's what we're doing. Sometimes there's
a missing piece, and fuck it. So I just
love searching for that missing piece and putting that in the right place,
and it connects the things. It's just. I love that.
So when I'm in that moment, literally, I mean, I will
not eat. I will not go to the bathroom. I will wake
up, and it's fucking three in the morning, and I've been. And I feel like
I'm. It feels like waking up from a dream is what it feels like.
That's my favorite state to be in. How much of your
time do you spend in that state as
an artist? This is a great question. Okay. Do you have kids? I don't.
Okay. Obviously, that changes everything. Yeah.
But let's see how much of my. I would say it's maybe
4 hours a day, if I'm lucky, and then on
an editing day, or if I'm, like, at the finish line, and it's like,
if I can just go hard, and I'll be done today,
and then tomorrow is for everybody else, which sometimes
happens on Thursdays, which is the greatest. Why Thursdays? Cause I
post on Fridays. And so I would
say on those days, I might get eight, but my precious
time is, like, I wake up at four in the morning, five days a week,
and then my precious time is like, four till my
son has to go to school, which is around eight something. And that's like
zero. Zero distractions.
And then, you know, each day is different, and they overlap.
So there's, like, a full writing day. Then there's,
like, a writing overlapping with shooting day. Then there's a
shooting overlapping with editing day, which is today.
And then there's a full editing day. And then there's
a posting day. That might overlap with a little tiny
bit of editing or just to go through. And so the,
like, shooting editing days is when I'm indulging in the.
In the flow state. And.
Yeah, I mean, but the building is what I'm like, the build.
Oh, there's also the building, though. And you build stuff, too.
Yeah. I hate shooting when
I'm building. And I know that I'm getting the right
to make. To spend 5 hours on this
thing I'm making this week is like, I smelted lead
fishing sinkers to make a heavy base for my
new camera. So I can put on the dashboard of my car without it sliding
around. And, like, I know that I can indulge in
melting these fishing weights
because I'm shooting it. And sometimes I just. When I'm
really indulging, I don't shoot. And I'm just making beautiful,
dah dah dah dah. And then sometimes I'll go back and fake it. Or sometimes
it just doesn't make it in the thing. And it's this.
You know, people are like, if you had. If money was no object, what would
you do? I was like, same thing, but I wouldn't shoot it. But also,
I think the truth is, if money was no object, I would just spend money.
That's all I would do. So the shooting is like the enabling mechanism
that, for you, I guess, makes it universal. It's like the
thing that is the value generating portion of
what you do. It's what allows me to do it, because that's what people
will support. Right, right. So it's almost like the
business model of your detail obsession is storytelling.
Yeah. Or it's like the making is
the advertising budget for my
video making. Or the other way around. The other way around. Video making
is the advertising budget for my. Yeah. Hand man. That's so funny. So,
for you. Cause what's interesting about that is I started
from there as well, where it sounds like for you,
the product, the thing that lights you up, is the
making of the stuff and the smelting and the repair
and that is your purpose on earth.
And then the video making is a way
to make that work, which for me as a musician.
But it used to be the video making. It used to be. Oh, so that's
different. In the beginning of the video making, in the first ten years
of the video making. Yeah, like Neistat brothers, it was the other.
Everything was feeding the video making. So that. When did that
change for you? I think it was when it was
like, the overhead started to get high and I really had to have
money. You know, I had to have, you know, it had
to be. It couldn't just be crazy. It couldn't just be reckless anymore.
You know, it had to just be. Alas, it had
to be focused, especially having the kid and all this
stuff. And then with YouTube, the schedule of it,
boom, the faster you get them up, the more the algorithm
is going to promote you. I don't know. The system
I'm trying to develop is, how do I have both? Can we talk about
the schedule for a minute? There are some artists
who really love that kind of. On one end of the spectrum,
there's artists on the other end of the spectrum who,
for them, it's like this oppressive clock of doom
to, like, have to put something out, like,
to serialize the creation of art.
I think for some people, that's a constraint that's exciting,
and it creates more artistry in themselves, and they enjoy
living up to that challenge. And for other folks, they're like, look, I want time
and I want space. I don't want a fucking algorithm telling me when to upload.
If the video's not ready Friday, fuck it. The video's not ready Friday, and I'm
going to take my bloody time. I've seen folks on the full spectrum.
What's your. Is that how you think about it? Or where are you on that
spectrum? Or how. Yeah, what's. So. About a year ago, about a
year ago, I was like a half, maybe I was almost a year into the.
Or maybe I was like, six months into the. Into the channel. And it
was very successful. It was insanely successful for the amount of time it
had been up faster than my brother. I mean, I had my brother's help because
he could promote me, but, you know, faster than, I got to 400,000 subscribers
faster than he did. But I was working really hard and doing
two a week, and I was just becoming a
total maniac, and my mental health was just unwinding. And when my
mental health goes, I get very angry,
very full of rage, and I'm like, tapping into that war gene
or whatever. And so my psychiatrist said
to me, take a break.
Take a break from the schedule.
Can you take a break from the schedule? And I said, okay.
And so for my first video of 2022,
I said, take as long as you want to make this to myself. And that
was my schedule. And it ended up taking like a month. It was like a
month. I mean, granted, it was like the Christmas new years month where
you're getting interrupted all the time. And it was pretty good. It was
the one with the Kurt Vonnegut thumbnail,
but I still felt the same weird pressure. I still felt the
same time constraint. And there's
a great. I think it's revisionist history podcast
with Malcolm Gladwell. And Gladwell talks about slow artists versus
fast artists. And Picasso did
65,000 works of art, which is three pieces
a day for 60 years. And then I
think the other one was like, cezanne or somebody like this. Somebody really
super slow. So there's that, and then there's, do you
remember the director's label dvd's
that came out? This is our thing that we've got.
I fucking watched those videos frame by frame,
right? Okay. A hundred times. I studied Michelle Gondry. This is the one I'm
going to talk about until my brain exploded. Yes, yes. And in the beginning,
he says, for this dvd, it was a collection of his
short films. I had to decide with going between
going for quality and going for quantity,
and I went for quantity because quantity
lasts, which is, like, so antithetical to
my thinking. I still don't have my head around it.
Because quality lasts. The pyramids last. Cause they're well made.
But quantity, quantity lasts. No, no, quantity yields
better quality. I agree. This is the
part that I can't quite get. I see
videos like yours, and youre just
insane detail orientation. Can you see that? I just
feel like I'm cutting corners the whole time. I'm like, all right, just let this
slide. Know you're the only one who's gonna see this.
I mean, the pacing, even the meticulousness of your
labeling the studio, the fucking date on your pencil, like, everything, it's just.
It's insanely meticulous. Okay?
And there's a piece of me that respects
that so much that I like.
I want to be that guy. But then, at the same time,
I have this deeply held belief that I
will only improve as an artist after making
5000 versions of the thing that I'm making,
like, in the Picasso spectrum versus cezanne. Spectrum.
I see Picasso. I'm like, of those 60,000 works
that Picasso made, 200 years later, 100 years
later, people are talking about 20 of them.
And he didn't know which 20 correct when he was making. This is how
I think about it. Yes. And so, yeah,
I could spend six months working on one
and put it out and hope that that's the one. Or I
could make 60,020 of them are probably gonna
stick. Yeah. And, like. And, like,
if I make 60,000, I'm gonna be pretty good. By the time I'm at,
like, 30,500, I'm gonna be pretty good at it.
Yeah. And so I just try to make a lot,
but it's not because I don't care about quality. It's because I care about
quality. And I think that this is the lever to quality.
Does that make sense? Yeah. And that's ultimately, I think, why I
do it, because I'm just like, no, the pace makes you better.
The quantity makes you better. You learn a little bit, you know, every time you
do something again, you little, teeny, little tweak.
And there's that. There's, like, a Zen saying that the wheel.
Smith cannot explain what he spent
20 years learning. Like, he can't teach you how to make the wheel because
there's so many tiny little, teeny, teeny, teeny details,
including, like, where the chisel goes in the chisel holder.
Maybe that's why it's hard to delegate. Thank you.
Yes. Right. Because it's like you're forced to
explain. Yes. What you want and how you
would make something which you're a wheel maker
after 20 years, and it's in your blood and your
eyeballs and your hands, and you can't explain it. Yeah,
yeah, yeah. Okay. Can we talk about Michelle Gondry for
a second? Yes, go ahead. Well, what I wanted to. I wanted to draw a
difference between your videos and Michelle Gondry. Cause Michelle
Gondry's videos, I think the main difference is pacing.
Michelle Gondry's videos are. It's like every 2 seconds,
something is happening. Whereas what I admire about your videos and what I think is
separates your videos from literally everybody else's on YouTube. That's very sweet.
Thank you. 15 seconds of silence.
Cloudy today, but clouds are good in these parts.
Your videos are more like watching a movie or
listening to a podcast than it is like watching a Michelle
gondry video. Don't get me wrong. I love Michelle Gandry videos,
but you use silence, it seems. I don't know why
you're doing it, but it seems like you're giving the viewer a chance to
reflect on themselves as they're learning
from you in your videos. And so there'll be
some dialogue, and then there'll be 15 seconds of silence with a little beautiful
pad, some beautiful ethereal kind of music playing,
and then some beautiful shots. And you give me time as a viewer
to think about what this video means to me. And I so
appreciate that generosity in your videos.
How are you thinking about silence in your videos? And I guess,
why are you using silence so much? Why are you giving us?
Is that just, does that come natural to you? Okay. No, it's two reasons,
or it might be three, but it's two primary reasons, and one of them
is Andrei Tarkovsky sculpting in time. Have you read that book?
No, I haven't. Okay. You have to read it. Okay. Okay. It's an assignment for
you. And he wrote it. I think it's the last thing he
ever wrote. And he was dying when he wrote it.
And he talks about all
of the, he talks about it in such non woo woo terms,
just the job of filmmaking.
And so I read that book and then I immediately,
of course, like, watched all of his movies.
And his movies, you know, he's making them behind the Iron Curtain,
almost all of them. And they're slow,
but you are drawn in. Your subconscious
is drawn in. They're like lynch movies in that way. And they're
slow. And slow means there's less work you have to do.
There's less shooting. There's less moving the camera,
less editing. But, and this is the chief thing that I
got from him. He said something like, you just, you're not
experimenting with the camera. You are getting the job done. You have the confidence
in that shot. You know what the shot is.
And that's what's going to go in there. You know how long it's going to
be. And the experimentation might be with the performance or
so forth, or some little tiny tweaks in there, but, and I think it
was the, you know, just be confident this is what the shot is. Be confident
what this movie is, and be confident that you're hooking the audience
so that they care and they'll go all the way, because that's all that we're
doing. All that we're doing is getting them to watch the end. All that's what
all this trouble is for. And the second thing,
I made a feature film with Tom Sachs. We co wrote it,
I directed it, and it was we shot it live, and then I went back
and shot all this little stuff. It's called a space program.
And I worked with a composer named Greg Gersten,
who did a lot, like, the first. All the videos of my first year.
And then he got so many offers that I couldn't afford to
work with him anymore, so. And he's
unbelievable. He's such a great artist, like, on every level,
but he just got composition. And one of the things when
we were editing and I'd take his music and put it into
scenes is he'd say, you need to put breaths in
so that people can digest what you've just
fed them a thousand percent.
That was the implementation. Gray Gersone. That was
the implementation. And every time I'm making something, I'm like, no, no, it's not about
speed. It's not about. Hey, look at this. Look at this. Oh, look at this
thing. You know? Yeah, no, that's. I literally
use the word breath when I'm talking about those moments. Yeah. It's like a
trumpet player. They output this incredible creative musical
phrase, and then they take a breath, and there's a little bit of silence.
Miles does this really well, and then it's the next one spit out. Yeah.
And you know who does this really well? Podcasters. I think
podcasters do this really well, which is why I compared your filmmaking to watching
a podcast, because. Now, hold on. Yeah. I interrupt you just for clarification.
So, podcasting, you have the, like Joe Rogan, where it's just a conversation like
this, but then you have, like, narrative, this american life. That's what I'm talking
about. Okay. Okay. Yeah. Those are narrative. Podcasts are geniuses. They are geniuses.
Another thing is, I'm trying to do to make my videos
so that you don't have to watch them. That's part of it, too. That's really
cool. So you don't have to watch them, because while I'm making stuff,
you see, I always have the ear buds in when I'm making stuff. I'm listening
to podcasts and stories and books on tape. It's like
Ritalin for me or something. It quiets the noise.
Yeah, I love that. I love that. But I interrupted you. No,
no, no. Well, I was just gonna say, I think podcasters are
almost like the narrative podcasters. They're like the modern creator
generation of filmmakers, because the way they tell stories
is more like filmmaking stories, more so than the way youtubers
tell stories, which is, again, what separates, I think, your videos
on YouTube from most other people's videos. Yeah, the podcasters
are. They're making stories that have these breaths
that have moments of silence that give us a space to reflect.
It's that I think in one video, you called it,
we're tricking you with the conflict and the resolution. We're tricking you to watch
the middle, is what you said. Yeah, that's what we want to tell you.
That's our propaganda's in the middle. But we got to trick you with, like,
we'll treat. You gotta set it up. Okay, so this takes me to my question
about storytelling, which is, how do you get people to watch the
middle? How do you get people to care enough to keep going?
Ask a question in the beginning that while
they're watching, they get a little bit hypnotized, but then
they also have to be like, yeah, but what about the. What about the.
And then you don't resolve it until the ending. That's right. And that's
their reward. And then you resolve it. And this is what mammoth, I think
David Mamet said this is that the ending
has to be both a surprise and inevitable. And that's
the trick. And that's what you have to suffer for.
And that's why most people quit, is because that
wall of. Where is that? That's why you also do it in the beginning with
the writing. Cause you don't want to get out of that. And they'll be like,
oh, no, it's this. I'm gonna go back and shoot. Which is how I used
to work. That's how Casey and I used to work when we were doing the
tv series. Wait, where you wouldn't come up with the whole plot.
I wouldn't have, like, the hook at the end. I wouldn't
have, like, the irony at the end. That's like, the plot point,
too. Like, that brings you to the conclusion, and it
just wasted so much time. And it's less disciplined than sitting
at that. I've used in manual typewriter. Sitting at the typewriter. And just.
And also, it's not as pleasant, because when you get that hook, when you
get that, oh, this is what it is. You.
You're on vacation at that point. You're just putting
it down. You're just putting it down. And then when somebody
in the comment. I don't read the comments, but I read all and respond to
all the Patreon comments that come to me. Like,
Patreon is how you communicate with me. It's like my office hours.
And when someone specifically a patron
who's paying me specifically mentions something that was like,
well, that's where it was. It's. That's the. To me,
that's like the heartbeat. It's like, okay, the whole thing worked. I'm just going to
keep going. Or when someone says, that's my favorite one, this is my favorite
one, then you're like, okay, the numbers matter.
The numbers fucking matter. But that stuff
matters more. And that stuff encourages you. And to
me, it's like, well, the numbers are going to come because if you can do
this, the numbers are going to come. And my channel hasn't
caught on yet as much as it's very popular. I do about 100,000 views
per video, but it still hasn't caught on,
you know, this reason to
keep going that you're talking about right now.
For me, again, it calls
back to the video that you made, the crisis
where you talk about Tolstoy's definition of art. The author's
simple definition of art was that
it is the transmission of feeling. The artist
has experienced 200.
That's the only, that's the only definition I'll accept.
Yeah, and it's the. And that's like that because that's hard art. It just.
No, because then the modernist came along and like,
you know, Duchamp, he just wrote, you know, like, he just wrote
armed mud on the toilet. And then it's like, okay, now that's what everyone's trying
to do, because that's easy. And. No, what Tolstoy said,
which puts to me, that puts the comedians at the top of
the artist food chain highest, because Andrew Schultz
says he's like, you can fake sad, you can fake angry,
can't fake funny. And those people can transmit
funny. And funny is the best one of all the emotions.
And that's why they get paid, and that's why they're so successful, especially now,
the good ones. And that's congruent, though,
with what you're talking about in terms of the reason to keep going,
right? What you're saying is like, when I hear from somebody who watches
my shit, that this was moving to them,
that is the resolution of the transmission of the feeling to that
person. That's the feedback that you're getting, is like,
I gave a feeling to another human, and I spent all this time and
energy and shot it and scripted it to the whole thing.
And this person felt the thing I wanted them to feel.
And that makes it worth it to you? Or is it they
felt what you wanted them to feel, or they felt the feeling that
you felt. I think that that is the.
That's what Tolstoy says. Yes. He says it's a feeling. You're trying
to, like, translate this feeling. I mean, there are some things that I
like, you know? Have you seen, I think it's called
the worst person in the world. Oh, I've wanted to see that. I still
haven't seen it tonight. Okay. I mean, Americans don't make these movies
anymore, and this is what they made in the seventies, but it's one of these,
like, you know, and, like, even if
it's unpleasant, it's still good. It's the feeling.
I don't know, the indulgence in feeling. That's why we love art.
I was talking about this last night with some friends, two musicians
that I love dearly. We were talking about ten out of ten experiences in
life, and we all agreed that
actually a lot of our ten out of ten experiences were not positive.
Yeah, the ten out of tens were like that moment where you
finished the album and you're like, fuck this
person. The first time I heard a Kendrick Lamar
record and I listened to the whole thing while reading the lyrics,
and I was just like, this tragedy of a human being,
ten out of ten, but not,
like, positive ten out of ten. Just the deepest
feeling of sorrow and. And loss
and. But that is the ten out of
ten experiences that I think we all crave.
And, you know, the great artists are able to give us those experiences,
which is why they're the great artists and the great, great,
great ones. They do it, like, over and over and over
again. I don't know how that.
Yeah, so there's tension
that I feel, and I know a lot of artists feel this, and I
have a feeling you think about this. On the one hand,
artistry is the transmission of a feeling to another person.
And the power, the purpose, the joy
comes from getting feedback around
that success. It's like, I gave this person that thing that
I was feeling. Now I feel more understood. I know they get me a little
bit more. I connect with them. And yet,
making art for other people
is a dangerous path. How much do you think about audience
when you're making stories? How much are you thinking about the
successful transmission of the feeling versus enjoying being in the flow and
doing your thing and making art for yourself?
It's kind of like your conscience voice
that's very quiet, and it just kind of tickles you. I think about it like
that, like, little, and it's very detailed
little things. It's not big picture stuff. Big picture
is just like, well, if they don't like this, it won't
get enough views and I'll go poor and that'll be the end of it.
But for little things, I'm very cognizant of,
okay, if this 2 seconds doesn't need to be in here
and a million people watch it, that's 2 million
second I've wasted of human beings
time. And so, like, for this last video I did where I
drove up to Montana to get the engine switched out of my truck,
which was like two weeks ago, but feels like a year ago, there was one
shot where I'm introducing, like, that. The engine overheats and that's
why I'm getting a new engine. One of the reasons. And I
opened that sequence with a shot of the thermostat, and then I
go back to the thermostat and it just bothered me a little bit
every time I was editing it. But you're editing so fast that
you just kind of leave things. And then I slept on. It went back,
and then the day I was going to upload it, right before the upload,
I just pulled it out because I'm like,
no, they don't need that. So I do think about the,
I think about the audience's time, but,
you know, my, there's this book called the YouTube formula,
and it's basically how to optimize the algorithm on
YouTube. Yeah. And I read this book,
like, maybe six months into having my channel
on my brother's recommendation, I believe, because the guy
who wrote this book is, like, an expert in optimizing
views and everything. He works with MrBeast. And I read
this, and it was like the exact opposite that I've ever been taught
by all of the people that I know that have artistic integrity.
It was like the opposite of that. It was like, go back to your analytics
a month later and watch the views and watch where the people drop off and
find the videos that have the highest number of views and then just keep
making those videos over and over again. I'm like, the whole reason I'm in this
is because I want to keep doing all the weird stuff and, like,
I want to go through the woods, you know, with, you know, I want to
cut. I want to cut the stuff down and kind of, I don't know.
But, you know, you have to also, you're struggling. You're trying to find where's the
balance? Where's the balance? I'm trying to discover new, like,
genres within my, like, little subgenres within my work.
And so one of the things on this, with this. This Montana
movie, one of the things is like, oh, I fucking love
talking while I'm driving the car. Like, this is a. This is a little.
And the sounds pretty good. And, I mean, in my land cruiser, because it's the
old engine, and. But I have a tacoma, and it's like a sound studio
in there. Or if you're driving, like, a Lexi or something, they did
an ad where they record, like, Pablo Casals or something,
playing cello in the back of one of those lexuses going 50 miles an hour
because they're so quiet. And so I'm building. This week's video is
about me building that rig so that I can do that. But I've
discovered a new. But that's just a little,
tiny, little tweak. Oh, he's talking in his car instead
of talking in his studio, and I. Oh, and I listen to the
patrons, and I take their. Sometimes they'll be like, you should make a video about
something. And I make it. There's a lot on there. A lot of videos I've
made came from the ideas from patrons.
Is that because you want to serve that community more, or is it
because you think the ideas are better? I think it's both. But, you know,
also, you got to come up with a new thing every week, you know,
and some, it used to before I had Patreon.
For me, Patreon is like, I'm taking advantage of my patron because before.
And I made an episode about this before Patreon on
my Mondays, which is, like, solely writing,
a lot of my Mondays were just spent on, what's the big picture
idea? And that should be kind of immediate. You should have just file
folders full of those that you can't get to. And I didn't have that.
And so with the patrons, it's like, oh, I had
an idea like this, and then this patron said to do this,
I'm just going to do it like forbidden practices
in the shop. That was a patron's idea. Number seven, no tripwires.
It's connected to a sledgehammer, goes around the leg of a
tripod. This book that you read about filmmaking
on YouTube or optimizing YouTube or whatever the book is
about, I think it's called the YouTube formula. So this is the
other thing that I'm not surprised you didn't like this book,
because I'm not exactly
sure how to frame this, but some, like, for me,
I'm a very outcome oriented person, which isn't to say that I
don't love processes and making things and details and, like,
I do. And I think in order to be an artist, you kind
of have to get lost in the grind, you know?
And. I don't know. There is also a very large piece me,
like, just as a person, I really think about five
years from now, ten years from now, and I'm trying to, like, get there.
And sometimes it makes me. If I'm being really honest,
it makes me feel like less of an artist. Hold on,
let me get my head around. Because I see someone like you.
Okay, so you're seeing a goal, or. No, you're conceiving some
goal. That's probably arbitrary. And you're like, okay, in five years, I want to.
I don't know, to Madison Square Garden. And then
as you're working towards, how do I get there? What choice is do I
have to make? You're thinking, oh, that's not what an artist does. Because I see
someone like you, and I hear even your response to that question. I don't know.
And, look, I'm not saying I hate this about myself. I actually think a
lot of the good things in my life are because I'm outcome oriented and because
I set goals and try to hit them.
And I also. Maybe it's just an
inferiority complex or something, but I
struggle seeing people who don't have
that at all just fucking make the greatest, most exploratory
art and find interesting things. Like, I love vlogging
in the car. I think a lot of outcome oriented
people don't wander as much,
and so much artistry happens in the wandering. It happens
in the experimentation. But you did that.
You did do that at some point.
But I do it because I know that that's where I
can find artistry. Okay, I'm going to tell you a couple of things that will
make you feel a lot better about this. Okay? You should. I don't know
if you've seen it, but rewatch the Ken Burns documentary
about Mark Twain. Okay. I haven't seen it. The only reason,
not the only reason, but a major reason why we still
read his books and a lot of those monster books that
he wrote. Yeah, he was in trouble,
and the only way to get out of it was to write his way out
of it. He, like, lost. He lost a fortune
on some stupid gadget that he, like,
invented. He invested, like, all of his money, and he lived like a king.
He was super, super rich. But my point is, like, he was
just. He could make writing that's where he could make money.
And he knew his money making
skill was writing. And in the end, we got
his great books because he had debts and because
he needed money for stuff. Oh, my God.
You know what I mean? Yes. It's not like you take these romantic characters.
No, they weren't like that. They were just like us. They were probably worse,
you know, or Caravaggio or whatever, you know, people writing themselves out of
jail because, you know. You know what that
reminds me of? It reminds me of the Beatles time in Hamburg.
Do you know about their time in Hamburg where they were just. That's where they
got their 10,000 hours. They were a covers band. They played six nights a
week. Yeah. And they were just grinding through covers for like three
years or something. And three of those early years, which is
like 2040 year old years. Yes,
totally, totally. And they
were doing it because it was the only. Right. They needed the income, they needed
to work, and they had to do it. And it was their treadmill.
It was the version of the treadmill from the sixties.
So this is the other reason, by the way, that I like the grind,
because I feel like the grind actually does output significance.
It outputs meaning and purpose for me as an artist,
not every time, but one in 50.
And I'll take that. I'll take that. Okay, wait,
let's transition one more time. I do want to get to
Michelle Gondry. Can you tell me a little bit about how,
I guess, what works of his you enjoy and
how he's influenced your work in particular? Okay, so I
know old guys always talk about before the Internet,
but before the Internet and before New
York, where I lived in New York, there was. I had zero access
to any kind of art, any kind of art that was being made today besides
pop music and music videos. And what I
know now, but I didn't know back then, is that those videos were the art
of the era. And they were made by probably the best
art in the era, because there was a lot of money, 100%. And I didn't
know that that's what I was experiencing, was art. And then I started
making my own videos in 2000,
I bought a video camera, IMac digitized the family
home videos and edited them to like a 1 hour
thing. And then after that, I had a camera. So I was making videos every
single day. We have the same. And so I think those
came out in 98, 99, those dvd's. And there was
the Spike Jones one, Michelle Gondry one, and then Chris Cunningham was the
third one. And watching Michelle
Gondry, it was the. He was utilizing resources that
I had access to. I mean, besides, like, okay, he's doing the white stripes
videos and stuff. I don't have the white stripes, but, like, the.
Technically, there wasn't anything. Like, I could see how it was made,
and it was made so ingeniously because
he was considering the machinery of
how it's being. He was the entire paradigm,
like, okay, I'm gonna do animation, which is one frame at a time, but each
frame is gonna be legos. That has to be taken.
And he did it on graph paper. He directed eternal
Sunshine, right? Yeah. And that was just a monster.
It's like Charlie Kaufman and Michelle Gandria. There should be a law.
I think it's the greatest movie of all time. I love that film so much.
I mean, talk about transmitting feelings. And it's probably the sensitivity
of those two people. Totally. Cause Charlie's a total sensitivity. And then he walked
off of Green Hornet. They gave him his big, biggest Marvel movie,
Michel Gandry. And he said, take my name off of it. And it's like,
wow. And he suffered for that. He definitely suffered from that. He's probably
the most talented guy of his generation, and he's not the richest.
And, you know. And so those dvd's,
we had access to all of this stuff that wasn't commercially viable.
And it was so effing encouraging.
And, you know, I did a. We used to do these lower Manhattan
cultural Council fundraiser videos,
because Tom Healy ran the LMCC, and he'd hire Casey,
me, and he'd pay us really well. And they had the most. It was like,
that party was the party in New York that night with security and everything.
And one of the honorees was Michelle Gondry in one of the videos. And he
was there and he watched it. And I remember Bjork was another one. And she
wasn't watching. She was just eating. She wasn't. She doesn't watch stuff. She doesn't watch
movies or anything. So she was just eating her soup while this thing
was playing. But Michelle Gondryu was glued
to the thing, and I was just like, that must have felt.
This is unbelievable. Oh, how cool. Maybe let's close
with your sense of
mystery. Maybe you don't think of it like this, but we've talked
a little bit about stories. We've talked about some surprise.
We've talked about watching the middle and getting people to watch
the middle. Bye. Making them feel like it's going to be worth
it at the beginning and then making it worth it at the end.
But the other thing that's interesting about your videos and the one that really comes
to mind for me is there's a video.
I think the title is something like, what to do when things are hard,
or when things get hard. Or like, what to do about hard times.
Yeah. Okay. Yeah. Yeah. And the
video ends, and you show this clip of you kind of listening.
You're going like this, and you're like. You're listening to something and you're watching this.
The best day of your life. Yeah. Where you took that.
You took a plane after the Hudson. After the plane crashed in the Hudson river.
And you're watching the best day of your life. And the video is called
what to do about hard times. And the whole time, at least when I was
watching this video, I was like, what am I.
Is he talking about what to do about hard times? You're talking about looking at
the best of your life. Remember the best of your life. I was trying to
figure out what was going on. I was doing a lot of work. My brain
was working while watching this video. And then in the last,
maybe second and a half of the video, as you're watching this best day of
your life, you crack and you start to cry. Conquer evil and
the truth will set me free and
I know someday I'll find the key
but now I'm trapped oh,
yeah, yeah, yeah oh. Cause, you know, I was listening to trapped by.
It's Jimmy Cliff, but it's. I was listening to Bruce Springsteen
and that. That song. You know the song? I don't know the song. Oh,
my God. Write it down and listen to it. And this is
where I go. Oh,
my God. I can't even talk about it without crying because that's where I.
And I. A long time ago, I was like, I gotta make a video about
this song. About what this. About Bruce Springsteen. About what
this song does for me. And it's about.
He's like. It's hard to talk about because,
you know, I'm a very, like, sensitive person.
He just talks about.
He's like, I'm fucking stuck. I'm in this situation. You're smarter than
me. You've got me against the rope. And I'm
gonna fucking. I'm gonna get out of it. I'm gonna fucking outsmart you. I'm gonna
outwork you. And he's like, but now I'm trapped.
And it's like. And that's the part of the song that's, like,
the explosive part, the cor but now I'm trapped.
And that's the part that he's screaming. And it's like, that is
exactly what it feels like. That is exactly like when I get,
like when you get real. Like, because I was having.
That was probably exactly, almost exactly a year ago.
And I was just. That was when I was talking about earlier, when I was
just working way too much. And then my rage and it just.
It's like the last fuel you have is that fucking fight or flight
is the fight to get. And I was doing like, I was trying to do
two a week. And that was
like, I was like really, like, I was like torching
things. Not literally, but like was kind of destroying all the
people around me. And.
And that's what it felt like because I had to get this video done.
I had to do that. And that's what I'm listening to. And I was just
like. The thing was like, I'm so sensitive to that song that
I was like, I know if I'm listening to that, even with the camera on
and all this stuff, like, I'm not an actor, but I know I'm just.
It's going to break. I can't get through it. Van,
thank you for doing this. Oh, man, this is a dream of this. This is
really fun. I feel like we could go another 5 hours. Oh, yeah.
You could do 5 hours on just Michelle. But thank you
for hanging with me. All right. It was great. Thanks for having me.