It's January 5th, 2025, my 4,969th day on YouTube, and here's a look at what I did today. I'm back home after coming home from Legoland yesterday, and I was grateful to have lots of time to get back into the usual routines. I filmed a 45-minute crypto video today that'll be out tomorrow, a tutorial people have been asking for on how to use the network nervous system.
Back to yoga and feeling functional
I went to yoga this morning, a 75-minute class. It was a great stretch after standing up so much and getting a little muscle soreness from walking around Legoland for a few days without doing any yoga. I love doing yoga at least every third day, if not every other day. It really leaves my body feeling flexible and functional, and when my body feels that way it's much easier to love myself and to feel good. In my experience, a lot of the pain I've had in my body in the past, and that I see other people having, can be relieved with just stretching and strengthening and getting your energy to flow. I'm so grateful I've been doing yoga now for years, probably close to three years, averaging three or four classes a week. It's really helped my mental and physical health.
A trip to Whole Foods with the kids
I took the kids to the store after yoga. We went to Whole Foods and dropped $270 there. That seems like a lot, but then the dinner we had at Legoland one night alone was about $160, and the hotel and the tickets to Legoland were $1,200 for two days. So it's all relative. For $270 I bought a lot of food. I bought four things of hummus, ate one whole thing of hummus tonight at an unusual dinner I ended up having, and we ate a whole $10 thing of guacamole. I bought a 64-ounce thing of freshly squeezed juice. When I look in my cart, it's mostly fruits and vegetables. I got some roasted peanuts. I should have taken a picture of my cart, maybe I'll bring the camera next time and get that.
I also bought this thing of organic, essentially Whole Foods style Lucky Charms. It's funny, because the real Lucky Charms would go fast in my house, but everybody hated the organic version. I like it, although Lucky Charms definitely tastes better. I'd just been thinking about it, like, I want some of that, so I got it.
Making music in the studio
This morning I got up and cleaned the kitchen, and I managed to make three music videos today, which felt really good, on my original channel. I love making the videos just by playing around in my studio, hitting random buttons and loading up a few synthesizers all at once. I even submitted a new album this morning with 17 tracks on it, about an hour and a half of music called I See Ambient, like Internet Computer Ambient. It's a bunch of freestyle tracks. It's not the kind of music that gets stuck in your head as much, but I think I enjoy making it. It's playful, it's fun, and to me it's music that leaves you feeling better after you listen to it. It leaves you feeling inspired and hearing some new sounds.
I don't want to be stuck in a trance. Most music is made to get you into this trance, to just zone out and disembody. My music is meant to kind of break your trance. So I hope you'll try it. I'd love to get over 100 followers on Spotify; I've got about 91 right now.
Time with the kids and a day on the court
I'm glad I got to go to the store with the kids today and spend some time with them, washing dishes and stuff this morning, because the whole rest of the day I didn't get a lot of time with them. They went to do an activity at the Morian Clay Center downtown with Laura's family. They were out the whole afternoon, from about 1:30 p.m. until 6:45, when I went to my AA meeting.
I went to play basketball again today as well, and I hit 83 three-pointers in about 40 minutes, which is a three-pointer every 30 seconds. If you think a 25% field goal percentage for three-pointers is pretty good for somebody who's just shooting basketball for fun, then you're talking about taking a shot every seven or eight seconds and making one about every 30 seconds. There were several times I hit two to four three-pointers in a row today. I actually played a four-on-four game today, and I made three or four three-pointers in that game as well, but they scored in ones and twos. So at one point I had scored about half our team's points, which was fun. I had fun playing today. It's so nice, after practicing hitting all those three-pointers, to get to put it into action in a game.
How I eat
For dinner I had a whole thing of the hummus I'd bought, with carrots and celery, some Triscuits, and a cucumber. I don't usually have dinner anymore; I meant to have a second lunch. I eat three meals a day, but generally breakfast, brunch, and lunch, because it seems to work better for my body to eat earlier. If I had to do it over again, I'd probably just skip dinner, because I'm still really full three hours later. It's nice to let your food have time to digest before bed. I'll probably be in bed in about an hour and a half.
Familiar faces at the AA meeting
I went to my AA meeting tonight, and there was a guy I'd been thinking about a week ago that I hadn't seen in about a year. I'd thought it would be nice to see him again, and I saw him yesterday at the AA meeting and again tonight. I love that. There was also a girl I'd thought about, that it would be nice to see again because I hadn't seen her in a while, and she was at the meeting too. I hadn't recognized that she was there in a full meeting of probably 40, at least 40, maybe close to 50 people. And she shared. I haven't seen her in months, so it was nice to see her again for the first time in quite a while.
My sponsor was there, and we had a nice conversation. I realized I did the steps with him about five years ago, and I was wondering, do I even remember how to take somebody through the steps? I asked him, you came over to my house, right, and I had you read steps one through four on your own out of the 12 and 12, and then we did step five and read through and talked about some stuff. And then I had you come over again another time or two and we went through the rest of the 12 and 12. That's what we did, isn't it? It's amazing. It's a good thing I have these diaries, because now I can look back.
Why I keep these diaries
I'm wondering, though, will I ever listen to these diaries? How far away do they need to get before I listen to them? I definitely wish I had some diaries from a year ago, and I do have a few. At this point, do I want to re-upload the old diaries? I've got enough work with the new ones. I tried going back and recording days in the past, and all I can remember about some days from a couple decades ago is a minute or two. It's amazing how much detail you lose.
There was a girl at Legoland sitting at a table and journaling. Laura said, that's a serious commitment to journaling. We were at breakfast and she was sitting by herself at a table journaling. Well, these vlogs are definitely on par with that. I think this is good for self-reflection, like a tenth step in Alcoholics Anonymous, to just look at what you're doing. I think it's ideal to have a life that I'm comfortable sharing publicly. I'm giving you the details of my life here, the things that are most relevant.
On privacy and the unseen audience
To me, the main issue people have in their lives is thinking that you get to have a private life. In my view, you don't get to have a private life. Maybe the other human beings who are alive can't see what you're doing in your private life, but that's a minority. I've come to believe the disincarnated souls, the ones who are between lives and will be born soon, make up a huge audience that can see everything everybody's doing all the time. Once you become aware of them, there's no privacy.
I remember, when I used to be doing things myself, shall we say, thinking that my grandfather could see me even though I was alone in the house. I remember thinking how creepy that was, like, doesn't he have something better to do than watch me do this? But I also thought, he doesn't have a body anymore, he can really go wherever he wants to.
I had a dream a few years ago where my dad came to me. In the dream I was a professional tennis player, with people in the stands watching me play tennis, which is funny because only in the last four or five months have I gotten into playing tennis. I don't think professional tennis is on the horizon, because I enjoy playing tennis but it's not something I want to do the way I do my videos. I'm a professional content creator. I do these videos every day. I don't know that I want to play tennis every single day. I had fun playing basketball today, but there are things you do as a hobby and things you do as a pro. To me, I'm a professional at making videos; I've done probably 10,000 videos, thousands and thousands of hours of them.
Regardless, in this dream I was a professional tennis player, and my dad came up to me after the match. I said, Dad, where were you? I didn't see you in the stands. And he said, well, I'm up there, I was watching, I saw the whole game. And I said, well, where were you, I didn't see you. And he said, you just needed to look more carefully, look harder. He said, I come to all your games. I was kind of blown away. Then I remembered that he was dead, and I got all sad and hugged him and cried and fell on my knees, and woke up. But I remember the line he said: I come to all your games. I woke up with that. To me, in practical terms, that feels true: my dad comes to all the more significant events in my life.
I think about how I participate in my son's school. I'm there before and after he goes, I'm there for his performances, and I'm there for special days. Most days I'm not actually at the school, but I could show up anytime. I could pop in at any moment, especially if I were a volunteer like Laura is. And that's how I've come to look at it when you've had people who have passed. In my experience, you're not separated from them. They're not gone. They can pop in anytime you invite them.
Once you're aware of that, and you understand that dreams are a very effective mode of communication with people who've passed on, you can even start to connect directly and mentally with people sometimes. If you set an intention that you want to communicate with someone, you can match your frequencies up, like a Venn diagram, and get them to overlap enough to communicate. I've done that, especially when my dad first passed and I first got sober. I did it a lot of times. While I was awake, I had the equivalent of a mental conversation with my dad, and I could very strongly feel his presence.
I don't need that as much now. I was very lonely after my dad died, and now I've got people to talk to. I have people to talk to all the time. To me, the people who are on stage, if you look at this as a big play, need your attention most. You don't really need to interact with the audience as much. The people on the stage are making the play, making the drama. The audience is there watching. This way of looking at things has been really helpful for me.
Passing on what I've learned
I had a great talk with a guy about relationships and what I've learned in mine, things like monogamy and romance. It was really nice. This guy was born a few years after me and he's in a much newer relationship than I am. It was a great pleasure that he was open to sharing all these kinds of things. Nobody ever talked to me about this stuff, and the way I was able to share it with him meant a lot to me.
I love that when I learn something, I'm able to pass it on and someone else can learn it more easily than I did. That gives me great hope for humanity. We don't have to learn everything the hard way. Some of us learn things the hard way, and then many of us who have learned something the hard way can teach it so that many people can learn it the easier way, and we can all collectively advance.
One of the cool things I heard a while back is that they have to keep making IQ tests harder, because there's some kind of collective intelligence at work and old IQ tests tend to get easier and easier over time. It's as if the collective learns how to take an IQ test, so you have to constantly update the tests. It's not just answers leaking out or something. It's that the collective, if you ask enough people who have taken the test, somehow learns how to take it. I think that's really cool.
Choosing love over fear about the future
I have so much hope and positivity about what's possible for humanity. You'll notice I'm not into getting sucked into all the negativity. I'm not saying negativity is bad. Negativity is also relative. What you might think is positive, someone else might think is negative, and vice versa. What I'm saying is that I feel a lot of love and joy for the future, and I don't feel much fear or apprehension about it.
At the same time, I've been thinking I want to work with a hypnotherapist and see if I can remove and understand some of the fears I still have. That's one of the biggest differences I can feel today, looking at my kids versus remembering being a child and a teenager myself. It also makes me think of some of the stories Wayne Dyer told. He described having entities do surgery on him, and what they said they did was remove a lot of old, stuck fear. I can feel that there's some old stuck fear in my body, fear that the kids don't have, accumulated somewhere and just stuck there. And I believe there's a way to release it. Wayne Dyer had that experience in his 70s. Like what I was sharing with the guy I talked to at a meeting, I'd love to have that experience 30 years younger, get some of those old fears cleared out, and see what I can do.
Sometimes you say no to what you'll come to love
The last thing I'll talk about in this diary is that I may continue listening to Brandon Sanderson's Elantris. It's funny how I remember starting this book and thinking, no, I'm just not getting into this. Sometimes the things you really want are the things you'll be most likely to say no to at first. I was looking for more books to read, and my mom and my best friend from college kept telling me about these books they love. I'd start reading them and my first reaction would be, no, I'm not getting into this. But now I'm really glad I did get into this one. And it was okay to put the book down at first.
Sometimes you'll know you really like something because if you stop, you miss it. Whether it's a person you don't see for a while and then really want to see again, or a book you're reading, or even some of my own music where you listen and think, that was trash, and then weeks later you're still thinking about it. Maybe it's something you're going to love, and you jump back into it. If any of this resonates with you, I share more of these reflections in my Life playlist, and I hope you'll keep loving these vlogs as much as I love making them.