It's January 16th, 2025, and I'm getting close to my 5,000th day on YouTube. Only 20 more days to go. Today I keep asking myself the same maddening question: how do I keep forgetting all the things I've already learned on YouTube? I did a live stream yesterday and I was all hyped up about it, and then I caught myself thinking, live streams are not the way. Hardly anybody wants to watch an hour or two-hour rambling video with me in it. What works, in my experience, is just cranking out shorter videos.
Shorter videos, more of them
It's time to keep my videos under 10 minutes. They've been getting too long, so I'm going to cap them at less than 10 minutes. I did a quick little crypto video, and I'll do two crypto videos a day instead of one. I'll do four videos a day instead of three, but I'm going to shorten all of them, because I only need an hour or two to film about 40 minutes of video a day. Yesterday I blew all my creative energy on that one live stream, and it was so inefficient. I put all these topics into one stream when I could have made five separate videos out of it. Five crypto videos, two a day for two and a half days.
This connected to something else I was listening to. I listened to hours and hours of content at double speed today, including DFINITY's newest video on Service Nervous System projects, which was great. It got me thinking: sure, it makes sense for DFINITY to do an hour-long call, but for me it's better to take two shots a day at getting people to watch something rather than one. And to be really specific in my videos instead of repeating the same thing over and over again.
2,000 pounds of bricks
Today I bought 2,000 pounds of bricks, a literal ton of bricks, from Home Depot. I'd taken my car in because the liftgate hydraulics on the back of my RAV4 weren't lifting. They'd been broken for months, probably four or five months at least, and I finally said, let's get this fixed. It was $2,000 to fix it, plus an oil change and repairing some slip bar or something that was messed up underneath it. But I had fun, because I rented a Toyota Tundra for only five bucks an hour. Actually it was a Tacoma. I took a new Tacoma to Home Depot.
I'm building a brick patio in my backyard. I got around 400 bricks today, 68 cents a brick plus tax. I brought home some plastic base pieces to put under it, and I already had sand and gravel. I'm going to dig it myself. I could just pay somebody to do it, but here's the thing: all the work I do on YouTube is so esoteric that I can't really see whether it makes a difference in anybody's life, outside of reading my open chat comments. So it really helps to do something physical, to get my hands dirty, to wear gloves while handling all these bricks. I took cart load after cart load, 32 and then 54 bricks at a time, out of Home Depot and loaded them into the back of my truck while the kids were at school.
The first load took hours. I even Googled the maximum capacity for a Toyota Tacoma, because I was about to put another 100 bricks in. I figured we were getting toward the 1,750 pounds or whatever the maximum hauling capacity is, so I stopped. I had fun doing that today.
Secret space programs and trying to find clarity
I also listened to hours of Dr. Michael Salla's interviews today. I spent about two hours at double speed, so three or four hours of raw video footage, watching this guy named George Kavassilas on Dr. Michael Salla's channel. I watched a new interview with him first, then an older one. He says he was in a secret space program, and that there are these Navy admirals who are like Jedi Knights. I'm into all of this stuff. He was saying things like, using your pineal gland to have these experiences is just a trick, it's technology, it's not consciousness.
My mind was all over the place. What's challenging is getting some clarity, because there's so much confusion on this planet. You listen to one secret space program guy, and then another one says something completely different with just a little bit of overlap. I really don't know what the heck is going on with this whole reality thing right now. But I am excited for the future, and I am grateful for what I have now.
Home Depot with my son
I picked the kids up from school in the Toyota Tacoma, which was fun. After I dropped my daughter off at home, I took my son to Home Depot and we got 108 more bricks. He's six and a half years old and he loves building stuff. He climbed up into the back of the truck, and he pushed the cart full of bricks uphill in the parking lot and pushed it around inside the store too. He had so much fun, and I love seeing his joy.
When we got home, I'd put the bricks in the truck and he loaded them into the middle because it was hard for me to reach. He asked me all these questions, and he and my daughter threw the bricks out of the back of the truck into the grass, which was actually easier than me climbing back there, which I'd done the first time with three times as many of them. We carried them in. There are still some out in the front yard right now.
A roller coaster of emotions
This has been such a roller coaster of emotions today. Right now I've recently hit the sad part of the day. I felt so sad earlier that I didn't even want to talk, so I made a little music video instead. My mind is so toxic about my music, and so are a lot of the people who listen to it once, say it sucks, and never come back. But it just feels so good to make it. At some point, when something feels good and it doesn't hurt anybody else, and maybe it even helps, isn't that enough? Maybe some of the songs did hurt people's ears, but sometimes it's got to be enough in life. Sometimes something is full of joy, and that's enough.
Why I'm grateful I could just fix it
Then I went to pick the car up. They had it from 8 a.m. to 5 p.m., and I went back and got the RAV4, dropping a couple thousand on the credit card. I think I spent about $2,600 today total: a couple thousand at the car dealership, and a bit less than $500 at Home Depot on bricks and those plastic pieces. I'm really grateful today. Some people complain about spending like this, but I'm glad I have money and can just pay to get something fixed, because it's often these little things that eat away at your life, like the back gate of the car not closing. Often you feel like your whole life is bad when really there's just a series of small things you can fix to turn it around. This is something I'd put off for a long time, and I'm glad I finally did it today.
On the way back I went to tennis. I've been thinking about dropping the racket club membership, but I figured I already paid $240 for it this month, so I might as well go use it. I was going to go straight home and film videos, and I asked myself: is it going to be more fun to film videos or to go play tennis? I got there 10 minutes late, so I had 50 minutes, and it was definitely more fun to play tennis. The most memorable shot: I often hit these weird shots inconsistently, but when we were playing king of the court and needed just one more point, the coach hit it to me and I smashed a hard return straight down the middle. They asked, "What was that?" and I said I'd just been holding onto that one, keeping it secret until we needed it. I had more fun doing that than filming videos.
But then I get home and I still want to film a bunch of videos. No pressure or anything, but make a video. I'm such a servant. Creating videos is a new nine-to-five for me. And then I listen to all this secret space program material and wonder: am I just contributing to technological slavery by putting these videos up and trying to get people to watch them? There's such a weird balance. It's good for me to reflect on my life and share it, and maybe that helps somebody. It's a delicate balance, and sometimes you tip right over the edge of it. If you want to follow more of how I think about earning, spending, and building a life around all of this, you can find a lot of it in my Money playlist.