It's my 4,994th day on YouTube. I'm also a Twitch streamer, and it's January 30th, 2025. Here's what happened today. I love getting to share my life here, and I'd love to hear more of this kind of stuff for other people's lives too.
My mind likes to say things like, "The watch time on your last video sucked. People didn't stick around for it." But that's really not my choice. It's up to me to focus on the things I can control. I'll just let people watch whatever they want. I'll say what I need to say, and you watch what you want to watch.
Filming four videos in an hour and a half
I had a great interview with Kyle Langham from Dfinity today. We filmed four videos in about an hour and a half, a little less than an hour of content total. That'll be a day's worth, because I put those out every eight hours. I told Kyle about my workflow, and he said it was amazing that I could make content that fast. Well, I've filmed over 10,000 videos. I've done thousands of hours live streaming. It's practice. This is what I do. Generally, I'm filming four or five videos a day right now, three of them on my crypto channel.
I also spent some time today working on my music setup in Ableton, especially after that video yesterday. I know exactly what I need to do. I need to build an awesome dance music template in Ableton that works for me and my workstation, and then just grind out dance music, because I love listening to it. In the short term I'd like to crank some dance songs out, but I need to set myself up for success and set a foundation I can grind out of, and that sounds good to me. So I put the time into doing some more advanced stuff today, like putting on a sidechain that takes down the lower frequencies right while the kick is hitting. When I'm not playing the drums, then I can play lower frequencies and other things. It meant Googling repeatedly to figure out how to do it, and I think it's so thrilling to learn new things.
Tension and release
I had a family member I haven't been around in a couple of months come over to my house today for a few minutes, and the tension in my body was real. I felt so tense. But thanks to music, I know that tension and release is what makes a song great. And perhaps what makes a life great is tension and release. So instead of feeling like it was wrong, I enjoyed it. I thought, "God, it's tense right now."
When they walked into the house, I knew they were coming in. I left my back turned. I didn't say hi. Then I sat down at the table facing them. I didn't look at them, didn't say hi, didn't say anything. This is behavior they very normally exhibited with me over many years. To me it felt really weird to be that way, because that's not normal to me. What's normal for me is that if you walk in my house I say hi, ask how you're doing, greet you, feel out what kind of energy you're bringing in, and then say goodbye when you leave. It felt super weird to have my back turned when someone I know is walking into my house, and not to say goodbye to them when I leave.
But I think it's kind of funny. And I'm happier with that than I was with what I used to do, trying to engage this person who just acts like that with me. I'll just act like that back, and everything will be great, won't it? It's hilarious. Sometimes you need to mirror people's behavior back to them so they see what they're doing. Maybe this family member doesn't care, doesn't even notice, because they're so self-absorbed they're not paying attention to my behavior. Or maybe they're thinking, "Why was he being so rude?" Well, why don't you ask me?
Why I won't take my mother to her doctors
My mom called today and had my mother-in-law take her to the hospital for a surgery, which I told her I refused to do. I look at someone whose mother is physically sick and isolated, and I'm happy to take her to anything I want to go do, or that I think is good for her. Al-Anon meetings. I'll go to the airbase with her. I'll go to the grocery store with her. But I'm not taking her to doctor's appointments. From my view, all her doctors have done is keep her sick and help her destroy her body and numb her pain instead of facing it for 25 years. Not one thing she's had before have they seemed to help with, except keeping her numb enough that she can't really feel the full pain.
To me, I've come to believe that when you numb pain you're taking the edge off, and the edge is there to help you grow. If I can't handle the pain of being in this body at one point or another, I might just leave it behind. A high level of pain is there to transform you and to encourage change. When you fight it and numb it, like when I used to drink all the time, you're also numbing your opportunities to do some painful character building, which I then did in early and mid sobriety especially.
Why I haven't relapsed
I went to an AA meeting last night, and a guy came back who'd had years sober and had relapsed. He said he stopped reaching out to people. He stopped doing his routine. I'm like, I don't have a routine. Some people pray in the morning, pray at night, call their sponsor, or do a nightly written inventory. I don't do that, although I say thank you. That to me is the main prayer I say: thank you. I'm not on my knees praying to God for anything, because I am God. I say thank you to myself for creating what I've created. And if I don't understand why I created what I created, I ask, "Why did I create this?" Those are my prayers. Thank you. And what am I doing? And what would I like to do? Those are my prayers.
So I was thinking, why didn't I relapse? I've been sober since 2014, and so many people, most people I've seen get sober since me, have relapsed. Some of them are dead. Some of them are in prison. Very few have kept up with me. I thought the main thing, and I shared this, is that I always talk to everybody about exactly what's going on with me. Everybody in my life knows exactly what's happening, within the limits of protecting people's privacy.
If you're my mother, you get a little less privacy than everyone else, though she didn't watch these anyway, even though I give them to her to watch. My wife and my kids get a little less privacy too. But I try to keep everyone else's life as private as they want it to be, because they should be able to go do their own videos. I prefer to be specific and in person with people. I use exact people's names. Everybody knows about this family member I've had an issue with. Everybody knows about my issues with my mother. Everybody knows about all the struggles I've had in my marriage for the last decade. Because of that, I have accountability. Other people see me. Other people really know me. They don't know some surface-level face I'm trying to put on. They know my innermost struggles and demons, and even things like my racial confusion. I changed my race, and it's been almost three years. I share myself truly and openly with everybody all the time, and that's because to me, the key to staying sober is doing that. It allows me the chance to have real connections with people.
People seem to really hate dishonesty. When you lie to someone, it costs you. I found a guy in AA I really respected. He got sober, and I was thinking about having him work on my house, but he lied to me one day. He was all upset and made something up. I talked to other people about it, and they said, "That's so ridiculous. He's obviously lying to your face." I thought it was a lie, but I checked with other people, because sometimes, what do I know? So I'm not hiring him to do work for me now, because he lied to me. Lying is one of the worst things you can do to other people.
I know that one reason I've stayed sober so long is because I tell people the truth even when it's awkward and uncomfortable. As I said last night at the AA meeting, when I was frustrated with my sex life with my wife, I talked to my aunt about it. Why? Because I was staying at her house and she was the person in front of me, and I shared what I was going through with her. I don't want you in my life if I can't get that real with you. If I can't tell you about the struggles I'm having with my sex life with my wife, then I don't need you in my life. And if you can't meet me at that level, we don't need each other in our lives. A lot of the time when I'm that open with people, they open up with me at the same level, and that to me is why I've stayed sober.
It's also because my wife and my kids have kept a close eye on me, and I'm never alone, and I really love that. All of you have given me so much love and support too, and I hope I can give back what you all give. If you want more of these honest, day-by-day reflections, they live in my Life playlist. I'm going to go play tennis now.