Transcript for Concerning the Future of My Content

It’s around 7:30 as I record this. You could lump this under late night thoughts, the hum of the fan going. I have this bad habit of getting really hot at night, and so I pretty much always have a fan running. I also have this inner ear issue where if I don’t have a fan constantly running or some white noise, I get this ringing in my ears.

It’s not hearing loss or anything, it’s just a hereditary thing. And I am feeling better enough where I wanna work on something, but I don’t really know what I wanna work on, and I think that this is probably the perfect time for me to explain what I wanna do going forward with these videos and just my content in general.

So I was gonna come out with a collected works next year, which was gonna be my best essays or the best essays that I have in my estimation. And I found that, I have a lot of good pieces of writing, but there wasn’t really enough for a book. But I figured, I could maybe put this on Substack and maybe have the ones that I spend more work on building out into actual articles would be paid content and whatnot. But the thing is, I don’t really need to make money on my content, it’s not that I don’t want to. It’s just that I have never liked the idea of turning my personal stuff into something that’s just to be consumed, something that’s just a product.

I have always personally struggled with the idea of, well, I don’t know what people want. Well, you know what? I shouldn’t worry about that, and neither should you. You should just do what you feel works, and then, yes, when you see what people like, naturally you wanna do more of that.

I was watching a David Achu video where he was talking about how if you don’t just simply do something, you’re gonna get stuck in decision paralysis. And that’s where I’ve been for most of my life, is I always have so many different things that I wanna do, and so I just end up not doing any of them.

And what I’ve found is doing this whole voice recorder thing where I can just slap a photo on a video and put a caption on it and just upload it to YouTube. I know it seems lazy, but it’s not that I’m being lazy. It’s not that I even care about being on camera. Part of it is the internet that I have in Buffalo It’s fine for downloading, but it’s not very good for uploading, and the software I use doesn’t like the fact that my connection likes to upload so slowly, and sometimes it crashes, and I have to redo entire videos.

So I basically am trying to do audio only so that worst case scenario I still have the original audio, and then I can just edit it again, which is annoying. But that way I have the audio, so if something messes up, I don’t wanna have a whole bunch of video that then is essentially useless.

Because the way that it works, the way the software I use works, if for some reason the video doesn’t finish uploading… what it does is it puts the audio first, so you can edit the transcript, and then it will then go back and edit the video to match the audio. But if the video stops uploading for whatever reason, if there’s any interruption at all, it completely decouples, and then you’re left with just nothing.

You’re left with a transcript that’s not connected to anything. So what I’ve been trying to do is get the transcript edited as quickly as I can, export that audio so for in case the video doesn’t finish uploading, at least I have audio that’s edited that I can then put a picture on.

So that’s the reason why going forward, you’re not gonna see me on camera very much. It’s not because I don’t wanna be on camera. It’s not that I’m lazy or anything. It’s that I don’t want to spend a whole bunch of effort on editing a video that is not gonna upload. It takes something like 60 to 90 minutes, to upload 10 minutes of video, depending on the day and the time of day.

And frankly, I’m not very good at the visual side of making videos anyway. I’m good at the audio editing side.

I’m good at the scripting side. So now I can actually write scripts, and then if I sound too monotonous, I just cut that part out, re-record that part, and then just shoehorn it in. And that’s why I always wanted to do an audio-only podcast. I didn’t really wanna be on video.

And yeah, I’ll be on video occasionally. I’ve considered doing shorts, maybe 60 to 90-second videos where I’m at the park or something, and there’s just some thought that I have that I want people to sound off on. More of a discussion starter than anything else. I’m just not good at short-form content.

I never have been, which is funny ’cause I was really good at social media for a long time. And I got away from that because it just got toxic, honestly, and I don’t really want any part of it. I might go back to Sub Stack eventually, but frankly, the state of the music industry right now,

I don’t really want to sound off on it because it’s pretty bleak and depressing. It’s not that I’ve lost my passion for it. I do still wanna help indie artists, but right now I need to kinda figure what I’m doing with myself first. So New Vibrations is not dead, it’s on hiatus probably until next year when I finally get everything settled with my situation.

Moving your whole life is a process. So what am I gonna be doing the next couple of months? I’m not making plans anymore. I have goals and I have aspirations. My goal going forward is to take The Unmasking of the Phoenix project, which was going to be my collected works, and turn that into a series where I’m going to be reading the essays that I have collected for that, and then after reading them, give my thoughts on them.

In real time, you get to see, do I still think this is even any good? Why is it good or why is it not good? Is this something that I can turn into something bigger? I wanna kinda show a little bit of the process, the sort of BTS, if you will, behind the scenes of kinda what’s going through my head as I’m trying to build this collected works.

I’m kind of at the point where I’m actually gonna get a lot more attention if I just make videos and put these on YouTube and kinda just throw them at the wall and see what people are interested in. I am actually planning to do fully scripted, researched essays that are probably gonna even have some images and slides and visual interest to them.

It’s just that I don’t wanna do full-fledged video because as I said, if it messes up, it could be a mess. So what I’m gonna do is I’ll edit the script and then find the timestamps, and then that way if it messes up, I already have it all timestamped out and I already know what, what slide is supposed to go where.

But I don’t like planning things out like that. David Achu actually had a really good point that when it comes to thumbnails, a lot of times he’ll come up with the idea and come up with a thumbnail before he even makes the video, which I think is interesting. I’ve never been good at thumbnails, especially on this channel so far.

My whole goal with this channel is not to make a bunch of views to get a whole bunch of subscribers right away. It’s more me getting my feet wet and getting my thoughts out there and seeing what you all think. And I am getting views on things, and the videos that are audio only seem to be doing better than the ones where I’m on camera.

That’s kind of interesting. A lot of people are just looking for something to put on in the background, kinda like how I have my fan. They’re looking for white noise to try and focus on a task. I know how ironic that seems, that you’re putting someone talking on in the background to work on something.

I mean, I do it all the time, so I get it. And I wanted to talk a little bit why I called it The Unmasking of a Phoenix. So i’m what you would call a high-functioning autistic, where I’m pretty good at faking being normal, but I’m really not. And I have a lot of the typical autistic sort of stereotypical quirks, where I need things to be a certain way and I’m not like the kind of person who has to do the same thing at the same time every day or anything like that, but I’m very picky about brands.

I’m very picky about textures and light levels and certain packaging. There’s just a lot of quirks… i’m very sensitive to things that don’t make a lot of sense to most people. I’m not normal, I guess you could say.

And over the last couple years I’ve been working on trying to unmask that autism and trying to just be myself without worrying about being too weird or not normal enough, I guess. It’s a process. But the thing is, we all mask. It doesn’t matter if you’re autistic or not. We all have masks that we wear with our friends, with our family, with other people.

But while being more with myself, I realize I actually kinda like being with myself. As much as I don’t like myself sometimes, I like myself enough that I like spending time with myself. It’s very rare that I’ve had time to myself, and most of the time I go crazy because I just don’t have any applied reason to be by myself.

Does that make sense? Solitude is only useful if you’re using it in a way where you’re actually being constructive. I don’t mean productive, It doesn’t mean you always have to be creating something or like the proverbial going out into the cabin with a typewriter or whatever, and just sit there until you’ve produced a five hundred page novel.

It’s not anything like that. Although I have actually considered taking up … I don’t really like morning pages, but I do feel like I should take up the practice of writing at least three pages every morning. I still write in my journal all the time, but a lot of times it’s not useful.

And maybe what I should do instead is I should take everything that I wanna do that day and write it down, then realize that there aren’t enough hours in a day to do all of that. But still write it anyway because it then gives me an idea of, okay, where is my brain going? Where am I spending way too much of my mental energy?

That is a big issue for me, is I tend to waste a lot of mental energy, and we all do, on just dumb things. Things we can’t control. Although I am doing better with that. But I also want to say that doing this editing process means I can say things that I probably shouldn’t say publicly and just cut them out just to get it off my mind.

And I think maybe taking up a morning pages type ritual might help me again. I’ve been kinda sick. I’m feeling better enough. I think tomorrow I’ll be able to finally go back to the park. I do need to go to the store and get some food, so that’s kind of the main motivation for me to go. And I have plans Thursday and Saturday evening.

So I have now put a couple of videos up on YouTube this week. I have a shelf I need to put together that just came today. But by the time it came this afternoon, I was just like, “I don’t wanna deal with this,” and recorded something for a video instead. So at least I’m doing things. It’s not about being productive, it’s about moving forward, gaining momentum, and rediscovering myself.

Every day we’re rediscovering ourselves, and that’s what I think the whole point of this video is. I want Unmasking of the Phoenix to be is me unmasking my own insecurities and my own vulnerabilities, and sharing them with you because, yeah, I might be autistic, but honestly, normal people and autistic people aren’t as different as you think.

It’s just autistic people tend to overdo certain things , tend to be flawed in very extreme ways . And unmasking my process and what has been holding me back all these years, which is I’m just afraid people won’t like me, and people are gonna take me wrong. It’s stupid because we all say dumb things.

We all mess up. But the worst that’s gonna happen is, I’m gonna make a video that people really don’t like and vocally don’t like, and I’ll be, “Okay, lesson learned. I should not have said things in that way.” You can say something completely innocuous, and people are gonna blow it out of proportion and read it all wrong, and then because of how comment sections work, it just completely loses the original meaning and context.

But it’s funny, sometimes I’ll post something that I think’s gonna be, a conversation starter, and then it gets nothing. It gets absolutely just no attention at all. And that makes me even more mad. I’d actually rather people hate a video. I remember years ago, I put up a video where I talked about I really didn’t like this particular song.

I’m not gonna say what song it was, but it was objectively a bad song, and I got torn apart for it. And it’s actually the only time I’ve ever been truly torn apart on a video or any piece of content I’ve ever made. And listening to it back, yeah, I sound kind of smug , but I was being ironic.

I was trying to be sort of serious, but I wasn’t serious, if you know what I mean. I think it just, it didn’t land right, and Who knows? But see, I’ve been a victim of trolls before on forums and whatnot, but that was the only time on YouTube that I ever got really destroyed and I immediately deleted the video and even a friend of mine said that it was a bad video.

So I was like, “Yeah, I’m…” I think that my opinions and my reasoning for what I said were correct but the presentation was just so bad and that scared me away from doing YouTube for a long time. I still did YouTube but I never really came on camera again for a long time. Whenever I’m on camera it just, it didn’t do well.

I mean, it didn’t do badly or anything but… So voiceover videos are basically kind of what I then defaulted to. It’s not that I’m hiding, it’s just that I feel a lot more comfortable with these types of videos if you can even call them that. But I’m now going way off track. What I want to say is that my long-term project is going to be me going through my writing, reading my writing aloud and then having a commentary on it and I’ll still be doing the Sitty Chatties, I’ll still be doing the Walkie Talkies on top of that.

And if I happen to have some music related ones they will actually go on my new Vibrations channel because that just makes sense. And frankly right now that’s just not where my passion is right now and I have a couple artists that I follow very closely but other than that I’m just kinda taking a break from all of it.

I’ll revisit it in 2027. But yeah, I think going forward, I’m going to be doing morning pages again, and then just kinda taking the highlights, and that’s probably will end up being my walkie-talkies or things that I was thinking about that I feel like I should talk about.

The ones that I’m on video are gonna be very short, and they’re gonna be more like “You know, I was thinking about this. What do you guys think?” kinda thing. I don’t know how that kinda content will even do. It might do nothing, but it might do something, and that’s what matters.

I did try the stop scrolling bit, and I actually got some views out of that. That was just me being funny. But yeah, I have goals for this channel, and it’s just really to get me to organize my writing in a way where it’s out there where people can hear me actually read it myself and realize that I’m not AI.

I have been accused of being AI so often. In fact, I was accused of being AI before ChatGPT was even released, so that should give you an idea. People just don’t believe I’m a real human being. But my writing style is simply something I have crafted over my 30-plus years of writing seriously That’s all it is.

So yes, look forward to more researched articles. In fact, what I’m going to do is I’m probably going to be taking a lot of my weaker essays that didn’t make the cut and turning those into well-researched things that are actually worthy of being called a, quote-unquote, “video essay,” even if I’m rarely in the video.

I’ll probably be in the video a little bit, but I’ll probably record little bits just to prove that I’m human, like maybe at the beginning and at the end, but then the rest of it will probably just be audio. The problem with me is that video editing is something I don’t enjoy doing.

I like doing the script editing on Descript, but I don’t like actually being on camera and watching all the skips. Whereas if it’s audio only, I can sit there and I can craft it to sound nice. And yeah, even then, sometimes you hear some weird skips, but I’ve learned that if I mess something up, I can always copy and paste the way I said something from somewhere else.

I flubbed a name earlier, and I just copied that same name from another part and pasted it over. So it’s good to know I can do that. And Descript is great. I don’t use all the AI. The only AI thing I use is the studio sound. That’s it. Because it actually makes it sound good.

And I’m just using my phone most of the time. It does sound better when I use my actual studio microphone, but yeah. So yeah, i-if there’s a burning topic that you think I should cover, which I ask this all the time and no one ever responds, but, if there’s just a burning thing on your mind, rather than say, “Hey,” drop it in the comments, better yet, you should just open, your voice recorder or your Google Docs, or your notes app and just write it down or speak it into your phone or whatever device you have handy.

Don’t let thoughts just circle around your head because that’s really dangerous. And now that I have time and I’m here by myself, I’m probably gonna start making a lot more voice notes. That’s something that I should’ve been doing a long time ago. I’m gonna stop planning and figuring things out and just do it.

Get the thoughts out there, because now I can just throw them into Descript anytime I want and edit it and just post it, and that’s awesome. That’s it for now. Good night.