It's time to go Peter Gabriel

BIG TIME! I'm on my way, I'm making it

What do filmmaker Casey Neistat, Artist Tom Sachs, and engineers Mark Rober and Colin Furze have in common?

They don’t think small.

When they consider their next project, they don’t hedge thinking the world might not accept it.

They aspire to do the scary things.

The dangerous things.

The ideas that nobody else will do for fear of it bombing on social media.

Casey posted a vlog to YouTube for 800 days straight, snowboarded the streets of New York City being towed by the NYPD, and ran around the world for Nike.

Tom turned a guillotine into a Chanel display piece and built a to-scale version of the Apollo Lunar Lander, complete with a working staff of astronauts.

Mark turned his backyard into a Ninja Warrior obstacle course for squirrels, not once, but THREE times, and he is single-handedly every porch pirate’s worst nightmare.

And Colin, OMG COLIN! If there was ever a YouTuber more at risk of losing his life on a regular basis, it’s Colin effing Furze!

The Point?

As I put my head in the sand, worrying If I’ll lose my integrity as an artist by turning my art into a phone case, these guys are shooting for the moon.

This is a photo of my December content plan I created a few weeks ago:

Everything on those lists is safe and aimed at satisfying the gentle nature of my subscribers.

Nothing on those lists is dangerous and certainly doesn’t aim for the stars.

Snake River or Bust

Now I won’t pretend that I was ever bold enough to be Evel Knievel, but I always wanted to be him. The aspirational nature of kids is unmatched by anything else, but over time, we get that sense of daring adventure worked out of us. There’s no shame in admitting you don’t want to break bones trying to drop into a 15-foot halfpipe or bomb the rocky side of Mammoth Mountain’s cornice. However, If anyone should have more bravery and adventure in life, it’s artists.

We buffer ourselves and kowtow to the algorithm.

Let’s be honest, the social media algorithms are the biggest problem, training us to aim for the middle, and punishing those that shoot for the periphery.

I don’t have any interest in playing that game anymore.

It’s time for a rethink and it starts with those lists. I don’t know what this means for my projects or my content just yet, but I’m taking the weekend to see if I can’t scare the shit out of myself with nutty ideas.