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Transcript
Welcome back, everyone. Have you ever wondered that what separates great art from good art? Because it's interesting, right, that art is the subjective perceptions and this subjective interpretations of someone else's view of life or their view of certain avenues at the same time? Because it is subjective. There is no black and white and concrete metrics to say, oh, good art, that is bad art.
Yet art can be good and can be bad. So what separates great art from good art? The society at large eradicated most Feminines. But do we create this new digital feminine that's filled us with distractions and other unintended consequences and we are suffering both mentally and emotionally, whether that's the hustle culture, whether that is the social cloud or social proof era that we live in.
That brings in today's guest james Adams II. James is a cinema reaction YouTuber film director and an artist. With his creative insights and approach to dissecting and analyzing some of the most classic films ever filmed, like The Children of God and so on, he was able to amass over 100,000 subscribers on YouTube within two years.
And he has this extremely unique way of looking at fame and why art truly imitates life. This episode resembles more of a very, very honest and insightful conversations in like a coffee shop versus like a more traditional interview format that I've had on this show. But I really appreciate James's perspective, his artistry and just his worldview of creating an art that both authentically represents who he is and also something bigger and larger than himself really speaks through everything we talk about today.
So I'm very excited for you to join in today's conversation with James and for you to discover some of the more practical mental health insights and for you to take away the golden nuggets and approaches he uses in his life to optimize your own. Without further ado, please enjoy today's conversation with James Adams II. That Spiderman quote is legendary because it's extremely true.
Life imitates art and art imitates life and it goes hand in hand. And so for those who are out there who are struggling to find their own style, struggling to find themselves, go into art, try and find art pieces and dive into them and immerse yourself. And I guarantee you will learn a lot from that.
Discover More podcast is for introspective thinkers with growth mindsets seeking authentic lifestorms. As a therapist, Benoit Kim highlights the magical relationship between healing and the optimal human experience of what we call life. Here is your mental health being a top priority today and every single day? Let's get this started.
James, welcome to the show, man. Hey, thank you for having me, man. Appreciate that.
Thank you for the intro too. That was incredible. Thank you.
What do you think that means to you being an artist or even as a creative that you are? I'm vulnerable to the world around me and art is this thing where it builds me up to the strong individual who I know that I am, who I see in the future as this person that I look up to. No one else knew of the manga that I was reading. Nobody was listening to the music that I was listening to.
Nobody was diving into deep art at the level that I am or that I was doing at the time. And I wasn't able to have conversations with that to anyone else. So there was a lot of reinforcement that I had to give to myself and to validate myself, because that validation is important to keep yourself set on the line that you're trying to strive on with no one else around to kind of help you out.
You grow to really love your craft even more because it's so much of you into it. So a lot of it was through selfish intent, whether that was like, entrepreneurship through my art, whether that was through emotional growth through my art, through physical growth, through my art, just how I interacted with a lot of things. It was all for myself and the betterment of myself and what does that mean for myself? But a lot of it was through this personal reinforcement of like, no, this art is important.
What you're learning is important, what you're doing is important. And just continuously doing that over and over and over again from, like honestly, from middle school to where I am now, it's still going with that. Yeah.
I think language is important because we are both the stories we tell about ourselves and others. So I want to challenge you with your term selfish. It sounds like it's more self serving that art is not only your coping mechanism to deal with the isolations and ostracizations by your friends who didn't understand this force of nature, as you said, with your gravitational pull towards art, which is sacred for you.
So I wouldn't say it was selfish. I think it sounds more like self protective and self serving because you talked about it. I think being an artist and YouTuber or content creator that a lot of the public doesn't know about, it's a very lonely path.
All of the great artists that I look up to or respect, they really have this single focus into this craftsmanship. And I heard this saying long time ago, I forgot who said it. It's something like, be nice to the ones you used to bully because those people are going to rule the world.
I'm a little bit older than you are, but when I was growing up, being nerdy or geeky or into computer or tech was not a cool thing. Now it is. So I feel it's cool that society at large is recognizing these early talents that may not fit the mold of what society or what a normal pathways air quote kind of looks like.
I stumbled upon those aspects of technology alongside with my love of art kind of like almost at the same time. And when I say love of art, more so like what I wanted to do with my life and as life continued, using that as like a shield, using that art form as more than just the physical creation of things, but a lifestyle for me, a sense of protection and accountability and responsibility and making myself a human, a better human. And what does that mean? So like, the definition and the value of art kind of leveled up for me outside of being just a creation of sorts, whether if it's for myself or for other people.
It's genuinely a lifestyle to me. And that was a conscious choice I made as well. But it really does help.
Like you said, it's a place where I'm able to feel safe, it's a place where I'm able to heal, it's a place where I'm able to analyze and to break down and to make better decisions for myself, which is essentially what life is all about. So it's great that art is able to segue itself as to being a good life lesson for me too, outside of it being just clearly a demonstration of someone's talents. Yeah, I love when you said art is a lifestyle.
That could be a pretty catchy title for the episode. We'll see if I use that. But I like art because art is so nuanced.
Like, who is to say that this art is good, that art is bad? It's entirely subjective, I think. And that's why I think art is a lifestyle, because life is the nuances, right? At least the way I see it. So I want to push you a little bit further into, like you said, your art, whether it's creative field of film directing or making, YouTube now, yes, it is a safe place, but how do you process or deal with that loneliness that I alluded to earlier? The best way I can answer that is you have to know yourself.
And accountability is key, especially with artists. Artists, we love to have that like, oh yeah, I can fuel myself through myself. But you have to be responsible for what that means.
And that means that the cuts that are going to happen to you, the bruises that you'll receive from life, that's all going to be on you. And that mental fortitude is important. It is a lonely road.
It is a lonely street and path to walk on. And honestly, not a lot of people are probably meant for it, especially when tackling on growing a business through social media because it's like a whole other thing. But for anyone that is attempting to tackle it, I think the best thing they can do for themselves is to recognize and take accountability and responsibility for what is to come.
From being an artist who's a freelancer, who is trying to be their own boss. What does that truly mean? And are you truly ready for what that implies? Because that implies a lot of stuff and even the things that you aren't even looking out for just getting blindsided. What does that mean when a pandemic happens? What does that mean when a relationship, during this moment of your life as an artist happens? How does that affect your work? How does school affect your work? How does your parents do that? Et cetera, et cetera.
And that's why it is a lifestyle. Because genuinely, for those who take it seriously, their life is their art and their art is their life. And there's a lot of sources that can influence that that can also destabilize that.
But if you are accountable and if you are strong enough to understand what this means, all of those can be components in your art. And that is a powerful thing because that literally means anything that happens, you can genuinely take as a life lesson in order to sharpen your craft, to sharpen what it means to you to be an artist. And doesn't make the falls and the fells and the cuts and the bruises any less painful, but it makes that mind of yours that much sharper.
And that's like something that helps with every elevation, every level up, I guess you could say, as being a human, as an artist, as a person within their craft. It's just better being able to know what these stakes mean, I guess. Another thing I wanted to add too is understanding and being vulnerable with yourself, not putting up a front.
And again, artists, they love doing that. They love thinking that we're perfect, we're not perfect. And I think that's what makes it so beautiful.
But it's up to the person, the artist, the human to understand that you have to be vulnerable and open, but at the same time know that you have the strength to be as strong and as courageous and as fearless as you can. It's like a pendulum. Yeah, I think unless your last name is Christ, first name is Jesus, nobody's perfect.
No one's perfect. And of course, vulnerability, strength is an idea by Bernay Brown, right? The prominent research went to shame and guilt. And another quote that reminds me of is like a spiderman quote, right? With great power comes great responsibility.
But I think the reverse is also true. With great responsibilities comes great power. Because I view accountability as synonymous with responsibility.
And I think if you can truly be accountable with the help or by yourself, since everyone has different genetics and variables and circumstances, if you can truly internalize and accept that, oh, I have great responsibility to do X, Y and Z, you do that long enough, that translates into power. It sounds very counterintuitive, but when you really can accept and live your life through this internalized responsibility, you have a lot of immense power within you. And that is what we call empowerment.
So do you have any thoughts with what I said in terms of grace? Responsibility comes with great power, because I know you're a huge Spiderman Marvel fan as well. Anime, other art forms, manga were great pieces for me to not really feel lonely and learn some of these valuable lessons that I've learned as a human, like Naruto and Jeraya and all of these people that have influenced me in a way that I've grown as a human. And if I grow as a human, my art is going to grow as well, because I've already made the responsibility of accepting that, no, this is the type of artist I want to be.
This is the type of person I want to be. That Spiderman quote is legendary because it's extremely true. Life imitates art, and art imitates life, and it goes hand in hand.
And so for those who are out there who are struggling to find their own style, struggling to find themselves, go into art, try and find art pieces and dive into them and immerse yourself. And I guarantee you will learn a lot from that. But like you said, it's not just an artist thing.
When you're in this place where you feel like you can't break out of and you can't get out of bed or you just don't want to go out, I really do challenge people to just throw themselves into these sources because they won't judge you. These things won't try and misguide or stir up your sauce or anything. It's only going to amplify it.
And that's the beautiful thing. That's why books are great. That's why manga is great, anime is great, cartoons are great, especially when they're made out of pure intention.
Yeah. I want to highlight and zoom in on something you said. You said that these entities don't judge you.
I love that because I've never thought about this way. But whether you subscribe to the belief of God, universe, the source, the oneness, whatever names you want to label them as, in this case, books or art, judgment comes from a place of ego and art and books. And these entities do not have ego.
They're egoless because ego is a human characteristics. And that's what you're right. They cannot and they will never judge you because they're egoless.
I do want to go in and ask you about something a little bit further and a little bit deeper. You talked about life imitates art. Can you elaborate more? Something that I've realized, especially now, because I was very impatient younger, very impatient younger.
And it showed like that was the conflict that I had prior, the revelations that I had in my recent years, that it was how I continue meeting time. And it was always that friction, and it always did something with my art, and not necessarily in imagery, but more so with how I felt with myself, which is art, too. So it's one of those things where I had to not necessarily adapt, but learn more from life imitates art.
It's like time is between all of that, and it's how one uses that time. We're wielders of time, if we can think of it like that. And I'm truly starting to understand what that means, not just in an art sense, but more so in a sense of, like a human sense, a soul.
Like, how does this feel towards my soul? And it's been helping me out tremendously, thus improving my art. Yeah, I feel like this may sound very esoteric, but because time is a construct, right? I read a little and I know tiny bit of astrophysics physics like that. And I do know that the stars we see every single day, many of those stars are already dead, but they're liars and liars and liars away.
What that means is by the time the projections of the light that reflects a star get to our human eyes, those stars already could have been ceased to exist. That means we're concurrently in real time air, quote, peering into the past while weighing the present. Don't ask me any questions, but these are factual statements and it makes my head hurt because I don't understand it's.
The meta philosophy epistemology all these things. But I share that because in that sense, since time is a construct, time is limitless. There is no limit to time.
Because how can there be limit to a construct of an idea? At the same time, we humans, through our ego and our perceptions of reality, we put confinements on time so we can wield them, as you said, at the same time, we don't wield it perfectly because there's ego, there's fear, anxiety, depressions, comparison syndrome, impostor syndromes, the urgency, right? Because life is short and long. You can achieve a lot of things in life by being intentional, by being responsible, by being accountable. And that's one of those paradoxes that are simultaneously true and sound conflicting.
And humans are one of the few species that can hold two seemingly contradicting things at the same time. That's what makes us humans, right? It's funny that you mentioned that you can physically see the past because that's how it feels with me when I go on these hikes and when I hike a mountain that I do multiple times and I have a different experience. But I feel stronger in a way.
And I love that because it genuinely feels that's how good art is. Really, genuinely good art is supposed to be made. It's just one of those cycles that I feel is continuous and a lot of things that I admire in life.
Hence why life imitates art. I see a lot of the things that I cherish within art that I hold to a high degree the same thing unfolding in front of me in life, that I am like, wow, I love this. I genuinely love experiencing this.
This is a good moment. This is a genuinely human moment. And that's something that I had to learn.
And it all wraps around time. It all deals with time because it is long. But yes, like you said, it's also very short.
But it has so much within that it's crazy. I feel like the reason why you can peer into the past through a portal when you go hiking, it might be that powerful ganja that you're smoking. But because I do view marijuana in some sense as like the performance enhancement drug for a lot of artists because it does create multiple dimensional thinkings and poor ways into your minds.
Like when people are like, oh, I had a light bulb moment, or Zap. And the idea comes to me, what does that even fucking mean? We don't know. I think our brains are antenna and we're connected to this collective consciousness because I believe in a philosophy of oneness and I'm also very spiritual, esoteric and religious.
And I am a clinician working towards psychedelic therapy. So that might explain my perspective. But it's very interesting.
So I do want to ask you about something more specific in terms of the cycle, in terms of the grounding mechanism that you alluded to in regards to manga, anime and films. So many people go to podcasting and audiobooks and a lot of the personal development books for insights and personal growth. I belong into that category.
I've been a personal development junkie since 13. I read The Secret and I haven't stopped reading for a while. I haven't picked up a personal growth book in a while because as you understand, there is a few sets of universal truth.
And if you can really practice and refine those truth, you don't need more motivations, you don't need more toolkits. The toolkits I have in my box personally are sufficient and that when the needs arise, then I will read more books. But now I think I have enough toolkits for me personally.
But for you, James, you chose the avenue of anime, manga and films for your avenue of personal development. So what about these specific types of storytelling that really called out your name? I think it was first a feeling of loneliness. That's what we talked about previously.
It was that I didn't really have anyone to share the same level of love that I have for these things around me, the things that I love. For example, like Naruto, this unwavering faith in himself. And now I don't have a demon fox in my belly.
But I know what it feels like to be Ostracized. I know what it feels like to be to yourself, yet still have this dream that requires you to be noticed by everyone, to go past beyond everyone's expectations because it's your dream. And that right there was just one of those themes that I picked up on and obviously through brilliant writing and Kishimoto is the author of Naruto.
Just continuing that theme and then evolving it and I'm growing up along with this, while also picking up other animes and mangas, you start to get that this isn't just a kid show, this isn't just an anime, even. Like, this is a real human being behind this, that written this, that drew this, that put these themes in here for a reason. There was intention with this.
And that's what it really start clicking in for me, where I was like, wow, okay, like a human did this. That level of appreciation and respect branched into films and more so with films because films where it's a little bit more it was a little less chaotic as anime and manga. It's a little bit more grounded in a sense, but the themes still are the same.
You have to have intention. The films that I love, like Blade Runner and obviously a lot of Quintino films, but then you have like Lawrence of Arabia that I just recently watched and I'm digesting and analyzing these films on the spot for my YouTube audience as well, too. And the reason why I'm able to do so in a way that almost seems effortless is because I genuinely understand the intention.
I know that there was intention behind certain things to every frame and that's just been a principle I've kept with myself ever since graduating high school and leading myself into college. And then where I am now is that art has really good art, especially ones I appreciate has great intention. Nothing is good and nothing is bad, but everything can be good.
Everything can't be bad. But I do believe there is a threshold and that comes forth with intention and that comes forth with how you go about executing that intention. There is like an echelon of that anybody can break through it.
That's a great thing. But it does require intention. And I think that level is something I appreciated in all forms of films and anime and manga.
Yeah, I don't think it's just intention, though, because I do want to nuance this where I did say earlier that I think art is entirely subjective and there is no good or bad. However, there is a difference between great art and good art. And I think that threshold is, as you say, intention and b the ability for the artist or the author to connect on an emotional level with the audience.
I think that makes a great art. And the third piece is, as you said, like with Naruto, because Naruto is the embodiment of this archetype of a hero's journey, which is an archetype in a lot of storytelling. And because he embarks on a journey to better himself at the same time, he also empowers and provides confidence for all his peers.
He's the one always says, you could do it, you could do it. And now, of course, he becomes one of the greatest and he brings back triumph and resources to the village, his Fire village, right? And that's the Hero's journey, it's not just for yourself. You ultimately have to provide and I guess revive the entire village, but the fact that you're able to rewatch the same sequence and series of anime yet derive different meanings based on different chapters of life you're in.
I think that's the third characteristics of a great art. These are my limited understanding of what a great art can be. But I do think there's a difference between good art and great art with what we talked about.
So I do want to talk a little bit more about the Hero's journey. Right. Because for you, as you said, you are bettering yourself throughout your journey.
Since high school, you've been on this quote unquote lonely path because of your die hard and hyper focused intention into your arts and craftsmanship. And through that you provide value and you try to elevate others through a YouTube channel, which you have 110,000 subscribers, which is that's a lot of people, right. But how do you personally, James, view Hero's Journey the way I explained it? And what does that mean to you, if any? It's an interesting trope because it essentially is built off of one's perseverance unwavering power in themselves.
I think the hero trope is a brilliant teaching of character, of life, and people can really extract from that because it's not just the adventure, it's what happens during the adventure that makes it great. It's not just the destination of the hikes, it's the journey of the hikes. It's the journey that makes these stories.
It's not just the beginning and the end page. It's everything in between that that would be a boring ass movie or film or anime, crazy build up, but nothing and just a conclusion. Absolutely.
Maybe you get to see a little bit of the credits at the end. Yeah, just end seeing credits. Yeah.
I think that's really important because I want to provide a quick clinical perspective. It's like the idea of reminding ourselves about our immense resilience. I think for anyone that's dealing with lows in the dark seasons of life, because life absent flows and it's seasonal, a lot of people might think to themselves, oh man, how can I possibly work through or move through this obstacle? How can I possibly come out of this dark space to that? I want to remind those folks that you're here, aren't you? The fact that you're here, that means you've worked through and moved through a lot of the obstacles before you could have been last year, two months ago, ten years ago, who knows? But I don't know anyone that does not have any challenges.
But the fact that you're having this anxious or negative thought about, oh, boy, how can I ever come out of this state alive? Remind yourself you're here. Literally having that thought that means you did came out of whatever previous circumstances, alive. And I think reminding us of our resilience and how far we've come in.
Life is a great pattern recognitions and great way to seek out evidence that oh, am I capable of this? Oh yeah I am. How do I know that? Oh yeah I survived X, Y and Z I had this issues I came through So there's a lot of data points, a lot of evidence in all of our lives to remind us that we are capable but then the circumstances does darken that perceptions or that memory and it might distort it sometimes too but just remind us that we do have the resilience in all of us. Yeah, what you just said is how art makes me feel.
It's why I believe and why I hold art to me as such a sacred foundation in my life because it is that remedy, it's the remembrance of how strong I am and what I've gone through. Yeah man, I agree 100% with that. And also like Kick Cutty is another musician, one of my all time favorites, Men on the Moon, one of my all time favorite hip hop albums but his song like Pursuit of Happiness, he sounds cheery, groovy, AF.
You really dissect what he's going through like man, he's going through some dark and painful and depressive and suicidal periods but as you said, that song or logics, right? 1800 the suicide hotline. I read a study that that song has saved a staggering amount of adolescents life from suicide. So as you said, art does imitate life and life there's lifelines within life, the container of life.
Similarly there's lifelines of help within art as well because as you said, I think art is a reflections of our interpretations of life. So in the intro I talked about one of the topics I want to dive into and this is where you want to put in your seatbelts or getting into the treaddy heavy hitter territory. So a lot of influencers, whether it's YouTube, social media, but generally YouTube, we call it prosumer right, producers and consumer and a lot of the key ingredients for YouTubers to make it quote unquote is to use search based content.
What that means is you do your research and you find out what are the content, what are the trends, what are the highest performing videos to the audience's liking and then you reverse engineering and cater your content to that. I don't do that as a podcaster because it's podcast right? It's unscripted so it's kind of hard. So it's different territory there.
But for you and many YouTubers that's what they do. So a lot of the influence are trapped by this audience captive phenomenon. What that means is they become the curated persona they created to appease the content that the viewership likes.
At the same time they lose their true self to this curated persona because you do that long enough. What is personalities? Personality is what you perceive as are people going to like this? Part of myself is this. Going to be validated.
And we used to do that with our close knit groups like small communities throughout the world, but now the entire world can validate or invalidate you. So I feel like this audience kept a phenomena is extremely dangerous because when you lose yourself, you don't know you lost yourself because your audience is going to love what you're doing. The more you appease the audience, the higher the yields, the higher the ROI in terms of the context of the viewerships and popularity.
Yada. Yada. What are your thoughts on that? And how do you make sure your course is as aligned, as pure as your true self, not this curated persona of James versus Cinema? Yeah, so you mentioned earlier about the North Star in a sense of keeping your morals aligned and that sort of was the mindset I had going into YouTube, because I'm the type of person where the best way to explain it is if my mom sees me acting different online, she'll check me.
And I don't want to be in a position to where it's like to where my friends and the people that are close to me obviously like my mom, but also to myself. If I know that I am not genuinely being myself, that's going to mess me up, that's going to make my journey worse. And I know that and I don't want to take responsibility for that.
I don't want to do that. So what's the best way to counteract that, just being yourself on the internet. And as I guess you could say, as hard as it sounds, that's the intention that I went into with YouTube is I'm only going to do this if I can just be myself.
Because I never really wanted to be like a YouTuber. I just thought it would be great. And then the next level was when COVID happened and I was using it more.
So of a way to keep me educated, to keep me in love with filmmaking. And it just so happened that it also blow up as well too. But the whole data and just when you see it all in numbers, when you see it all through graphs and when you see it, when they're like, oh yeah, your video is performing like this and oh, your video isn't performing like this, or less viewers on this one.
Oh, you have a lot of viewers on this one. That's when, at least for me, YouTube really, I start to see what YouTube was. I started to really see it.
There's a game that's meant to be played and you have to decide whether or not you want to play it or not. You can play it, but it's going to have some damaging effects later on just because for me personally, again, I like sleeping good at night and I just can't get with me not acting how I am now on the internet. That is me.
For anybody who decides to watch this and decide to go to my YouTube or to any other platform that is me. And I've always been that of me. Yeah, YouTube does this incognito effect.
It clearly shows you like, hey, you can make a lot doing this because you're making us a lot doing this. But how do you feel? How do you feel? You always got to ask yourself, how do you feel about doing this? How do you feel when doing this? Because it can cause even to someone like me, it sent me through depressions. It sent me through a lack of faith within myself.
It sent me into asking what it even is that I'm doing, reading comments and stuff like that, where people don't know me but are either acting like they do or acting like they do and talking bad about me and not clearly understanding that I went through a whole life prior to YouTube. There's so many elements that come along with entering this landscape that is still pretty new that I just didn't have any coaching on. I was just kind of like in the fray with it.
But again, I think the reason why I'm doing so well is because my intention going into it was I'm going to be me regardless. You can stay true to yourself. You just have to accept that it probably going to take longer, it's probably going to be a little bit harder and you won't make as much, but it's worth it because I think that's what makes like you said, it rises from good to great.
Yeah. And I think the tough part is I know you upload like six videos a week every single week for the past two years. I know you took no time off and tremendous hours go into it.
So of course it's in human nature to be seen, be heard and right so when you're exerting that much hour, I mean, that many hours every week for years with no break, of course you want to be validated by your art at the same time that validation cannot take over your art. Right? And that's the North Star we're talking about. And to me sounds like of course this comes and go and you may hit a different depression point, another mental fuckery designed by YouTube to fuck with us, to monetize attentions and keep the viewership as long as possible through whatever it takes.
You might get that in a million or whatever, but at least you have this awareness. And I feel like if you can maintain this approach, it's almost like you're hacking the system. What I mean by that is if you aim for authentic self as your metric, if your internal metrics is no longer about the numbers or the viewership, but rather can James Adams III be as accurately translated into James versus Cinema? If that is your internal metrics, then your viewers that you attract are also going to feel that so when you're being inauthentic, your viewers are going to call you out.
So in a way, the best way to grow your platform is by being adhering to your internal metrics or being yourself. So when you're not being yourself, you may lose viewers. That doesn't mean you're immune to this audience captive YouTube fuckery phenomenon.
At the same time, I think it gives you a stronger anchor to be grounded because it's an entirely different metrics. And of course this is very difficult thing to do. And as you know James, my YouTube journey is the infancy stage.
I've been on YouTube for about three months now, and this is a very trivial example, but I just want to share quickly to really make this point home. So I know the difference between intentions and goal. I don't really set goals because I think it's in a human nature that when you set a goal, for example, you want to lose 30 pounds by the end of whatever.
If you don't lose that 30 pounds, a lot of people may think, oh, I failed that goal. You didn't. Even if you lost five pounds or ten pounds, you still lost five pounds and ten pounds, you just fell short of that goal.
So I say intention. So three months ago, I set an intention for myself that I want to achieve 1000 subscriber mark. And I didn't hit that thousand.
I'm pretty close now, but I fell a little bit short. And my videos gets about anywhere from 500 to 1500. Some of them have thousands of views.
And it's we are even talking about this now because when I first started, I had six views, 16 views. And when I got like 61 views or like 102 views, I was like, yes, 100 people viewed me talking to an expert for an hour, an hour and a half, because we're competing with Netflix, we're competing with Hulu, we're competing with these mega billion corporations. But now I don't even think about I was like, oh, this only got 1500 views.
Only 1500 people watch my video. Pathetic. Just think about that.
Yeah. And for me, the spiritual process I told you offline that I've been going through is as you said, I think I accepted that. If I truly believe in myself as a podcaster, if I truly believe in my capacity as an interviewer and as a facilitator of meaningful conversations, why do I have to be confined by this arbitrary construct of three months? That makes no sense to me, yet it's all fragment of my own imaginations.
So now I feel so much at peace. The amount of mental and emotional eggs I put into the basket of YouTube has subsided dramatically. And I feel relaxed, I feel calm.
I feel like I have the longevity and the stamina to do this for a long time. And I thought as soon as I make that switch, I'll lose my viewership. Or I would, whatever didn't really happen and I was like oh yeah, these are our internal demons making shit up in our brains audience doesn't know we're just one of the hundreds of YouTubers to subscribe to they don't care if we're producing one or two or three videos a week they literally don't care YouTube cares right? But I wanted to share my example, to double down on this example.
And you can extrapolate this beyond the YouTube space into your deliverables your projects. When you feel like you're so stressed working in a large corporate setting, remind yourself you're working for a billion or Fortune 50 or multimillimillion corporations. They don't give a fuck about your well being.
Remind yourself that and do your thing. Make sure you don't get fired. And be optimal and be professional your job and don't get lazy.
Right? At the same time, it's not end all, be all. And what I see often is even outside of YouTube. But let's say in this case, specifically YouTube, people going into YouTube for financial reasons, like for I want to make more money.
And they see YouTube as a way for them to make money because they either hear how much money YouTubers are making or maybe they just want to do it. And by all means, you can do whatever you want. It's going to be a very miserable ride because of the whole mental aspect that comes along with it.
Even if you know how to edit and you know how to shoot this and curate a video, you will be blindsided by the mental aspect of YouTube. It's like you said, if you are able to genuinely see future version of yourself, that is a continuation of you being authentic on this platform, then a ripple effect. Happens because you're just putting a video up for yourself.
But, oh, once you look at that, you get two views or you get 20 views, get 200 views, get 2000, 200,000. And it's like that form of momentum with your mindset that I think really helps aid you from a lot of the blindsides that YouTube as a business, as a company that wants to make money from you and essentially use you can do to people because YouTube is just an algorithmic system. And we're humans, we're completely different of that.
Yes. So I want to take a self pivot from the YouTube during our quality process. One of the proudest achievements.
And you talked about sleep earlier. In your response. Your proudest achievement is that you can be a high functioning YouTuber with a very considerable size of audience while still sleeping peacefully and sleeping like getting your needed sleep every night.
You put that as one. Of your highest achievements. And of course, as we all know, sleep is one of the most important recovery mechanism that we have from our brain.
REM cycle restores sleep. The whole nine. Can you elaborate more of why you're so proud of the fact that you can sleep well at nights where in America we glorify work till you die.
Mindset. I can relate to that mindset because that's what it was like. The hustle, the grind stages and all that came to a head when I moved out to California, and I was really at the pinnacle of that mindset.
I graduated college and I've done everything through myself. I've worked with crap ton of clients. I've done a bunch of personal work as well, too.
And now I'm at the stage of where it happens. I've been dreaming of California for like six to seven years. This is it.
And I'm finally here and I'm noticing it doesn't matter. I'm noticing it doesn't matter. What doesn't matter? The mindset that I had of just like, hustle, hustle, hustle, hustle, hustle that will get you noticed, that backbone alone will get you through.
And it does teach you a lot. Perseverance is great, but there are forces that I had to face that literally was like, no. Whether if it's because of skin or because of nepotism, because of just how Hollywood works, it's something that I had to realize.
And again, that wall that I talked about earlier of like, okay, I can either stay here and keep doing the same thing that I'm doing, and I guess in this case, the wall being COVID because that's when it happened. I could stay here and just continue to hustle in this environment, risk the fact that I'm probably going to go through a lot of conflict and somewhat lose myself through that, all for the sake of my art. But then again, what would my art look like by the end of it? How would it feel? Or I could use this and dive all the way into myself.
I chose to double down on myself and to interact with life differently because now that I have the experience and now that I've proven to myself that, okay, I can move out here and I can do this and I know how to hustle and all this, yada yada. How do I make it to where my art's me? How is it noticeable? People see that, they're like, oh yeah, it's James. The power of saying no is a huge ingredient in your success.
Because when you say yes to productivity or hyperproductivity restlessness, grind, grind, grind more and more and more culture. By saying yes to that, your default answer is you're saying no to sleep or recovery or reset or detachment. You can't have both when you're younger in your college, you're short.
I've had years of my lives where I would sleep 4 hours a night for years when I was working full time, plus going to grad school full time in my mid 20s. But it's not sustainable, right? You don't really feel it then. But I promise you, as a clinician with deep knowledge and psychophysiological aspect of human performance and body, lack of sleep will catch up to you.
Lack of sleep is correlated with lower future health index, higher health issues, right. Increasing probability of neurological disease, the list goes on and on. And I'm scared for a couple of friends of mine who may have strokes at age late 30s or 40s because they're sleeping four or 5 hours a day every single I mean, Jonathan Yu, the CEO of the A.
Figure real estate business. One of my closest friends here, man, he's been clocking in five, four or 5 hours of sleep for the past two years. And he took one week off because of the pandemic.
And he's feeling it. And he's so young and so successful at the same time. If he's going at the cure and rapid pace for the next ten years, he's literally killing himself for the sake of whatever he's pursuing.
And I have tremendous respect. At the same time, as a close friend, I care more about the longevity of peak performance. It's like in the gym, by compromising your form and just going as much volume or weights as possible.
Sure, you might get stronger, faster, you're neglecting your recovery period. You are more prone to injury that might make you out of the gym routine for months on end if you get injured. Because that has happened to me many times, right? And anytime that happens, I'm like, why did I do that? If I just went a little bit less intensive and prioritized my recovery and my food intake, I still will be working out right now while I'm in my bed, recovering from my injury for two, three months.
If you want to sustain that's what sustainability is, is doing something longer. If you want to sustain your peak performance as this optimal performance junkie for a long time, you better make sure that sleep or recovery or mental health is not an afterthought, but an operational point. That's the only way to be optimal for a long time.
I know that I can always get back into that, and I have caught myself multiple times doing that. Or if I do end up staying a couple of hours later, I'll make up for it. I make sure to make up for it with self treatment.
It's an important thing, and I'm happy that I caught that because man, YouTube doesn't say how important it is. There's nothing within the email or anything like that when you start that says, oh yeah, sleep is important, make sure to look out for that when you decide to do this. Yeah.
It's almost like World at Large. There's still feminine and food poverty in certain areas, right? For sure. But I think World at Large, if you look at the data, compared to 50 years ago, we have largely eradicated feminine and a lot of these diseases that kill people.
In a way, we created this digital feminine that deprives of our energies, our mental well being, physical well being, time and intimate hangout session with our loved ones, family, friends. And if you look at Kobe Bryant Rest in Power, I think he always got seven or 8 hours of sleep. But what he does is he clocks out by like eight or 09:00 P.m.,
and he wakes up at three or 04:00 A.m. Or 04:00 A.m. To work.
If he did that math, I think it's about 7 hours. And he just give out on drinking, he gives out on drug. He just, I mean, he was Black Mamba for a reason.
And he would sleep more than a lot of his athletes because he doesn't party or do drugs or whatever. He has way less distractions. At the same time, he's putting in more training hours than a lot of his colleagues.
And he already has the baseline of greatness of talents, grayness of physicality, grayness of X, Y, and Z. Plus he rests. Well, how do you compete with that? The answer is you can't.
That's why he's one of the greatest ever. But then when people talk about Kobe, all they talk about is, oh, he used to get in the gym at 04:00 A.m., 05:00 A.m..
He would work out. He would have four different training sessions a day. He did have four different training sessions because he got seven to 8 hours of sleep.
As a non negotiable, people love seeing A or B it's. And you can be hyper productive and hyper focused and get the adequate optimal amount of sleep. That equation equals to longevity of peak performance.
And these are the ingredients to make someone great, because a lot of great people don't become great until they're 40, 50, 60s, right? And people forget that a lot of these fame, success are compounded and iterator over time. So for us to become the future potentials of grayness that we all have, a lot of us have within us, you better make sure a you live until 50 or 60, and B, you can sustain your peak performance until your fifty s and sixty s. Because how many child stars, how many TikTok and whatever celebrities? Sure, 1514.
They make millions. Of course their parents get the money because of child protective, all that law. How many of those do we remember now? And how many of those have been just disappeared from the face of the planet because they either burnt out or they redirected or they lost their arts or they lost who themselves, whatever.
Different reasons, right? Yeah. I mean, also, how many have lost themselves to, like you said, the famine that is now digital. Just for those who would like to study up more on how damaging these things can be psychologically.
This video is on YouTube where it showcases the up and downfall of some of these people simply because of they were overworked or depression through cyberbullying, through all these other things that are becoming more prevalent within the space of social media and just the unfortunate lack of things that are done about it through the corporations that are hosting these things. And that's where it does come down to what are you going to do about it? What does that mean for you? And I love talking with my mom. I love hanging out with her.
I love hanging out with my friends. I love going on hikes, I love traveling, I love learning things, I love going and trying different foods. And I won't be able to do that if my mind isn't there.
I can't do that if I'm too busy trying to appeal to YouTube or to a certain audience or things like that because the things that I hold true to myself are vastly different. And outside of the entity that I'm working in, I genuinely love doing all the things I just said that have to be outside of YouTube. But if I'm so involved, I will not have any time to enjoy the things that genuinely make me feel good, that genuinely help and heal me.
And not to say that YouTube doesn't, not to say that doing YouTube doesn't, but there is a thin line that I think is meant to be placed by the person that separates the two. And you have to be aware of bouncing between the two because if you mix, that's where it gets messy. That's when the things that you're dealing with within this space starts leaking into the things that you truly cherish and that's when it starts to damage, that's when it starts to hurt and that's when you can unfortunately start hating the things that you love doing.
And that's a terrible thing. And honestly, that was the fear of what I was dealing with for a lot of the times. And that pushback on multiple occasions is due to the fear of that.
I don't ever want to hate what I love doing. I don't want to ever hate creating art or enjoying art because I love doing it. I mean, it's everything that has brought me to where I am now.
I'm grateful to be 25 and alive and healthy and being able to create art and also post on YouTube for thousands of other people who I probably will never meet but are also helping out but then at the same time eat breakfast with my mom. Those things can coexist and are coexisting because I'm able to make that intention. When I was going back to say like, yes, I'm proud of one of the greatest achievements is that of sleep.
It's the physical element of sleeping, but also the fact that I can genuinely sleep and wake up knowing that it's a fresh day and that whatever is in front of me, I can handle it, I can get through it because I'm giving myself the environment to do that. You can only sleep well at night when you don't have too many skeletons or demons in your closet. And like I said, life is always about actions and reactions like thermodynamics right and the best way to minimize negative reactions because life happens.
No one ever said life is peaches and sunshine. Suffering is part of life. Weight transcending.
Just the Buddhist eastern philosophy. Suffering is a part of life. I dare anyone give me one counterexample of someone that you know that has never endured any suffering that does not exist.
It's impossible, right? This is a truth. However, I do think that you can't avoid suffering, but you can avoid some unnecessary self inflicted suffering and that is by being intentional about your actions. Right? And one step to do that is prioritizing your headspace so there's no inner demons chatting all day, every day based on a certain actions you've done.
But with that, man, I want to roll out the red carpet for people to connect further. Check out your James versus Cinema channel. Any other personal film creative projects that you have.
How can people connect with you further offline? Yeah, 100%. So if anybody would like to see my body of work, the easiest way and most convenient is through Instagram. And that is at James Adams III.
It's James Adams II with three lowercase eyes. And you can also check out the YouTube. That's where I usually do a lot of commentaries and analysis videos to films of all kinds.
And that is James versus Cinema on YouTube. So if you guys are interested in learning about films, you have that. And if you also would like to check out my work, my personal work that I enjoy creating, you can also do that too on the Instagram.
So that's James Adams III. And then for YouTube, that's James versus Cinema. I really enjoy watching The Children of God, a movie that you analyze.
It's one of your best performing ones with millions of views, great bodies of work, speak for themselves, period. Yeah. With that being said to all the listeners as always I really really appreciate you enjoying and joining our week of train of discovering more to further our curiosity to wield this curiosity to discover more about life and all the unknown.
There is a lot of the YouTube subscribers are not subscribed so if you can really press the subscribe button, comment and like. And if you thought our conversations brought any value to you today, then we'll love for you to share this with one friend that you think could benefit from our conversations. And with that, I will post all the resources, anything that we mentioned in the show notes below.
And as always, hope to see you again next time on Next Train of Discover More. Thank you.
