Finding Heroic Meaning Like Stories Of Old - Tom Van Der Linden

We know there's some part of existence that's fundamentally strange. We sometimes have the realization that something very ordinary seems fundamentally alien-like to us. That's, I think, us becoming aware of our Sisyphus-like fate. When you become Sisyphus who is conscious now, suddenly he's no longer, like, hopefully going about his life. Now he is, like, forced to justify it in some way, to make sense of it.

Dude, I love your stuff. I think that your channel is absolutely fantastic.

Mm-hmm. Thanks. (laughs)

That, it's, it's one of my favorite things on the internet. For the people who don't know, it's Like Stories of Old YouTube channel.

Mm-hmm.

How would you describe... Let's say you meet someone at a party and they say, "Oh, you do YouTube."

Yeah.

"What, what do you YouTube about?" What do you say?

I- i- it's the worst question. It, it depends on the person, like, how familiar they are with the YouTube space. If I can see, like, they're, like, a normal person who doesn't have, like, the super high awareness about what YouTube means, (laughs) I'll just say, like, "Uh, I make short documentaries, like..." or something like that. Um, sometimes I'll just say, like, uh, "I make video essays." And they'll, of course people will ask, like, "Oh, what's a video essay?" And then it's, it, it's like an essay, but except it has video with it. (laughs) And it depends, you can, you can often quickly, like, sense, uh, if a person is, like, really interested or if it was just asking out of politeness, so, um, yeah. Depending on how they, on their attitude, I will expand more or elaborate more on... Um, I think the, the longer, more complicated answer would be, like, I'll say that it's a combination between, like, examining philosophy and doing media analysis and sort of exploring the relation between the two.

Yeah, I've had the, uh, "So what's your podcast about?" question 100 times-

Mm-hmm.

... since I've been in Austin, and, uh, I, I still am yet to come up with a good succinct answer-

Mm-hmm.

... that isn't five minutes long, and someone didn't want the five-minute-long answer.

(laughs)

They wanted me to say, "Oh, it's about Ultimate Frisbee," or, "It's about World of Warcraft," or, "It's about porn," or something, um, like they, they just wanted, like, a one-word answer. I'm like, "I'm sorry, I can't, I can't give you that." So, t- tie together, what's, is there a common thread that does tie together all of the videos that you do, or is it just your, whatever your curiosity has in store that day?

Um, I think what the channel name originally referred to, Like Stories of Old, is the idea that you have movies which is, relatively speaking, a new form of art. Like, it's been around for, like, just over a century. Uh, video games as well, it's even newer. And then, the idea was that even those new forms of art, they still have or still carry, like, the timeless wisdom like the stories of old, you know? So, that's kind of what I, what I set out to do, that was sort of the premise of the channel, that I wanted to kind of get a sense of the timeless within the contemporary art forms, and also that in doing so, like, explore why I'm still so, why I'm so drawn to all of these things. Like, why do certain movies become, like, my favorite movies? Like, why do they evoke, like, deep emotions within me, or why do films from filmmakers, like, far away resonate with me, like, very strongly even though I share nothing with them, like, on the surface level? And so, yeah, that's, uh, that's kind of how it came to be, and I think that's an element that keeps being, like, a cornerstone of the videos.