TRANSCRIPT
Someone recently wrote me. He said, “You know, Daniel, I’ve looked at a lot of your videos and I don’t think I’ve ever seen you smile.” And I thought about it for a minute. It hurt. I’m like, ooh… Is there something wrong with me? I never smile?
And then I thought about it. I was like, you know, I think it is true in my videos I really don’t smile very much, if at all, and why is that? So it made me think about, what is the nature of smiling? And I think, do I smile in the rest of my life? Because that was my first thought: Oh my god, am I such a miserable person that I never smile? But then I thought about it, and actually, after I got that email, I started watching myself and I realized, you know, actually I smile a lot. I wonder how many times a day I smile? I probably smile 50 or 100 times a day.
But then I thought, not every day. And it’s dependent on one main thing: if I spend an entire day alone, I pretty much don’t smile that much. What I do is I smile in interaction with other people. I notice a lot of my humor comes out in interaction with other people – usually people that I’m really close with, people who I like a lot and people who like me a lot. I find myself laughing a lot and I smile a lot in relation to them.
The thing is, why don’t I smile on my YouTube videos very much? And I think the main reason is there’s nobody else here! I’m sitting in a room, looking at a camera, and the camera is not giving me human feedback. Now, I could try to smile. It’s kind of like posing for a selfie. I see people posing for selfies and what I think, from what I look at them, is their smile so often looks fake.
When I come here to do these YouTube videos, I’m not faking it. I’m working so hard to just be honest. I actually go on some sort of mental tangent in my mind: I try to come up with an outline for what I’m gonna say and then I just wing it; I speak extemporaneously about whatever it is that I’m feeling and thinking. And… I think that is the nature of smiling. I think smiling in a large way is an interactive process.
And I think about that… little babies, you can smile at them and they smile back. Certainly little kids, I smile at them they smile back. It happens to me on the street all the time when I’m walking in the streets of New York City. I see people walking by me, all sorts of people, even homeless people often, and I’ll just look at them and smile and they smile back and sometimes it’s the most beautiful sincere smiles.
I remember I had this wonderful smiling moment with a guy the other day. I was walking in the West Village. I went to a thrift store to see if I can find something as a gift for a friend, and on the way back, there was a homeless guy rummaging through some trash. And he actually – and this is in the West Village of Manhattan – he probably had found about $500 worth of really fancy stuff, all these amazing books and really great clothes – people just threw it out on the street, and he was looking through it.
I walked by and I said to him, “Wow, you made a great find,” and he turned to me he goes, “Yeah!” and he smiled at me and I smiled at him and we had this moment. I said, “God, that’s got to be worth a lot of money!” and he goes, “Yeah, no shit!” And he starts telling me about how, like, valuable it was, what a great find he had made.
I said, “Yeah, in the West Village you can find some of the most amazing stuff.” He said, “Yeah, no shit!” And I said, “What’s the best thing you ever found?” He goes, “Damn, because you know, I found a gold watch once. Someone threw out a gold watch.” Hey, I was like, “Oh my god. How much was it worth?” He goes, “I sold it for $300.” I said, “You know, I find stuff on the street too. I found some pretty good stuff.” And he gave me this big smile. He was curious. He goes, “What’s the biggest – what’s the most expensive thing you ever found?”
I said, “Well, I don’t know the most expensive stuff because I haven’t sold very much of what I’ve ever found on the street, but I can tell you something I’m sure you’d appreciate.” He goes, “What?” and I said, “Well, I once found a cardboard box in the West Village” – because I used to live in the West Village, I was actually a therapist in the West Village for ten years – I found a cardboard box sitting there and I just became curious as I walked by it and I opened it up and to my amazement what was in it was money!
It was full of money. It was a box, about yea big, full of pennies, nickels, dimes and quarters and at the bottom there were even some 50-cent pieces. I couldn’t believe it: a box full of money. Someone had thrown out money. Only in the West Village in New York City do people throw out money. And I thought, why would somebody throw out money?
Well, actually first I looked around and I said, is this garbage? And I’m like, oh, it’s definitely garbage. Someone threw it out. I think what happened is someone was moving. They probably had hired a moving truck, and people do it. They don’t want to carry heavy stuff and to people who are so filthy rich that they have tons and tons of stuff, money doesn’t really mean that much to them. Putting it out on the street is easier than carrying it. So they just put it out on the street.
Now, what did I do? I was like – and by the way, the homeless guy was sitting there with a huge grin on his face, and I had a great grin on my face. And I said, I said, “Guess what I did with it?” He goes, “Yeah, what’d you do?” I said, “I picked it up and I walked it to the bank.” He goes, “You bet!” And I took it to one of the banks that I knew had one of those coin machine things where you just dump the money, and I dumped it in.
And he goes, “How much was it worth?” I said, “I can’t remember. I think it was, like, 120 dollars, and they did a printout and they handed me a hundred dollar bill and a twenty dollar bill.” He was like, “Yeah!” And I was like, “Yeah!” And that was it.