here are a few youtube rabbit holes that usually pay off fast for me:
1. Oddball micro-docs
Look for stuff that feels like it shouldn’t exist:
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forgotten inventions
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abandoned utopias
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one-off art movements
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“the guy who tried to ___ and failed beautifully”
Those can spark songs and facebook postings without half-trying.
2. Live takes & rehearsal footage
Not performances — process:
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studio outtakes
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rehearsal cams
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musicians arguing about tempo or chords
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great for songwriting
3. Old TV, badly archived
1970s–80s public access, local news, weird talk shows.
Pure time capsules. Accidental poetry everywhere.
4. Quiet obsession channels
One human, one obsession:
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map nerds
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tuning systems
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printing presses
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lost languages
These people radiate “practice,” which lines up perfectly with your work.
5. Accidentally prophetic clips
Anything pre-2010 confidently predicting the future — and missing.
Comedy + insight + protest song fuel.
Rule of thumb:
If you feel slightly embarrassed to be watching it… you’re probably onto something that will sell. Poke around. When something makes you mutter “huh… that’s weird,” you’re definitely on the right track.
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Who the hell was Alice Roosevelt?
Alice Roosevelt Longworth was U.S. President Theodore Roosevelt’s eldest daughter, and she became famous for doing exactly what a president’s daughter was not supposed to do.
She smoked cigarettes in public, drank, swore, gambled, and partied openly at a time when women were expected to be decorative and silent. She kept a pet snake named Emily Spinach, wore shocking clothes, and deliberately disrupted White House events just to see what would happen. Her favorite color was so distinctive it got its own name: “Alice Blue.”
Theodore Roosevelt once said, “I can either run the country or I can attend to Alice, but I cannot possibly do both.” That wasn’t a joke. She was that unmanageable.
After her White House years, she didn’t fade into polite society. She became one of Washington’s most feared and fascinating observers, sitting in the front row of American power for more than sixty years. Politicians dreaded her comments, because she saw everything and remembered it. In her home, she kept a pillow embroidered with her most famous line: “If you can’t say something good about someone, come sit by me.”
Alice wasn’t a rebel without intelligence. She was sharp, unsentimental, and allergic to hypocrisy. She didn’t attack power from the outside — she lived inside it and mocked it relentlessly. Long before anyone talked about punk attitude or anti-establishment posture, she embodied it, laughing at pretension and puncturing self-importance wherever she found it.
She matters because she proves something timeless: you can be surrounded by power without being owned by it. She refused to behave, refused to be managed, and refused to pretend. In a century of careful political masks, Alice Roosevelt Longworth made a sport of tearing the mask off — and enjoying it.
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Hey! Guess what? Here’s the Bardo bus — catch the rail as it goes by!
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See You At The Top!!!
gorby