Transcript for:
Deep Dive with Colin and Samir: Insights on the Creator Economy

I had Big Dreams as a 21 22 year-old kid I think you're only lucky enough once or twice in your life to be that naive and I I say lucky because I think it's like an unbelievable moment in time where I sat down with a pen and pad and I was like I'm going to make a TV network so in today's episode of Deep dive I'm joined By the Fantastic Colin and Samir they are the podcasting Duo and YouTube experts who for over the last 10 years have been helping people navigate the Creator economy they got their start building a small online Network for college La Cross and then they pivoted into helping creators make the most of the online space it was those early videos that I made which were about lacrosse that Samir saw and so when Samir invited me to come to Los Angeles for what was going to be just even 3 months I was like Wow someone will pay me anything $700 a month to go do this because I didn't study this so it was a no-brainer was like yeah absolutely their main channel has over 1 million subscribers they've interviewed the likes of Mr Beast and MKBHD and Mr who's the boss and me we never talk about the start of the Colin inir podcast which is essentially what has become come our entire career which was in 2018 when we were really down and out having an existential crisis cuz we couldn't make any money as creatives and decided as almost an act of therapy to get on mics to have open conversations with each other you guys are the Creator economy guys like you are the seeming you've somehow become the experts in the Creator economy where you've interviewed people like Mr Beast and Tim Ferris and like all of the big names uh and also uh me on your on your show a couple weeks ago all the big names and ali abdal um how in in a nutshell how did you guys get to becoming these like thought leaders within the Creator economy what was the doing that in a nutshell is going to be very difficult I mean what how how I would describe it is just that it it took us a really long time to figure it out ourselves and so we found people to talk to to ask how do you do it so so it wasn't that we're the experts we just talked to a lot of people who had done it um and granted we have been in the space for 12 years I think maybe something that a lot of people don't know about us is that we uploaded our first YouTube video together in 2011 and that is a long time ago so we actually have been uploading to YouTube for a very long time and have met a lot of people along the way and have had a lot of a lot more failures than had successes and I think that creates an interesting you know dynamic when you have the opportunity to have more failures than than success and in this version of us because there kind of have been two in this version of Colin and Samir we spent the majority of the time actually helping other YouTube creators helping them with their Productions and then once we had a podcast and a place to speak with them they were willing to come on the show to talk about it so I think that's part of it is that we were behind the scenes while trying to be be in front of the camera as well so I guess you guys have been doing this this this YouTube thing for 12 years now since way before the word Creator economy was even a thing since way before it was I guess around about 2012 was when people really started to make money in the space is my my vague understanding of what's going on um it it feels like a lot of young people these days want to become creators um to what extent would you recommend being a Creator as a career and what are the yeah what are the pros and cons I guess see when I hear that a lot of young people want to be creators I try and think about what is it that they're seeing that makes them want that and I feel like sure money is part of it but I think another part of it is confidence in identity you can quickly assume that a lot of the creators you follow are very confident in who they are if they're willing to put it on camera and I think those are two very attractive things like money and confidence in identity and I think there are many ways to get both of those before you go about pursuing this career and I think it's important to try and think about how you can pursue confidence in identity perhaps before you Embark I would would wholeheartedly agree with that and also say that it's not even some about like us recommending to you if this is something you should do I think it's just um there's there's people who can't help it and I would say that that we are some of those people who just can't help it we've been doing this since 2011 and as I mentioned we've had more failure than success that is a completely irrational thing to do to work on something day in and day out that is not working through you know your late 20s at times through not making much money to get together and get excited about uploading a video to the internet is irrational and so I think that there's some people who just can't help it and if you are actually that type of person you will become a Creator because you will just keep going and I think that um you do have to really evaluate what it is you're looking for is it the outcome that you're seeing is the outcome of validation um recognition money uh is is that the outcome you're looking for actually the majority of being a Creator is the process of creating so you have to really understand your relationship with your the process of creating yeah in a way like are you embarking on this journey for the sake of the journey or for the sake of the destination yeah because I mean everyone can you have to see it for yourself everyone can tell you the there's like no real Merit to the destination right like the destination doesn't exist you reach there and then you're like now I just do more of this I remember when I felt like we had achieved some level of success and I was like oh so success just means doing more of what we used to do but in a more comfortable way it's the same thing you know when we were first starting out we were figuring out ideas and then filming them and then editing them and then coming up with a thumbnail and then putting it up it's the exact same thing we do today it's just sometimes more comfortable and sometimes more stressful and different problems arise from it there's a nice um quote I think I think it's from Zen Buddhism or something like that which is kind of what happens before you reach enlight Enlightenment and what happens after and so the quote is before Enlightenment uh chopwood carry water after Enlightenment chopwood carry water I think of that in the Creator economy it's fair Fairly similar like the things that we were doing when we hadn't made made it and we were making videos and making no money are basically identical to what we're doing now and making decent money from the thing which is kind of weird I me even this morning we got a text from our friends uh yes Theory and there're people who we work behind the scenes with and they texted us this morning a picture of themselves at a computer editing the same way that they were doing like 5 years ago when we met them and yet they've experienced what maybe they have what seven eight million subscribers now same thing it's this like you look at the photo of them at the computer today this morning and we just go like this is amazing it's still the guys at a computer yeah okay let's talk about money um you've guys have been doing this for 12 years uh at what point like how how much money were you making in the early days and if you're open to sharing how much money are you making now like how do they work yeah so in the early days none um you know the way it worked in the early days was we started I I graduated college and then started a company called the Lacrosse Network which was a sports media business about lacrosse my vision was I'm going to make a television network for the sport of Lacrosse a sport I grew up playing very niche um can't make a TV network can't pitch it to anyone on TV so okay let's make it on the internet that that was the you know base premise I had Big Dreams you know as a as a 21 22y old kid I was like I I didn't I think you're only lucky enough once or twice in your life to be that naive and I I say lucky because I think it's like an unbelievable moment in time where I sat down with a pen and pad and I was like I'm going to make a TV network that's a ludicrous thought right like to have that thought at 34 years old with everything I know now I'd be like I wouldn't even allow that thought to go the next step let alone a TV network for a sport that not that many people play the majority of people who play it actually play it on the entire other side of the country yeah and most people probably also haven't heard of it like I heard of Lacrosse when I got to University I was like lacrosse that's the thing okay cool fair enough at that time did you think money was going to be something that came like that's why you were doing it was like this is a is a money thing no it wasn't money driven it was like I'm really passionate about this community this community has given me a lot like I found a lot of identity in that Community I found a lot of friends I that was what I did in college I coached a team I was like very involved in the community so I wanted to give back to the community but I'm not going to say it was fully pure I was like I want to be in the entertainment business I know you can make a lot of money in the entertainment business I grew up in La um and that was a huge part of it that's not you know at 21 years old that's a huge part of it and I think we talk about a lot that the era that we were in at that time was the startup era the sexiest thing you could be a part of or have was a startup and you know when you think about the social network that movie you know Facebook Snapchat Evan Spiegel these are 21 22 year old startup Founders who were becoming Mega millionaires so everyone had you know an idea for a startup at that time long story short um as it sounds like that was not a quick way to make money to start a lacrosse based YouTube channel with another friend and then fly Callin from you know uh Colorado to come live in LA I mean this was not a way a quick way to make money um nor did it ever really make money in the three years that we built it so how are you how are you sustaining yourselves in that time yeah so the The Way We Were sustaining ourselves was was two ways one from my savings and two from uh my dad runs a clothing company and basically I said we're a group of creatives give us essentially a contract to do your creative work work and we will do the Creative work basically 9 to5 like printing logos on no like uh photography for the clothing lines photo shoots campaigns website design graphic design Colin design the logo for my dad's clothing company that's actually just changed after 12 years yeah it was a 12 year logo it ran it had a good run yeah um it's funny cuz looking back even for me when I moved out to work with Samir I did not assume that this would be a company that would make money because I was a member of the lacrosse Community I kind of understood how big it was didn't fully understand YouTube but just was like okay I want to come out for 3 months and learn and I even said in my first email but I also want to be involved in some of the other projects things you have going on because I just wasn't sure that money was going to be a reality so this is kind of so a lot like a lot of people I know who are in like their early 20s for example would think that okay your 20s are for grinding your 20s are to get the job at Mackenzie and to do the Consulting thing and to set yourself up to maybe then follow your passion further down the line but it seems like you guys went for the I'm passionate about X let me do the thing well I I'll back up I know the question was about money so I want to be you know respond to that question to give you a frame of reference the deal with Colin was come out for a three-month internship will'll pay you $700 a month oh okay that was the deal I don't know if you remember that that was the deal to give you a frame of reference of where we were at uh and that was a big deal for us to to spend that kind of money um so just to back up about like how did this come about I grew up in LA was always into film I was into you know performing I was into uh music was primarily what I was into when I was a kid I thought I was going to end up being in a band a touring band that's what I thought yeah we'll put some Boll if you playing the guitar I thought I thought that's what the outcome of my life would be like of course I'm GNA I'm going to be in a band we would perform like a ton in high school and um I had a lot of dreams of of becoming a performer some type of Entertainer um I went to film school i' I you know ended up being pretty good in my film school to the point where they placed one person in a job in Hollywood and it was me uh as an editor and so I got placed on a film called Ides of March um and I was an assistant editor on that film bottom ofth the barrel assistant editor a job that today is done by AI but I was there to you know the the this thing I basically synced audio and video that was it um for the dailies so dailies came in every day I would sync them and then pass them to the next editor um I sat in a pitch black room every day uh the the distance from the entrance of the studio to the editing room was probably like 100t but I would walk as slowly as possible just in case a producer saw me and they were like there he is that's the guy put him in the movie uh never happened but I would sit in this room and I just like didn't get it I was like this is not the entertainment industry like all the editors were in cargo shorts and hoodies and were kind of overweight and just sitting in this dark room I was like this is not what I imagined at all um and I I went out to lunch with the head editor and he asked me he was like you you know you seem a little kind of not into this is this what you want to be doing and I was like I think I want to make stuff I don't know how to explain it any further but I just know that I'm capable I can edit something top to bottom I can also film something I can also come up with an idea and I can also be in it and uh he said he gave me the best advice I've ever received he said so here's the deal you are an assistant editor from me right now and you're pretty good I like having you around I will hire you again as an assistant editor and I'll recommend you to my friends as an assistant editor and one day in 10 years maybe you could be me is that what you want I was like absolutely not and he said okay so I'm gonna urge you to leave right now and go do exactly what you want to do exactly what's in your head go do that because in 10 years from now you'll get the opportunity to do more of that whatever that is and I left and that's right when I said you know what I want to do everything so I'm gonna make my own network because then I can do everything I'm gon I can film I can be in it I can edit I can make the programming decisions I'm gonna do everything yeah so that's that's how it came about because then it was like so what can I talk about the thing that I know the most about the thing that I know the most people in the community that I'm organically a part of of Lacrosse and where can I take this network the only place where they can't say no the internet so that's how that came about there's so many ideas that are just SP sparking in my mind um one of the questions I've been thinking about a lot is what would you do if you won the lottery what would you do if money was no object and I I often like to I I ask myself that question quite a lot in terms of helping figure out like what are my core values what are the things I intrinsically want to do but I also find that if I'm doing a sort of having coffee with a friend and they're like asking for advice or any on anything I'll just open up with that question be like hey you know what do you actually want to do and that's a scary question to answer for a lot of people because for a lot of people they're like I don't know like we're so used to thinking in terms of being a cog in a machine the schooling system and everything like that that it's if we imagine the constraints lifted from us it's almost hard to imagine what we would like to do and often when people do imagine that they they they would say some things like well to do music I'd love to write books I'd love to do art I'd love to create stuff but then the immediate push back in their own minds is oh but you can't make money from that and so is it's like a lot of people seem to have these creative aspirations but I held back with the but it's not it's never going to make money yeah I was lucky enough to be a terrible student and so I knew I would be a terrible employee so I I it was never in my mind that I could go be an employee somewhere so that that was never an option for me and my dad's an entrepreneur um it just wasn't I was it just wasn't an option yeah different for Colin so how did how did you decide to take the plunge well I mean I guess if I'm backing up for me I grew up in an area where everyone kind of went into finance and wanted to be a banker I kind of thought that's what I would do I went to college and was a business major coming in in the business school for no other reason than I just thought that's what you're supposed to do you go to college you go do business and you get out you do business you make money and got into school and found myself like very uninspired quickly by my accounting and statistics and finance classes and bought a camera after I graduated and knew that I wanted to do something entrepreneurial like Samir was saying it was like the startup era when it was all about having your own company your own thing and I was like all right I don't know what it is but if I know how to film I know how to edit I know how to put up the website and how to design the logo then I'll be Leaps and Bounds ahead if I just know how to do all the those things that I think an entrepreneur needs to do yeah uh then I'll be all right I'll at least be a little bit ahead um so for me I just found it interesting from an identity standpoint and I went into college thinking I was some sort of way I was a business-minded person and came out realizing actually no I'm much more of a creative person I want to work on Creative projects and that's kind of what got me going um so yeah I mean when I graduated from college I was working at the front desk of a hotel and after I would get off work I would go film and edit just to teach myself and it was those early videos that I made which were about lacrosse that Samir saw yeah and so when Samir invited me to come to Los Angeles for what was going to be just even three months I was like Wow someone will pay me anything $700 a month to go do this because I didn't study this so it was a no-brainer was like yeah absolutely nice so you guys sorry I was just going to say to answer the question about money the first the first three years you know the exposure to the company uh I think was around $770,000 a year total what does exposure mean meaning like how much we spent because we used one of my dad my dad had a warehouse he wasn't using in Downtown LA and we moved in there um which was you know an interesting experience there was like cockroaches and a a bathroom that barely worked and you know it was it was a true cool startup experience but we were lucky enough to have a space cuz prior to that we were in my bedroom um which is actually really fun and cool and funny um and like stereotypical startup I was living at home so I I didn't receive any money um for basically up until we sold the company um and you know it was an interesting experience because it was very it was very tense I would say like within two years because two years in it's like okay we have a creative contract with my dad's company this doesn't feel good we aren't making any money you know this isn't this this isn't right like this doesn't feel right but what did feel right was we were creating these videos having a lot of fun creating the videos and there was an audience reacting to it and I was just like how do we hold on to this so then we started doing we were like what you know we can be a creative shop for other people and so we did random things we did uh we would make websites for $1 thousand and I remember having an argument with Colin and and um Julian who was uh the guy who I started the company with um about the ,000 I was like that's that's not enough we should charge more and I remember uh Julian said to me like well we need to at least do one thing so that we can you know have a proof of concept and sell more and so like we would get into arguments about how much we could charge we we started building computers for people we just did whatever we could figure out because we were like we have to keep this YouTube channel going but we have to make just enough money to get bought yeah it's like amongst the three of us whoever had a certain type of skill set was like all right we'll charge for that skill set you know whatever it is Colin had a friend who needed stickers I remember he came into the the office one day and he was like uh my friend needs stickers you think we could make stickers and I was like yeah we can make stickers we charged him 800 bucks to make stickers and we bought them for like 500 so it's like made $300 you know it's just random things to just keep the YouTube channel going um I think we had a belief that I had a belief that advertising would come a lot quicker but again I was I was riddled with naite at the time that you know yes people were making money on YouTube no people were not making money with lacrosse videos so um luckily enough we got acquired by a sports Media company and and when I say acquired it was an aqua hire so one of the greatest yes there was you know money exchanged but one of the greatest things was that they gave us all jobs um and so we all had jobs at a company and got to continue working on the Lacrosse Network but also immediate within weeks we're working with dude perfect and so immediately we were like okay now we're working with successful creators and athletes we started working with Jeremy Lynn started working with um Giannis uh started working with all these NBA players and teaching them about everything we knew about YouTube which again in 2014 for guys who had been doing YouTube for three years we were the most experienced guys in sports YouTube I remember having so much imposter syndrome when we first got acquired thinking why are they doing this I'm going to get fired they made a huge mistake col thought he was going to get fired within the first two days I I remember a call with with Colin because we were working on something and basically immediately the aqua hire meant like our stuff went over there it got bought by the company and absorbed so we did keep working on that but again it wasn't making really much money maybe by that time we had covered like I think that year we had made $90,000 so like at least we were covering our own oh like 90k divided by three so you on like 30k celeries yes yes it's not too bad and that's with like year three of the business yes yes okay and how much money you're making now though however comfortably you sharing that I think I I actually this is not a cop out I don't know the actual 100% like number but you know we are we are making you know in the in the millions um I would say probably this year we'll cover two million if not a little bit more than that revenue or profit uh Revenue nice yeah and what sort of margins are you guys running out uh we we have taken on a lot more expense this year um we've taken on a lot more expense we have a bigger office we have a bigger team we're kind of in in a of like investing into the company so this year I think our our profit is less I mean one of the great things right now is that I am pretty far removed from this now we have hired people to help us with our finances and it's kind of crazy for me because even as I say that number I'm like I don't even I I know that that's some that somewhat accurate but it might be off and we're halfway into the year and I'm not 100% sure and that is scary but also really freeing because one of my goals this year was to lean into being Talent yeah you know like I want to be good at the craft of being present during more creative projects I don't want to sit in a creative project and think about how much money it represents I think also that's after years of you know the the era that we're talking about with Lacrosse Network being 10 plus years ago over 10 years ago it was no money no money got a real got a job got acquired but it was essentially just a job for very normal salary then we left those jobs and then it was no money no money no money negative money no money you know a little bit and then 2022 was it right the first year that we really hit being last year of course we had deals that came in that allowed us to exist yeah but for the first year we actually made money at the end of the year it was like oh there's money in the bank yeah yeah there was a surplus of money at the end of last year time ever was last year which was essentially yeah us getting paid right like we we do distributions at the end of the year and that's when we know how much money we make right um so it's it's a really interesting trajectory because colins's right there was years where um you know when so basically we we sold the company we sold Lacross Network we um got into the world of uh this company had great jobs had a really great I I call it our MBA we learned everything about the Creator space you know what what is referred to as the Creator economy was getting figured out in real time in that company right we were learning about how how companies were working and and and everything so um that was a really great experience and we got I would say overconfident in that company we felt really good we were able to grow the Lacrosse Network to become a profitable division of that company which was like really impressive to me um and very exciting and then we were able to help you know people like dude perfect or you know any of the other clients there figure out their revenue monetization I felt really good and so we decided Ed one day over pasta that we would leave uh and start our own thing and primarily because we didn't want to do Sports forever we didn't want to be the lacrosse guys forever we we were in love with the process of making videos but not in love with sports um and so we were like oh Casey neistat's vlogging he's got a Channel with his name on it we could do it right Colin and Samir and uh I remember everyone at the company kind of speculated that we had some something going on we were we were we had raised some money or we were joining another company and we actually just left M we just left our jobs and I think the first week Colin was like on the beach yeah lost and called me and he was like so what do we do and I was like at home and I was like I I feel like you started directing your energy into your family business very quickly after it was like all right well that's done and now you know I'm needed over here I'll plug in over there and I was just on the beach like this is wrong something's wrong here so we got together and just were like okay yeah you're right let's just start making videos and we just started making videos like no plan one of the most ill-advised things but again this was the second time that we were lucky enough to be this naive uh to just be like we'll just start it we'll just make videos we'll see what happens let's say you were speaking to um a let's say someone in their 20s they've just graduated University May they've tried a job for six months and they're like screw the job like job's not for me I want to become a Creator what would you if you if you had to give this person if you were their like mentors and you you you were giving them a road map what would be the road map now that it's 2023 to succeed in the Creator economy you have to buy the course to find out you can't answer that yeah I'll invoice you after no I'm kidding um so as I look back on that I think the one thing that we always agree upon was that we went into um making the Colin and smeir Channel with being very like um selfish creators which is completely fine it's like here's what we want to make yeah right here's what we want but if you're if you want to be a Creator then you have to be empathetic towards the audience and we were not an artist has no empathy to the audience right an artist paints something and says this is what I wanted to paint I don't care what you think about it and as if you want to be an artist that is a thing if you want to be a Creator you have to be empathe towards the audience there's a balance between what you want to make what the audience wants and what the platform wants there's three things that make up you know what you want to make what the audience wants and what the platform wants yeah okay that's something that we call content Market fit is finding you know that that right in the middle of that is content Market fit what you want to make what the audience wants to watch and what the platform wants this episode is very kindly brought to you by none other than hu now I've been a pain customer of hu since 2017 I first discovered it in my 5ifth year of medical school and if you haven't heard of it it's basically a meal in a bottle and in that meal you get a balanced mixture of carbohydrates and fats and proteins and fiber and it also 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story of exactly how heel came together so head over to heel.com deepdive and thank you so much heel for sponsoring this episode this episode is sponsored by kajabi and they've actually got something really valuable for all of our deep dive listeners now if you haven't heard of kajabi it's basically a platform that helps creators diversify their revenue with courses and membership sites and communities and podcasts and coaching tools so it's one of the best places for creators and entrepreneurs to build a sustainable business we started using kajabi earlier this year and as soon as we started using it we were like oh my God why haven't we been using this product for the last 3 years it's got everything you'd possibly need for running an online course or hosting an online community or building an online coaching business and it essentially makes it really easy to run your entire online business from payments to marketing tools to analytics kajabi has everything that we creators need all 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kajabi have paid out over6 billion dollar to creators that's billion with a be and over a thousand creators have become millionaires through products on the platform now back in May 2023 I did a keynote at a kajabi in real life kajabi Heroes Event in Austin Texas and in that keynote I talked about the exact steps that I use to grow my business from zero to over $2.5 million per year from course Revenue alone now people paid for the pretty expensive tickets to watch this keynote at the kajabi hero live event but as an exclusive deal for deep dive listeners kajabi have very kindly offered to provide the recording of that keynote completely for free to anyone who listens to this podcast so if you're interested in getting completely free access to that keynote just head over to kajabi.com Ali that's kajabi.com Ali and that'll be linked in the show notes and the video description as well you just enter your email address and then you will get the recording of that keynote completely for free whether or not you ever become a kajabi customer so thank you so much to kajabi for sponsoring this episode okay so let's say I'm like you know I really want to be a music YouTuber I love Kurt Schneider I love that voice Avenue era of uh popular song covers on YouTube and I want to I want to make money on YouTube playing guitar and singing songs and I'm and you guys are my mentors how would How would how how how would we be having that conversation I would say if you want to make money figure out another way to make money to start I think that's one of the biggest mistakes we made when we started this YouTube channel was that we did not really think about where money would come from and we assumed that it would come pretty immediately from this new pursuit of creating YouTube videos because we had just come from a background in YouTube why wouldn't it we kind of thought we understood how that would work but it it made us make choices that were based out of fear taking different production projects and things that took energy away from what we were trying to put into this creative Pursuit so I think if you love music and you want to make money from it figure out a different way to start to make money from it so that you can just focus on the creative side and when it comes to the the video making side the first question I would ask you is who's the audience oh I'd be like I don't know like people who want covers of Ed sharan songs on YouTube okay and how much of that is available to them loads of people Shar so i' ask you to scan that right and say okay cool now go study who else is doing what you want to do why are they watching what's interesting about it you know like do they have space to watch five of these in a row is that the culture of this audience where else do they hang out on the internet outside of um YouTube and a lot of what we've learned I would say over the past 12 years is this process of studying audiences because we are again we are part of the equation but the audience is we're playing p with an audience right that's what the internet is really great at we throw something out the audience reacts to it and we understand oh interesting that's what you what you guys like that's what you didn't like okay let me try this oh okay now I just learned something new about you guys so creating being a creator for the internet is a collaborative process with the audience and so you have to deeply before you embark on this journey Define who you're speaking to and understand them it's okay for that to evolve I don't want to say that you have to put yourself in like a very tight box in the beginning but that's the first question I would ask you is lead with who you are speaking to why is it valuable to them y because you are asking people to invest time in your edar and cover so what's their return on that investment how does it differ from what someone else is offering it's like somewhat similar to just general entrepreneurship or launching a product like is there enough space for you in this market if you are going to enter that market are you different are you singular do you stand out or are you replaceable and a lot of times you're not going to you should think about it up front and you should figure that out but a lot of times that's going to come from starting but I do think sometimes people would get Leaps and Bounds ahead if they were more aware of the market they were entering or the space before they did it yeah yeah the way that I I I think of this that I that I teach this in our course is um you know sort of three levels level one get going level two get good and level three get smart so get going I would say is like the first three videos just like put the videos on there it doesn't matter like don't overthink it because loads of people get stuck in overthinking um especially if they've come from a background where they've been to University and done well or they've already been in a job and done well suddenly to go into YouTube it's like oh the overthinking stops them from doing from doing anything just make a handful of videos see how it feels see what the vibe is and then I would say level two is get good which is still while you have a day job like get good at the craft of actually making videos and get to a point where the stuff you're making no longer makes you cringe and as soon as you stop cringing at your stuff that means it's reached some level of internal quality but if you start getting responses from the audience like like comment subscribes whatever the thing might be that's an external barometer for is the thing you're making actually good and at that point now that you know how to make a thing that is good then we can worry about like are we treating this like a hobby or are we treating it like a business if it's a hobby do what you want have fun do your Ed un covers no one cares if we're treating it like a business a business exists to serve an audience and there for like all the things around treating it like a business I I would say that's the other you know that's the question before the question about the audience is like why why do you want to do it right is it is it a hobby or is it do you have commercial intent or do you not know yet you don't have to know when you start you know like commercializing your creativity is a very complicated thing to do it's not clean you know it's not a clean process what do you mean creativity is a very at least for me like coming from you know growing up and and playing music I think about the concept of writing songs and how enjoyable it was to write a song and think about how like songs would just come I had a lyric book I would write I would just kind of enjoy the process of writing music um if that became a commercial thing right now I don't know what my relationship with that would be if I had to do it right or if someone pays you to do it and if people start paying you to do it you all of a sudden are evaluating your ideas based on a value system that is quantitative and a quantitative value system we all know on YouTube is a uh it's a very just I think it's a tricky thing to do with your creativity you think about a creative video idea you're like I love this idea you put it out it tanks do you still love the idea or did something just happen did something just change about what you feel about the idea you know like you finish the video you love it and you put it out and based on if it's a one out of 10 or a 10 out of 10 you your emotions towards it might change dramatically yeah there are videos that I've put out that I thought this is really bad and it does well I'm like oh you know what it was good all along and you know what I actually love that video now and I would do another one yeah so that just immediately when you have performance-based creativity it's a completely different thing than creativity have you ever worked with a creative person hired a creative person who's not motivated by money you may not attract that type of person I don't think so honestly like like even hearing you guys talk about creative stuff that's completely the opposite World from where I've grown up which is all about like imagine like imagine working with someone who doesn't care about the paycheck they really care about the final outcome of the work in the way that they would prefer it to be oh I have students like this on my YouTuber it's so frustrating heard about these people yeah when they say why is my channel not growing and I'm like like who who's the audience like what's like why should watch you it's like oh no but I I really wanted to make this and I I think it's really I think my message is really important yeah okay but like clearly other people don't so like think mistake the sometimes creatives mistake what's happening on YouTube for creativity uh that there isn't a lot of creativity on YouTube yeah not that there isn't but again like let's take a look at the film industry yeah why are there so many Spider-Mans because it's commercially successful it works because it puts butts in seats okay that's just like the simplest thing I can say about the film business right so if you want to be in the film business if you were to decide I want to be in the film business you're playing by those rules what puts butts and seats if you want to be a filmmaker you can be a filmmaker but you might not play with the film business it might intersect a couple of times but those are it's okay for those to be decoupled yeah right it's like how it's like how someone who enjoys making coffee is very different to someone who runs a profitable coffee business or coffee shop completely different things completely different things with like minor overlap but like broadly completely different things yeah different things um col said this to me one time he was like I think uh we we thought YouTube was about monetizing self-expression but it's not does that make sense it can be of course within certain confines and in many ways you look at our Channel what we're doing right now your channel sure you are monetizing a bit of self-expression but there are compromises which gets increasingly more difficult when you're compromising on yourself yeah yeah you know and and all this to say we found a format that for me at least I feel has allowed for me to be myself and an uncompromised version of myself and have that intersect with commercial viability and I feel really lucky about that because there was a lot of versions of like attempts at YouTube that I was not I was not being 100% myself you know and I I if I was good at not being myself I would have pursued acting which I wanted to do but I wasn't good at it I can't pretend for that long um and so I feel very grateful that we found a format where it's like when you watch our videos like I that is me I am Samir in that context I'm not playing a role like we had coffee with James Hoffman before this um at his coffee shop and we spent three hours with him basically funny enough felt like we did a podcast without recording it it's like it's exactly the conversations we enjoy having it's exactly the people I'm interested in it's exactly how I show up in those conversations and I feel really lucky that that is what we get to to do but for the record I'm a paid actor just to make sure that that's clear for everyone listening and watching I do have to ask myself how many of these conversations would I do if there if it wasn't tied to you know Commercial Success how much would I upload how much you right like you you do have to think about that too it's like okay is this what you know and that's what running a creative business is you know and I think that's that's the thing the advice I would give is like just get really smart on understanding what making it means to you like what is making it to you what is what does that mean to like make it on YouTube what are you imagining in your head and then also like you know do you deeply authentically care about providing value to the audience that you've told me you you want to have because if you do then you can have a long career um then you're going to wake up every day and be like okay this lifestyle is really enjoyable the process of making videos is really enjoyable I get to do the thing I'm about I feel like myself while I'm doing it and the people on the other side are really happy and I I get joy from providing value to them you can make some some sorts of businesses work on some sort of like a you know a lot of people have jobs which they're not fully passionate about yeah but you know it makes money it gets them by to what extent do you guys think that passion is a prerequisite for success in Creator Creator economy land I think it really depends what type of person you are you know if you're motivated by metrics if you're motivated by dollars the message or the medium or or what you're putting into the creative side is not as important so you're it's easier for you to compromise it's easier for you to make decisions that will allow you to be financially successful also the yeah the passion that you have is towards uh entrepreneurship or making money that's a completely fine passion to have you know and like if the we've met creators who say I am an entrepreneur just happens to be that my product is and I think that's a completely fine thing I just think all of this is like a process of self-discovery and self-awareness of like if that's the case that's completely fine you're going to make different decisions about video you know and that's that you're going to make different decisions than I would but I have to understand that I'm the type of person that deeply cares about the craft of the video and what it looks like what it sounds like what goes out to the the people on the other side I deeply care about that and I would sacrifice um the numbers on the screen going up uh in exchange for for me being happier with the video yeah it's like this these different approaches there there are some people that approach YouTube or whatever the platform is from the perspective of a creative trying to make money yeah and then there are others that approach it from a perspective of an entrepreneur trying to make money who's recognized that there's a nation there's like a oh I can make a faceless YouTube channel with AI and stuff ex that capitalizes on this High CPM Niche kind of thing I think we um when the term the Creator economy came I think it was in like 2020 maybe it was the first time I had heard it um and it was so funny because it was the first time I was like oh wow there's a name for the thing that we talk about people are calling it something that's interesting um but I think that word Creator got way too used in a way that assumes that everyone is the same like every Creator is the same but I think the word Creator is very similar to the word athlete like if I said this is a show for athletes you would say what what kind of athletes right and think that's what the term Creator is like I think there's like within athlete there's tennis players soccer players basketball players lacrosse players and they all have different wants needs training regimens and there's amateurs and professionals sem professionals all all that so the amount of variants there are in the term athlete I think there's that many if not more variants in the term Creator yeah and I think we we oftentimes assume differently yes that's a really good point this is partly why like you know when like I really struggle to make videos like how how to succeed as a Creator in 2023 it's like a good title and it's like oh we know it's going to it might do well but it's like H how do we even begin to talk to all these people and so even the title for this podcast episode I was thinking it's like how to succeed in the Creator economy okay I can get why we would title it that but also like okay where where do we even begin like just yeah and and what I found and I'm curious to hear your guys thoughts on this what I found is that like I I really struggle to like if someone asks me how do you succeed on YouTube all I really know is my own Playbook of educational talking head videos providing value to a small niche of people monetizing it through a course on the back end and doing that for six years that's a pretty reasonable formula for success in my opinion provided you have something some sort of expertise something to teach in a market that's not that's not so saturated that you can't stand out but you guys speak to for example Mr Beast or dream and people like that who have made it in the Creator economy and a completely different way so I guess my question for you guys is of all the people that you've interviewed and spoken to about this stuff do you see any like what are the commonalities you see amongst the creators who manage to make it professionally versus the ones who either just keep it as a hobby or who who like quit after a while uh for me it's Focus yeah I was going to say the same thing Focus like when you talk to you you've spoken to Marquez Marquez brownley is someone who is like you think about some of these people and the amount of opportunities that they've had to to expand into other directions and the ones that really remain focused on uploading videos consistently are the ones who win like and I I speak from a a place of um you know experience of as we started to see some traction I was like took a pen to pad and I was like great now we can launch this business and this business and this and this and this and if we expand like this and hire these people then we can do that and you lose focus pretty quickly and I would say discipline rides right alongside that focus and discipline like those the ability um to have Focus discipline even when we talked to Jimmy recently right like Mr Beast is refocusing in on Main Channel and Feasta bles those are the two things and that's a lot running a massive chocolate company and a the one of the biggest entertainment Platforms in the world even that is a lot like you know even that is too much for for one person and he has a lot of help to do it so he's someone who's told us many times focus on making the best next video and the world will open up to you you know and I I I agree on that and I think sometimes creators eject out of that way too soon like eject out of that Focus too soon like I look at Colin and Samir and although it might feel in a way to some people maybe someone listening uh that oh that's an established brand in the space we are brand new we are a brand new brand I often times think about companies if you think about a like a toddler right or like a baby a one-year-old company can you leave that alone and like allow it to fend for itself no a six-year-old no right we six years ago was our first upload and I would say we really came about in 2020 so we're like three years old you know so so you have to actually continue to do the fundamentals of just keeping this thing uh alive allowing it to develop um and I think we overestimate a lot of times like how much we can do and how much we we should do and again I'm speaking from a space of experience myself of um really having to learn how to refocus and and really having to have discipline on like we are going to do this we have a lot of brand building to do um we need to be best-in class at what we do first and maybe that's it maybe we will never expand beyond that but let's try and be best in class and can we focus enough can we be disciplined enough to be consistent MH because that's really difficult I think some of the top creators are all consistent they found a way to be consistent even though in our opinion creative people are often not consistent people we ourselves are not consistent I do think that's our biggest struggle can we focus enough can we be disciplined enough to remain consistent because even now that we've found a format and we're two years in every day I wake up and go oh I could do that how do I make space to do that thing over there what if we cleared three months to do that and things that are sort of not in what you what probably anyone who would be looking at us from a business perspective would recommend how does this tie in okay so I I I have two thoughts here both are somewhat gobbled the first is a fear that I often have that I've had for a while and I'm only just realizing it as I put it into words is that what if I got a lucky break what if you know it's it's unusual to see a YouTuber who is relevant today who was relevant 10 years ago outside of the tech guys like there's very few people who've managed to sustain that longevity audiences are fickle audiences thingies change like uh you know Vibes and uh preferences change over time what's to say that if I just continue making videos consistently actually next year or the year after the year after that I'll I'll still I'll still be relevant I'll still be around therefore should I not focus on diversification and trying to build a platform off of YouTube and trying to build all these things just in case I'm not in fact relevant I become a hasb been two or three years from now that to me is like uh and again I'm going to speak from a a deep place of experience that is like very fear-based thinking in my opinion right like you're there's something that you're afraid of there of of becoming irrelevant yeah um I think that like my experience right now is like I've I've somehow worked out a way to relinquish a lot of that fear oh how'd you do that um a mix of uh you know like being married to a therapist uh lot of journaling and uh slight help from psychedelics but um I would say that like relinquishing some of that fear around scarcity and abundance is is what I'll say so I've grew up in a very scarcity mindset environment right growing up in an immigrant household especially immigrant I sorry especially Indian immigrants right like coming to America like that's scarce scarcity mindset at you know my my parents and I I assume that there's a lot of Trauma from the partition um that that came through and that is like we have to acquire everything and hold on to it and what if it all goes away tomorrow because that did happen yeah right that did happen but um as I've you know come into this space uh I've I've started to learn that we are in a abundant environment and not abundant from a dollar's perspective I could we could not make any I think money comes into goes and like it could all go away um but I'm in an abundant environment because of the people that I know and the network that I've built and the skills that I have I have an abundance of skills I have an abundance uh in network and I have abundance in just my own ability to know how to utilize that Network and utilize my skills so if everything went away do I actually believe I am the type of person that would let all of this fall right and that would actually let this hit you know Rock Bottom in some way like what am I afraid of because my worst case scenario is not that bad and there's a lot of people I could call along the way a falling down that right so if I'm operating at a space of fear it is actually incredibly irrational because there's nothing to be afraid of so if I can relinquish some of that fear what what does the world look like and this is we were talking about this at lunch I got to speak with a business coach um at the um at the spotter Summit so spotter is a company that I don't know if you're familiar with spotter um they're a company in the US that that works with creators and gives creators financing uh and we Colin and I helped co-host a summit where we brought experts in to talk to creators and we got to reap the benefits of that as well because we got to sit down with a lot of the experts and one of the experts there was a was a business coach and I was explaining this to him because I was dealing with a lot of scarcity mindset I was making a lot of decisions out of fear I was feeling an incredible amount of fear to the point where I couldn't sleep um because we had built something and when you build something you have something to lose and I was terrified of losing and he said something that was really powerful to me he was like you have entered into a world of abundance you are an abundant vers or you don't know the Abundant version of yourself you don't even trust the Abundant version of yourself the scarcity mindset version of yourself got you here helped you achieve a dream yeah so you don't trust abundant Samir to make a decision for you to take you to the next place because that person is brand new that's a stranger and he said to me the same amount of time you need to build trust with a stranger is going to be the same amount of time and work to build trust with this new version of yourself real business coach thing to say really good and I loved it and that's when I realized I was like okay there's a new version of myself that I'm coming into but that's going to take a long time and it's still you know it still manifests in a space of like when we get offered a brand deal I'm terrified to say no terrified you know if I say no they'll give it to someone else and then they'll like that experience and then they'll never work with us because they'll only work with our competitors and then you know and that's that's incredibly fear-based so I always have to take a step back and go am I making this decision out of fear or am I making this decision because it's the decision that we want to make that we are excited about that sounds fun for us that is a decision from abundance um I'm not saying we nailed it but like we are we are working on that or I am working on that personally for me I also want to be honest and say that it's way easier to think about dealing with irrelevance if it were to come tomorrow because we have found some relevance true just being fully transparent you know when we back in 2019 we had negative $118,000 in our bank account we shut down the company essentially I moved home we had yet to be successful and it really hurt from an identity perspective an ego perspective confidence I didn't know where I would work what I would do what value I could bring to anyone and because we were able to find some success in 2021 and then in 2022 cross over a million subscribers have people call us your favorite Creator's favorite Creator things like that to get that validation if it were to all go away tomorrow I'd go okay at least I can close that chapter knowing I did it of course I don't want to wake up tomorrow and be irrelevant but there's a sense of calm that comes from feeling like we quote unquote made it after so many years of thinking we could never this season is Once Again being sponsored very kindly by trading 212 now people 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Euros or US dollars so if any of that sounds up your straight then do please hit the link in the video description or in the show notes and that will let you sign up to trading 212 and if you use that link you will also get a completely free share up to the value of £1 so it's literally free money so you might as well so thank you so much trading 212 for sponsoring this episode this is so interesting like we were I was having this conversation with with the the team yesterday we were um so we're about to launch launch my book and we were thinking like what do we want the pre-order bonuses to be and one of my thoughts was let's make a $300 productivity course and just give it away for free as a pre-order incentive cuz that's a grand slam offer it's like you the book for $20 and you get a $300 course sick amazing but then there was some push back from the team um around but like are we really going to give away this $300 product like we could make money from it like how do we know we don't need the money like you know our YouTuber Academy is now stopped and and tinon our YouTube producer who we met earlier at lunch um said guys it it seems like with with we we're we're we're we're having this conversation from a place of fear like what if we just decided to bet on ourselves instead yes and in which case we would make a decision that's like best for the audience that is more from a place of abundance and we would give away this course cuz like why not we might as well yeah but from a place of fear it's like uh oh the 5,000 people who pre-ordered the book they the warmest audience they might buy this for $300 that's like 15K we're losing out on like uh oh oh my God and it starts to spiral into this fear-based situation I would say also like you know we are incredibly lucky to talk to people for a living and Tim Ferris is one of those people and he talked about the concept of fear setting which I think is like one of the most important exercises I've ever heard about I it it has stuck with me and it is something that I actually use um which if you're unfamiliar with it the concept is the same way that we would goal set we should also fear set we should write down our fears and then actually play them out he has a framework it's on his website I would recommend you check it out um but essentially like you write down the fear then you write down um you know how you you essentially take it you're like all right for example I just did a 10day vacation and I have in the past had a lot of fear around vacation vacation is terrifying to me what if so here's one of my fears what if someone emails with an opportunity and I'm not at my email okay well that's a even as you hear it out loud that's a ridiculous fear you just route it to your agent or route it to Colin or route it to someone else to read it and then it's okay well what if it's an opportunity that we want but I can't do because I'm on vacation well if you value vacation then you are that is a reality that's going to happen yeah oh okay okay that's not actually that bad yeah uh and then you just keep going down okay how could I repair it quote unquote well we can just email them and see if we can do it when I'm back right it's just like there's so many it sounds ridiculous as you go down and you start to realize like oh these fears are just I haven't thought them through yet yeah they're very surface level and so they're they're um eating at me because my imagination is so powerful and I'm I'm a Storyteller inherently so I'm able to tell myself a completely invalid story um but if I live it out and write it down it's like oh okay actually it's completely fine um um so yeah that's that's has been incredibly helpful oh man I love the fear setting exercise any anytime I feel any sort of existential crisis about my business or anything I just Google Tim Tim feris Fear setting literally just go through it type it all out and I'm like at the end of it I'm like cool my conclusion from all of this is things are totally fine yeah I enjoy making videos I can just keep making videos yeah and just that's that's it I would share some advice for you know young creators of like the the the way to experience some of that is uh or what we're talking about of like relinquishing some fear like I think fear a lot of fear comes from um maybe building too fast you know like let's say you have a great Q4 yeah and you're like oh my ad rates are up the channel is exploding this is amazing we should hire three more people we should sign a one-year lease on a uh on a really expensive Studio we should you know invest in all these different things um being a a creative and being a creative business you have to expect some level of volatility and not just volatility in the market you have to expect emotional volatility and I think emotional volatility of like I'm in love with this process of making videos right now it's so fun could there be a more fun job paired with I hate this I don't want to do this anymore you know I don't want to make a video today I'm not feeling up to it I want to make one video this month instead of four that level of emotional volatility or just you know you have to leave space for that and if you tie your creativity to Too Much overhead now you're afraid now you're like now I can't pay people now people depend on me now I'm going to disappoint people that's terrifying right that's that's when fear really starts to build up when you're like I can't pay my rent I can't oh my God I'm not going to make any money because to run my business costs so much money so yeah sure we're making a million dollars but I'm spending 990 you know like that's that's when you're in a scary place right and if you have two people running the company expect two times the emotional volatility what is that Dynamic like because it's it's unusual to have co-founders like a duo in the Creator economy I suppose there's a r and Link um there R link U but most of them are couples yeah like mat and Abby I love the couple yeah for the record like we are a couple because that is the most searched the most searched question question about colere or colon inter dating uh just see us in a frame and they assume we like sleep in bunk beds in the same room and the how how could we not be in this box together um but no I have a wife and Colin has a fiance so unfortunately uh to to to quell those rumors we are not doing um but you know that said it's not different from a a marriage you know I'm married and it's it's not uh there's some things that are different but it's not uh you know there's emotional similarities to it of having a partner uh attaching your your yourself to someone your ability to earn is attached to someone your ability to express is attached to someone uh your bank account is attached to someone like there's so much that's attached right our our context to other people I'm Samir from Colin and Samir right you know that that's that's also yeah I was surprised when I first heard your surname I was like oh yeah I guess you've got a surname yeah exactly yeah yeah and so many people call me Colin which is so funny because they like they look at me and they're like Colin and Samir yeah you know like his first name is Colin they Samir first like oh Colin wait what what yeah so we we are like to package yourselves uh is is a very you know it's it's it's not an easy thing to do and I I would say that it's um I saw this we both saw this on Twitter but someone said uh if if you don't want to split the company evenly with your co-founder or co-founders you should not be co-founders if you don't believe that you are providing equal value y you should not enter into that business together and um I think that's a really important thing you know and you have to believe that wholeheartedly and hold on to that belief for the entirety of the project um you know is like we are equals in this project we support each other without either of us it doesn't exist um that's a super important thing um I think value alignment is more important than creative alignment of what do we value about life what do we care about when it comes to life because we will spend the majority of our life together right like you spend more time together than you do with your respective Partners at times yeah for sure I mean on a day-to-day yeah we're together for 8 to 10 hours during the day um that's really significant you know so yeah there's a lot of complex Dynamics to it I don't know much of a life without it cuz we've been doing we've been creating together for 12 years oh that's so wholesome yeah yeah it is wholesome it's probably why people think we're dating I mean even for us it's strange or at least surpris no one thinks Rett and Link are dating yeah we don't know that yeah actually I guess we don't know that I guess I've never once thought that they were dating but I didn't think of that about you guys some reason I guess cuz you're cuz you're younger so like maybe we're younger yeah I don't know we're just more stylish than them that's probably but you don't want to go on record I don't want to go they have stylist they're more stylish if I can just for a quick second I would like to redact just for a quick second if I can say how jealous I am of how stylish I think R link are every time I see them I'm just like they look Dynamite so okay go what what were you saying call now I'm just thinking about R and Link style fashionable they are there there's only two occasions where I've seen R and Link the first one is in their YouTube ad for Wix before I had YouTube premium we written link and we made our website with Wix and the second one was their interview with you like I did not really know anything I think they're very us Centric yeah they like i' never heard us outside of that Wick's ad and then you you them you're like are those the guys from the wi I was like wo these guys are huge they've got whoa and I was finding out about them for the first time in your interview with them I was like Dam this is this is a good setup there did we answer your question what was your question um what's it like being co-founders oh yeah what's it like Co yeah I don't know anything else it's uh it's a lot of what you said you don't you don't make 100% of the decisions that you would make you don't spend time 100% of the way you would make it you don't get 100 % of your identity in public you're sharing a lot of it and uh takes a lot of compromise a lot of uh communication and a lot of belief that the time spent together is uh worth it is enjoyable and is producing now the life that that you actually want yeah there's all you know as a bit as in a business you know it costs a lot of money to run our business right now because you know we we've gotten a bigger student again we're investing a lot into the business right now um but whatever my financial ambition is I have to double it for us right as a company and um that's our reality right and I think you have to that is hard and so you have to um look at the cost benefit and be like but the benefit of this so heavily outweighs you know that cost that of course I'll do it and it's not even a question there's not even that evaluation it's just like this is the only way I could be doing this thing I'm doing right now which I am enjoying doing and I also you know there's a moment where we cross a million subscribers while giving a speech at vidsummit yeah which was not planned and a very intense emotional experience um and sharing that moment with someone is what to me is powerful about this whole journey is that Colin and I can always look at each other and go dude can you believe this m mhm we did it or we're doing it or we just did that isn't that crazy and like I can say that to Colin and he can say back to me yeah man it is crazy and like you know I can say that to my wife or to my brother and my dad my mom and they can kind of be like yeah yeah it seems It's really impressive what you're doing that's so cool it's like do you want to go on a roller coaster by yourself or you want to go on it with someone that that you enjoy who can affirm to you that it was scary it was fun it was everything that you also thought in your head that yeah and so I think that that is like you know that that to me is like I think life is meant to be shared I think creative projects are more fun when they're collaborative like I just have a belief system that this is a collaborative thing to do um it's more fun to collaborate and so if we're looking at fun as a metric which it should be for everyone in a creative business uh then this is more fun would either of you ever start a couple's Channel with your respective wives fiance not no shot I am I have just the amount of exposure that I want yeah okay to my personality to everything to thinking about a brand yeah I find it incredibly difficult I haven't posted on Instagram in over two years because I can't do it and do it just objectively what do you mean like I can't do it I I have to ask why am I posting that who's the audience for this with what reason what isor this I know that won't perform because I understand some of these platforms and it's just I like I need to just focus on the YouTube channel the business that we're building I can't spend mental energy let alone on another like couple's Endeavor it would be far too much I I I enjoy like posting about personal stuff I occasionally post on Instagram and when I feel like it I enjoy it um but yeah I I am this to me like in terms of amount of recognition we have I I feel very fulfilled in it I feel uh like I have enough I don't I don't crave uh Fame you know beyond the the recognition we have right now so when I think about that and I definitely don't crave it in the context of my relationship what I crave in the context of my relationship is quality time and that to me does not include a camera so you know that changes the dynamic it's a it's another person in the room it's another you're you're you are it's completely different um and I think like life is very fun like traveling with my wife and you know we just went to Italy and just had a great time and we walk to coffee shops in the morning like I don't want sometimes we we go to coffee shops or we go to dinner and you know people sometimes more than others people come up and you know want to talk or take pictures and um that's like so incredibly like to me I'm still like that's insane that people would want to come up and and chat luckily our fans and the who watch our show are like professionals you know and so they come up and they're so respectful and you get to have like a really cool conversation but I wouldn't want that in the context of my relationship you know of people looking at my relationship and and being fans of my relationship like I that to me is there's nothing about that that sounds interesting or attractive I my answer might have been different in my early 20s when I when I really craved Fame uh but I think that's wrapped up in a lot of different things and I I don't I don't have that feeling at all anymore yeah interesting interesting I love uh being on this side of the mic and looking at you and being like where's he about to take that did I just drop something that he is now changing his trajectory so I've been I've been intrigued by the idea of like the coup's channel is a phenomenon for a while oh so you want to do it I I'm not sure this this is the thing I'm I'm trying to figure out yeah this is what I'm trying to figure out because you know I've got a podcast that I occasionally do with my brother we've been doing it since 2019 initially it was very consistent now less so but it's nice cuz we just rock up what's the what's the podcast called it's called Uh not overthinking oh not overing yeah SE it's it's kind of nice good memories Good Vibes get to chat with my brother kind of thing and it's a fun little joint project that we do together at one point we had episode sponsored and we hated that because it put a requirement on it and we got rid of the sponsors and now it's purely a passion project yes and so my idea for a coup's channel is like well let's say I were to start a couple's Channel with someone else and it was purely a hobby like we never there no there's never on upload schedule it's it's just like we talk about relationship stuff occasionally we like reading relationship books and it's like here's what we learned could be kind of helpful uh maybe a brand might sponsor us to go stay in a nice resort for a week or some something like that I have this sort of like somewhat idealistic like oh it would be fun to do this joint project with someone else um but then I think about it and I think about like do I need the fame no do I need the money no like would I be trying to make it a commercial asset no do I can just go on the day to the resort anyway like regardless of whether it's free or not you want to go to the resort and do a deliverable with yourfriend not not recognized as the couple that understands how to be a couple like if you're trying things you know you're reading books and you're talking about it the perception may be that you have it all figured out yeah or that we're learning learning along the way um and even if you are actually learning along the way you know I would say the perception may not be that my advice for you would be if you crave it to do it without without Distributing it for a while oh interesting yeah like make videos with your significant other and just watch them back yourself with her y maybe show a friend or family like I think we have lost the art of uh experimenting and practicing in private we think everything needs to be an exp a public experiment yeah and public experiments uh come with a lot of just complications they come with especially as you are a you know recognized brand in the space whatever you do people are going to talk about and be like Ali abdal launches you know X Channel why did he do that let's break it down seven reasons why ol up doll you know I'm like that's going to color some of your thinking um the strategy of it is going to color some of your thinking like I think you can do it in private you know when I really we had this conversation the other day we talk about the start of the Colin in Sim your channel as you know September 2016 we never talk about the start of the Colin in smir podcast which is essentially what has become our entire career career which was in 2018 when we were really down and out having an existential crisis cuz we couldn't make any money as creatives and decided as almost an act of therapy to get on mics to have open conversations with each other because it created a container where we sat and looked at each other and talked about how we felt about what was going on for an hour or two and it was one of the most therapeutic things that we could have done was decide that we would just grab my and talk to each other and that when I think about it is like something I'd like to do with my dad I'd like to create that container with my dad I'd like to do that with my wife do I need to distribute it no I could just record it but what I actually want is the container I want that space yeah yeah I keep thinking about home movies the fact that I actually do have from my younger years home movies shot by my mom or my dad that were just sitting on tapes in my house and of course when they film them it was just to hold on to these memories and even as I travel with my fiance next week or I think about like having kids I don't want to not have home movies and home video I just may not want to put them out in public and I think we started the podcast that way in a way it was like let's just record this because it's something we're going through something we want to do was like putting it on a shelf not that many people were listening to it back then uh but now I'm so happy that we did that and we have those those memories and and that understand of what it was like there's an episode that I will cherish forever which is uh the most Hollywood thing we've ever done it was at a time where we decided you know okay none of this is working but our dream is to we were making some branded documentaries and like our background that's what we're passionate about that's what brought us together was our love of documentary storytelling and so um we had made some successful documentaries in the more like branded world we never made like an entertainment documentary and during the quibby era I don't know if you remember this wow quibby was not a thing here the Americans listening who are in the entertainment business I remember quibby it was essentially a wildly well-funded distribution platform that was looking for Content okay through a series of crazy events Colin and I got the opportunity to um create a Sizzle reel and pitch a show with a with a creative partner who was uh named Tom Boyd who's an awesome Creator who had filmed essentially Home Videos in Atlanta living in a house with Justin Bieber and an artist named Asher Roth and they had worked together um Asher Roth was like signed by scooter braa who's Justin Bieber's manager and uh had you know was an emerging artist in Atlanta scooter found Justin moved him into the house too and they all lived together and Tom was there as like a creative partner and was filming all of it scooter kind of suggested to him maybe we'll make like an MTV show about this music house so Tom filmed all of it and he called us and was like Hey I I found all this this footage of like these early days with Justin Bieber and um this song that we wrote that essentially saved scooters company that then financed Justin Bieber's career like there's this crazy story about this time and we're like okay cool we'd love to make a dock we're looking to make a dock this sounds like a really good dock and we basically got the the opportunity to create a pitch create a Sizzle reel and go pitch this to scooter braa and when we went there uh to our surprise as we're pitching the show Justin Bieber walks in the room and there's four of us one of them is Justin Bieber and it was just a crazy experience the most La kind of Hollywood trying to make it his filmmakers experience within half an hour of ending that meeting we we got mics and just told the story back so we wouldn't forget every detail and we put it up on our podcast feed again no one listened to it but it was just like now I sometimes go back and listen to that episode because it was so funny and fun and we were laughing and it was like what a crazy experience we had nothing happened with that pitch it did not pan out but that memory being captured with no commercial intent is so pure to me and it's so great to go back and be like that was a time in my 20s when I was trying different things and Colin and I would stay up all night making these Sizzle reels and pitches and be like maybe this is the project that'll make our career you know and just having these crazy experiences and that's what I think maybe We crave and we we mix that up with the Desire with with maybe justifying it through commercial intent you know you're like well if I'm going to film me and my girlfriend I should probably monetize it right because I know how to monetize video but I don't think you need to do that yeah that's a yeah it's a it's a a thought process that that goes through my head annoyingly often when whenever I do like I was playing Diablo 4 the other day and I was thinking oh it's such a waste of time doing this and not streaming it like I should stream this on Twitch exactly like twitch is dying like YouTube game oh I guess okay cool I guess I stream it on the main Channel or on the second Channel and then I guess you know might as well restream iio to like all the other platforms and I suppose I can answer question from the audience while it's happening suppose we can record that chop it up into I just [ __ ] I'm just going to sit here and play Diablo 4 for a little bit it's okay it's all good that like confusion around like should this be productive is something I've wrestled with my entire life and still wrestle with if I sit on the couch I'm like sitting on the couch what what could I be doing while sitting on the C okay I'll text people I'll text you know uh people about ideas I'll get feedback on ideas maybe I'll call my mom maybe it's like sitting in Stillness is one of the most challenging things to do or just even enjoying something for a moment like I'll just read this book oh but this book Maybe by reading this book I'll know how to write a book okay that's good that'll justify it yeah I found that I found that for me over over time it's it's it's kind of annoying in a way but I've I've been increasingly reading fewer and fewer books each year because before any downtime would be spent listening to something on Audible at 3x speed and then I'd be making videos about how I read 100 bucks year hold on can we just pause on that 3x speed I mean it depends on the narrator but sometimes 2.5 sometimes three if it's a really dense book 1.5 that is wild I am like 1.25 is my Max oh you can slowly work it up over time if you really want to but 3x is insane I mean for for most like non-fiction books if you self-help books if you understand the vi you can you can kind of get through the message but I used to do that quite a lot and then that would lead to these great videos where it's like how you know how I read how I read 100 books a year kind of thing it's not that hard if you listen to an audio book every 3 days at 3x speed yeah if you bump that up to 100x you could probably prob read a million hold back um but now increasingly like even when I'm driving I'll often just think you know what we just like not listen to anything or go for a walk and hide Park and not listen to anything like actively yeah and hard it's hard but I think over time I'm becoming more and more comfortable with it which then also means I'm like oh man I used to be the 100 books a year guy and now I read like 25 this year oh wow what a waste man you know that kind of thing you know what I found to be the most helpful uh activity if you want to start to practice not being stimulated by Audio or video and that sounds like crazy even when I say it but swimming uh I started swimming and you're underwater in this Flow State just with your thoughts yeah and like the first few lengths it's kind of like you're focused on the swimming and then after a while it goes like huh I'm just here underwater with no inputs I can't speak I can't listen to anything I'm just here yeah that to me is like the most present it's that and playing paddle tennis oh because when you're playing paddle tennis if you lose focus on the ball you're like you're going to lose the point or you're not going to hit the ball you have to like focus on this green ball it's like very nice to just be like I'm present I'm focused yeah it's funny I think the value of there being too of us is that I'm not like that oh yeah you know that I can I mean I can I always since I've been a student I can sit and focus on one thing for hours or I can go to the beach not listen to music not do anything and sit for an hour I just like have that ability I think to like like have a baseline that's a little bit Zen VI and maybe that's because I'm not like a son of immigrants and like I was not raised in a in that type you know of environment uh but I think it's it is like a very like different thing about the two of us it's also the yeah again back to the question about co-founders it's that's why it works right like I I said this uh the other day in a pod that we were talking but I I said like my job is to create the canvas Colin's job is to paint on it that is how we operate okay um I bust the door into a room and say we can do this and then I actually don't know how we're going to do it and then Colin walks into the room and does it yeah right like and helps us do it like that is that has been our relationship for 12 years not that we don't flow over to you know the other side and help but that that has really been the relationship even us being here in London right now I was not going to be the one to say like to push and to buy the ticket and be like yes we're going to London we're going to interview all these people yeah but then once the decision is made we can craft it sink into it creatively turn it into what we want it to be yeah so that that is also like again like the the the exploration of like value in Partnership is like you know you have to look at the other person and be like I I I like deeply respect empathize understand and value your contribution to this in a way that's like uh I don't know how to explain it but in a way that's like it would never even come into question like it just it's not even something and I I would say that's that differs from other Partnerships that I've been in where you kind of go to bed and you're questioning the value that each person is contributing or you're questioning like hm is this split right am I getting compensated enough for this is this like if you're entering into doing a creative project with someone like the way we do it you that I wouldn't do it if that ever that question ever arises in your head I also want to add one thing to you playing Diablo 4 and feeling guilty about it yeah so oh no so I I was playing it while on my walking treadmill so I got the steps in you figured that out there it is so I tried also play listening to listening to an audio book and I was like no that's too much just those two things there was a moment a few years back when I kind of had a similar feeling watching shows on like Netflix and whatnot documentaries and things like that and feeling like am I spending a lot of my time consuming y here and not really creating and a really good friend of ours who was a professional lacrosse player that we met during our time there still you know was a groomsman in samir's wedding Paul Rael uh that we've done a lot of projects with said to me he was like no that's part of your job you're heavily on the creative side of this business you need to be watching studying relaxing at times taking in these inputs that are a bit unexpected like you need to be exposed to all these things so if you're staying up late and you feel guilty watching something or staying up late waking up late the next day that's okay don't don't be so hard on yourself because try and think about where that actually fits into your creative process not necessarily your the productivity side of your brain or the productive process there's a um a little bit different uh on the concept of rest um there is a Tim Ferris podcast with Jerry Colona I cannot recommend it enough it's about um rest breaks and doing different things and the value of that in your entrepreneurship okay yeah I just have to recommend it I think it it read defined my relationship with the rest sick yeah I will check it out you guys both at various points use the phrase uh finding a format you say you found the format which you now have what do you mean finding the format a format is the most powerful thing in media period like finding a format is the whole thing in my opinion you look at some of the most popular shows hot Ones hot ones is a format right Shan Evans sits across he can explain the format well right okay I'm going to interview someone and we're going to eat progressively hotter and hotter Wings right questions are hot the wings are hotter something like that whatever the the tagline is uh Amelia de molenberg not to stay in the chicken space but chicken shop date right and when you find a format you can get better at that format you can collaborate within that format you can build a team around that format you can build a brand around a format right formats are the key that unlocks success in Media um it allows for that consistency that we were talking about earlier that's really difficult for creatives to find yeah but if you can find a format again you know how long it takes you know how much it costs right let's look at how many you can make let's look at other examples uh Ryan Tran the penny series that is a format I am going to start with a penny I can only you know get things through this Penny and I'm going to achieve this goal at the end of it that is a format let look at Mr Beast um $1 Thing versus really expensive thing that is a format right he is replicating a format and getting better at a format so you know largely I think I I if you want to make it as a Creator um there is a you know there is an unlock which is finding your format finding that thing that you like to make yeah that the audience wants and that the platform likes and and again within that format you can also figure out how does a SP sponsor fit into this format where does the sponsor fit in does the sponsor fit in y right and so all of a sudden you have a product the product is the format and so if if we are you looking at media as a business then that is what you're building the most successful formats in the world you know if you zoom out American Idol that is a format right that can be scaled replicated built upon there can be an audience for that format so like that is that that is I think um what you're looking for uh when it comes to building a career on the internet uh as an online Creator looking for a format and for us specifically we were doing Vlogs we were doing video essays and then finally when we turned the podcast into video form that's the unlock for us that's what worked that's what we could handle that's what we could build a process around we could hire for we could get out on a consistent basis we could get better at doing it yeah yeah that makes so much sense I feel like so much stuff has just sort of clicked in place in my mind and I'm never really had the terminology to describe it but I guess like with my channel I've been experimenting a little bit with formats over the years at one point there was I started off with Vlogs as the format then moved to talking head videos that are educational in 5 to 15 minutes and then experimented with more like voiceover Vlog as the format experimented with like long form study with me video as the format experimented with like me giving advice while walking around experimented with like Matt Della documentary style format H but really what it always comes down to is me talking to a camera 15 minutes and having random [ __ ] come up the screen occasionally that's the format and I keep on thinking I keep on getting format fomo like Johnny Harris Johnny Harris is format gets him 5 million views a video like oh [ __ ] like why don't I do videos like that format fomo is such a good term I like that term I've never heard that before format what uh format fomo what the guys at Charisma on command do like breakdowns I'm like oh like what if I could do a breakdown of productivity it's such a good ter real but um again we're not consistent people or creative people so that's why you have the fomo you're like I'd like to do that over there yeah yeah yeah the um I would say the like the alab doll format one of the greatest things is I can close my eyes and envision it right that's a brand a brand is consistent a brand is something that can be talked about I can say oh yeah Ali abdal he's a he's a creator that does these list videos about productivity about evidence-based studies you know like I can I can talk about your brand because you have a format um if we did a different video every single time sure there might be people are like I like these guys calling in smeir they make uh creative videos yeah that's hard to to build and again it's this is all coming from a place of like us articulating what it has taken to turn this into a commercially successful entity not what it is taken to be creatively fulfilled that is a different thing um so like finding a format in media is the biggest unlock from a commercial perspective that's that's the thing that can take you do you guys get format fomo these days all the time yeah of course what it every time I watch YouTube Netflix Instagram at all times I think that'd be probably fun to make I have for fomo with you personally yeah with your videos I I've I think I've always wanted to have that Avenue of like looking into a camera and and articulating ideas and and um things that I've learned I've just always wanted that um and I've never pursued it so like I have format fomo with that I think we collectively have format fomo with documentary yeah Johnny Harris with the breakdown video essay definitely have format fomo with that I think our interview show came from me having format fomo uh of podcasts I I spent a lot of my 20s listening to Tim Ferris listening to how I built this as DX Shepard came about listening to Dax talk to actors like and that was like I would love to do that you know that's that for me is where the the interview show came from I was like that's cool no one's doing that in the world that I really care about that I think is actually the future of entertainment and Entrepreneurship so let's try that to what extent should should you experiment with formats even once you found your format that works I think everything's like you should always be experimenting as a creative I think the thing about even our podcast is what happened was we were ex we were making these like explainer videos on our Channel people who've been watching for a while know we found a format that was working which was Colin and I sit in the car and break down you know something about YouTube yeah and that was a great format it was fun it got way too hot in the car cuz for some reason we wouldn't let ourselves turn on the AC we thought it would mess up the sound so we would just sweat profus in the car it took a lot of writing and a lot of research and a lot of creativity that you know was was intense the post- production really sat on Colin's shoulders which was a lot of work and a lot of effort um and it was hard for us to be consistent within that format so when we wanted to experiment with a podcast we started a podcast YouTube channel and we started uploading the Colin and smeir podcast to that YouTube channel oh yeah the col and smeir show yeah yeah well it was called and we interviewed we gave we did A's first interview on that channel we did an interview with graham Stefan we talked to each other on that channel we probably did 20 episodes over there and then what we realized was okay these car videos are working and they're good and people like them but we can only really make like one a month or one every six weeks the podcast while we've been doing that we've made once a week so that's the format because we can do that so so now we're ready let's bring that to the main Channel and the views were comparable yeah and then on some other ones they were exceeding what we were doing exposive on the breakdown so it was just like you found a format that you can be it's easier to do it's more consistent you enjoy it yeah requires less post-production great yeah and so now that's become our engine right like that's the basis of what we do it's the basis of the business but because we have an engine MH we now have allowed ourselves space to experiment a little bit more freely so I'd say don't experiment without an engine and don't experiment in the engine yeah you know if you don't if you don't have to you should always be trying to get better and and experiment within the confines of like you know how to how to make the engine better um but we also changed the name from the colme podcast to the Colin itsme show and that was really intentional because as we brought it to YouTube we started thinking about what we were doing in the car could also kind of be done in this new show format where maybe sometimes there would be a guest maybe sometimes it would just be me and Colin maybe sometimes we would do it a little different and so to allow for that variance we called it the Colin and smir show that was intentional to say there might be a level of variation here it might not always feel like a podcast so let's call it a show and that that was the decision to change from Colin andir podcast to Colin andir show and then there was still a lot of experimentation and I would probably say a lot of identity like complications within identity of here's two guys who you know and I'll let Colin speak more to this but like who set out to become documentary filmmakers and now we have a talk show was this what we wanted yeah I mean I was accustomed to feeling a sense of selfworth from editing storytelling even holding a camera yeah so to then forego that for an unedited hour plus conversation where conversation was what was valued it was really difficult for me to be like oh I have to just I'm going to shed the part of my identity that gives me what I think like validation from myself that was kind of scary um and I think I've kind of fought it over the last two years of taking conversations and hyperediting them when we first started yeah they were very hyperedited stuff hyperedited I I was feeling so much fomo of that format I was like oh man we should totally like do a podcast where we hyperedit everything no you should it's well if you want to do it sure if you want if you want to but yeah the format that and it was really interesting because this was a moment of like you know creative collaboration that I you know I could feel was like I was a consumer of long form podcasts Colin was but not re not as much definitely not in video form yeah and so like I was a consumer of this format I I had format fomo of this format uh I I was really happy when we found a talk show format I was like this is what I want to do I could see myself doing this for a very long time yeah you know and still to this day I'm like I I I've pinched me moments when we do the interviews like sitting across from Tim Ferris was crazy sitting across from dream was like I love this this is amazing like we get to have long conversations with people that inspire me uh and that I'm curious about that to me seems still like insane uh that that is our job now you know we have to fly to London to have conversations I think I've said it every day we've been here like this crazy is this G we can do this we can just the dog yeah yeah yeah yeah it's it's amazing uh it's it's incredible but it took a long time to accept I would say between our our collaboration to say we are podcasters we are talk show hosts that is what we do that took that took time to re establish this identity and it doesn't mean that's all we are that is the format that is the engine of the business at the end of last year we got to experiment with a documentary we got to spend 24 hours with Mr Beast as he opened his first physical restaurant that was awesome that was just me and Colin holding cameras and then we got to collaborate um with one of our editors Chris who really helped us while we continued to push the engine forward you know essentially create this story that we were really proud of and create this documentary that was the type of documentary that we wanted to make and so the engine is what unlocked the rest of the world to us the the dream which was let's make this documentary and for me I didn't feel like I was missing out on anything like I look back on that year and that one project was enough to feel proud of to like scratch that creative itch to experiment and do something different to do something more filmmaker and now I look at as oh my gosh what a gift that we get to speak to people and have a podcast that's the engine that we then get to experiment and I also think it is building the craft of documentary film making in a way because we're sitting and learning how to ask questions how to get to interesting conversations and we're building trust with people and if you really want to tell a good story you need access you need access you need trust you need to know how to tell an unscripted story which is what we're doing right now and it's what you build when you sit with someone for 2 hours you build that trust that's really good oh man finding the format it's like experiment until you find the format once you find the format you've unlocked your engine yes and now keep that engine running don't like screw the engine up because you're like chasing the the shiny thing but you can experiment on the side with the shiny thing if you really want to keep the engine going but also don't experiment too early cuz the engine will fall apart like build the engine make the engine strong like without an engine you don't have a car so like worry about like the color of the paint yeah um podcasts loads of people get format fomo about podcasts because they're like I can't believe you guys get to do this for a living where you sit down and talk to people I want some of that um to what extent would you guys recommend for someone who is completely new to the Creator World starting a podcast as the the thing that they do I think uh having a podcast is one of the most rewarding things you can do I would decouple it from the financial reward um this was a conversation we have tin Ferris he talked about there's the uh non-financial reward of having a podcast which is the conversations and the experience of getting to have long conversations then there is the performance and financial reward those are two separate things when you first start a podcast you should not even think about the financial reward one of the greatest things is that we didn't know that as we were starting a podcast from 2018 to 2021 really that podcast existed at as a fun thing that we got to do together so the reward if you really think about it guys who are not really making a lot of money were spending time every week making a podcast editing a podcast because it was rewarding from a lifestyle perspective from a fulfillment perspective from just I need to have this conversation I need to have this format so that we can sit together and talk about the ups and downs of what we're going through that was rewarding in itself so I would if you're going in as a Creator saying I want a podcast asked remove the monetization and just say I'm going to do this because I want to do this because it is rewarding for me to do this making a podcast is one of the least expensive things in the world for in the creative world not in the world but in the in the cretive world um it's not expensive you know we we had two mics laying around that were under $100 um we you know you could get a USB mic like you have right now that goes into your laptop you you can record a podcast on a very small budget um and you can also edit a podcast quickly you don't even have to edit it you can upload it through anchor or megaphone or like any of these there's there's services that are free that you can use like it is a lowcost low friction thing you shouldn't tie a ton of stuff to it you should just have it be a thing that you enjoy doing and if that turns into something amazing but I don't think you even know if you like it until you do 100 episodes you know maybe 50 episodes I don't think you'll know anything about your podcast until you do that so leave enough space for it to end at episode 30 yeah and what do you think is the commercial viability of the podcast format these days for someone completely new completely new to it that's hard yeah I think Discovery is really hard yeah Discovery obviously is difficult which is why a lot of people have taken to YouTube because you can use SEO and and find audiences I think when you find an audience it can be one of the most impactful ways obviously to monetize because you're in people's ears for hours at a time you know I remember there was this time where we we built to the point where we had like 2,000 people listening to our podcast in probably 2019 um and that to me was like a lot that was a lot of people I think it was like between 1500 and 2,000 people and we did this podcast episode where you know we were experiencing a deep existential crisis so I didn't know we didn't know why we were doing what we're doing we're very confused so I stayed up at night one night and wrote These like 17 questions that we were going to independently answer that would help us kind of reestablish our why why are we doing this and so I sent it to Colin we independently answered them and then we came on a podcast and answered them and it was really fun and really nice and at the end I gave a URL to download it at the end the last minute and it was a unique URL and 750 people downloaded it in the first day wow out of 2,000 people yeah and I was like like the list of questions yeah okay the PDF of questions and I was like whoa that is an incredibly engaged audience and that's when I realized that having a podcast having someone in between your ears for an hour or two hours every week is potentially you have them in your ear more than you have your own parents then you have your best friend then you have they are they're occupying the space in between your ears that is so incredibly deep that connection and so what I what what I would also suggest is like yes discover is really hard if you are like a brand new Creator and you're like I'm gonna upload a podcast that's going to be really hard if you have an audience okay that's you know that's why a lot of YouTubers start a podcast it's a simpler format um they already have distribution people people are already interested in them okay now they can have a podcast but you also can figure out how to monetize with a smaller audience in podcast because you have such a deep connection with them is it going to be in sponsorship that depends on your Niche that depends on your topic maybe you could get a title sponsor you could figure something like that out um but think about that premise of like if you're selling people something if you have a product that's truly valuable that's connected to the content they're probably the most engaged audience people who click on a podcast and an RSS feed are some of the most engaged I would say them and newsletter readers yeah yeah one thing that we um I I was looking at our kind of internal company metrics and stuff the other day and we track a bunch of things and I was I was looking for patterns and I was looking at the podcast and the podcast has about 20 times fewer subscribers and like similarly 20 times fewer views than the main Channel but then I looked at the watch hours yeah and the watch hours for the podcast are like half of what the main Channel is yeah and so there is like a 10x difference between watch time on the main Channel and watch time on the podcast given if we control for size I was just like wow yeah damn this podcast is actually like you need a very way smaller podcast to have a huge impact on people because of the forness of it like on our audio feed specifically uh We've like an 85% completion rate so you know even if you're sitting at 30,000 people listening to an episode but 85% complete it yeah it's like two hours of an hour or two whoa right that's like whoa and they will click no matter what you put up not they they aren't judging it based on a title and thumbnail they're like I trust you I trust you here so I'm gon to click it's a permission-based environment which is very different from YouTube which is an interruption based environment right I have to create a thumbnail that interrupts you in your feed enough that you stop and go hm okay I'm going to click that and then you click it and I still have to win yeah the next 10 seconds and then I still have to win the next 10 seconds for you to buy in right but an audio experience is kind of like like it what podcast do you listen to Tim Ferris for okay if if Tim FIS has a new episode and you don't know who the guest is how long will you give it oh like half an hour an hour half an hour that's the same answer that I have I will give it half an hour yeah who will give you half an hour on you exactly they'll give you 10 seconds real life yeah yeah so I think that that is what's so powerful about podcasting um let alone I think the fact that the lack of video sometimes can be to your advantage I think it's perhaps more engaging sometimes to just listen and fill in the gaps in your head of where they are and what they look like and how they're feeling that day then to watch the video and get all those things answered for you you're also the friend that keeps them company on their road trip or while they're doing laundry or you know while they're doing another task so it's kind of like it's like do I want to drive alone or would I like to bring one of my best friends in the car I'd rather bring my best friend of the car and that's who you are to to a lot of people which is so interesting in podcasting it's a completely different relationship um but yeah it's it's not easy it's not an easy thing to do because it's very saturated and and people only have a certain amount of time and you're asking for an hour or two hours of the time it's significant yeah yeah dring um changing gears a little bit you guys have a newsletter business as well called the published press yeah which was only when you guys were interviewing me in La that I I realized that oh that's a really clever name because it's like press published but like reversed and also it's like like whoa that's that's really clever I I can't believe I come that um what's the story behind the newsletter business and why did you decide to start a newslet business yeah so I I think um and what is a newsletter business just for people who might not be familiar with the publish press yeah I mean our business is uh content and sponsorship that's like to simplify it we produce content and we get relevant sponsors to sponsor that content that content happens in audio form in video form and now in written form um that's like the simplest version of it right and you look at um what the content stands for like what is the the the product that we are creating um well a lot of what we're doing is building a very hypers specific audience that's interested in a c certain topic um which is the creator economy and The Business of creators so as we started producing you know the podcast uh as a video podcast we were still having hiccups in the process and figuring it out but at maximum we were like we can make one of these a week you know that's that's maximum for us is what it felt like we can make one really good one a week um and we were aware we had a conversation with Alex liberman who was the one of the founders of morning Brew we had a nice call with him talked and I was like I'm curious about newsletters because I think the audience that we are building spends time in their email inbox like we're building a professional audience they care about this profession of being a Creator and a professional audience spends time listening to things and reading things and we're making YouTube videos so that attracts kind of the aspirational Creator and we break our audience up into aspiring creator career Creator and Creator industry okay the aspiring Creator is you know the Creator who knows how to make videos has probably made some videos that have hit or you know trying to figure it out and um they hang out on YouTube they get their education from YouTube right um the career Creator is someone who is making an income and trying to figure out how to progress in their career trying to learn from other career creators trying to um figure out how to make more money trying to understand the career looking for you know a sense of community they're feeling isolated um and then you go to the Creator industry those are people who want to work with creators they want to join the industry they want to understand creators more each one of those um categories of audience um has different wants and needs and requires different things and also hangs out in different places as I mentioned that visual to me is like a pyramid the aspiring Creator is the base of the pyramid um they hang out on YouTube big big audience that's a big audience it's on YouTube we're going to a ton of that audience and we need to provide them value right the career Creator is also on YouTube but they also open their email inbox right the uh Creator industry probably mostly opens their email inbox right so now where do we provide content in this pyramid YouTube podcast inbox so that's that's that was the thought right is like where do we provide value where do we catch our audience where they already exist because our exercise and these are worksheets that are you know going to be in our course or that we've already built for our course it's like how do you study where your audience is and that's what we realize audience is in the email inbox so we wanted to do it we we met with Alex liberman and talked to him about it understood like okay this is creating a good newsletter is similar to creating a good show right you have to get the right people involved you have to uh have people help you in in the way we wanted to do it we wanted to do something similar to morning bre which was hey can we tell three Creator stories and can we do that multiple times a week now we've gone from okay we tell one story in podcast form but we could potentially tell six stories in written form a week maybe nine could we do that how could we do that and so Alex introduced us uh to someone who was leaving morning Brew at the time named Josh Kaplan uh who came on as a consultant and helped us just figure out how to spin it up how do we how do we make a newsletter who do we hire what does it look like and what we did was we we brought on a writer and we ran it internally we built it and ran it as an internal newsletter at our company to say what is this process like is this good is this valuable is this anything you know is this a thing we want to do so we did I think maybe like two and a half three months we did it just internally a little over two months yeah I think what we realized too is that in our company Slack started to bring in more voices people who consume different parts of the crater economy than we do people who focus on gaming or fashion and realizing that within this slack Channel where everyone was sharing news that they were seeing throughout the day that we were building something really valuable that if people could have access to essentially a curated version of this that can kind of be the newsletter and I think we started to realize that in those two months of development by bringing in writers adding them to the slack Channel and that's where we were like oh that's where this value really is we can only tell so many stories on our YouTube channel we can only interview so many people because we primarily interview people whose content we watch or listen to and that's going to be capped Y and this was a way to see a much more holistic picture of what's happening with creators that we felt was valuable that we could distill to other people we talk a lot about the term value prop extension so you're like what is your value prop as a creator and what is an extension of that value prop so you know for us it was education or it is education right education and curation I would say I would say education curation and articulation we articulate what's happening in this industry right so those those three things are value propositions um education okay how can we extend that courses we can make well articulated well curated online courses that you could buy okay that's a Direction for us um education curation articulation we can write about the greater economy so that was the extension right and so like those were the two things we really looked at those are good extensions we could do events right we could do events that's that's pretty good but that's that's hard we don't know how to do that um and so that's where we said okay there's some choices here merchandise is a choice but is a t-shirt an extension of those three things I just said not really right it it does represent community and identity which is a part of our value proposition but not it's not what we lead with so that's where like newsletter made sense to us we can extend our value prop through this newsletter and that's why courses make sense to us those two things are extensions of our value propositions um and so as we ran it internally for a while then we said okay I think this is ready then we released it to a trusted group like a couple hundred people and basically asked the question is this valuable and the answer was yes and largely I think because of the curation there was so much happening someone tell me what matters you know what do I care about in the space if I'm a graduating college kid how do I learn quickly about what's happening in the Creator economy oh I could subscribe to this newsletter and learn right so it's like it just felt right and so then you know we we um released it we ran it we we ran it for a few months without any sponsorship just ran we acquired um you know thousands of readers and then um we started getting sponsorships and then we also realized uh at some point that this is its own company it we have our own writers for the company it needs to build its own culture it's uh it's its own thing and we're in the process of that now it's spun into its own company and you know the original team that helped us and brought on we brought on as consultants or partnered into it um we we own it with uh with two other people and um that is uh a whole experience in and of itself of building another content coming along what we do um but it follows the same thing we know make content get sponsors yeah like those are the things we know how to do so we we we are in that when I talk about courses although it's a value prop extension it's a different business you know that I've talked to you at length about courses and I'm very overwhelmed by this new business um and ready to get into it now that we have these engines that we've built but um courses is a new business it's a completely different business model merchandise is a new business model these are all new business models but creating content and selling sponsorship is a business model we are familiar with that's so interesting yeah I guess value prop extension yeah I guess for us it's the thing that we're good at is creating content and selling courses and so when I speak to people who struggle to make courses I'm like guys it's so easy but I'm forgetting that like we've been doing it for a while like I've been making courses since like 2013 like I've been doing this for a while 10 years of figuring that out yeah you're you're also Al good though at like taking uh Concepts and uh boiling them down into simple like well articulated videos so I would say the course thing makes sense but then us trying to build our own stationary brand which we tried to do last year adjacent yeah adjacent it's like one thing I'm exploring now is could we build our own productivity app which feels like valy prop extension in that we help people be more productive and build a life they love it's like cool instead of promoting apps that we don't own can we promote an app that we do own turns that making an app is really freaking hard everyone spoken to like bloody is really hard I'm like okay well if we made a $5 a month app for us to make anywhere near the amount of money we could make on a course it would require like hundreds of thousands of users MH it's almost not worth it like why are we trying do you invest in a productivity app do you have a long-term partnership with a productivity app that's what I would explore as a Creator it's like do you need to own it do you need to be in the software devel vment or app development business like probably not probably not right I'd love to be a minority shareholder in a other productivity app that I genuinely use that's available to you after this you'll get emails from people and you can evaluate those and maybe you can bring on someone on The Venture side to be like hey you know what we're going to set aside half a million dollars or $250,000 and we're going to make $50,000 investments into startups right and then you can you can scratch that itch of like I want this productivity app but let me get the people who are committing their life to software development let me not pretend like let's not pretend like I'm going to do that like are you ready for 10 years of learning that everything takes like 10 years so one one one question I was asking myself uh when journaling the other day was what would I do if I knew I wouldn't fail and on that list was I build a productivity app but then I asked myself what would I do even if I knew I would fail yeah and on that list was definitely not building productivity CU I was like absolutely hell no like if I knew it was going to fail why the hell would I build a and I was like ah hang on that's interesting that's interesting yeah even if I knew I would fail like one one thing that was in both lists is I just really like the idea of building like a stage show like a oneman stage show like Darren Brown me J kind of Vibes and that would be super fun as a bit of a side side project even if like it completely failed because I would want to combine like magic and music and like mentalism mind reading type stuff with like message I dabble yeah you know used to do closeup magic at parties and balls at University C tricks and [ __ ] you know wow B over there I would love to come see that show yeah so that feels really fun and that that's lit far underneath me of like oh this would be really cool but I'm also not imagining it's going to be like a particularly commercially yeah legit thing it's just like okay cool that's a bit of a a side Hustle but I like this idea of Valley prop extension how how do you square the newsletter with the whole Focus thing cuz it's not you're splitting your focus between like not just focusing on the the format that works I think we have sacrificed Focus yeah to get it off the ground there's no doubt in my mind yeah that the fact that we've done what we've done over the past couple of years while also launching that surprises me and I think there will be a period there is going to be a period now of getting focused back as we build it as its own company truly uh with someone at the helm who probably wakes up every single day and is like this is my soul Focus you know not just part of our Focus part of our focus is obviously heavily on what we're doing on the colon and smir side part of it is what's happening with the published press yeah I think uh as creators like we're very excited because we are creators the term is like about making things it's bringing ideas to life right and that's not just video so like I think we are great zero to one guys right now like we can come up with an idea and and really push it from zero to one and because of our distribution now we have an accelerant attached to that zero to one right which is great but the 1 to 10 needs to be done by a seasoned person and your role in the 1 to 10 is to continue building your distribution you know it's called the publish press that was intentional so that it could scale not the Colin Samir ex Colin and Samir everything we do with Colin and Samir unscalable the day we don't want to do it it's over it's an unscalable project and that's okay but what we want to do is build scalable projects alongside it right and so the publish press is a scalable project um and that requires team and operators to do that scaling right and and alongside the scaling we have to continue being the accelerant which is we have to build our show we have to come on shows like this we have to be Colin and smeir who own the company the publish press right and if we can be that alongside seasoned operators who can operate it and hire people and have a company culture there then we will find success um but the push poll is going to be can we let go enough to allow that team to develop on their own without us controlling it and being like that line didn't work why did and we are those type of guys right we are those guys who scrutinize everything um that goes out can we let go of the grip a little bit and play our role in this and allow the team to play their role um and so I think like as I look forward it's like there's a lot of zero to ones that I'm really excited about those are hard and they will sacrifice focus on what we're doing but you also have to know that you're not the person to go from 1 to 10 you are not there's no possib way you have to be the Creator I need some advice one thing we are considering doing is launching a daily newsletter called a daily productivity okay so I bought the domain daily productivity like daily stoic exactly like daily dad like fully inspired by Ryan holiday we spoke to Billy and Dawson from his team when we were in Austin Ryan's so good and we were like okay that's really cool uh I had um Alex lman on the Pod like last year talked about morning Brew is like that's an interesting model it's super inspired by what you guys are doing at the public at at the published press and the idea being like can we do daily stoic but like the productivity version where we give you a productiv an evidence-based productivity tip or an idea in your inbox every morning for your consideration or something like that where it's not tied to my name maybe for at the started daily productivity by Ali abdal or something but like over time we lose that thing and try and build its own thing around that thing what what do you reckon what are the thoughts that you'd be like what what sort of questions would you be asking what's how would you approach that how how would you write the content batch like would you write 365 before you launch it uh probably not um we are thinking we'd write seven and pilot it for seven days um with our audience and see what happens and then four weeks from now decide are we actually going to do this cuz we're in a bit of a we're not sure if we want to do this stage right now I definitely highly recommend what we did with keeping it internal pilot it internally for like start with just staff okay and I would think like friends yeah 60 to 90 days of piloting at a minimum yeah at a minimum but and I would also in that because what we do is topical what we do is let me tell you the latest let me tell you what matters that's that's hard right and like daily stoic is awesome because I can read it three years in a row in terms of the book not not the newsletter but like that's one of the greatest things um I would write 365 before you launch because what you're doing is it's not it doesn't it's not tied to date right no it's not yeah the ones that we wrote we couldn't couldn't so we we were writing and they couldn't but I would write I would just think about it as like we're going to spend three weekends writing 365 of these and once we because then you're happy with it you're happy with the project and then it goes out like decouple the production from the distribution because the overwhelming thing for me is writing 365 and that is what you're doing with the what's it called the daily daily productivity daily productivity what you're doing with that is you're building a ritual so if that doesn't hit my inbox at 9:00 a.m. or whatever the time it is you've you've [ __ ] my ritual I don't know if you swear on this podcast but yeah but uh like you have you have messed up my ritual um and you have to think about like ritual based content is about the ritual I might not care about what you sent on day 120 but my ritual is to click it open and drink my coffee and I'm habit stacking right to to quote James Clear there so you're building a habit for me so how do you ensure that you're going to hit me every day at the exact same time the way I would do that is write it all be happy with it and then distribute yeah why 365 why not like 90 because I thought you wanted to do it every single oh oh oh why 365 yeah so why would like why why not write 90 issues and then launch it if we're happy with the 90 and then figure it and then build build the tracks as the train is I think it depends on your relationship with the content yeah like I really I I would struggle if on day 92 I didn't like what was written and it was written by my team or like and it went out and I had to rush it and I had to make something that I didn't like I would really struggle with that and so that's why I say I would want 365 written before it went out um but if you're kind of like I give it space to be like I know that some of them are going to be 10 out of 10 and some of them are going to be three out of 10 but in aggregate the whole Project's going to be an eight out of 10 then you know maybe you can do that um but I I don't know how to get someone else to do that work that that I'm 100% happy with so I have to have a different relationship with with a lot of the stuff you may also want to make sure you have an understanding of what is that one out of 10 newsletter send and what is the you know five out of 10 or whatever it is so that you can actually space them out appropriately yeah instead of just you know like oh winging it yeah like running out getting close to running out then all of a sudden you may send a 5 out of 10 a 6 out of 10 a 7 out of 10 for multiple days in a row yeah uh and then your quality goes down but I think you can do the internal thing first right and be like is daily too much or is daily just right you know you have to answer that question too as a consumer yeah so I think you have to answer some of those questions first and then you can make the decision on which want to do the project but I would batch produce it that's good but it sounds right for your brand obviously like it's a prop extension also is it a newsletter is it a text oh is it an SMS oh right project through Community or something like that maybe I want it as a text yeah maybe maybe that's the option maybe my productivity um doesn't allow me or doesn't I'm not good at opening my email first thing in the morning or I just want to clear my inbox I don't want more clutter in there so give it to me somewhere else yeah maybe it's uh what Ryan did with daily stoic in podcast form and you know you can click a date and hear you say it I don't know I I would really look at like the distribution of it and what's like what do you like from the distribution but just think about those two things you know distribution being they're decoupled and they're different and you have to understand both um yeah are you glad you have a newsletter business yes yeah I I think uh based on what I talked about with um permission and Interruption um it's a permission based environment the people there have given us permission to be in their inbox they open it when we send they click on stuff that we recommend um that is a group that I feel like I have a deeper understanding of that I have uh a depth of connection with because of the permission they've given us on YouTube it's harder right because you're like I have to interrupt you you know but I kind of wish I could be like just just just watch whatever I put out yeah you know but that's not the case and um the newsletter format kind of allows us to to have this perion per based environment and if you don't want that anymore if you don't give us permission anymore you just unsubscribe and it's and it's done so the people who are there who are opening it that to me is like a very core group um yeah and I also think it's like it's been a really good lesson in scaling yeah I'm happy we tried something new like it has it own it has its own set of challenges that would not come from having a YouTube channel and it's interesting to learn about how to build a different type of slightly different type of product and business and to experience actually even the highs and the wins of like launching cool things with it or seeing people tweet about it and realizing oh I didn't I didn't have much of a hand in that newsletter send that day it's pretty cool that like something came out of our camp that people are resonating with that's really interesting I think also like uh we were with Matt from yes Theory who doesn't watch YouTube doesn't have Instagram doesn't really have social media but reads our newsletter and he said to us yesterday he was like that's how I keep up with this world and I was like that's that's so great and there's some people who I've gotten messages from who are like you know at UCLA or in in college who are like this is how I am learning about the job I want to have and to me that's the coolest possible thing and take it a step further there's people who have been hired because of the job listings we put in there there's creators who hit us up and they're like hey man I just hired an editor who applied through your newsletter that's crazy like that to me is transformation and transformation is very energizing and fulfilling as a Creator when you know you've trans formed someone why is going viral a bad thing I think it's not a bad thing it's only bad if you take the wrong indicators from it I think it was MKBHD who said the best thing that never happened to me was having an early video go viral if you have a video that goes viral it's your first one or your second one and the process was terrible you didn't like it but then you just take that as an indicator of that's exactly what I should do you're going to find yourself in a life that you don't like so I think it's just about having the understanding of the lifestyle you want if and when virality comes yeah I I think sometimes uh virality turns you into someone who is uh constantly seeking that outcome of virality and um I think the the thing to seek is the process right and so that that's that's my opinion of like I think as creators we should be seeking a a better more enjoyable process not necessarily the outcome like the outcome is a byproduct of that process um and so if we're just chasing the outcome and I'm speaking from a space of experience the DOP mean head of going viral is one of the most intoxicating things ever how did you guys feel off to your Mr Beast video because that was like two million views in like two days which one the the most recent one the interview oh I mean the thing is you get to a point where you can look at what you're creating and understand what you know the you understand the the the distribution perspective of that I think we felt some of our on the production side like we we had wished we had you know asked a few more questions we wish we had taken some different angles and like so there was some of it where we sat down as a team and we were like how can we do a better job of prepping that that's what we took away from that I I assumed that you know there would be a large audience for that you know that's not that's not a surprise the bigger Rush was 5 years ago when we made a video essay about David DOI and he shared it on Snapchat and it blew up up like crazy and you just comments are coming in and you think this is it we made it this is the moment Everything Will Change I I think the you know one of the the rushes for me came from you know when we did our interview I felt like it was a great conversation and I was like that was a rush when we did our interview with dream it was a rush when we did our interview with destroying we found places and avenues and uh learned things that was like a total rush we did our interview with Tim Ferris was a rush and like all of those have different metric numbers next to them from a distribution perspective but process wise some of those were really really fun and I felt like we were really prepped and we um really just nailed what it meant to be Colin and Samir in that conversation same with the try guys I think that was another one that felt really good and so some of those those to me feel really great but the virality of them is a separate thing and that is not entirely up to us it's it's up to how the audience receives it yeah you're focusing on what you can control yeah yeah which is the process and showing up consistently that's the more succinct way of saying what I just said yeah yeah I think this is um I've I've recently been reading the practice by Seth Goden oh such a great book um I highlighting the hell out of it I'm just like oh my God this is the advice I need right now where I'm having format foro I'm like oh you know maybe I should make more Johnny Harris videos it's really hard to make a Johnny Harris video and like I've been trying Johnny Harris is Johnny Harris because he knows how to make Johnny Harris videos yeah and then even speaking to you guys over lunch where I'm like yeah I don't if I should just continue with my three videos a week that are chill and nice and fun to film and I enjoy making them or do something completely different for the sake of chasing some numbers it's like the the answer is obvious as I even as I say it yeah it's the process rather than the result yeah um you mentioned something in a video around like 12 lessons from 12 Years on YouTube uh you mentioned brand is more important than reach in the long term what do you mean by that uh reach what we're talking about here views is many times filling space on these platforms if you think about Tik Tok shorts Instagram reals it's so quick the the amount of time that your video will come in there capture someone's attention and then they swipe and they move on you are potentially just feeling a void of space for a quick jolt of entertainment or whatever it is the person who watched your video may not remember who you are the value that you bring enough to come back again and again like that would be a brand so we're recommending and urging creators to think about how they can connect with people consistently over time in a way so much so that they can can have a brand that people will remember and we've been making uh comps to Severance which is such a great show I haven't seen it oh it's phenomenal it's amazing right and yet it hasn't been on the air in over a year right but when it comes back I'll watch it because the brand of the show is remarkable and it's so good that I'll wait for that and as a Creator you want to try and do a similar thing you don't want to feel like you have to upload every single day right yeah it's like back in the day when Sam C was making videos it's like every six months oh Sam CER video just dropped and everyone just flu to it in the sort of travel I don't even know if Sam CER has uploaded in the past year but if someone told me Sam CER was working on something I would think it was premium yeah yeah when you say sam CER I see a sunset in my head a beach cinematic super attractive guy doing a back flip he he actually hit me up on Instagram like two days ago Sam's great we worked with Sam on a on a project a couple years ago he's awesome yeah he's so cool like honestly you know what's upsetting is that he's that attractive and that cool you know yeah I know it's really unfair it's just you can't have all of it some has a brand so he can take breaks right this was about BR like a paid thing with DJI and it's like oh it's just such a good I'm going to watch it anyway even though I know it's an trades on like Brands trade at a premium yeah you know I don't know how many views Sam Colder's videos get I don't but if I was working at a brand I would want a Sam CER video yeah right talk video is sick great if I was working at uh yeah like DJI I'd be like yeah I want a Sam CER not because of his but because of the brand Association yeah we talk about this concept of Singularity that Sam CER is singular for a lot of people and for a lot of Brands DJI might not want just any Creator want want Sam CER and that goes for Brands too right Coca-Cola doesn't want you to just want any drink they want it to be Coca-Cola and so we urge creators to think about that how do you get to a point where you're singular you're irreplaceable and we have a worksheet for that oh in our course nice that we're building yeah that you're building when's it going to be released uh I would think September is safe um yeah September is safe yeah September is a safe bet like we are title for it yeah we have many yeah many titles for it uh we have a whiteboard full of titles but we're we're closing in on it I think like we're very uh confident in the curriculum of it and very confident in the worksheets like I think it's a it's a course that's self-discovery like you will discover a lot about yourself you discover a lot about your business um and you'll come out of the other side being prepped to figure out how to turn what you're doing creatively into a into a product into a business right I'm sold yeah there you go that was the sales pitch that sounds great sign me up yeah um yeah brand brand thing is interesting like I I feel like there's a lot of people these days who especially with the Advent of short form content there are millions of followers millions of views and completely broke like is that a pattern that you guys see as well mhm mhm yeah I think not only uh you know completely broke or not it's like millions of views millions of followers but could not fill a room if they had an event you know like nobody really cares um and I think that's because the the the platforms have done this really smart thing right and largely led by Tik Tok where it was like okay people are here for creators that is pretty volatile creators come and go they could leave they could like so what Tik Tok showed everyone is that the platform could be the Creator when you say I'm watching Tik Tok you are watching Tik Tok there's very few people who go on Tik Tok and say okay I go on Tik Tok I search Ali abdall now I'm watching ol abdall right no it's I'm watching Tik Tok I'm scrolling the for you page so Tik Tok is the creator yeah you take the top 10 creators off of Tik Tok Tik tok's still Tik Tok it's still enjoyable yep right and so YouTube I I believe you take the top 10 creators off YouTube it's a very different place um but YouTube was looking at Tik Tok and saying hm you know not only this is what the the younger generation likes but it's also a it's a safer bet for a platform yeah because if you stop making your videos is that going to change the shorts feed no you just replace it with something else yeah people may not even notice on a short form feed yeah no one's going to be scrolling be like interesting there's no Alia haven't seen one those in a while so like the feed is the Creator and that's like a really safe bet for the platforms but as the Creator you have to recognize that you are not really building your own individual brand you playing into the feed and you might be rewarded for playing into the feed but you were playing into the feed it's not to say some creators aren't doing it and building careers and building communities on short form content but I think it's way more difficult yeah and they're stick there's some creators who are sticking out dramatically and then they're they're typically though they're like building into a more you know kind of sticky format or something that gives them length like podcasting is is common if you build um a large audience or moving over to long form YouTube videos like long form if you can make it in long if you can use your short form videos to build your long form videos then you're in a good place if you guys were let's say you decided that today you were going to start a YouTube channel for example or what would be your balance of long form short form videos and how would you go about YouTube versus Tik Tok versus threads versus all the all the 10 different options we have for posting on platforms these days like if you were trying to build this crat economy career I can only speak from a completely biased perspective which is that I enjoy making long form content for YouTube because I enjoy watching YouTube yeah I would probably test uh formats on shorts because I think you need to practice a lot and you need to find your voice and I think shorts created a lower barrier to entry like when you say get going uh when I think about that the easiest way for me to get going would be to make short form content right but I think you have to have the understanding that you are doing that to find your voice for long form content at least for me I would be like I'm going to make shorts for a while to test the market test the audience find a group of people interested in the subject matter and then give them long form content that's what I would do nice uh Colin one thing you said that in one of your videos that you're not working on a YouTube channel you're working on yourself what do you what do you mean by that um I think that with everything obviously we've been talking a lot about process while we've been here and it's not the final video people see the final video right and maybe they spend 30 minutes 40 minutes with it but for me that was potentially a month of my life so I need to think about how I spent that month did I enjoy it so with every video I'm thinking about the process and then trying to adjust you know and that's where I think it is this process of like every video every experience as a part of this channel is an opportunity for me to reflect on myself and how I enjoyed it how I showed up in that video was I proud of that right I think it's also a lot about like how you choose to spend your time like we choose to spend our time making videos that then go out and are you know publicly judged or validated you know like why do I I always think about this like why do I do this and I think whatever you're doing whether it's making videos or entrepreneurship like it's all a process of self-discovery why am like who am I that I care about this so much that's what you're figuring out with every step of the way you know like next year am I going to want to upload more videos or less videos and what does that mean about me do I want to make more money why do I want to make more money what do I care about what's my value system I'm not going to care about everything we do equally yeah right you're going to care about things differently and even the way you care about something is going to change yeah right it'd be impossible for me to say I care equally about like our Discord our newsletter our interviews our Twitter account our Instagram account right that's all going to fluctuate and and I have to take stock of that and make decisions based off of how I feel if you guys won the lottery and you had 100 million in the bank What would about the way you spend your time if anything I I don't I think I would have coffee with more people and feel okay about that like feel okay about um spending a little bit more time and moving slower um I think that would be one big thing I I know that's so achievable but like this exercise is I think whenever I do this exercise it's to reveal like what is achievable in your life right now cuz at least for me most of what I want is very achievable just have to like uncover it um I think it would just be like time I would I would treat things um I would give time to more things like I would move a little slower in my creation um so that I could have more time for other things I would also build a recording studio so that musicians could come in and record and I could just be there that's been one of my dreams for at some point when I settle down and have a studio space I want to have like a creative campus somewhere like out in nature where people can come and create things yeah that would sick I think we're just describing Rick rubin's Shang now yeah but I have a friend who's doing it in ta New Mexico he bought a bunch of land and he's building a recording studio there and he's doing like artist residencies and like that's really popular as the writer writers go there to hang out yeah writers go there and so he's doing that as well his writers who are coming and like to be around that to be a part of that to enable that to absorb that like just creative people exploring creative things and specifically music for me is really important and I haven't gotten to be around it since I was in high school I'd love to be back around music so I I would just spend my time differently that's it you know like you just spend your time on things that are are enjoyable and exciting but I am a creative person I enjoy creating I would always create I'm not creating you know purely because I think it's a good uh financial decision I think there's a lot easier ways to make money than what we do so if it was about you know generating money I would do something different I think I would open up a budget for myself friends and particular and my family to fly either like first class or private to come see me or for me to go see them and try and minimize the Gap yeah of time that we don't see each other and make it really easy that's cool would you continue to do the the show the Colin andir show 100% Yeah question yeah that would be you had or if we both said no this thing no we hate each other yeah yeah without a doubt I mean like my answer is like so vehemently yes because the people that we meet like like I said what I would do is like have coffee with interesting people I I have a formula and a format to do that that allows for um you know a Ryan holiday to come and sit with us for three hours like I we have that so it's great yeah like that is that is great I would do more of it and some of it I would do off the mic back in the day the advice that you would often hear about growing a YouTube on YouTube or podcast whatever is the jab Jab jab right hook thing of like give away loads and loads and loads of free content this is the the Gary Gary Gary V model a jab is giving away free content and you do Jabs for like 50 times before you land a right hook the right hook is the ask the selling something and so the whole vibe was spend ages building an audience with free with free content you build an audience of people who know like and trust you and then when you decide to sell something there will be people who are willing to buy it I feel like that formula is sort of changing but I wonder to what like what are your guys views on how long should you spend building and creating free stuff before thinking about monetization when you're saying free stuff are you saying ad supported stuff oh yeah I mean like videos on YouTube for example that just have AdSense behind them before you start selling a product uh before you start selling a product yeah for example yeah so that depends on if you have a value prop extension that is a product right like or like it could be a digital product could be a physical product but like one of the greatest things about YouTube specifically um that is completely insane is that you can just create content and if you create a certain type of content you just magically receive a check every month and I don't want to oversell that that's hard to do but if you're that type of Creator who can do it that's the highest margin creative business that I've ever seen what what you don't have to get on the phone with an Advertiser you don't have to read a contract you don't have to negotiate a rate all of a sudden you're making stuff and a check comes that's crazy you know like you really think about that and like to me me sometimes I think it's crazy when creators complain about AdSense or or ad rates it's like it's not in our control like this is this is not our platform it's we you know yes we make up the platform but like we don't I don't know this thing is crazy that they just pay us and some of the ad rates are ludicrous that you see you're like oh my God it's also the only game in town yeah for the most part there aren't any other platforms who are offering splits like this at rates like this I think there's some tangibility that we can talk about of like when should you sell something and you know what we look at as like views from subscribers returning viewers like do you have a healthy Community are they actually coming back are you just really good at making titles and thumbnails that are reaching a completely new audience every time you upload um I wouldn't sell something if you are reaching a viral new audience every time you upload you could have you know five million views of video but it's new audience and they're kind of there just for entertainment they don't want to buy something from you but that could turn into a great sponsorship business and a great advertising business um if you have like 10 to 20,000 people who are coming back every single time you're like okay there's something here do I have an extension of my value that I can offer to them but it's going to be subjective like again back to the athlete thing that's like you know it's tough to say it's based on the athlete nice final question um what are you guys working on for the next six months up until the end of the year we are working on our course that is like one of the biggest things that we are working on um I a bunch of interviews we're here filming interviews we're working on you building our engine and solidifying our engine and and making sure that we have great interviews and content on our channel that provides the value that we've promised that's like number one right that always has to be number one on your priority list as a Creator um and then you know number two as we feel like the engine is getting more stable is is building out these new value prop extensions continuing to build out the publish press newsletter with the team that's there um and building this course which is a completely new business completely new thing a completely new cycle of creation and self-doubt and you know pricing and uh customer experience and student experience and design and funnels and acquisition all these new words that you know aren't familiar to us we're learning and it's taking us a lot longer than I think we anticipated um but I feel really confident in the curriculum we have a lot of learning to do on how to be an Ali AB doll um but we are we are learning and that everything takes longer than you think and this is taking us longer than we think and that's what we're going to commit the next six months to is extending this value prop into paid education nice and any final pieces of parting wisdom for anyone who's listened to the three hours of this podcast so far wow you're here yeah welcome welcome to the deep end welcome to the deep end here as we call it we're we we Dove really deep in this uh any parting words of wisdom um find as much time as you can to spend time with yourself for me that has come through the practice of of writing and journaling um I can't recommend that enough um but if that's something different for you if that's listening to music and going on a walk like like we said all of this is self-discovery whether it's entrepreneurship or creativity and in order to do that you have to create space and time for you to spend time with yourself uh I would say uh one of the books I've really been enjoying and we bring it up all the time is Rick rubin's the creative act way of being and he talks about how being an artist is about practicing the art of awareness and I think that has to do with what Samir is talking about of like spending time with yourself and being aware so much of this career for us has been about having a heightened sense of awareness for what's comfortable what's uncomfortable what's the right type of discomfort what's the wrong type of discomfort and so I think uh make sure to build that muscle of awareness I think that's what will ensure a sustainable long-term career fantastic thank you guys so much thanks thank you all right so that's it for this week's episode of Deep dive thank you so much for watching or listening all the links and resources that we mentioned in the podcast are going to be linked down in the video description or in the show notes depending on where you're watching or listening to this if you're listening to this on a podcast platform then do please leave us a review on the iTunes Store it really 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