You already know it's the creative spaces show. Do you consider yourself a
creator? No, I don't. And I don't know if that's just an identity and insecurity thing, but I think for the most part, like I work with creators, I manage a handful of creators and so I look at them and I go, they're doing that thing full time now. Solidifies the title of a creator.
And I don't see what I do in terms of publishing little essays and things on the internet as being a creator, though, I think from the outside, looking in, maybe it is a little bit of that, but it's partially just a I'm in this world. And I see what it means to actually be a full-time creative. And so I don't necessarily consider myself that at all. Is that
anything.
Yeah, there's been a story that's played in my head, like throughout my life of you need to be this or that you need to be an artist or an athlete. You can't be both was like the story I had when I was a young kid. And I think now it's you either are a business person or you're a creator. And I think something I'm working through right now is how do you break down that narrative and give yourself the space to be fully both.
So I love the business side of creativity and then I also love the creation side. And so can I start to create more space in my day where I get to do a little bit more of the creative side and yeah, just try to be more full. Yeah. So tell
me about how that's going so far.
Just this week flipped my calendar. So normally I would do a lot of working out in the mornings, and now I'm trying to do that in the evening so that I have an hour to an hour and a half uninterrupted where I can just write in the mornings. And so that's a very recent shift for me, was realizing when you're working with other creators and your responsibility and job is to make sure that their careers and their creativity is taken care of. It feels very selfish to justify spending time on your.
Creativity. So trying to just rework my schedule and make a little bit more.
Yeah, that makes sense. So what exactly are you creating? You mentioned some essays. Yeah,
definitely trying to do a lot more essays, both in the kind of like creator world is discovering. You're looking at trends and stories and different things in that space or of something that I call like a medic. Someone who is like analyzing creativity and what's actually happening in the space. And in the past, I've written quite a bit on the internet, just about like grief and loss and love and all the kind of deeper human questions. So I want to be doing a bit more of that as well.
And then I always, I try to take on one broader creative project at least every six months in our sphere. And so looking for the next one of those right now, too. Yeah.
And you were an early ship, 30 for 30 participant, right?
I was, it's lovely because there's something about just buying into the accountability that makes you stick to doing something you think it's silly, but it actually holds you to it
serious. How much of that essay format carried over after participating?
I think what ship 30 for 30 is really strong as getting you in that daily habit of creating what it did really well for me is it forced me to be a lot more succinct and coherent with thoughts, something I would normally publish in, let's say a thousand words. I was trying to publish in 400 words. So that was really good for me. I think I want to spend more time developing longer thoughts.
And so what that did for me was just allow me to realize how important it is for me to create the space and the time to do that. But it's not necessarily a format that all hold on to.
On my first ship, 30 go round, round day 16 or so when this show started and then two, three days later, I said, okay, I can record an episode every day, or I can write an essay every day. I'm going to record the episode.
That was the end. I think like part of that is the key to being prolific is finding the thing that you like to do. And then designing around doing that more consistently. I think there's always this pressure of, oh, I need to be doing this. I need to be writing an essay every day, or I need to be making a video every day on this. No, if you really like audio and you're like having conversations, why don't you just do that every day, so much easier.
We're not fighting this uphill battle, forcing yourself to do the type of creativity. Do you think is appropriate? Is
that common? Do you see that a lot with Korea? Yeah,
I think we have these ideas of what we need to be doing that sometimes get in the way of what we actually love doing. And the paradox of the entire thing is the thing you love doing is the thing you'll be most consistent at, which means it will be the thing you'll be most successful.
So you've got a very interesting position in the creator economy. And I'm interested when it comes to like creators who become businesses versus creators who set out to be businesses. Do you see that as a divide? That shifting? Because I know like with podcasts early on hobbyists became professional. But these days, most of the podcasts that succeed are really coming into it with funding or backing or audience, some form of a professional experience before they enter the space.
Like a lot of the critters you work with are on YouTube. And yeah, there's a fair amount of that starting to happen, where people are starting to realize, wow, this is actually a viable path to creating this. That transition in that the broader thinking, I think only happened in the last couple of years. Young people were always very excited about the potential of becoming YouTubers, but they had no idea how much money you could make or what kind of businesses you could develop out of that.
And with the commercialization of this, we are seeing a very different mindset of person that's entering this world. But I, you're not seeing as much like maybe what's happening on the podcasting side, which is more of those like companies coming in with massive production budgets and put out shows and then figuring out the distribution in a completely different way. I also think it's just a very different game in podcasting. The distribution is just so terrible.
Honestly, like finding a new show is just really hard. It's not necessarily the case on YouTube. You can break through the noise to some degree. It's a little bit easier to do, I think, than in podcasting, still like with the creators that we work with, they all bootstrapped. They all started. One day, they were like, this is what I want to do.
And what I'm now seeing really is mostly a change in mindset, which is the recognition and awareness of, oh, I don't just want to hoard a bunch of cash on my way up. I actually want to build businesses and empower the people around me and develop things that really matter in the world. And that can exist long after this YouTube channel has died and creator
driven businesses are the hot topic of the moment. You'd be interested in digging in on that a bit. I certainly would love
to. Yeah. Yeah. I think there's a huge opportunity for this. And like the first iteration of how you monetize for creators was so you started with just kind of ad revenue on YouTube and then it was brand partnerships. And then obviously we have this huge wave of merchandising. So everyone has an apparel brand now, and I think those kinds of things help you develop and build up the capital. You need start using it just as seed funding and other things that you do. For your community.
The brilliance of what creators have is they have these pre-filtered communities. One of our clients is air act. People that watch air acts, see the world a certain way. They care about certain things. And so what we can now do now that he has a community of a 1.5 billion people watching him consistently every week is start to understand who is that person and what are they looking for in the world? And like, how can we help them get more of what they're looking for in them?
And those are the types of things that got us really excited is like really connecting the dots for people in a community. Instead of someone just sitting and watching the YouTube videos, it's like, how do we help them bring whatever that lifestyle is offline? How do we build the infrastructure? And so with Eric, what we've realized is that a lot of the people that follow him or interested in becoming creators, that's the thing that they want to do.
They're looking at him because he's rising at a time where everyone's telling the story of how it's really hard to break out on YouTube. And he is breaking out. So we've developed a program called creator now, or it's a very similar to a ship 30 for 30, but with video and creators are publishing a video every six weeks and they're in teams and they're competing and yeah, no, sorry. Once every week for six weeks. So six videos in six weeks. Got it. And what.
In selling that and telling his audience was like, that was the first time that we found that a click moment where it was like, his audience really loved what we were bringing to the table. And it's because that's actually what they want right from him. And that's why they're following him is they're watching him for the map of how do you do this at scale? That's what gets really exciting is you go like every creator has a slightly different angle and world.
And their community shares that worldview to some extent. And then how do you just start developing things that are actually made for that community rather than just using creators as a marketing vehicle for any random toothpaste or random deodorant or product? I mean, what can you actually create for these people that make them feel more connected to whatever the kind of worldview is offline as well?
Yeah. And it seems like the big thing that I keep hearing when it comes to building a brand and monetizing the community around a creator is to it's about effectively packaging, that connection, because they want to get a little closer. They want a bit of that golden touch from the creator. And so it's just about walling out. Is that how you see it, or is it a little more
complex? That is one model. And it's definitely something that we've seen a lot, a fair amount of creators do. And it's actually like this moral battle I have inside myself is like, I think part of the human experience is looking for teachers and people that will tell you this is how you do it. And you want to get a little bit closer to the sun. We all have that capacity to look for answers and the people that seem ahead of us on whatever path we want. Right.
But I think what we're trying to do at least is use that as the hook and then actually create something that's way more engaging than you just being closer to the sun. I don't want a world in which a bunch of people are just falling Erik and all they care about is just being able to message with him. One-on-one and that's the only thing that matters.
I would rather use that as the hook and then develop a really tight knit community where they realize, oh my gosh, look at all my peers that are so incredible. And now I can connect with them and collaborate with. And do that. And so that's how I think of creators in general. Is there a hook on these worldviews?
Are there a hook on these ideas and instead of paywall and content and just making some, doing cameos or some kind of only fans or whatever the heck, that's not interesting to us, it was more interesting as can you use that as a hook and then create a community that's way more engaged off the bat. And
so when you get into those sort of community engaged, Metrics or measures when I think of a podcast, at least the ultimate measure is, does it have word of mouth referral? If we do nothing, will it grow episode over episode? What's the measure of a great community. That's a really
good question. It's something I'm like deeply asking myself right now. There's this debate about the difference between an audience and a community and. Kind of have a general feeling that it's a lot of really intangible things, but that it's mostly measured around engagement. So I'll say for creator now our main metric of success and like something we're doing on the exit interviews is did you make friends with one person that you're going to talk to when this program is over?
That's like our number one metric of success, you should ask
twice because, so I actually have specific reason here. My big complaint with all communities is that they focus on one-to-one matching and not one to two max. So a social network builds from triads, not dyads. And so if I'm only making dyads from a community or from an experience, then I'm much less likely to be building a network over
time. Yeah. So actually the way that we asked that was, did you make at least one friend that you'll talk to, and then the next question was something like, how many did you make? And there was a bunch of them. Love that. Awesome. Yeah. I agree with you.
So you were mentioning, was it the
six videos? Yeah, that was our second metric of success because my fundamental kind of idea around this stuff is if you're pointed towards a goal together, there's a reason to be bought in. I think what we're seeing as a struggle in digital communities is if there's no real distinct reason that you're interacting, a lot of people get really disengaged very quick. Or they just don't know what the rules of engagement are.
And so part of our thesis was we could develop these teams that were all pointed towards the same goal together and give them places to connect. So are people walking away with one or more friends? And then on top of that, is that thesis around you being pointed at the same goal, actually even correct in terms of getting you to engage and are those two things correlated?
What's your north star metric. How do you know you're on the right path? This is going
to be a very LA answer. It's very much in my heart. And am I loving the people around me? And that to me is the number one metric of success. And I find like when I'm in that space, I'm a lot more creative. I'm doing a lot better things. I'm coaching the people around me better.
I have over the course of my twenties, refined the feeling of wanting this big audacious goal to now being like on a daily basis in my showing up the exact way that I want to be showing up and trying to measure myself based on that, more of that internal metric than what the heck is happening outside of me.
And so then what's your current goal? Normally I'd ask this as a creator, but since you're not a creator and you're the first guest that I don't think I'm going to argue that you are what's your current goal. And if you could make it smart for us around helping create.
Yeah. My current goal is about, can we develop the educational infrastructure required to get more people making a hundred thousand dollars a year doing something that they really love and sitting at a desk doing something that they don't. So for me, that's the north star. I have these milestone metrics around how we go about doing that. But for now it's really just that. Can we over the next five to 10 years?
Actually develop the resources and the tools that are needed to get more people into this space.
I like it. And so my last question for you today, if you could send a tweet back to your start, what would it be? And when would it be you get to choose the star?
I would send a tweet probably to myself around like 20 years old. Just tell myself to calm down the whole messages. It's going to be fine. Okay. Would you
mind digging into the bit what was going on then? How would you not calm, gassy gets back to that big goal that
you alluded to before? Yeah. I think my early twenties was filled with a lot of angst as I think it is for a lot of people. There's this pressure of time. You feel like throughout the next decade, you need to do all the things. Whatever all of the things are, and you need to focus on the external metrics of success.
I think also at that time, like I was going through a fair amount of stuff, personally, it was very difficult and I was like being cracked open in terms of what the heck is life about. And so I would just say, it's going to be all right, just keep moving. Day by day, I put one foot in front of the other lay one brick down today. Just keep going and follow that kind of inner compass of what you enjoy doing and stop telling yourself these stories about how you. To be XYZ.
Like we talked about the very beginning of this conversation. I think a lot of times the vision of what we think we should be doing, actually screws us up from doing the thing that we want to be doing calm. And the thing that will be most successful and happy doing.