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I read that it takes you eight hours somewhere between eight and twelve hours to go from ideation to publish for one video.
Is that true?
Well, yeah, depending on the size of the video. Yeah, I write pretty fast. Now, I've done over a thousand of these. So actually getting the idea, I have like a solid filter for what's a good idea and what's not. It's probably the most important thing to have. Then, you know, I'm writing the script or a guy on my team writes the first edition of the script, I'm make an edit, I film it that The filming process is actually really quick.
I'll hammer out a video in like four minutes, but I sent it off to my editing team, who are beasts. These guys are the best and they'll spend full shift on it. So they'll spend eight hours editing this, you know, one minute video.
Wow, So okay, So you guys all get together for the ideation first or just just like walk me through the granular steps of how that happens.
From all over the place. Like I saw, for example, today, I saw a post from ESPN NFL. It was a quote from DeMarcus Ware and it was talking about Micah Parsons. He has all the tools to be Lawrence Taylor. I was just having a conversation with my dad last night about how the NFL is hell bent on making Micah Parsons and the Lawrence Taylor. They are going so far with this thing. So when I see that post today on my Instagram feed, I'm like, Okay, that's just ammo.
Now I have like a visual aid to put into this script. It's going to look even better now. I'm reinvigorated to write this thing. I got some of my thoughts out with my dad last night. Let's write this. I write it, I film it, I get to the team.
How long did it take to write the script?
Thirty minutes, not roughly when you edit.
The script or someone writes the first edition.
And I know this is like very granular, but I think it's super important for people who want to be creators.
What are you looking for to be in the script?
Because I read in this interview, but I also just based on what I know you've got some of the best hooks, meaning the thing that gets viewers listening and interested and not to swipe left or rights or out of there. Like, So what's the most important thing for you when you're building that.
Yeah, it's a fine line you got to walk. You can't be so sensational and be like this is the greatest, you know, all this stuff, because then you're gonna lose people's trust. It's probably not the greatest, the most crazy thing ever you heard. And I see people who do that, and you know, I don't think it's sustainable. So you got to give people something without giving them the whole thing. You have to make it exciting without making it sensational.
It's a balancing act. You have to weigh these things and be like, Okay, how can I not give up enough information here but still gain their interest and still make them need to watch the whole video, which I don't. Some people have a problem. They call that clickbaiting and stuff. I really don't think it is. Like I think of my story structure in a lot of the same ways that like movies are written. There's context, there's characters, there's setting,
there's tension. A movie wouldn't be fun if they just gave you the ending right away. You know, you got to you gott add some build up here.
Yeah, you have to say, hey, like check this little that trailer.
The trailers wouldn't exist if we didn't have to draw people in.
So how many people do you have working with you on your staff right now? And how did it?
How did it go from you by yourself in La to now you having a little squad.
Well, I'll start in La. I tell people this all the time, like, you don't I got the nice mic right here, so do you? You know you don't need this stuff. But the biggest mistake some of these newer creators make is they want to buy everything right away. I had an iPhone seven. I used like a suction cup and put it on the wall and use the front camera. It was nice and sunny in La, so I was near a window, didn't need any lighting. But
I couldn't film it was dark. You know, I had to get I had a little window here, but you know I had a fifty dollars mic from Target. I did have a MacBook Pro, but that's it. Like, you know, I just cleaned up the room that I was living in so it didn't look messy for people, and made the videos. You know, it's a low barrier entry nowadays. You don't need to have all this fancy stuff. You gotta slowly, slowly level up.
You use like whatever final cut or you edited in post correct. You wouldn't just do straight to camera post on TikTok. You would do straight to camera, upload the MacBook Pro and then put what we call b roll in, which is the video footage that you have overlaying your audio.
Right. Yeah, So I had all these skills. Like I said at the top, I've been making these videos since two thousand and eight. I used to use Windows movie Maker. You know, that was the worst thing ever iMovie some of these programs. Then I went to final cut. Now I'm at Adobe Premiere, so I know how to use all this stuff. I had those skills. The skill I really didn't have at the beginning was being on camera talking.
I never did any of that. I was like, hey, I got zero followers, Like, no one's going to see this, you know, like who cares. It's like my friends don't even have TikTok yet. It's pretty early. So I was like, hey, you know like, even if if I'm terrible here, no one's going to see it. Sure enough, my first video gets one hundred thousand, and I was like, oh, well, you know, at least I got the stats to back it up. Now if I'm terrible.
Interactive media major in College of Miami of Ohio. I think the thing that's interesting to me is that it feels like, just from moment one, you kind of just knew that this was your game plan.
Like what is that program? What did you learn? How much of that do you use every day?
Now I'm one of the few people who really uses their major, at least like from my friends in college. But yeah, it did feel right. I didn't know Miami had this major when I went there. I was undecided and I was going to try and get in the business school. You got like a Dean calc. That wasn't happening. I wanted to be an entrepreneurship major. It wouldn't let me be an entrepreneurship major. Like makes no sense to me at all, but you know, it's all for the best.
I find interactive media. I finish out that major, and there wasn't really any job for me. Like I came out of college and I was jobless for six months. It sucked, like I felt pretty bad about myself. To be honest, all my friends were like working making money. I was like, damn. I went for an interview as like a loan support analyst. That was painful. I was like, no, I cannot. I hope they don't offer me this job. I do not even want to have to say no to them. So, you know, shout out to all the
loan support analysts out there, no disrespect. But it wasn't for me. Finally found the thing at Clutch Points and you know that wasn't for me either, But you know I learned a lot of valuable things there and part of ways and do my own thing in twenty twenty, So for.
Those who don't know, my man Frank Smith was running the socials for Clutch Points and killing it there.
And what I thought was interesting was the interview that I that.
I read was that they were totally fine with you doing your own thing while you were working there until you surpassed them. What was that like conversation like and what did that sort of teach you?
That was wild? That made no sense to me at all, Like I wanted to win so bad. I'm a competitive person. I really wanted to win. When I was there, I was like, we got to do new stuff, We got to be more creative, we got to like, we got to evolve as a brand here. We need to do original content. Like I said, a lot of it's aggregated, and that they made a business model off of that. I'm not saying this anything like wrong with it, but I wanted to level up and I saw this original
content as a way to do that. And I would tell them every Monday we had this meeting about TikTok. I was like, look, this stuff's working for me. We should lead into this, we should be posting this, we should be you know, devoting resources to this. And they kind of just blew me off week after week until I passed them and then their whole attitude flipped and
they said they owned my page. It was crazy. It was like they were trying to basically say that, like everything I created in my own time on my own phone was theirs. And at that point, like the relationship had totally soured and there was no way that I was going to continue working there. I was already working remote, which was weird anyway, and I was like, now I'm just going to better myself and do my own thing. So they fired me.
They're loss, you're done with clutch points, but you're still in LA. You go off, you do it all by yourself. Now walk me through how you get from that to living in Pittsburgh with the team media mogul them.
All Right, So, first of all, I love Pittsburgh. You're not going to hear a lot of like creators in Pittsburgh. Although like my guy Colin is here, it's not exactly a creator hotbed. It's the oppice move you'd make if you're starting a media company a production company. You're like, oh, let me move from LA to Pittsburgh. At like the peak of this business, you know, I was doing like eighty million views a month. Things are going well. So
I was like, yeah, let me move to Pittsburgh. And a lot of people's minds they were probably like, that's the opposite way, that's your work. But for me, it was like, I don't know what the point of living in LA is anymore. People don't want to meet with you in person. COVID got so weird there that you know, what's the whole point of being there? If you can't build relationships. Everyone wanted to take a meeting online. I was like, why am I paying all this rent? And
I just love Pittsburgh. This is my hometown. I love the city. People here have like a real community connection with the other, with each other. There's not transplants. You know, it was weird living in LA Like I'm I would walk down the street and people like wouldn't wave at you, like the simplest things, like no one was friendly ever. And that's something that Pittsburgh really does a good job of, like we all have this like you know, well most of us were born here, so you know, it just works.
But anyway, I had the opportunity to buy my childhood home where I am right now. So I was like, okay, that's perfect. I can set my studio up in the basement. I know, I have plenty of room. I love this house. And I made it. I made it happen in October of twenty twenty one.
At what point did you say, Okay, I've got the resources where I want to either have people come on to my team or you obviously started a production company as well.
So that happened actually while I was still in La I got my first video editor. He is a beast. I've worked with him for like six or seven years actually, so he was at clutch points and he was like I taught him how to do most of his edits in the beginning, and this guy, like he's such a grinder.
He is so much better than me in every possible way. Now, Like he has really taken that minor lesson I gave him at the beginning, like six or seven years go and become so talented, Like he's so committed to his craft. He helped me build the rest of our video editing team. We have like ten guys. Now, wow, so we don't just edit for me. We have a whole portfolio of snap shows we do. We take brands on as clients. We've really taken this team and built it out in
a couple different ways here. So yeah, credit to him, credit to our relationship, and I mean it just helps to have someone who's actually committed to their craft. Like there's two different kinds of people you hire. I've definitely realized this. There's the one person that's just like, yeah, I'm here to like do my thing, and the other person's like, I want to get better it's like that. You see it happen in sports too, like you draft
a rookie who never gets any better. They're probably not working hard enough this guy's job.
Yeah, and it's interesting too because you as somebody who's like that, who's almost maniacal about every day I gets, as you can tell if I'm me and my friend who's worked on the podcast with me since the beginning, are like passing back and forth, like what do you think makes this video really good?
Like?
Why did this video go viral?
There's a there's an element of like always wanting to improve, and when people don't have that, it's just a very jarring, jarring feeling.
I can't imagine living that way. I think about this a lot, actually, and I've come to terms with it. It used to frustrate me a lot, but I've come to terms with like, some people just they're not interested in that and that's not going to change for them, and it's something you have to accept.
Do you think that there are stories that are good that you make that don't go viral? Like is there a story that you remember making that you were like, Yeah, this thing's gonna crush and the algorithm for whatever reason, just did not respond.
And if so, what was it? Oh, did not respond, just did not respond.
You know what, I'll have to look through. Can I give you the opposite?
Yep?
Okay. So I did a story on Barry Bremen and he for anyone who hasn't seen the video, there's actually an E sixty on him that's really good too. He was a professional fraud. He would go to games and get on the court by like dressing like the players, and he was famous for this, Like everyone kind of loved him if you did it. Nowadays, today's equivalent is like the guy he used to be Klay Thompson, remember him, Yes, yes, yes, So no one likes that guy, Like he's banned, he
can't go to games anymore. Barry Breman was such a likable guy and such a pioneer in this stuff that everyone kind of like loved when he did it, and it was a thing like, oh Barry Breman, like the impostors here. And when I got that story, I was like, we're gonna make a you know, a TikTok or a short out of this. I was like, this is definitely going to blow up, Like this story is so good. I don't think a lot of people know it, which
is a big part. And any story that has like an element of fraud or crime or foul play or something like that, there's like a hint of that to it always going to be better. And then what happened, Oh, blew up immediately everywhere.
Yeah, what about a video you thought would not do well and then it just exploded?
All right, I'll give this one as an example. So I hadn't tried this format yet. I did a video about the fifty forty ninety Club, and I was like, Man, Tony Snell's like in the fifty forty ninety Club. I found this information and I was like, he hasn't missed a freak throw in like two years, you know. And it wasn't one of those players. It's like, oh, you know, like he plays four minutes a game, Like he's not qualifying.
Like Tony Snell was starting a lot of these games. Now, he wasn't shooting a lot, but he was playing a lot of minutes. And he was like he did have the stats. I don't think he ended up qualifying at the end of the season, but I was like, oh my god, what if I made this video and I didn't reveal his name until the very end. I hadn't tried this format yet, so I was like, this could be really bad or it could be amazing because people will have to watch the end to see ended up
being great. But I can't imagine like making a video about Tony Snell and it doing well, Like there's not that much interesting stuff about Tony Snell.
Except for Kasia in the Club Trillion too, or like he was in oh.
Yeah, the The Zero Game.
Yet the Zero Game stories.
You mentioned that you at one point didn't want to do stories about yourself or you didn't want to make yourself like a focal point of the video, but those are crushing those, like you said, create value for an audience. At what point in the process for you, did you realize that you were just as important as whatever it is that you were talking about.
Well, I definitely realized that when everyone copied my style, when everyone started making videos that were identical to mine, I was like, Okay, now my face is actually like integral here, because it's the differentiator between people trying to do my style and me doing my stifle. They don't have me, so definitely at that point and you'll see it so often with the thumbnails. The thumbnails is crazy.
The fact that I started making these colorful thumbnails with the cutout above the text, and then everyone tried to do that. There's so much.
It's pretty sick. It is pretty sick. Let's be honest.
It's nice. I love it, but like, my god, there's so many other ways to be creative here. I'm surprised that, like there's people doing it now that don't even know they're doing mine. They're doing someone else that did mine, And you know, that was definitely a turning point. But I will make videos about myself to answer your question. It's just got to be interesting enough. Like people have to realize, like I don't live some like crazy lifestyle, like a lot of creators don't. Anyone who read the
Shams article knows he doesn't. It's on his phone twenty hours a day. You know, I'm not doing those numbers. But you know, a lot of my days spent hanging out in my studio, like editing videos and writing scripts with my cat down here. You know, it's like, you know, it's not exactly story worthy content.
So what's next? What do you want to?
Like?
What's the big dream? For you.
A couple things on the radar right now. The Hunt, which I talked about earlier, which is a great way to put myself into the content. I love actually meeting the people who watch my videos and it's always an amazing interaction, and to add some level of creativity there is even better. So I'm really excited to work on that. We have built fantasy games before. Five Card Draw is a big one. I've done it for years, really popular. We have some big plans with that. I'm involved in
an agency, a creative agency called Supersonic. We brought on a couple brand clients there and we share my video editing team. So you know, that's kind of the whole thing right now. With creators, right it's like you can only go so far with the actual content unless you're Alex Cooper or Joe Rogan or you know, mister Beast. But he's even a good example of someone that built a business on the side in addition to his billions of views. You have to take what you're building and
build businesses off of it. So that's definitely the next step for me.
Fascinating