The Full Story of Colin and Samir
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By the way, in case you haven't heard, my brand new book, Feel Good Productivity, is now out. It is available everywhere books are sold, and it's actually hit the New York Times and also the Sunday Times bestseller list. So thank you to everyone who's already got a copy of the book. If you've read the book already, I would love a review on Amazon. And if you haven't yet checked it out, you may like to check it out. It's available in physical format and also ebook and also audiobook everywhere books are sold. I had big dreams as a 21, 22-year-old kid. I think you're only lucky enough...

or twice in your life to be that naive. And 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,

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 lacrosse, 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 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. It was like, yeah, absolutely. - Their main channel has over 1 million subscribers. They've interviewed the likes of MrBeast and MKBHD and MrWhosetheboss and me. - We never talk about the start of the Colin and Samir podcast, which is essentially what has become our entire career, which was in 2018 when we were really down and out having an existential crisis 'cause 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 Ferriss and like all of the big names and also me on your show a couple of weeks ago. All the big names and Ali Abdaal. How, 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, how I would describe it is just that 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 it wasn't that we're the experts. We just talked to a lot of people who had done it. 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 more failures than we've had successes. And I think that creates an interesting dynamic when you have the opportunity to have more failures 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 in front of the camera as well. So I guess you guys have been doing 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-ish. My vague understanding of what's going on. It feels like a lot of young people these days want to become creators. Yeah.

To what extent would you recommend being a creator as a career? And what are the pros and cons, I guess?

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 wholeheartedly agree with that and also say that it's not even about like us recommending to you if this is something you should do. I think it's just there's people who can't help it.

And I would say 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 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 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, recognition,

money, 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 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, but everyone can tell you that 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 quote. I think it's from Zen Buddhism or something like that, which is kind of what happens before you reach enlightenment and what happens after.

And so the quote is, before enlightenment, chop wood, carry water. After enlightenment, chop wood, carry water. I haven't think of that in the creator economy. It's fairly similar. Like the things that we were doing when we hadn't 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. Yeah. Which is kind of weird. I mean, even this morning, we got a text from our friends, Yes Theory. And there are 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 five 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.

Okay, let's talk about money. You guys have been doing this for 12 years. At what point, like, 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 did it work? Yeah, so in the early days, none.

You know, the way it worked in the early days was we started, 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. Can't make a TV network, can't pitch it to anyone on TV. So, okay, let's make it on the internet. That was the, you know, base premise.

I had big dreams, you know, as a 21, 22 year old kid, I was like, I didn't, I think you're only lucky enough once or twice in your life to be that naive. And 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. Yeah. And most people probably also haven't heard of it. Like I heard of lacrosse when I got to university. It's like lacrosse. Yeah, exactly. 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? It was like, this is a, this 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 colin from you know uh

Colorado to come live in LA. I mean, this was not a way, a quick way to make money, nor did it ever really make money in the three years that we built it. So how were you, how were you sustaining yourself 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.

And we will do the creative work, basically nine to five. Like printing logos on t-shirts? No, like photography for the clothing lines, photo shoots, campaigns, website design, graphic design. Colin designed the logo for my dad's clothing company that actually just changed after 12 years. Yeah, it was a 12-year logo. It had a good run. Yeah.

It's funny because 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 three 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...

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 McKinsey 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'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. We'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. I was always into film. I was into, you know, performing. I was into 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 B roll of you playing the guitar. I thought that's what the outcome of my life would be. It was like, of course I'm going to, 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 or some type of entertainer. Um,

I went to film school. 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 of 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 daily. 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. The distance from the entrance of the studio to the editing room was probably like 100 feet, 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. 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. And I went out to lunch with the head editor and he asked me, he was like, 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 he said, he gave me the best advice I've ever received. He said, so here's the deal. You are an assistant editor for 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 going to 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 going to make my own network because then I can do everything. I can film. I can be in it. I can edit. I can make the programming decisions. I'm going to do everything. Yeah.

Yeah. So 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, 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 just sparking in my mind. 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 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 yeah 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 there's 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 would say some things like, oh, I'd love 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 pushback in their own minds is, oh, but you can't make money from that. And so it's like a lot of people seem to have these creative aspirations, but are 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, it was never in my mind that I could go be an employee somewhere.

So that was never an option. For me, my dad's an entrepreneur. It just wasn't an option. Different for Colin. So 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 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 i know how to design the logo then i'll be leaps and bounds ahead if i just know how to do all 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 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 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

And 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 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. It was like, yeah, absolutely. Nice. So you guys have... Sorry, go on. I was just going to say, to answer the question about money, the first three years, you know, the exposure to the company...

I think was around $70,000 a year total. What does exposure mean? Meaning like how much we spent. Oh, okay. Because we used one of my dad, my dad had a warehouse he wasn't using in downtown LA and we moved in there.

which was, you know, an interesting experience. There was like cockroaches and 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 because prior to that we were in my bedroom, which was actually really fun and cool and funny and like stereotypical startup. I was living at home, so I didn't receive any money for basically up until we sold the company. And, yeah,

It was an interesting experience because it was very tense, I would say, 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 onto 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 a thousand dollars. 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 thousand dollars i was like that's that's not enough we should charge more and i remember uh julian said to me he's 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 by. Yeah. It's like amongst the three of us, whoever had a certain type of skillset, it was like, all right, we'll charge for that skillset. Yeah. You know, whatever it is. Colin had a friend who needed stickers. I remember he came into the office one day and he was like, my friend needs stickers. You think we can 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 was like made $300, you know, it's just random things to just keep the YouTube channel going. 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 naivete 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 acqui-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. Yeah.

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. Colin thought he was going to get fired within the first two days. I remember a call with Colin because we were working on something.

And basically immediately the acqui-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, it's like 90K divided by three. Yeah. So you're on like 30K salaries. Yes, yes. Okay. It's not too bad. And that's like year three of the business. Yes, yes. Okay. And how much money are you making now?

However comfortably you want to share that. Now I think I actually, this is not a cop out, I don't know the actual 100% number, but we are making in the millions. I would say probably this year we'll cover 2 million, if not a little bit more than that. Damn. Revenue or profit? Revenue. Nice. Yeah. And what sort of margins are you guys...

Running out. We have taken on a lot more expense this year. We've taken on a lot more expense. We have a bigger office. We have a bigger team. We're kind of in a year of like investing into the company. So this year I think 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

It's kind of crazy for me because even as I say that number, I'm like, I don't even, I know that that's 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 talent.

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 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 a 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. Yeah. We had deals that came in and allowed us to,

exist. Yeah. But for the first year we actually made money where 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 the year, which 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 Collins, right. There was years where, you know, when, so basically we, we sold the company, we sold lacrosse network. We, um,

got into the world of this company, had great jobs, had a really great, I call it our MBA. We learned everything about the creator space. You know, what is referred to as the creator economy was getting figured out in real time in that company, right? We were learning about how companies were working and everything. So 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 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 one day over pasta that we would leave 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 were in love with the process of making videos, but not in love with sports. 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 I remember everyone at the company kind of speculated that we had something going on. We had raised some money or we were joining another company. And we actually just left. 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 think 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 to just be like, we'll just start it. We'll just make videos and we'll see what happens. Let's say you were speaking to a, let's say someone in their twenties, they've just graduated university. Maybe 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 there like mentors and you, you were, you were giving them a roadmap.

What would be the roadmap now that it's 2023 to succeed in the creator economy? You'll have to buy the course to find out. We can't answer that. Yeah. I'll invoice you after. No, I'm kidding. So as I look back on that, I think the one thing that we always agree upon was that we went into making the Colin and Samir channel with being very like selfish creators, which is completely fine. It's like, here's what we want to make. Oh, 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. Interpret it as you wish. Okay.

If you want to be an artist, that is a different thing. If you want to be a creator, you have to be empathetic 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 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.

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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 two and a half million dollars 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.

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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 Boyce Avenue era of popular song covers on YouTube. And I want to make money on YouTube playing guitar and singing songs. And you guys are my mentors. 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

But 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 video making side, I mean, 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 Sheeran songs on YouTube. Okay. And how much of that is available to them?

I would 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 YouTube? And a lot of what we've learned, I would say over the past 12 years is this process of studying audiences because you

We are again, we are part of the equation, but the audience is we're playing ping pong 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. Ooh. 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, right?

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? Because you are asking people to invest time in your Ed Sheeran 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 upfront and you should figure that out. But a lot of times it'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. The way that I think of this, that I teach this in our course, is 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 put the videos on there. It doesn't matter. Don't overthink it. Because loads of people get stuck in overthinking, especially if they've come from a...

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 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, you

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 own covers. No one cares. If we're treating it like a business, a business exists to serve an audience. And therefore like all the things around treating it like a business. 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 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, as we all know on YouTube, is a, it's a very just, I think it's a tricky thing.

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? 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, your emotions towards it might change dramatically. Yeah, there are videos that I've put out that I've 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. 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. Even hearing you guys talk about creative stuff, that's completely the opposite world from where I've grown up, which is all about... 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 YouTube academy. It's so frustrating. I've heard about these people. Yeah, when they say, why is my channel not growing? And I'm like...

Like, who's the audience? Like, why should someone watch here? It's like, oh, no, but I really wanted to make this. And I think it's really, I think my message is really important. Yeah. Okay. But like, clearly other people don't. So like, navigating that. I think people mistake the, sometimes creatives mistake what's happening on YouTube for creativity. Ooh, that's a good soundbite. Not 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 in 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 it's okay for those to be decoupled, right? It's like how someone who enjoys making coffee is very different to someone who runs a profitable coffee business or a coffee shop. Yeah, of course. Completely different things. Completely different things. With like minor overlap, but like broadly completely different things. Yeah, different things. Colin said this to me one time. He was like, I think 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. You know? Yeah.

And all this to say, we found a format that, for me at least, I feel has allowed for me to be myself.

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 a hundred percent 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.

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. When I'm playing a role, like we had coffee with James Hoffman before this at his coffee shop and

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 do. But for the record, I'm a paid actor.

Just to make sure that that's clear for everyone listening and watching. But I do have to ask myself, how many of these conversations would I do if it wasn't tied to commercial success? How much would I upload? You do have to think about that too. It's like, okay, is this...

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.

do you deeply authentically care about providing value to the audience that you've told me you wanna have? Because if you do, then you can have a long career. Then you're gonna 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 passionate about. I feel like myself while I'm doing it. And the people on the other side are really happy. And I get joy from providing value to them.

You can make some sorts of businesses work and some sort of, like, 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 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, you're motivated

the message or the medium 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 pro we've met creators who say, I am an entrepreneur just happens to be that my product is video. 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 people on the other side. I deeply care about that. And I would sacrifice the numbers on the screen going up in exchange for me being happier with the video.

Yeah, it's like there's these different approaches. There are some people that approach YouTube or whatever the platform is from the perspective of creative trying to make money. 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 niche and there's like a, ooh, I can make a faceless YouTube channel with AI and stuff. Exactly, yeah. That capitalizes on this high CPM niche kind of thing. I think we, when the term the creator economy came, I think it was in like 2020 maybe, it was the first time I had heard it. 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 talked about people are calling it something that's interesting 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 I 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. Yeah. And semi-professionals. So the amount of variance there are in the term athlete, I think there's that many, if not more variance in the term creator. Yeah.

And I think we oftentimes assume differently. Yes, that's a really good point. This is partly why, like, you know, when, like, I really struggled to make videos, like, 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, oh, how do we even begin to talk to all these people? And so even the title for this podcast episode, I was thinking, it was like, how to succeed in the creator economy. Okay, I can get why we would title it that. But also, like, okay, right.

Where do we even begin? And what I found, and I'm curious to hear your guys' thoughts on this. What I found is that I really struggle to, 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 some sort of expertise, something to teach in a market 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 creative economy in 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 like quit after a while? For me, it's focus. Yeah, I was going to say the same thing. Focus. Like when you talked to, you've spoken to Marques. Marques Brownlee is someone who is like,

You think about some of these people and the amount of opportunities that they've had 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 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 Feastables. Those are the two things. And that's a lot. Running a massive chocolate company and one of the biggest entertainment platforms in the world. Even that is a lot. Like, you know, even that is too much 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 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, that, oh, that's an established brand in the space. We are brand new.

We are a brand new brand. I oftentimes think about companies. If you think about a company 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? 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 you have to actually continue to do the fundamentals of just keeping this thing going.

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 should do. And again, I'm speaking from a space of experience myself of, um, really having to learn how to refocus 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.

Let's try and be best in class. And can we focus enough? Can we be disciplined enough to be consistent? 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 probably anyone who would be looking at us from a business perspective would recommend. How does this work?

Tie in. Okay, so I have two thoughts here. Both are somewhat garbled. 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 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, you know, vibes and preferences change over time. Well, it's to say that if I just continue making videos consistently, actually, next year or the year after the year after that, 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 has-been two or three years from now. That to me is like, and again, I'm going to speak from a deep place of experience. That is like very fear-based thinking in my opinion, right? Like there's something that you're afraid of there, of becoming irrelevant. I think that like my experience right now is like I've somehow worked out a way to relinquish a lot of that fear. How do you do that? Yeah.

A mix of being married to a therapist, a lot of journaling, and slight help from psychedelics. But I would say that relinquishing some of that fear around

scarcity and abundance 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'm sorry, especially Indian immigrants, right? Like coming to America, like it's scarce, scarcity mindset. You know, my parents, and I assume that there's a lot of trauma from the partition that came through and that it's like, we have to acquire everything and hold onto it. And what if it all goes away tomorrow? Because that did happen. Yeah.

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 dollars perspective. I could, we could not make any, I think money comes and 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, um,

I have an abundance 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 of 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 does the world look like?

And this is, we were talking about this at lunch. I got to speak with a business coach at the, at the spotter summit. So spotter is a company that I don't know if you're familiar with spotter. They're a company in the U S that, that works with creators and gives creators financing. 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 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 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 version 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. Yeah.

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 still, you know, it still manifests in a space of like when we get offered a brand deal, I'm terrified to say no. Right.

terrified. 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 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? Yeah.

I'm not saying we nailed it, but 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 $18,000 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 creators, 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.

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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. Because that's a grand slam offer. It's like you can pre-order the book for $20 and you get a $300 course. Sick. Amazing. But then there was some pushback from the team 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 has now stopped and

And Tintin, our YouTube producer who we met earlier at lunch said, "Guys, it seems like we're having this conversation from a place of fear. What if we just decided to bet on ourselves instead?" And in which case we would make a decision that's best for the audience, that is more from a place of abundance. And we would give away this course because why not? We might as well. But from a place of fear, it's like, "Oh,

Yeah.

he talked about the concept of fear setting, which I think is like one of the most important exercises I've ever heard about. It has stuck with me and it is something that I actually use.

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. But essentially like you write down the fear, then you write down, you know, how you essentially take it. You're like, all right, for example, I just did a 10 day 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. Yeah.

Well, if you value vacation, then you are, that is a reality that's going to happen. Oh, okay. Okay. That's not actually that bad. 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. They're very surface level. And so they're, they're, um,

eating at me because my imagination is so powerful and 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 okay actually it's completely fine um so yeah that's that's has been incredibly helpful oh man i love the fear-setting exercise yeah any anytime i feel any sort of existential crisis about my business or anything i just google tim tim ferriss fear-setting literally just go through it type it all out and i'm like at the end of it i'm like

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 it. I would share some advice for, you know, young creators of like,

The way to experience some of that is, or what we're talking about of relinquishing some fear. I think a lot of fear comes from maybe building too fast. Let's say you have a great Q4 and you're like, oh, my ad rates are up. The channel's exploding. This is amazing. We should hire three more people. We should sign a one-year lease on a really expensive studio. We should invest in all these different things.

Um, being 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.

I don't wanna make a video today. I'm not feeling up to it. I wanna make one video this month instead of four. That level of emotional volatility or just, 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 when fear really starts to build up. When you're like, I can't pay my rent. 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. 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. Yeah.

What is that dynamic like? Because it's unusual to have co-founders like a duo in the creator economy. I suppose there's Rhett and Link. There's Rhett and Link, but most of them are couples. Yeah, like Matt and Abby. Yeah, Cara and Dave. I love the couple, yeah. Which is why people... For the record, like... We are a couple. Yeah.

Because that is the most searched question about Colin and Tamir, our Colin and Tamir dating. I think people just see us in a frame and they assume we like sleep in bunk beds in the same room. How could we not be in this box together? But no, I have a wife and Colin has a fiance, so...

unfortunately, to quell those rumors, we are not dating. But, you know, that said, it's not different from a marriage. You know, I'm married and it's not... There's some things that are different, but it's not...

You know, there's emotional similarities to it of having a partner, attaching yourself to someone, your ability to earn is attached to someone, your ability to express is attached to someone, your bank account is attached to someone. Like there's so much that's attached, right? Our context to other people. I'm Samir from Colin and Samir, right? You know, that's also our context. Yeah, I was surprised when I first heard your surname. I was like, oh.

yeah i guess you put a soda 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 yeah if they see samir first like oh colin yeah 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 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, you should not enter into that business together. And 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. Yeah.

You know, is like we are equals in this project. We support each other. Without either of us, it doesn't exist. That's a super important thing. 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 eight to 10 hours during the day. 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 because we've been doing, we've been creating together for 12 years. Oh, that's wholesome. Yeah. Yeah. It is wholesome. It's probably why people think we're dating. Yeah.

I mean, even for us, it's strange or at least surprising. But no one thinks Rhett and Link are dating. Yeah, we don't know that. Yeah. Actually, I guess we don't know that. I've never once thought that they were dating, but I did think of that about you guys for some reason. I guess because you're younger. Maybe. We're younger. Yeah. We're just more stylish than them.

That's probably it. But you don't want to go on record saying that. I don't want to go on record saying that. They have stylists and they're more stylish. If I can just for a quick second say... I would like to redact everything Samir just said about them. Just for a quick second, if I can say how jealous I am of how stylish I think Rhett and Link are. Every time I see them, I'm just like, they look dynamite. So, okay. What were you saying, Colin? Now I'm just thinking about Rhett and Link and their style. Fashionable then.

There's only two occasions where I've seen Rhett and Link. The first one is in their YouTube ad for Wix before I had YouTube premium. We're Rhett and Link and we made our website with Wix. Yeah. And the second one was their interview with you. Yeah. Like I did not really know anything. I think they're very US centric. Yeah. Like I'd never heard of them. Yeah. Outside of that Wix ad and then you were on our channel and you're like, are those the guys from the Wix ad? Yeah, those are the guys from the Wix ad. I was like, whoa, these guys are huge. They've got a whole, whoa. And I was finding out about them for the first time in your interview with them and I was like, damn, this is a good setup. Did we answer your question? What was your question? Um,

Um, what's it like being co-founders? Oh yeah. What's it like? 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 a hundred percent of decisions that you would make. You don't spend time a hundred percent of the way you would make it. You don't get a hundred percent of your identity in public. You're sharing a lot of it and, uh, it takes a lot of compromise, a lot of, uh,

communication and a lot of belief that the time spent together is worth it, is enjoyable, and is producing now the life that you actually want. Yeah. In a business, it costs a lot of money to run our business right now because we've gotten a bigger studio. Again, we're investing a lot into the business right now. But whatever my financial ambition is, I have to double it.

for us, right, as a company. And that's our reality, right? And I think you have to, that is hard. And so you have to 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,

There's a moment where we crossed a million subscribers while giving a speech at VidSummit, which was not planned and a very intense emotional experience. 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? 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 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 it was. Yeah. And so I think that that is like...

You know, 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. 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, then this is more fun.

Would either of you ever start a couples channel with your respective wives slash fiancés? Absolutely not. No shot. I have just the amount of exposure that I want to my personality, to everything, to thinking about a brand. 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 have to ask, why am I posting that? Who's the audience for this? With what reason? What brand is going to sponsor this post? I know that won't perform because I understand some of these platforms. And it's just, 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 couples 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 feel very fulfilled in it. I feel, uh, like I have enough. I don't, I don't crave, uh,

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 dynamics. 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 walked to coffee shops in the morning. Like I don't want, sometimes 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 that's like so incredibly, like to me, I'm still like, that's insane that people would want to come up and chat. Luckily our fans and the people who watch our show are like,

And so they come up and they're so respectful and you do get to have like a really cool conversation. But I wouldn't want that in the context of my relationship, of people looking at my relationship and being fans of my relationship. Like that to me is, there's nothing about that that sounds interesting or attractive. My answer might have been different in my early 20s when I really craved fame.

But I think that's wrapped up in a lot of different things. And I don't have that feeling at all anymore. Interesting. I love being on this side of the mic and looking at you and being like, where is he about to take that? Did I just drop something that he is now changing his trajectory? So I've been intrigued by the idea of like the couple's channel is a phenomenon for a while. Oh, so you want to do it.

I'm not sure. This is the thing 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 because we just rock up. What's the podcast called? It's called Not Overthinking. Oh, Not Overthinking. Yeah. It's kind of nice. Good memories, good vibes. Get to chat with my brother kind of thing. Yeah.

And it's a fun little joint project that we do together. At one point, we had episodes 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 couples channel is like, well, let's say I were to start a couples channel with someone else and it was purely a hobby. Like we would never, there's never an upload schedule. It's just like...

We talk about relationship stuff occasionally. We like reading relationship books and it's like, here's what we learned. It could be kind of helpful. Maybe a brand might sponsor us to go stay in a nice resort for a week or 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. 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 i can just go on the holiday to the resort anyway like yeah regardless of whether it's free or not i want to go to the resort and do a deliverable probably not probably 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. And even if you are actually learning along the way, you know, I would say perception may not be that. My advice for you would be if you crave it to do it without distributing it.

Oh, interesting. Yeah. Like make videos with your significant other and just watch them back yourself with her. Yeah. Maybe show a friend or family. Like I think we have lost the art of experimenting and practicing in private. We think everything needs to be a public experiment. Yeah. And public experiments are,

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 me like Ali Abdaal launches, you know, X channel. Uh, why did he do that? Let's break it down. Seven reasons why Ali Abdaal did, you know, I'm like, that's going to color some of your thinking. Um, the strategy of it's going to color some of your thinking. Like I think you can do it in private. What

You know, when I really – we had this conversation the other day. We talk about the start of the Colin and Samir channel as, you know, September 2016. We never talk about the start of the Colin and Samir podcast, which is essentially what has become our entire career, which was in 2018 when we were really down and out, having an existential crisis because 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 mics and talk to each other.

each other. And that, when I think about it, it's 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.

And of course, when they filmed 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. It was like putting it on a shelf. Not that many people were listening to it back then. Yeah.

Uh, but now i'm so happy that we did that and we have those those memories and and that understanding 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 Quibi era, I don't know if you remember this. Wow, Quibi was not a thing here. The Americans listening who are in the entertainment business remember Quibi. It was essentially a wildly well-funded distribution platform that was looking for content. Through a series of crazy events, Colin and I got the opportunity to create a show called

Create a sizzle reel and pitch a show with a creative partner who was 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. Asher Roth was like signed by Scooter Braun, who's Justin Bieber's manager.

and 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 found all this footage of like the

these early days with Justin Bieber and this song that we wrote that essentially saved Scooter's company that then financed Justin Bieber's career. Like there's this crazy story about this time. Yeah.

And we were 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 opportunity to create a pitch, create a sizzle reel and go pitch this to Scooter Braun. 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 as filmmakers experience. Within half an hour of ending that meeting, 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 'cause 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 twenties 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 mix that up with the desire, with maybe justifying it through commercial intent. Mm-hmm.

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. And I don't think you need to do that. Yeah, that's a... Yeah, it's a...

It's a thought process that goes through my head annoyingly often. 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. I should stream this on Twitch. Exactly. Like Twitch is dying, like YouTube game. Oh, I guess, okay, cool. I guess I should stream it on the main channel or on the second channel. And then I guess, you know, might as well restream IO to like all the other platforms. And I suppose I can answer questions from the audience while it's happening. I suppose we can record that, chop it up into sort of...

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 could I be doing while sitting on the couch? Okay, I'll text people. I'll text...

you know, people about ideas. I'll get feedback on ideas. Or maybe I'll call my mom. 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 for me over time. It's kind of annoying in a way, but 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 books a year. Hold on. Can we just pause on that? 3x speed. I mean, it depends on the narrator, but sometimes 2.5, sometimes 3. 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 most nonfiction books, self-help books, if you understand the bio, 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, you know, how I read 100 books a year kind of thing. It's not that hard if you listen to an audiobook.

every three days at 3x speed. If you bump that up to 100x, you could probably read a million books. But now increasingly, even when I'm driving, I'll often just think, you know what, we just not listen to anything. I'll go for a walk in Hyde Park and not listen to anything actively. It's hard. 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'm really like 25 this year. Oh wow, I'm a waste man. You know, that kind of thing.

You know what I've found to be the most helpful 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. I started swimming and you're underwater in this flow state just with your thoughts. 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. That to me is like the most present. It's that and playing paddle tennis. 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. It's funny. I think the value of there being two of us is that I'm not like that. Oh, yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah.

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 have a baseline that's a little bit. Zen vibes. Maybe that's because I'm not like a son of immigrants and like I was not raised in that type of environment. But I think it is like a very like different thing about the two of us. It's also, again, back to the question about co-founders. That's why it works, right? Like I said this the other day on a pod that we were talking, but I said like my job is to create the canvas. Colin's job is to paint on it.

That is how we operate. 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 it helps us do it. Like that has been our relationship for 12 years. Not that we don't flow over to, you know, the other side and help. Yeah. But 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 this.

And to buy the ticket and be like, yes, we're going to London. We're going to interview all these people. 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 is also like, again, like the exploration of like value in partnership is like, you know, you have to look at the other person and be like, I understand.

I like deeply respect, empathize, understand, and value your contribution to this in a way that's like, 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 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,

Hmm, 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 I was playing it while on my walking treadmill, so I got the steps in. Okay, there you go. So you figured that out. There it is, yeah. So I tried also playing it listening to an audiobook, 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? Yeah.

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 and Samir's wedding, Paul Rabel, 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, uh,

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 and

waking up late the next day, that's okay. Don't be so hard on yourself because try and think about where that actually fits into your creative process. Not necessarily the productivity side of your brain or the productive process. There's a little bit different on the concept of rest. There is a Tim Ferriss podcast with Jerry Colonna. I cannot recommend it enough.

It's about 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 redefined my relationship with rest. Sick. Yeah. I will check it out. You guys both at various points use the phrase 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? Sean Evans sits across. He can explain the format really 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 or something like that, whatever the tagline is.

Amelia de Moldenberg, 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, right?

It allows for that consistency that we were talking about earlier that's really difficult for creatives to find. 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. Ryan Trahan, 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's look at Mr. Beast. $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 if you want to make it as a creator, there is a...

There is an unlock, which is finding your format, finding that thing that you like to make that the audience wants and that the platform likes. And again, within that format, you can also figure out how does a sponsor fit into this format? Where does the sponsor fit in? Does the sponsor fit in? And so all of a sudden you have a product.

the product is the format. And so if we are looking at media as a business, then that is what you're building. The most successful formats in the world, 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 that is, I think, what you're looking for when it comes to building a career on the internet as an online creator, looking for a format. Yeah.

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've 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, I started off with vlogs as the format, then moved to talking head videos that are educational in five 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 Matt D'Avella documentary style format. But really, what it always comes down to is me talking to a camera 15 minutes and having random shit come up on the screen occasionally. That's the format. And I keep on getting format FOMO. Like Johnny Harris. Johnny Harris' format gets him 5 million views a video. Like, oh shit, why don't I do videos like that? Format.

I like that term. I've never heard that before. Format FOMO. What the guys at Charisma on Command do with breakdowns. I'm like, what if I could do a breakdown of Elon Musk's productivity? It's such a good term. It's so real. 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. I would say the Ali Abdaal format, one of the greatest things is I can close my eyes and envision it, right? That's a brand, right?

A brand is consistent. A brand is something that can be talked about. I can say, oh yeah, Ali Abdaal, he's a creator that does these list videos about productivity, about evidence-based studies. You know, like I can talk about your brand because you have a format. If we did a different video every single time, sure, there might be people who are like, I like these guys, Colin and Samir, they make creative videos. That's hard to build. And again, 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 has taken to be creatively fulfilled. That is a different thing. So like finding a format in media is the biggest unlock from a commercial perspective. That's the thing that can take you. Do you guys get format FOMO these days?

all the time yeah of course what is it every time i watch youtube netflix instagram at all times i think that'd be probably fun to make i have format fomo with you personally yeah with your videos i 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

I've never pursued it. So like I have format FOMO with that. I think we collectively have format FOMO with documentary. Yeah. 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 of podcasts. I spent a lot of my 20s listening to Tim Ferriss, listening to how I built this as Dax Shepard came about, listening to Dax talk to actors like that.

And that was like, hmm, I would love to do that. You know, that's that for me is where 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 you experiment with formats, even once you've found your format that works? I think everything's... You should always be experimenting as a creative. I think the thing about even our podcast is what happened was we were making these explainer videos on our channel. People who have been watching for a while know we found a format that was working, which was Colin and I sit in a car and break down...

you know, something about YouTube. And that was a great format. It was fun. It got way too hot in the car because 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 profusely in the car. It took a lot of writing and a lot of research and a lot of creativity that, you know, was intense. The post-production really sat on Colin's shoulders, which was a lot of work and a lot of effort. 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 Samir podcast to that YouTube channel. Oh yeah. The Colin and Samir show. Yeah. Yeah. Well, it was called the Colin and Samir podcast. Yeah. And we interviewed, we gave, we did Arak's first interview on that channel. We did an interview with Graham Stephan. 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 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. Explosive, yeah. 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. Yeah. You enjoy it. Yeah. Requires less post-production. Yeah.

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, we now have allowed ourselves

space to experiment a little bit more freely. Yeah. 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 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 Colin and Samir podcast to the Colin and Samir show. And that was really intentional because as we brought it to YouTube, um,

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 Samir 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 was the decision to change from Colin and Samir podcast to Colin and Samir 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.

Yeah. I mean, I was accustomed to feeling a sense of self-worth from editing, storytelling, even holding a camera. 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. And I think I've kind of fought it over the last two years of taking conversations and hyper-editing them when we first started. Yeah, they're very hyper-edited. They're hyper-edited. I was feeling so much FOMO of that format. I was like, oh man, we should totally like do a podcast where we hyper-edit everything. No, you shouldn't. Well, if you want to do it, sure. Yeah, if you want to. 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, not as much. Definitely not in video form. Yeah. And so like, I was a consumer of this format. I had format FOMO of this format. 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.

And still to this day, I'm like, I have pinch me moments when we do the interviews. Sitting across from Tim Ferriss was crazy. Sitting across from Dream was like, I love this. This is amazing. We get to have...

long conversations with people that inspire me and that I'm curious about that to me seems still like insane that that is our job now, you know, I get to fly to London to have conversations. I think I've said it every day. We've been like, it's crazy. Is this good? We can do this. We can just talk. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. It's, it's amazing. It's, it's incredible, but it took a long time to accept that.

I would say, between our collaboration to say, we are podcasters. We are talk show hosts. That is what we do. That took time to reestablish 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 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

the rest of the world to us, 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-y. And now I look at it as, oh my gosh, what a gift that we get to speak to people and have a podcast. Yeah.

That's the engine that we then get to experiment. And I also think it is building the craft of documentary filmmaking 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 two 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 shiny thing. But you can experiment on the side with the shiny thing if you really want to. But keep the engine going. But also don't experiment too early because the engine will fall apart. Like build the engine. Make the engine strong. I'm like without an engine, you don't have a car. So like don't worry about like the color of the paint. Yeah.

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. To what extent would you guys recommend for someone who is completely new to the creator world starting a podcast as the thing that they do?

I think having a podcast is one of the most rewarding things you can do. I would decouple it from the financial reward. This was a conversation we have with Tim Ferriss. He talked about there's the non-financial reward of having a podcast, which is the conversations and the experience of getting to have long conversations. Then there's 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 as a fun thing that we got to do together. Mm-hmm.

So the reward, if you really think about it, guys who are not really making a lot of money, we're 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,

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.

In the creative world, not in the world, but in the creative world. It's not expensive. You know, we had two mics laying around that were under $100. We, you know, you could get a USB mic like you have right now that goes into your laptop. You can record a podcast on a very small budget. Yeah.

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 low cost, 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 a hundred episodes.

Maybe 50 episodes. I don't think you'll know anything about your own podcast until you do that. So leave enough space for it to end at episode 30. And what do you think is the commercial viability of the podcast format these days for someone 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 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 built to the point where we had like

2,000 people listening to our podcast in probably 2019. And that to me was like a lot, that was a lot of people. I think it was like between 1,500 and 2,000 people. And we did this podcast episode where we were experiencing a deep existential crisis. So I didn't know, we didn't know why we were doing what we were doing. We were 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

re-establish 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 2000 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, than you have your best friend, than you have... They are... They're occupying the space in between your ears. That is so incredibly deep, that connection. And so what I would also suggest is like, yes, discovery is really hard. If you are like a brand new creator and you're like, I'm going to upload a podcast, that's going to be really hard. If you have an audience...

Okay, that's why a lot of YouTubers start a podcast. It's a simpler format. They already have distribution. 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. 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 in an RSS feed are some of the most engaged. I would say them and newsletter readers.

Yeah, one thing that we, 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 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. And the watch hours for the podcast are like half of what the main channel is.

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. Damn. This podcast is actually like, you need a way smaller podcast to have a huge impact on people because of the long formness of it. On our audio feed specifically, 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. An hour or two? Yeah. Whoa, right? That's like, whoa. And-

They will click no matter what you put up. They aren't judging it based on the title and thumbnail. They're like, I trust you. I trust you here, so I'm going 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, hmm.

Okay, I'm going to click that. And then you click it and I still have to win 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, what podcast do you listen to? Tim Ferriss, for example. If Tim Ferriss 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 YouTube? They'll give you 10 seconds. Or even in real life. Yeah, yeah. So I think that is what's so powerful about podcasting. 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 than 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 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 in the car. And that's who you are to a lot of people, which is so interesting in podcasting. It's a completely different relationship. But yeah, it's not easy. It's not an easy thing to do because it's very saturated. And people only have a certain amount of time. And you're asking for an hour or two hours of time. It's significant. Changing gears a little bit.

You guys have a newsletter business as well called The Publish Press. It was only when you guys were interviewing me in LA that I realized that, oh, that's a really clever name because it's like press publish but like reverse. And also it's like, whoa, that's really clever. I can't believe I haven't come across that. What's the story behind the newsletter business and why did you decide to start a newsletter business?

Yeah, so I think... And what is a newsletter business? Just for people who might not be familiar with the published press. Yeah, I mean, our business is 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. That's like the simplest version of it, right? And you look at...

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 hyper-specific audience that's interested in a 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 Lieberman, 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. 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 they hang out on YouTube. They get their education from YouTube, right? 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. They hang out on YouTube. That's a big audience. It's on YouTube. We're going to attract 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 creator industry probably

probably mostly opens their email inbox, right? So now where do we provide content in this pyramid? YouTube, podcast, inbox.

So that was the thought, right? It's 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 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 realized, audience is in the email inbox. So we wanted to do it. We met with Alex Lieberman 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 have people help you in the way we wanted to do it. We wanted to do something similar to Morning Brew, 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 to someone who was leaving Morning Brew at the time named Josh Kaplan, who came on as a consultant and helped us just figure out how to spin it up. How do we make a newsletter? Who do we hire? What does it look like? And what we did was 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, we started to bring in

more voices, people who consume different parts of the creator 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.

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. So those three things are our value propositions. 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. Education, curation, articulation. We can write about the greater economy. So that was the extension, right? And so those were the two things we really looked at. Yeah.

Those are good extensions. We could do events, right? We could do events. That's pretty good. But that's hard. We don't know how to do that. 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 does represent community and identity, which is a part of our value proposition, but 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. 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 this space? If I'm a graduating college kid, how do I learn quickly about what's happening in the creator economy? Ooh, I could subscribe to this newsletter and learn.

Right. So it's like, it just felt right. And so then, you know, we, we released it, we ran it, we ran it for a few months without any sponsorship, just ran, we acquired, you know, thousands of readers. And then we started getting sponsorships. And then we also realized at some point that this is its own company. We have our own writers for the company. It needs to build its own culture. It's

It's its own thing and we're in the process of that now. It's spun into its own company and the original team that helped us and we brought on as consultants are partnered into it. We own it with two other people and that is a whole experience in and of itself of building another content company alongside what we do. But it follows the same thing we know. Make content happen.

get sponsors. Those are the things we know how to do. So 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 and ready to get into it now that we have these engines that we've built. But

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 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 also good though at like taking concepts and boiling them down into simple, like well articulated videos.

So I would say that. The course thing makes perfect sense. But then us trying to build our own stationary brand, which we tried to do last year. Right, it's like adjacent. Yeah, adjacent. It's like one thing I'm exploring now is could we build our own productivity app? Which feels like value prop extension in that we help people be more productive and build a life they love. And it's like, cool, instead of promoting apps that we don't own,

can we promote an app that we do own turns out making an app is really freaking hard yeah of course everyone i've spoken to is like bloody hell this is really hard i'm like okay well if we made a five dollar 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 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 development or app development business? Probably not. I'd love to be a minority shareholder in a other productivity app that I genuinely use. And 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. And then 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's not pretend like I'm going to do that. Are you ready for 10 years of learning that? Everything takes like 10 years. One question I was asking myself 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, well, what would I do even if I knew I would fail? And on that list was definitely not building a productivity app. Because I was like, absolutely hell no. If I knew I was going to fail, why the hell would I build a productivity app? And I was like, ah, hang on. That's interesting. Even if I knew I would fail, one thing that was in both lists

is i just really like the idea of building like a stage show like a one-man stage show like derren brown kind of vibes and that would be super fun as a bit of a side side project even if 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 close-up magic at parties and balls at university card tricks and shit yeah wow i would love to come see that show yeah

So that feels really fun. And that's lit a fire 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 legit thing. It's just like, okay, cool. That's a bit of a side hustle. But I like this idea of value prop extension. How do you square the newsletter with the whole focus thing? Because it's not, you're splitting your focus between like not just focusing on the format that works.

I think we have sacrificed focus to get it off the ground. There's no doubt in my mind. Yeah. 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 focus back as we build it as its own company, truly, with someone at the helm who probably wakes up every single day and is like, this is my sole focus. You know, not just part of our focus. Part of our focus is obviously heavily on what we're doing on the Colin and Samir 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 one to ten

needs to be done by a seasoned person. And your role in the one 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 and Samir. Yeah, 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. And that requires team and operators to work

do that scaling, right? 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 Samir who own the company, The Published 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. But the push-pull 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? And we are those type of guys, right? We are those guys who scrutinize everything 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? And so I think 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 one to 10. You are not. There's no possible way. You have to be the creator.

I need some advice. One thing we are considering doing is launching a daily newsletter called Daily Productivity. So I bought the domain dailyproductivity.com. Like the Daily Stoic?

And the idea being like, can we do Daily Stoic, but like the productivity version where we give you 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 at the start it's Daily Productivity by Ali Abdaal or something, but like over time we lose that thing and try and build its own thing around that thing.

What do you reckon? What are the thoughts that you'd be like, what sort of questions would you be asking? How would you approach that? How would you write the content? Batch? Like, would you write 365 before you launch it? Probably not. We are thinking we'd write seven and pilot it for seven days with our audience and see what happens. And then...

four weeks from now decide are we actually going to do this because 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 men 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 the newsletter, but like, that's one of the greatest things. I would write 365 before you launch. Because what you're doing is it's not, it doesn't, it's not tied to the date, right? No, it's not. Yeah. The ones that we wrote, we couldn't air. Yeah. So 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, cause 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 a.m. or whatever the time it is, you've fucked my ritual. I don't know if you swear on this podcast, but yeah, but-

Like you have messed up my ritual. 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 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 it.

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 not write 90 issues and then launch it if we're happy with the 90 and then figure it out and then build the tracks as the train is on the- I think it depends on your relationship with the content. Yeah. Like I really, 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. 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 3 out of 10, but in aggregate, the whole project is going to be an 8 out of 10. Then maybe you can do that. But I don't know how to get someone else to do that work that I'm 100% happy with. So I have to have a different relationship with a lot of the stuff. You may also want to make sure you have an understanding of what is that 1 out of 10 newsletter send and what is the –

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 or getting close to running out. Then all of a sudden you may send a five out of 10, a six out of 10, a seven out of 10 for multiple days in a row. Yeah. 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 what you want to do with the project. But I would batch produce it. That's good. But it sounds right for your brand, obviously. It's a value 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 that's the option. Maybe my productivity...

doesn't allow me to 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 and 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 yeah they're decoupled and they're different and you have to understand both um yeah

Are you glad you have a newsletter business? Yes. I think based on what I talked about with permission and interruption, 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. That is a group that I feel like I have a deeper understanding of, that I have 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 watch whatever I put out. Yeah. You know? But that's not the case. And the newsletter format kind of allows us to have this permission-based environment. And if you don't want that anymore, if you don't give us permission anymore, you just unsubscribe and it's done. So the people who are there, who are opening it, that to me is like a very core group. Yeah.

Yeah, and I also think it's been a really good lesson in scaling. I'm happy we tried something new. It has its own set of challenges that would not come from having a YouTube channel. It's interesting to learn about how to build a slightly different type of product and business and to experience actually even the highs and the wins of 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 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 so great. And there's some people who I've gotten messages from who are like,

you know, at UCLA or 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've 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 transformed 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 as 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. I think sometimes virality turns you into someone who is constantly seeking that outcome of virality. And I think the thing to seek is the process, right? And so that's my opinion of like,

I think as creators, we should be seeking a better, more enjoyable process, not necessarily the outcome. Like the outcome is a byproduct of that process. And so if we're just chasing the outcome, and I'm speaking from a space of experience, the dopamine hit of going viral is one of the most intoxicating things ever. How did you guys feel after your Mr. Beast video? Because that was like 2 million views in like two days. Which one? 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 that I think we felt some of our, uh, on the production side, like,

We had wished we had, you know, asked a few more questions. We had wished 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's what we took away from that. I assumed that, you know, there would be a large audience for that. You know, that's not a surprise. The bigger rush was five years ago when we made a video essay about David Dobrik and he shared it on Snapchat. And it blew up. It blew 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 think the, you know, one of 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 learned things. That was like a total rush. We did our interview with Tim Ferriss, it 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 really,

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 up to how the audience receives it. Yeah. You're focusing on what you can control. Yeah. Which is the process of showing up consistently. That's the more succinct way of saying what I just said. Yeah. Yeah. I think this is...

I've recently been reading "The Practice" by Seth Godin. - Oh, such a great book. - And I'm just 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 FOMO. 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 to- - Yeah, Johnny Harris is Johnny Harris 'cause he knows how to make Johnny Harris videos. - And then even speaking to you guys over lunch where I'm like, yeah, I don't know 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.

The answer is obvious, even as I say it. It's the process rather than the result. You mentioned something in a video around 12 lessons from 12 years on YouTube. You mentioned brand is more important than reach in the long term. What do you mean by that? Reach, what we're talking about here, views, is many times filling space on these platforms. If you think about TikTok, Shorts, Instagram Reels...

It's so quick. 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 filling 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. 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 have a brand that people will remember. And we've been making comps to Severance, which is such a great show. I haven't seen it. Oh, it's phenomenal. Yeah, okay. 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. It's like back in the day when Sam Calder was making videos, it's like every six months, oh, Sam Calder video just dropped. Yeah. And everyone just flucks to it and the sort of travel. Exactly. I don't even know if Sam Calder has uploaded in the past year, but if someone told me Sam Calder was working on something, I would think it was premium. Yeah.

Yeah. When you say Sam Colder, I see a sunset in my head, a beach, cinematic. Super attractive guy doing a backflip. I know. He actually hit me up on Instagram like two days ago. Sam's great. We worked with Sam on a project a couple years ago. He's awesome. Yeah, he's so cool. Honestly, you know what's upsetting is that he's that attractive and that cool.

Yeah, I know. It's really unfair. It's just you can't have all of it. Someone has a brand so he can take breaks. Yeah. This was about brands. It's like a paid thing with DJI. Right. It's just such a good, I'm going to watch it anyway, even though I know it's an ad for the label DJI. But Sam 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 Colder video. Yeah. Right? Like the Jim Chalk video is sick. Yeah, the Jim Chalk video is great. If I was working at, yeah, like DJI, I'd be like, yeah, I want a Sam Colder video. Not because of his reach, but because of the brand association. Yeah, we talked about this concept of singularity, that Sam Colder is singular.

For a lot of people and for a lot of brands. DJI might not want just any creator. They want Sam Colder. 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 in our course. Nice. That we're building. That you're building. When's it going to be released? I would think...

September is safe. Yeah, September's safe. Yeah, September's a safe bet. We have many titles for it. We have a whiteboard full of titles. But we're closing in on it. I think we're very confident in the curriculum of it and very confident in the worksheets. I think it's a course that's self-discovery. You will discover a lot about yourself. You'll discover a lot about your business. And you'll come out of the other side being prepped to...

figure out how to turn what you're doing creatively into a product, into a business. I'm sold. Yeah, there you go. That was the sales pitch. That sounds great. Sign me up. Yeah, the brand thing is interesting. 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? Yeah, I think not only, 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. Yeah.

And I think that's because the platforms have done this really smart thing, right? And largely led by TikTok, where it was like, okay, people are here for creators. That is pretty volatile. Creators come and go. They could leave. They could like, hmm. So what TikTok showed everyone is that the platform could be the creator.

When you say I'm watching TikTok, you are watching TikTok. There's very few people who go on TikTok and say, okay, I go on TikTok, I search Ali Abdaal. Now I'm watching Ali Abdaal, right? No, it's I'm watching TikTok. I'm scrolling the For You page. So TikTok is the creator. You take the top 10 creators off of TikTok, TikTok's still TikTok. It's still enjoyable. Yeah.

Right. And so YouTube, I believe you take the top 10 creators off YouTube. It's a very different place. But YouTube was looking at TikTok and saying, hmm, you know, not only this is what 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. Yeah.

People may not even notice on a short form feed. No one's going to be scrolling and be like, interesting, there's no Alio Gold today. I would take one of 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're playing into the feed. And you might be rewarded for playing into the feed, but you are 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 there's some creators who are sticking out dramatically and then 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 common if you build a large audience or moving over to long form YouTube videos. Like long form, if you can make it in long form, 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, what would be your balance of long form, short form videos? And how would you go about

YouTube versus TikTok versus threads versus all the 10 different options we have for posting on platforms these days, like if you were trying to build this creator 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 create a lower barrier to entry like when you say get going 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 gonna 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

Colin, one thing you said in one of your videos that you're not working on a YouTube channel, you're working on yourself. What do you mean by that? 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 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 I 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 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 a hundred million in the bank, what would change about the way you spend your time? If anything, 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 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. Cause at least for me, most of what I want is very achievable. I just have to like uncover it. I think it would just be like time. I would, I would treat things, I would give time to more things. Like I would move a little slower in my creation 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 settled 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 be sick. I think we're just describing Rick Rubin's Shangri-La right now. Yeah.

But I have a friend who's doing it in Taos, New Mexico. Right. 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 writers go there to hang out. Yeah, writers go there in Taos. So he's doing that as well. There's 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 would just spend my time differently. That's it. You know, like-

You just spend your time on things that 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 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 particularly 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 of time that we don't see each other and make it really easy.

That's cool. Would you continue to do the show, the Colin and Samir show? A hundred percent. Yeah. Yeah. That would be awkward if you had different answers to that. 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, you

Like, like I said, what I would do is like have coffee with interesting people. I have a formula and a format to do that that allows for, you know, a Ryan Holiday to come and sit with us for three hours. Like 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, a podcast, whatever, is the jab, jab, jab, right hook thing of like give away loads and loads and loads of free content. The 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 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 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? 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? Or like,

It could be a digital product, could be a physical product, but like one of the greatest things about YouTube specifically 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. Yeah.

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 really think about that. And to me, sometimes I think it's crazy when creators complain about AdSense or ad rates because it's not in our control. This is not our platform. Yes, we make up the platform, but 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 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 is 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, 5 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 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,

A bunch of interviews. We're here filming interviews. We're working on building our engine and solidifying our engine 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. And then, you know, number two, as we feel like the engine is getting more stable is building out these new value prop extensions, continuing to build out the PublishPress newsletter with the team that's there 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 customer experience and student experience and design and funnels and

acquisition, all these new words that aren't familiar to us, we're learning. And it's taking us a lot longer than I think we anticipated. But I feel really confident in the curriculum. We have a lot of learning to do on how to be an Ali Abdaal, but we are learning. And 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. If you're here, welcome. Welcome to the deep end. Welcome to the deep end here. As we call it. We dove really deep in this. Any parting words of wisdom? Find as much time as you can to spend time with yourself. For me, that has come through the practice of writing and journaling. Yeah.

I can't recommend that enough. But if that's something different for you, if that's listening to music and going on a walk, 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. I would say one of the books I've really been enjoying, and we bring it up all the time, is Rick Rubin's The Creative Active Way of Being. And he talks about how being an artist is about practicing the art of awareness, right?

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 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 gonna 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 helps other people discover the podcast. Or if you're watching this in full HD or 4K on YouTube, then you can leave a comment down below and ask any questions or any insights or any thoughts about the episode. That would be awesome. And if you enjoyed this episode, you might like to check out this episode here as well, which links in with some of the stuff that we talked about in the episode. So thanks for watching.

Do hit the subscribe button if you want already, and I'll see you next time. Bye-bye.