[Unedited Transcript]
[00:00:00]
Paul Ford: So rich. Uh, not too long ago we had an episode about Mr. Beast.
Rich Ziade: Yes. Top of the YouTube food chain, Mr. Beast.
Paul Ford: right, that’s right. Mr. Beast likes to do big charity things on YouTube. He has lots of fans. And
Rich Ziade: Lots of fans.
Paul Ford: Kids love him.
Rich Ziade: Kids love him.
Paul Ford: a, he is a, he’s a big old deal, Mr. Beast. And, uh, you came in today and you said, I just can’t stand that guy.
Rich Ziade: Well, I just didn’t like the stuff I, I thought it was, I thought it was a optimized. It was just, just sugar and fat. Like it was just optimized to just be digested instantly and hit like the right receptors. And it’s, um, I, I, who am I to decide what people should or shouldn’t watch
Paul Ford: you’re, you’re no one to decide that, right? Like, that’s
Rich Ziade: I, I’m no one to decide that. I do get to decide what my kid watches until he’s slightly larger than me physically, and then he won’t, [00:01:00] he’ll do
Paul Ford: Oh, this is, I don’t, people don’t talk about this. Like the, the amount of lockdown related to YouTube that has to happen in a house.
It’s, it’s, kids will prefer watching YouTube to playing video games. Like they will prefer watching YouTube almost anything.
Rich Ziade: And, and.
Paul Ford: and
Rich Ziade: Let’s just to be clear, we’re not talking about explicit content. We’re not talking about curse words. It’s normal stuff,
Paul Ford: No, it’s, I, I’m gonna watch someone play Luigi’s Haunted Castle for four hours.
Rich Ziade: it’s just turning. I could just see my kids’ brain getting turned into a fine pace. There’s a long a, a few podcasts back. I was pointing out how dumb everything was, how impatient everyone was, was, and I wanna call you out for something you said to me. Sometimes you said to me, and I’m paraphrasing, sometimes you just wanna lay there and eat a scoop of ice cream.
That’s what you said to me,
Paul Ford: I mean, it’s, that’s the story of my life up until Manjaro.
Rich Ziade: [00:02:00] On occasion I do it, I veg out, I like, I’ll watch the dumbest thing, or I’ll just not wanna think too hard. But I don’t think it’s good to lay down and eat ice cream for six hours straight
Paul Ford: Here’s what’s tricky. It’s a tricky part about working in the media. Is that your initial fantasies of what human beings are like are demolished. When you do anything real at any particular scale, the emails you get are from people who hold abhorrent belief systems who weren’t able to perceive beyond the headline of the article you wrote.
The people who, most of the people who watch succession can’t pour milk out of a jug, and yet they’ll tell you that that’s the smartest show on tv. Okay, so it’s just like you are really up a
Rich Ziade: to succession. It might be the [00:03:00] smartest show on
Paul Ford: It doesn’t matter. People like warm moving shapes in aggregate and it’s, this is what the internet has taught us over and over is that there, you know, there’s always this idea that like, oh man, if we could just tap into human potential and just let everybody have a voice, what a society we would have.
Rich Ziade: It’s not working out that way.
Paul Ford: we te we did it. We did it and it actually turned out that humans are not here for like a long time. We’re here for a good time. Like it is not, you are not
Rich Ziade: I’m just looking for a good time.
Paul Ford: what humans are, man. It’s just you got chimpanzees with guns and, and so like, there is that, and so then there was a part of you, you have to decide this is a hard choice.
I, I’ve made this choice. Other people make it in different ways. Do you, and this is, this I think is a complicated needle to thread, okay? Because Mr. Beast is human seo. He said, I see what the robots do. I will, I will feed the fire and let’s see what people say. And anything that [00:04:00] makes my audience in aggregate happy, I’ll do more and more of.
Rich Ziade: By happy you mean bigger,
Paul Ford: bigger, more money, brighter graphics. You know, it, it’s what you see is as time goes on and more and more SEO content, everything, everything approaches essentially what would please a baby, right? So like a baby likes bright colors, loud noises,
Rich Ziade: time. Yeah.
Paul Ford: ice cream. Right, like just sort of soft foods and, and so Mr.
Beast is, is sort of headed towards a kind of soft baby kind of content. Look baby, I gave the dog a biscuit. Like that’s kind of the end game. Here
Rich Ziade: It is, and you know, I, I’m not gonna sit, let me, let me be realistic here. Okay. My kid, my, I have a 10 year old boy.
Paul Ford: Yeah.
Rich Ziade: I tried to sit him down on like Ken Burns Jazz,
Paul Ford: Now I gotta tell you.
Rich Ziade: docuseries.
Paul Ford: Having young children both gives you [00:05:00] tremendous faith in humanity and challenges it very profoundly
Rich Ziade: All at once. Yeah. Right.
Paul Ford: You’re like, oh, you know, you like that one song you enjoy. Take Five by Dave Brubeck. Maybe you’ll like this documentary about jazz. Yeah. How did that go?
Rich Ziade: Look, I, I, I, my parents didn’t pay attention to me when I got home from school. I had no activities. I had like nothing going on. No jiu-jitsu, no soccer, no nothing.
I would sometimes be allowed to leave the house and play stickball. I grew up in Brooklyn, but other than that, they paid no attention. Most of the time I watched TV and when I watched tv I watched Tom and Jerry. Sure. A lot like hours of it, like just, and I didn’t li, I didn’t smile or laugh cause I’d seen them all within the first
Paul Ford: months. Now, you know. You know a nice moment in your life is when it would get dark outside and your face would be illuminated blue as you sat there alone in America watching Tom and Jerry.
Exactly. Yeah.
Rich Ziade: So,
Paul Ford: bleak
Rich Ziade: [00:06:00] know, it’s not like I was watching, you know, history channel, like I wasn’t doing that either. I do think there’s something different
Paul Ford: you. Were a nerdy kid. You were interested in the computer. You got there
Rich Ziade: before. This is, this is like, I’m in my like eight or nine years old. I’m
Paul Ford: talking, oh yeah.
It’s a disaster.
Rich Ziade: disaster, right? And so, You could blame my mom and I’m trying to be like, open-minded about this and, and not, you know, not be the old man who’s like, well, on my day we used to read a book.
Right? I, I don’t wanna be that. And so I’m thinking back and I’m thinking, I used to just veg out. Like I used to just sit there and watch that stupid cart. I’d get my homework done. She’s like, you can watch TV now. And then she would just essentially dole out secondhand smoke while I’m
Paul Ford: smoke and talk on the telephone. Those are the
Rich Ziade: Yeah. Yeah, yeah.
Paul Ford: That was, motherhood.
Rich Ziade: That was mothering. She,
every song
Paul Ford: seventies and
Rich Ziade: put the receiver to her neck and go lower it.
Paul Ford: Yeah.
Rich Ziade: then I’d,
Paul Ford: she’d get, and, and as she said that a a like puff, the magic [00:07:00] dragon level of smoke would pour out of her body.
Rich Ziade: So
I’m thinking about that and I’m thinking about today and how. Aggressive we are with this stuff and, and I think I, I do see it as some important differences and I want to highlight them. Um, the local television station was buying blocks of Tom and Jerry cuz it was cheap to put ’em on the air before the news kicked in at six o’clock.
Paul Ford: o’clock News man.
Rich Ziade: Yeah. Um, what
Paul Ford: a terrible killing in Bay Ridge. And also traffic on the ones. Yeah,
Rich Ziade: All of that. Now, what you have today, right, is two important things that have changed. One is the instrumentation around what success looks like is much finer grained and. Apps. Like you don’t get credit for a YouTube view unless certain amount of it has been watched.
Paul Ford: 12 people in Germany think you’re the [00:08:00] tops. Exactly.
Rich Ziade: So the, the sort of micro analysis and the, and, and the metrics you can pull off of this stuff has incented people to just continue to refine the, the work so that it’s not about a creative work. Look, there were orchestras. I’m going to, I’m gonna vouch for Tom and Jerry for one second.
An entire orchestra. There was no sound effects. It was like the big, the guy who held the big symbols would like smash ’em together whenever Jerry hit his face, you
Paul Ford: what it is though too.
The, the creative cycle and the loop was much. Longer. Right? So you had to make a whole cartoon, not woody woodpecker, right? You have to conceive of the woodpecker. You have to figure out what the woodpecker’s gonna look
Rich Ziade: took
Paul Ford: People love that woodpecker and every, it still takes months, every time you want that woodpecker to do something.
Okay? Big hit goes for years. Woody Woodpecker, et cetera. Mr. Beast is able to know in minutes how things like, I’m sure at this stage in his career, cuz I can do [00:09:00] this. I, if something goes out into the internet instantly. You see the feedback on Twitter and you kind of know like in a minute if you have a hit on your hand or not, you’re just like, oh, okay, well that one’s not gonna go.
And, and so like what I, what I see with Mr. Beasto, there is no point. Mr. Beast. Can only Mr. Beast it up? Like, yeah. I mean, he could turn to the camera and be like, really? Why are we making these videos? But no one will care.
Right? He’s created an envi, he’s just a machine for creating certain sensations in humans, and he’s able to profit vastly as a result. Yeah,
Rich Ziade: Yeah, and I, I’ve said before,
Paul Ford: it, going back to the Tom and Jerry Point and the Woody Becker point. We’re on a cycle of days, hours, minutes. You know, you can, you get the reaction very, very quickly.
Tom and Jerry, man, they put that out and people would be like, ah, you know that one where the cat fell off the kitchen table? That was good stuff, Mike.
Rich Ziade: Well, I mean, it’s, it’s, it’s more than that. It’s, it’s actually stuff from the fifties and sixties cuz it’s cheaper to just [00:10:00] buy syndication of old stuff. It was very expensive to, the local station’s not gonna produce new cartoons.
Paul Ford: is a shame though, that local TV produced shows went away from the world. They were the ones that would get
Rich Ziade: Oh,
I, it was amazing.
Paul Ford: like Captain Tommy Space Cadets and just all that good stuff. Anyway,
Rich Ziade: was another character, there’s another distinction I would make, which is that when Tom and Jerry ended, it ended and then something else came on.
Paul Ford: Yeah.
Rich Ziade: Uh,
by giving the kids to the, the power to on demand, just eat gobs of this stuff. Um, I think, I think that kind of control that early. Uh, well, here’s, lemme put it differently. I’m as guilty as anyone else. If [00:11:00] I’ve got like an extra 30 seconds waiting for the bus, I’ll eat a snack of dumb shit.
Paul Ford: Yeah. You know how, you know our society is failing. People take the bath, the phone to the bathroom when they pee.
Rich Ziade: I’m really good at It man.
Paul Ford: used to be like, it used to be like, mm, I’m gonna take it in there. I gotta, I gotta about five minutes to go.
But no, it’s like I gotta, I, I have to get like urine outta my body, but I don’t want to miss a moment. I’m gonna watch a YouTube video.
Rich Ziade: We’ve made this point before,
Paul Ford: Yeah. I mean, we’ve pretty much have like five points, so I wouldn’t worry about it.
Rich Ziade: No. Fine. No, but I guess, I guess here’s, I like a long song,
Paul Ford: uh, like American Pie by Dominic Clean Real
Rich Ziade: not a good song. I don’t like that
song.
Paul Ford: long time
Rich Ziade: But I like a song that you kind of have to put the work in, and then when it culminates and it starts to come together and like out of
Paul Ford: oh, like, like off the album tales of the topographic oceans. But yes,
Rich Ziade: [00:12:00] Not that either. Not either of those actually. Appetite for little snack size bites of information. I think has put us in a place where you know all the algorithms and they’re manipulating our children. It’s just us. It’s us. We have any waking moment we can, we can duck out and take a little bite of something and watch a dog, like, you know, balance a bird on his nose, like, and
Paul Ford: My my pin tweet on Twitter, which I have never received any feedback for Uhhuh.
Rich Ziade: Uhhuh.
Paul Ford: Um, for those who don’t know because they have a life, you can put one tweet at the top of your Twitter account and it says, we did this to ourselves.
Rich Ziade: ourselves. That’s it. That’s the name of this podcast
Paul Ford: it is an unforgivable sentiment. In right now to say, Hey, I think actually this might just be humans, uh, rather than Mark, you know, people think Mark Zuckerberg or, or, or, well, it’s tricky with Elon Musk because he does seem to actually have a paranoid desire to squash most liberal thought, but I don’t think Zuckerberg [00:13:00] does.
And, uh, and, and so like we’re living. In this world where we get really, really paranoid and so on. But I actually think most things like there needs to be a corollary to Occam’s Razor, which is the general triviality and chimp like behavior of aggregate humans explains most internet things.
Rich Ziade: Exactly. I mean, I, I, I think, I think our desire for. Sort of that immediate gratification and the tech is getting better and better
Paul Ford: Sure.
Rich Ziade: it. Um, we’ll take it. I was like, yeah, wait, what? I can tap three places on my phone and then chicken pad tie shows up. I mean, of course.
That sounds excellent. I
Paul Ford: you explained to me for a while, while you were never gonna make another phone call to deliver food again.
And I was like, ah, come on man. Get over yourself.
Rich Ziade: when’s the last time you spoke to anyone?
Paul Ford: It’s been a while.
Rich Ziade: like beyond
Paul Ford: This is like four years ago, and you’re like, [00:14:00] why would I ever call another restaurant when I can hit some buttons? And now I’m like, yeah, no. No one would ever, I’d rather go pick it up. I’d rather go get it.
Rich Ziade: It’s reached that point. all right. So there’s a thing going on. Now we’re talking about this, but the reason we, what sparked this conversation actually was there’s an article in. The published press.com, which is a newspaper I know. I know. It’s a newspaper or
Sounds really great.
Paul Ford: It’s specifically for creator, creator economy types.
Everybody gets their own newspaper in 2023. It’s fair. And so they wrote a big article, uh, or a big series of articles called The New Wave, the Next Generation of Creators. This part’s hard fighting for the soul of YouTube. First of all, the soul of YouTube, as far as I can tell, is the database that tracks how many times somebody clicks, like, like on a, on a picture of a
Rich Ziade: just one big thumb.
Paul Ford: Yeah. But [00:15:00] anyway, but let’s,
Rich Ziade: okay, Well you, you read up on this, you point. You shared it with me yesterday. What? Why?
Paul Ford: Well, I think this is, so, they’re all very young and there’s, you know, they go to creator camp, which I’m not quite sure where it is, but all the pictures show it’s very snowy and you’re in a lodge, okay?
And you’re like, you’re 22 and you have 10,000 followers. And I, I think I.
Rich Ziade: um,
Paul Ford: There’s, first of all, there’s always an aesthetic counter movement. You know, there was Dogman 95 in 1995 where everybody’s like, we’re gonna make really, really boring movies that are badly lit. And, uh, a number of films that nobody can remember came out of that.
And, um, and, and so sort of like, uh, there’s always an aesthetic movement and it’s always, you know, tends to be. The young folks, the people under the, you know, the people who are under like 30 going, not a hell of it, man. It’s pointless. Anyway, like they’re looking at Mr. Beast and they’re going, I have a medium that I can use to [00:16:00] express any human emotion I can to share stories from my life.
I can be simple, I can be low budget, and I can be interesting under those constraints. Rather than constantly chasing this sort of algorithmic, like, I’m gonna give away more and more money and put a big picture on my face with letters and words on the screen, on the thumbnail. Like,
Rich Ziade: more. Okay. I now, now I’m understanding it. And this is reminded me of a conversation that we had, you and I had with a mutual, uh, friend of ours who’s a musician.
Paul Ford: Oh yeah, sure.
Rich Ziade: And what the tension you’re talking about is the difference between the eternal sin.
of an artist,
which is, I’m gonna make something that everyone is gonna find to be delicious.
It won’t actually be how I feel or in a real creative expression of my own, my true self. But boy will they find it to be delicious.
Paul Ford: true. The true artist is a, is the chef who, when you go, because he is known, For [00:17:00] his, his fried chicken gives you a brick.
Rich Ziade: Yeah.
Paul Ford: And you’re like, well, I guess I’m going to eat it because he made it.
Yes. And then your teeth fall out and you’re like, well he really is an artist.
Rich Ziade: what we’re talking about. What Mr. Beast is saying, and you can’t fault him for it, is like I studied it and I optimized for it, and who cares where I grew up or what I’m about,
or what my creative expression is.
Paul Ford: it’s don’t play.
Don’t hate the, the player hate the game. Right. Like
Rich Ziade: am an entertainer. Yeah.
I am here to entertain you. Yep. And I am going to give you the best show you’ve ever seen. This is about you.
Paul Ford: Vaudeville. Vaudeville. We just, here we go.
Rich Ziade: Go to the other extreme. Right. And you have Johnny Greenwood. Leaving Radiohead to make like a found sound album with like a this, this like musicians in India.
Paul Ford: you know Who else is where John Ante or Shanti [00:18:00] from? From Red Hot
Rich Ziade: Amazing guitarist. I hate the red hot chili peppers. I think
Paul Ford: He’s a really good guitarist.
Rich Ziade: overrated, but he’s a very good
Paul Ford: Yeah, I am too. But he makes like these weird synth drone albums that are like, the last one was almost Unlistenable.
Yeah. Yeah.
Rich Ziade: So the other extreme is, I’m going to express myself.
I am
Paul Ford: of good though, too. I just wanna say like, I had to, I had to give it to him. It was pretty good. It’s kind of a good album.
Rich Ziade: I mean,
Paul Ford: anyway,
Rich Ziade: Look, the holy grail is when you could tell it’s an absolutely pure distilled expression of, of, of someone’s creative soul, but also resonates with a lot of people. See,
Paul Ford: See, I don’t buy it.
Rich Ziade: Okay. Explain. I
Paul Ford: don’t buy, I, I, I feel that all of this conversation ends up being, People are looking for where their power and control is under this giant system, and they’re gonna assert it, and then they’re gonna create a little community and the community’s gonna meet up and they’re gonna say, aren’t we a good community? And then one of them is [00:19:00] gonna get an offer. To make something for five times as much
Rich Ziade: Well, it’s the eternal tension, right?
Paul Ford: And then they, it’s like an A, it’s like a mothership comes over and sucks them up like a cow out of a field. Just woo.
Rich Ziade: I mean, you know, I mean, what’s the holy grail? The holy grail is I express myself and you pay me a lot of money because it turns out a lot of people want to hear my self-expression, my expression, which has nothing to do with metrics and whether it resonates or it’s pop, it has has enough pop hooks.
It just turns out that when I express myself, many, many people want to listen
or
Paul Ford: of this too, like a, A good example would be like, boy genius, everybody loves boy genius, which is Phoebe Bridgers and a couple other people. I’m not afraid you’re not a fan, but for the people who love boy genius, it is the greatest thing that has ever happened in the history of humanity.
Rich Ziade: greatest
Paul Ford: Christ came. Christ was born and boy genius arrived.
Rich Ziade: They, they are, they are projecting authenticity. Yeah. Not selling out, but also have [00:20:00] put out like, A pop album, effectively an accessible piece of music. You wanna know who’s way better than boy? Genius Perfume. Genius
Paul Ford: genius. Yeah. Frankly, I’m, I’m with you on that.
But the people who, uh, love boy genius think, think they’re the greatest. And the people who don’t love boy genius kind of don’t say too much right now online cuz they don’t want to get punched in the eye. But like most of the world doesn’t care about boy genius. Right. And a lot of people think boy genius is just, just about full of it.
And so like this, you, but you, you’re people I know. You’re able to construct this tiny little world and you get to live in it, and you get to say like, I am affiliated with the, with the true art of the world. Meanwhile, the rest of the world’s going on and saying like, I don’t care about that at all, man.
The hell with that. That’s nonsense. Yeah. What I care about are these songs about chess where people perform them dressed as dogs. That’s the real art. That’s
Rich Ziade: That’s real art. Yeah.
Paul Ford: Over and over and, and it’s very hard when you’re in those scenes, cuz I’ve been in some of ’em. It’s incredibly hard to see that it’s a scene.
What you think is you’ve created a [00:21:00] revolutionary pattern for improving the world and it will always get co-opted once more humans get involved, not because of capitalism. Capitalism is the symptom of humans.
Rich Ziade: the
Paul Ford: It is that we are the disease. And so like, as I look at these creators, I’m like, that is great.
You guys are gonna make some good stuff. I hope there’s more good stuff to watch that’s kind of more slow and more thoughtful. Because right now, Mr. Beast is unwatchable to me. It’s like having saccharin poured directly into my eyeballs and I can’t close them. Yeah, right. And so I’m like, all right, good.
If you want to use YouTube as a, as a communications platform and, and you know, really like take, take advantage of this platform to create something that’s art. Good for you. That is great. And then it kind of stops for me cuz I’m like, there’ll be another one three years from now.
Rich Ziade: sucks. Yeah. I mean, they have to be ok. If you’re gonna keep score by views or money yeah. You’re gonna lose
Paul Ford: well and that’s, that’s what’s fascinating about this article, right? So they’re fully into this. It’s the creator economy. You think
Rich Ziade: they’re gonna like, They’re gonna [00:22:00] take
over
Paul Ford: scroll down. It’s all ANA analytics about this new wave and they’re, because that’s how they see the world.
Yeah.
Rich Ziade: the issue, right, is you’re keeping score that way and that’s the big challenge
Paul Ford: things without keeping score is essentially appears to be impossible because no one, I mean, people are sc, it’s too scary. Like to just go away for a couple years and work on something and come back and say, I don’t know.
I hope you like it. That’s like something artists used to do in the sixties. We don’t have that culture anymore as far as I can tell.
Rich Ziade: We don’t, we don’t.
Paul Ford: And I think that that to me is the loss. Like if you wanted to, like what’s the cultural problem that I would love to see solved? It’s that people can’t go away for two years and work on something weird.
Rich Ziade: They can’t, and when we do stumble on something that seems like. Sufficiently unique and original because it’s a creative work, but also happens to resonate with a lot of people. That’s a special thing. That’s like a really, really special thing. [00:23:00]
And so every so often someone a, usually it’s because of constraints is like a truest form of expression. Comes out through like just really, really tough constraints. So there’s like a filmmaker named Sean Baker who spent a hundred grand cuz he didn’t have more than that.
Probably not because he felt like only spend, you know, spending a max of a hundred grand, um, made a movie on with, with phones, um, uh, and it’s called Tangerine. And now he’s like a big time filmmaker. He’s a bigger
Paul Ford: filmmaker. Oh, Tangerine is great.
Rich Ziade: Tan’s a great movie, but you know, he had no aspirations of having that open a film festival, right?
Like he just put this thing out and it took, and, and it’s part of the reason it takes isn’t, and this is what humans do when they see something like that is pure and truly authentic, they’re appropriated almost instantly and say, have I sh you have to see the cool thing that you don’t know about yet
Paul Ford: You actually [00:24:00] were like, you have to watch Tangerine. It’s an amazing movie.
Rich Ziade: I said this to
Paul Ford: Yeah, you did.
Rich Ziade: Yeah. And it’s a beautiful movie and
Paul Ford: there’s a, it’s also, it’s two reasons. One is like a beautiful movie, and the other is, there’s like a scene where there’s a guy from the Middle East and they, like, everybody walks in on his family and you’re like, this is my family.
Like, I’ve never, it’s,
Rich Ziade: It was just incredibly real
Paul Ford: You had never seen your family, like represented quite that well. Exactly. Yeah.
Rich Ziade: And, and so every so often you strike lightning, right? Like, and, and it’s just a, it’s a beautiful moment because you can tell, you can tell that’s the end of the creative purity for that artist.
Like I could tell that this is gonna be his last
movie.
Paul Ford: not gonna make another one with an iPhone.
Rich Ziade: He’s not gonna make another one with an
iPhone. He’s made other good movies,
Paul Ford: now and then, like someone, Steven Soderberg will do that. He’ll be like, ah, I’m making a movie with an iPhone. Roll me around in a rolly
Rich Ziade: Yeah, exactly. And, and that’s cool. And you know, like I mentioned Johnny Greenwood before, he does a similar thing where he looks for those constraints.
Paul Ford: I’m gonna tell you something here. Okay. Let’s. It’s not that one has constraints and one [00:25:00] doesn’t. I can turn this into advice. I can make this into Yadi Ford advisors.
You ready?
Rich Ziade: Go
Paul Ford: The choice that you make isn’t what crew you’re gonna be in or what manifesto you’re gonna sign. It’s what constraint system you choose. Mr. Beast chose SEO and YouTube al algorithmic rules.
Rich Ziade: That’s how he keeps
Paul Ford: That’s his creative, that’s his creative constraint system. I
Rich Ziade: I don’t think, does he view himself as creative?
Paul Ford: Of course he does. He is creative. Okay. He does creative work within the constraints of that system, except that that is a constrained system that has rewards built in. And so it gets into a whole nother stratosphere. The, uh, the other fo and, and when you pick a constrained system, you are kind of picking a community to belong to.
There’s certain things that certain constrained systems align with communities, so like, I’m gonna make sort of more pure and wholesome YouTube videos that are low budget and more thoughtful. Well, I’m gonna align with these kind of people. Yeah, and I’m gonna do that. You may [00:26:00] not realize this, but whenever you sit down to create something software, Writing something, whatever you do, any creative act at all, even ones that people don’t even think of necessarily as creative, you’re working backwards from a constrained system.
Most of the time. You’re not picking it, you’re saying like, I wanna write a sci-fi novel. You’re not saying like I, you’re not looking where the boundaries are. You’re not saying like, I’m gonna write a really good proposal. Right. That picking your constraints wisely is the best thing you can do.
Rich Ziade: It’s probably the healthiest thing you can
do
Paul Ford: to further your own goals, and so you need to look at people who work within the constraints who are doing things that you think are interesting.
Choose those constraints and get going.
Rich Ziade: Unfortunately, the, the overarching constraint is money. Like, can I do this? Can I express myself and make a
Paul Ford: Then find people who are making just enough money who are doing work. You think is interesting.
Yeah. Like the, I I do feel that this is, people tend to optimize for, like, I think that’s interesting and they were able to be really successful with that and like, 1978 and therefore I’m going to do [00:27:00] it too. And it’s like, no, the rules have changed and the system isn’t there and so on. So, so that, but that’s, that’s my advice.
Rich Ziade: good advice. That’s a, that’s a good closer
Paul Ford: All right. All right, we’re closing. Are we done? We’re done. Oh my
Rich Ziade: Oh my God. This was a meaty one.
Paul Ford: All right, so, uh, you know what, we have a sponsor. The sponsor is a board a board.com. It’s a website that lets you collect anything, organize it right there in your web browser, and, uh, then you can collaborate with other people.
I use it to collaborate with Richard.
Rich Ziade: Sign up for the beta aboard.com.
Paul Ford: it out, and, uh, this is Zdi Ford. Check out Zdi Ford on Twitter or send us an email at hello@zdiford.com. We’d love to hear from you.
Rich Ziade: we’d love to hear from you. Have a lovely
week.