Why YouTubers are fake retiring

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1:10Try it for your research. Try it for getting variations of your titles, your ideas. It's one of my favorite tools on the internet right now for our creativity. And now back to the show. So earlier this year, YouTubers started quitting, retiring, and scaling back. This concept of retiring seemed like it was contagious. I made the decision to quit. Planning to retire. I have not been very happy. I just don't have the manpower. I don't want to do this anymore. I am bringing them to an end. It's not clickbait. So I'm taking a break. It was a lot. And it seemed like everyone chimed in on this topic, except for us.

1:43But we have been thinking very deeply about it. So today on the Colin and Smear Show, we're going to be talking about quitting. Are these actual retirements? What should we take from all of this? And what do creators need to know? If you make it to the deep end, let us know.

2:02Here's where I want to start. Yeah. All of these creators who are retiring. Yeah. I'm going to start with Tom Scott. Ooh, okay. Legendary creator. Also, we were nominated for a streamy against him. He won. I'm over it. I'm over it. Okay. But Tom Scott, he made a great announcement video. Yeah. When it came out, it was called, After 10 Years, It's Time to Stop Making Videos. The thumbnail said goodbye. Incredible video. He's on a helicopter. He's riding off into the distance. Here's the thumbnail today. No way. How incredible is that? Is that real? That's real. He's adjusted it. You know what? Goodbye, but probably not forever.

2:38I gotta ask a question to Tom. This man flew off into the sunset on a ladder attached to a helicopter. The caveat is incredible there. Wow. So we'll get into this and why maybe you shouldn't listen to. all these creators who are saying goodbye. Do you think the dopamine just got to him of 10 million views on his retirement video? I mean, probably, yeah. What am I going to stop this? This is so fun. My last video was a one out of 10? Come on. I'm not going to end on a one out of 10. I got to keep this train going. So this is, yeah, I think this leads us into a great conversation around this, you know, mass exodus of YouTube we saw at the beginning of this year.

3:16And thinking about the context of like, why did this happen? Why did so many creators make announcement videos? Why did it feel contagious, this premise of retiring from YouTube? What does it actually mean? Are people actually retiring or what's going on? Why is this even a conversation in the first place? Retirement. All types of industries, people retire. Why is this all of a sudden a moment that we all want to talk about? And for me, I wrote down this line. I wrote, most people don't retire from art. The industry retires them first. Right. like the career of being a musician or a painter, it's something that you want so badly, like to make creativity a career.

3:56It's not stable. It's not promised. So there's never really a scenario where you would want to retire early. You want to be in it for as long as you can. You love it. It's your passion. You don't assume that like a musician or a painter, whatever, after maybe 10 years of being a painter would have to acknowledge publicly that they're retiring. This isn't like LeBron James. But an athlete does. Yes, of course. And I think creators are more similar to athletes. Yes. The difference is, it'd be if LeBron James also was running the Lakers and he said, I'm going to retire from playing on the court. You have to say that because everyone's watching you do your craft.

4:37So I empathize and understand it. I just think that we as an industry have gotten to the point where we're on the court and owning the team and running the day-to-day operations of the team. And we've grown beyond just being the player on the court. But that's what the public knows us as. So everyone knows MatPat as being the guy on camera. They don't know what MatPat does with his time outside of that. And so he does have to acknowledge when he stops doing the thing that the public knows him to do. I do think you have to acknowledge that. Like, I do believe that. But I think these retirements for me made me take a step back and write out, like, what are the considerations of this career that make it such that you do retire from this version of yourself or you do feel like you have to say something?

5:23And the first thing that I wrote down was you are not scalable. You have scale, but you are not scalable. I think that's super important for creators to recognize. Like, the early days of being a creator, it's your individualism that's driving the momentum. and you like have this incredible like internal reward system that's like your creativity is being expressed, it's being rewarded, all of a sudden there's financial opportunity. And really quickly, we start to get into a land of opportunity. If you're good, all of a sudden you get this wide ranging opportunity and you hit a fork in the road.

5:59One is like, keep things simple, do what you can as yourself. The other is scale. And we've approached this moment in the creator economy where the obvious answer there is scale. It's no longer like, oh yeah, you know what? Yeah, I'm getting a lot of opportunities, but I'm just a guy in my room who makes cool videos and I'll slowly grow. We're often afraid of missing out on opportunity. Exactly, yeah. Who knew that we were going to even have the opportunity to make this a business? So when opportunities come and you're not prepared for it, it's like, I better scale because that deal may never come back again.

6:36That opportunity may never come back again. Yeah. So I better hire some people to help me do this. Right. And then as you start doing that, like I wrote this down, like simplicity is not a problem. It's a gift. And I think we look at simplicity as a problem in our early days as a creator. All I do is upload one video a week. That's a problem. I could be uploading three. I could launch a course business. I could launch merch, right? And all of a sudden your simplicity of your business becomes a problem because the opportunity and the simplicity of your life. Right. I mean, there were times for us in the beginning where it was just meet up every day.

7:12It's just you and I. We're not in an office. We had no overhead. Yeah. But it felt small. It felt like we were, we had yet to make it. Like we were failing because our lifestyle was too simple. Yeah. So we wanted more. Like we wanted to build something around us. Yeah. Yeah. So you identify this problem of simplicity and all of a sudden opportunities come. And then that creates this moment And the second thing I wrote was the day you scale is the day you retire. Like, I think these retirements that are being announced are not, they're like the public version of the retirement. But I actually think like the day you start really building your company, hiring people, taking on overhead is the day you retire from being a creator.

7:54I don't know if I agree with that. Well, let me explain. Like when you and I used to go meet up and sit next to each other and edit videos, to me, that was us being like true YouTube creators. you know like we would make the videos together we would do like my days are so not that anymore i just don't believe that to be a creator uh in its truest sense it requires you to be 100 attached to filming editing yeah and and uploading and being 100 involved in that process i think we've gotten better at this but i think there was a time where the smallest portion of our days were creating in this business and i think that's what i mean It's like the largest portion of the days is like meetings, driving revenue, team management.

8:42And that's what I mean. It's like, as a creator, when you think about the job, you're like, oh, the job is making videos. But when you scale, your job is not making videos. I disagree, though, that it means you've retired from being a creator. I know what you mean. I think like potentially you've retired from that version of yourself. You've retired from that version of yourself. and you've started the process of moving away from what made you successful in the first place? Yeah, I think you're still a creator, but you've added additional considerations and you've taken your focus away from that.

9:14And your mind can only, I think, handle so much in a day. And we've talked about this at length, but the micro decisions you make as a creator creatively are exhausting, right? When you're sitting in an edit and you're making creative decisions constantly, then you're faced with all of a sudden financial decisions. And financial decisions feel like they have more stakes than creative decisions. And I think your stakes all of a sudden get to shift where it's like, wait, this decision over here is going to require more of my focus because it has financial stakes to it. This decision over here has creative stakes and those are connected.

9:48But I might move my mind over to the financial stakes because that feels heavier to me. At least that was my experience of scaling. And it took a really long time to come back to like settling into putting more focus on being a creator, but it's still never going to be the same as when we first started. Like that version of me is, has retired. I could make an announcement video about that of like, Hey, the guy over there, that guy's gone. I think the moment that we scaled is the moment it started feeling like a job for better or worse. Yeah. Even the first time we got our first office, which we eventually couldn't afford.

10:25We had for a very short amount of time. Pressure was on. It was like, oh, this is not, we're not just sitting together making these videos because hopefully it will do well and hopefully one day it'll turn into a business. It's like, we got to pay for this place. But I actually think it's when you hire team where things really change. It's not when you add like a studio or financial stakes. I think when you hire a team, things change, especially a small team. When you're a creator and you have a small team, there's a crazy sentence I'm about to say, but when we were sitting with J.J. Abrams and talking to him in January, he was talking about how like every good project has a singular artistic voice.

10:58I think that's a really important thing for creators to recognize, that scaling that artistic voice is really hard. And it's your voice. And I do think that as you build a small team, it becomes like artistic vision by committee, or it can become artistic vision by committee. And when that happens, your singular voice can sometimes get removed, especially if you're required in other aspects of the business. And the creative that's going out has a different artistic voice. And I think that's actually more of a thing that I would just push all creators to hedge against. It's either if you're going to scale, you're going to hire someone who can scale your artistic voice.

11:35So I would say Stevie with Rhett and Link is like unbelievable example of this, right? They always credit that she understood their creative voice so well that she could apply it to all the things they were doing. This final product that she just oversaw is almost exactly what we would have. That's great. It may be a little different, but it was just as good. And it's very difficult to find those people that you can trust. Sure. Because if that wasn't the case, then we would have never let go. And there's a lot of YouTubers that never let go. But a lot of creators don't find that. And so then they're making stuff that maybe lacks their creative voice, and it's more of their employees' creative voice.

12:13And now you've built – that's like the opportunity in the creator company. You built a media company, but you as the creative are not 100 % represented as the artistic voice across all the projects. And I think that feels uncomfortable. I know for me that has felt uncomfortable whenever that has happened. Yeah, of course. And that's what I mean by like you retire from being that singular artistic voice. Yeah, but I disagree that you retire from being a creator. Sure. I think you're still a creator, but yes, you have become a new version of yourself. Yeah. I really can't overstate this enough, but one of my solutions is the right people and slow hiring.

12:48One person can change everything about your business, and that goes both ways. The wrong person can ruin your life. The right person, right? I mean, we've experienced that. The wrong person can, it's just like, it just can occupy your mind at all times. And then all of a sudden, you're no longer like focusing on creative work because you have this person that is just not working. the right person can unlock everything. And the only way to do that is to slowly, slowly build trust. And I think we move a lot faster than we think because of the opportunities. Because you get an opportunity, you're like, how could I do that?

13:28I just need to hire someone. I'll bring this person in. They'll help me make money doing this thing. And you have to actually move a lot slower than that. We move faster than the pace that trust builds. Yes, it's so important to move at the pace of trust. The other thing I wrote is that everything project-based at first, you know, that's in relation to hiring. Everything is project-based when it's hiring. And also everything is project-based for you. If you're starting a new format, don't say it's indefinite. Don't say I'm, you know, don't commit to anything being like, I'm going to do this every Monday for the rest of my life.

14:02It's actually like, I'm going to do it every Monday for the next four weeks. That's project one. because there's no start and end for anything in our business. You have to create your own starts and ends so that you give yourself permission to get out, right? Like, I think that's one of the issues. We don't feel like we have permission to get out because of the audience and because of the expectations. And that then creates these like announcement videos where it's like, I just have to proclaim that I'm out, you know, but actually you could set that yourself and be like, this is a six-month project or this is a one-month project.

14:36Um, I think that is that is really really important is that everything in your world as a creative needs to be viewed as a project everything Like this has a start and end and if it doesn't end no problem You can renew your own project if even just internally to start even just internally just be like i'm gonna try I'm gonna experiment with this for four weeks And then after four weeks you're like, you know what? I want to keep the experiment going for another four weeks But if you create those limited time windows You always give yourself permission to leave the thing behind and go that was great that's done now.

15:07It's a great solution. So you were saying you have a list of problems that you feel like are creating these retirements. Yeah. So I think that first one is like, you know, that opportunity overload with being like, I think I can scale, but you're actually incredibly unscalable. The other one is like, the first version of yourself that started this is a risk taker, right? All of us are risk takers in that sense that we like put ourselves out there on the internet to be like, I don't know, maybe this idea is good and has something. And I do think that once you find success and you do build a company, you become, you go from being a risk taker to a risk manager.

15:44And you, you develop like a new reward system and a new relative zero, as we've called it before on the show, which is like, what's zero views for some graders. That's a million views for some graders. That's a hundred thousand views. But I think risk management is not as, it's just not as fun. There's not as much dopamine involved in risk management where you're like thinking about an idea. And instead of pursuing an idea you like, you're going to pursue the idea that works. And I think that shift is a dramatic shift of going from I'm a creative who expresses ideas that come to me to I'm a risk manager who's like, what do people want to see?

16:19And I think that is another thing. These are all problems I think everyone should just be aware of, of like, where am I on that spectrum of being a risk taker into a risk manager? And have I set myself up to be able to take some risks still? Because if that's just the type, that is the type of person you are. If you started a YouTube channel, you like taking risks. So you have to have some of that. Like you have to have some of the risk putting yourself out there on new experimental things. Otherwise it's going to get a little mundane. So these problems that come from being a YouTube creator, do you see them as an existential threat to the creator economy?

16:54Like, are they specific to YouTube and to creators? And that's why everyone's retiring slash scaling back. I think they're specific to creative individuals because creative individuals are like steeped in self-worth issues. And I think we find success to be the ultimate validation. And that success comes from like external validation, which is either money or other people, you know, saying your work is good. And that comes in the form of viewership, subscribers and engagement. And so I think if we're just not aware of how we are building our reward system, we get really far away from what we thought the job was.

17:34The job initially that attracted me, and I think attracts a lot of creators, is this opportunity to make really cool creative shit. And I think as you build a company, what ends up happening, the reason why creators are retiring is because you're like, I'm doing a job now that I didn't want to do. like this is now not the thing that i actually wanted to do now i'm running a company now i'm doing something that is completely different and i think there's steps along the way that it's okay for us to zoom out and go again that like the simplicity of this maybe is really really great of uploading youtube videos you know yeah but if you're the type person who is the your creative art is building a company that's also something you can do i think you just have to gauge where you lie on that spectrum.

18:20And I think the expectation is that we're all entrepreneurial media company CEOs. But when you slide over there and you're not that person, that's when you're going to retire, right? You're like, actually, wait, hold on. What just happened? Personally, I don't see these retirements as a threat. I look at these retirements and these scaling back announcements more as, hey, have patience with me while I figure out a new version of myself. I think that's all these are. It's just, hey, have patience while I shift my creative identity or my life a little bit. And I think that has a mix to do with a couple things.

18:55Creator Economy has been around for a while. Some of these people who are making these videos, like Matt D 'Avella, are having their first kid. Matt, Pat, and Stephanie have children. Tom Scott is older. These are people who are just coming of an age. Even PewDiePie, right? When PewDiePie had his first kid, he made a video and he scaled back. I think we're not even thinking about like the human part of this. Right, right. Where like creators have just been in it for longer. The ones who can even think about retiring are the ones who are at an age where they're now like having families and their priorities have shifted.

19:24So that's part of it. Another reason why I think this is happening is a shift in the ad market in a response to COVID. So I was looking at Epic Gardening. Kevin made a video on his second channel about YouTubers quitting. And there was an interesting comment from a creator called I Like To Make Stuff who has 3 million plus subscribers. And this is what he said. I'm in the camp you're talking about and the pivot over the last six months has been one of the best decisions of my adult life. I've been doing YouTube for about 10 years. I built a team, I bought an office and after COVID, the income started drying up.

19:58I struggled with it for a long time and was kind of in denial that a change was needed. We downsized the team and the video creation pace and it was the best move I could make. I think that's a reality too, that a lot of creators during COVID hit this massive boom. new creators as well as some of these more established creators. It was just like the age of excess. And so it was like, build, build, build. There's more opportunity than ever. And now that it's subsided and come back to perhaps normal levels for some people, it's like, that was exhausting. Like that growth was exhausting and now I'm feeling it.

20:32That was also fueled not only by COVID, but like the crypto boom. It's been a while since we've talked about crypto on this channel. I'd bring it up because of that. Bitcoin's back and crypto Samir is here. No, I'm talking about it in the context of the audio-only episode that we published about Marques Brownlee's Ridge deal. And Sean Frank, the CEO of Ridge, I think makes a really good point that during that era, also, ad rates just went through the roof because of the FTXs of the world and the crypto boom that entered the creative economy. And that then influenced everyone else's ad rates. So yeah, I think you're right.

21:06But that's what I mean, that there's a simplicity to this where I think people sometimes forget, You can do this job at a really high margin, and it doesn't mean you have to build, build, build. And you just get inundated and overloaded. And the reality is for a lot of people, including us, we've been relatively successful for less time than we've been unsuccessful in our 12 years of being creators. Right? Yeah. So I would say 40 % of the time, we found success, if not 30%. And the other times, it's been really hard. Yeah. And I think when you're in that small pocket, it feels really uncomfortable to say no to opportunities.

21:49Totally. Yeah. With that, when a creator does make an announcement, I will say from an audience perspective, I don't think you should believe them. Yeah. I don't think you should. Yeah. Not saying you can't trust them, but I don't think there's ever a thing for creators like us who've been in this for as long as we have, who've been unsuccessful for the majority of our career and still choose to do it. There's no such thing as retiring. But also, I don't think you should ever make a firm announcement that you're gone forever because there's no reason. No one's canceling us in terms of off the air.

22:21No one's canceling our show. It's just like, hey, things are just going to be different. And even when we sat down with Jimmy recently, he was like, I think I'm going to bring gaming back. And it's like, oh, I thought you were done with Mr. Beast Gaming and Mr. Beast Reacts. And he's like, no, I don't know. Those videos are fun to make. and it's been like two years and it's like, okay, sure. If you want to bring it back, it's just sitting there. You can totally bring it back. Even MatPat, who was the loudest goodbye internet. Yeah, yeah, 20 million views. That's got to be a big W. 20 million views saying goodbye.

22:50And I don't think this is much of a surprise, but like, you know, when we spoke with him on the show, he said, I'm not going to be a 70-year-old still managing the same YouTube channel. And then he goes, but maybe. Right? It's like, it could happen. We don't know. Like there's never been a creator in it for as long as they have. And, you know, there's a huge opportunity that he'll show up on YouTube again. Maybe it's a different channel. Like it's just, it's never over, man. We just need a better like culture of understanding what it means to take breaks on YouTube. Like we just don't have that culture at all.

23:26One of the things I wrote was you are plugged into the matrix. And I imagine like in the movie, the matrix, when they like sit in the chairs and they're like, like that is I'm plugged in right now. You're plugged in right. We're all you're plugged in at all times. What I mean by that is like, there's never a time where you're not thinking about YouTube. I don't think since our first upload in 2011, that I have spent a week not thinking about the next upload. Like, can you, can you think of a week where you were like, I'm not thinking about my next YouTube upload? No, there's no way. Yeah. So it's been, that's, you know, 13 years, 14 years or so.