Simone Giertz: EVs, Viral Robots, and Becoming a Product Designer

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1:17What is going on, people of the internet? Welcome back to another episode of the Waveform Podcast. We're your hosts. I'm Marquez. I'm Andrew. And I'm David. And this week, we have a special guest. I'm gonna be interviewing her. Her name is Simone Yetch and she's a fellow YouTube creator that I've watched and admired for a long time. I don't know. Have you guys seen Simone's videos online? I feel like she's one of those people who has gone viral in several different like spheres of the internet at different times for different things. I don't know if you've you've watched them. Yeah, she's been prevalent on YouTube for a very long time.

1:49She's sort of one of those creators that like kind of disappears for a little bit, but it's because she's working on some insane project. And then like once a year, all of a sudden she goes super viral because she did something crazy. Those are some of my favorites. Sometimes we're like, I wish they made another video. But when that one hits, you just drop everything. Which is like, what's that robotics kid that made Spot P in a cup? Michael Reeves. I literally brought that up. They're super similar types of people. Yeah. Big project YouTuber. Truckla, you've probably seen. Model 3. Yeah. She turned the Model 3 into a pickup truck before the Cybertruck even existed.

2:24Which looks amazing, by the way. It's really cool. Before the Cybertruck existed? Yeah, I talked to her about it. Well, yeah. You mean currently? Before it even got unveiled. Actually, that was the first time I met her was she brought it to the Cybertruck event. Oh, wow. Yeah. So this was, she's ahead of her time, obviously. But we also talked about just like her foresight on building a business that is more sustainable outside of YouTube. Like this reminded me a lot of my conversation with Doug DeMiro, which is you don't want to hinge everything on the power of your creativity and just putting it on YouTube and hoping the platform takes it away.

2:59You can be a Mark Rober, but like you can also not be successful on YouTube. It's really easy. So she's built a really interesting business with products alongside the videos that she's making, which is really cool. We talked about that. So there's a lot to this conversation, and I think it's a really fun one. My turn? Yeah. segue hey so uh a lot of people hit me up on twitter and in the youtube comments and we're like ellis i actually do really want to know that weird color thing you were talking about and i'm here to tell you i'm not gonna do it it's too boring but if you do really want to learn about that stuff there's another creator online the channel is called technology connections yeah and he has a six-part series on television three of which are about color technology we'll put a link in the uh in the description in the show notes for those who want to check it out uh but yeah without any further ado let's get to the conversation with simone and there is trivia trivia dude all right simone hi thanks for joining us welcome to the waveform podcast oh thank you so much for having me i've been watching your videos for a long time and so i have a lot of questions for you i'm always fascinated by different types of creators and youtube channels and you have one that i want to pick your brain about okay well go ahead so you have a very official like laptop open with a list of questions and i think it said simonequestions.pdf yeah it's uh it's so it's not too crazy but i do i i am uh fascinated by the like big project creator if that's a genre that i can sort of like loop you into like mark rober uh this sort of what else did i write down there's a bunch of youtubers michael reeves another great channel with your channel there's such a variety of projects that you choose to do and I'm always curious about your process for deciding to make a video is it I'm going to do this table for jigsaw puzzles anyway why don't I just film it or is it I have an idea for a video this table I think would be really fun and people would resonate with it let's make it a project like How do you start with a project?

5:13It's a little bit of both. I think it's like for me, the video has kind of become the excuse to go down these build rabbit holes. And so it's very much like I don't think I would have self-motivated to build a mechanical puzzle table. So it's a table where you can switch between two tabletops. So you can work on a jigsaw puzzle, but then you can switch the tabletops and you can use it as a dinner table. um yeah i don't think i would be self-motivated enough to like go and do that because it's it took so much work but it's really like the video aspect of it is the excuse that i can use to be like no i can spend two months designing this table it's like the the ultimate ikea project like i could never put that also there's the the amount of like engineering ingenuity you have to you have to invent something basically like this table doesn't exist so you need to go through the process of thinking about how it needs to be made and then and building these things and trial and error that's like that's a fun video like all of that is is entertaining to go through with you as you go through it yeah it's like ikea off-road operating and you're like there's no manual for this yeah i think it's there's always like a so i'll have an idea of something i want to do and then i do like a cursory google search to be like has anybody done this before partly to see how other people might have done it but also to like if it has been done then i'm not as interested in it okay uh and there's always the part where you're like has nobody done this before because there's a good reason i'm like somehow magically the only person who's thought of this or because it's a really bad idea in a way that i haven't predicted right and uh yeah it's about a 50 50 split interesting that i have two questions so one of them have you ever scrapped videos in the middle like this is too much no you've gone to the end of every project you started on camera honestly the the video i was working on last week it was the first time where i've like genuinely thought about giving up yeah um i was making this uh robot arm out of stained glass like so like old-timey stained glass window but it's a mechanical robot arm so using this like really old build technique to build this hyper modern object and it just kept on breaking and that was the first time where i like it broke i yelled really loudly and then i was like can i just give up is this is it i'm okay i'm done yeah bye and then five minutes later i come back and i'm like okay but what if i do it like this so i think i'm just too stubborn i don't know if there are a good amount of videos that i've seen that are actually that turn out really well even though the project did come to a halt where they like realized oh this isn't how it's going to work out I think Mark Rober had a video like this similarly where they're like well let's pivot and make something different or let's like change it up a little bit because this one won't work I mean a robot out of stained glass sounds impossible if you ask me but I've never built a robot so yeah no I you know you go through it and you're like this was a really dumb idea from the start why did I do this like now I'm glad that I did and I have this object that I'm terrified of breaking for sure so then so you come up with the ideas how do you know if you're going to be able to do it at all like i think of truckla as the ultimate no one's ever going to be able to do this project uh just like on its face like i'm going to take a tesla model 3 and i'm going to cut the back off and turn it into a truck shouldn't shouldn't work probably just shouldn't work but if you put enough thought and effort and effort into all the things that you did it will but the thing is it's like two points about that one i'm like i should start tracking my mood throughout every build because i think i go through a lot of the same emotional swings through every build like every build has a part where i'm like i'm not going to be able to pull this together this is never going to work out and also has the parts of like i'm the queen of the world um but then the second part is one of the benefits of having a youtube channel and that kind of shields me from failure is that every build has two outcomes or like two products that come out of it one is the build itself and then it's the video so with truck law like that is an incredibly risky project but i could take it on because even if the build was a failure i knew i would get a video out of it so i think it's yeah every project runs the risk of not working out but at least I'll be able to salvage it into something interesting and so you still drive every day that's your daily driver it was for like two three years but then now I've got a Volvo c40 oh I like that the recharge the electric one yeah I like that too I like it it was just like truckla is is absolutely amazing but we were going to do more work on her so she was going to like go under car surgery for a while and also it's like i get doxxed every time i drive it you're the only one on the road yeah what was what is that like driving it do you did you get pulled over are there people who are just like pointing i imagine a lot of pointing and cameras and yeah like that i mean and that's fine um i think people following me was the stuff that was really scary people taking photos outside of my house with it or like I remember somebody following me up a cul-de-sac when I was like gonna visit a friend and you know and it's like two guys in a car and I was just like hey I understand you probably have really good intentions but this is really scary for me to like be followed by two people I don't know up a dead end street so like I don't want to talk about my car right now yeah and the thing is most people don't give a fuck about who i am like they're just interested in the car or think like it's a secret tesla prototype that they just spotted that there is that whole culture too around tesla where like there are whole like spy channels have you seen these people okay so tesla's got this like fremont test track and all these factories and stuff like that people will literally go take a drone take off from a nearby parking lot across the street and go fly over tesla's stuff and just like fly the drone up to people and up to things and take videos of it and post that online.

11:26And people will find neat things in those, oh, they're testing the Cybertruck over here today. And that's an article. And that's a whole thing. So if people see the new Tesla Model 3 Highland project driving around on the street, people will actually follow it around to get videos of it, to put it on YouTube. So that also surrounded truckload, I'm sure, with just like people not knowing what it is and wanting to be curious about it. Yeah, that's wild. But how do you like the Volvo? I feel like the xc40 was one of my favorite uh evs when i first tested it so i have a c40 uh which is yeah just slightly different but uh i i'm surprised by how much love it like i thought i wasn't going to be you know i because i was looking at buying another car and i wasn't excited about any of the evs and i wanted another electric pickup truck but like the ford f-150 and the revian are just giant like they're physically so big and they're also so expensive and i'm like i don't want to spend that amount of money unless it's something that I absolutely love so I was feeling really lukewarm about all the cars because also like I realized that I like really obscure vehicles like the two cars I have are incredibly weird uh because I also have like an obscure like 80s commuter car so it's like a yellow little triangle yeah um so I think like I'm just like this is how I express my personality and then having just like an undercover car a little bit more um I I don't know.

12:51It pained me to some extent, but I really love it. And I think it's also like Volvo is Swedish or now it's owned by a Chinese company, but it was founded in Sweden. And I'm from Sweden and I'm having that like immigrant or like emigrant type of thing where I'm like suddenly just wanting to surround myself with Swedish things, which never happened when I lived there. But now when I've lived abroad for like 10 years, I'm like, oh, yeah, maybe maybe a Volvo. There's an Ikea like 10 minutes from here. hear the theme music and the Swedish meatballs play yeah no there's that makes a lot of sense I started this car channel earlier in the year and I wouldn't have always considered myself a car person but then with all these EVs coming out I slowly became an interested in the tech in cars type of person so I wonder to do the truckler project you had to at least be interested a little bit in obscure cars and doing projects with cars um but yeah that was a that was a pretty next level but i think it's also i mean with truck like because we had a whole team come on like it was definitely i was not a lone actor in that so i had a lot of backup and expertise and people who could help me um with it um but yeah i kind of jumped into the deep end of like gear head stuff yeah that was the deep end yeah because i'd like just gotten my driver's license like a year earlier or something because yeah so i definitely didn't have like a strong car interest and now i think they're amazing like i'm not yeah but i i've never had a gas vehicle and i don't think yeah there's still limited options yeah there will be there's a whole generation growing up that will never own a gas car which is pretty sick yeah put me in a gas station i'm like the fuck so it's funny in new jersey you specifically are not allowed to fill up your own gas so there's this meme of like jersey drivers going to other states and just like sitting in their car waiting for something to happen because what do you do uh but that's ev drivers too yeah what do i do i rented a gas car what do i do granted the charging stations are barely better yeah like they're all weird and they have like their apps and some never work and yeah there's definitely i mean the tesla supercharger network is unparalleled and from like a user perspective but all the other ones it's yeah also last time i talked to you about truckla you couldn't supercharge right i could they never yeah took it away no they never took it away that's amazing because tesla would not i'm sure if they uh found out too much they would not like to have that supercharging but but the thing is i think the project got protected by that it was a little bit too big for them to come after because they knew that i would have thrown a hissy fit online and i think they just like kind of wanted to silence it as much as possible by like ignoring it interesting yeah sort of let it slide yeah so i think they they let it slide but i do i like scheduled a service appointment because i wasn't getting software updates or there was some like minor issue and they called me from the appointment center and they were like we know who you are and we know what you've done to your car and i got so spooked that i ended up just solving it myself that's so cool that's funny all right do you ever miss uh old youtube like oh i'm doing air quotes old youtube old school youtube i don't know if i've been on the platform long enough to be able to say that i mean i started my channel 2015 so i think 2015 youtube is very different from 2023 youtube where like i'll give you a couple examples one is like there is some level now of like algorithmic like i want to just optimize for the algorithm you've seen these channels that just want to maximize views and that's the whole point of the YouTube channel, where I would say, I'd argue in 2015, especially our channel, it was like, we had an idea for video, we'd make it.

16:49And then as it was being uploaded, we were like, all right, we need a title and thumbnail too, right? Okay, let's think of this at the last second for packaging and then just push it out. Yeah, I feel like that was a different time on YouTube. And I wonder if you, especially when you were starting, you kind of had this interesting vibe where you were making these projects but you also had such a gap between them that each drop was like a big deal and especially with reddit like reddit would love every new project and then there would be this sort of community around that and it was just a different time you know i think my relationship to thumbnails is inverted from yours because I used to care a lot more about it and now I'm in my golden era on YouTube where I feel like I'm retired and I'm like I'm just doing things for myself so you don't have over obsession on thumbnails anymore no I mean of course I'll like change it out midway if it's performing 10 out of 10 so like YouTube gives you this metric I'm not explaining to you this to you but to the viewer YouTube gives you this pretty useful metric where it ranks your videos performance compared to the latest 10 videos that you've had and whenever it's ranking like 9 or 10 out of 10 then you're like oh damn it and then I might update the thumbnail yeah yeah but I think I was definitely like clout chasing a lot more before and I was a lot better so like my YouTube channel kind of started as an afterthought like I was mostly making gifs like that was the core of the project And every project I did was kind of built around being translated really effectively into a GIF.

18:28So I was making all these like shitty robots. And it was all like, OK, how can this work in like a seven second loop max without audio and people still understanding what it is? And then people started requesting like more video around it. So I was like, OK, I'll start making like a bigger video around it. Right, because wasn't your first one like a few seconds long? It was basically just the gif in the video form. Oh, gif? Sorry. Really? Gif? Gif? Gif? You're a gif? I'm a gif. It's graphic gif. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Gif. Okay. Gif. Really? I can't believe you said gif, but you're not willing to die on the hill.

19:13I'm not. Because I feel like the only people who say gif are like ride or die gif. Hardcore gif people. will tattoo it on their chest. There's the peanut butter, which is JIF, which is JIF, right? So I guess I have to. All right. I already get against my own. All right. It's GIF. So but your first video is like super short. It was just the project. And then people asked for more like, how did you make it type things background? Then you sort of like built a video around it. Yeah. Okay. Yeah. And I think it's also like my content has changed because what I used to do is I had the gif of a project and then i would make a video of when i was filming the gif and like playing with the machine so i wouldn't document the build process at all because it was just it's really intense from like a production standpoint and i just wasn't ready to let people in on that cluster of a process uh and now when my videos or the projects that i do are less gif friendly like the build video has become a lot more important because there's no like for example with the puzzle table there's not going to be a 15 minute video of me just showing how it works yeah so like I kind of need it to add the build element into it to make it a worthy piece of content yeah that's interesting I also think like building around one shareable even though it might not be a gif building a video around one shareable visual inside of the video has always been a great idea like that's i kind of try to do that to this day we had this um well we we bought an old original iphone and sort of did an unboxing with it and i knew the whole time like every other video anyone's ever tried to do of this the retention spikes at the moment that they break the seal so how do we sort of build out from that like we know we're going to have the moment of breaking a seal but can we introduce tension and sort of a storyline and all that i think it's smart to have a point in the video that you build up to as like the climax of the video visually and that helps you know yeah create structure for the video i think yeah i i call i call the like social content um like flagship videos because they're kind of like the ones that you send out yeah and what i've started doing now is instead of a gif it's like a little voiceover clip of me being like hi my name is simone and i built this chair because i have a needy dog that likes to sit next to me and I, yeah, you know.

21:31Yeah. And that's been doing pretty well. Like it's not as efficient as a GIF because I would always like, Reddit does really well. Like it's very reaction GIF memeable, shareable in that way. But it's also a compromise with like trying to fit in a content strategy that works with a type of builds that I want to make. On that note, we're going to take a quick break, but we'll be right back with Simone.

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23:57with 24 monthly bill credits for well-qualified customers plus tax and$35 device connection charge credits end and balance due if you pay off earlier cancel finance agreement 256 gigs 830 eligible port in a new line$100 plus a month plan with auto pay plus taxes and fees required check out in 15 minutes or less per line visit t-mobile.com is there a project you're working on now or like a super ambitious future project that do you have like a go like a mount everest of projects that one day you're going to be able to do because you mentioned you're feeling like almost like retired like you're you're in the golden years of youtube happily there's no way someone who likes to build as much as you do doesn't have like a goal somewhere okay but the thing is so what i realized is that youtube is not an end goal for me right like it's not my goal has never been to have the biggest possible youtube channel or to try to have that career for the longest time so what i started thinking about is like okay but if this is not the goal then how can I use this as a tool to accomplish other things I want to do?

24:53And I still want to build things. But what I'm exploring now is building and developing products for a product business and like kind of leveraging my YouTube channel in a way to do that. So I kind of turned my YouTube channel into more of an R &D department where I have an excuse to constantly build things and turn out projects and try to solve problems. It also becomes early audience testing. And if there's something that I build on my YouTube channel that I think might be interesting as product, I can pass it over to the product team. And then when it's ready to be sold and marketed, I can pass it back over to my YouTube channel.

25:25So that's kind of been like the behemoth of the long-term project that I've been working on and something that I've invested really heavily in time-wise and monetarily in the last year, which is like why my YouTube channel has gone down a lot. And I'm also working on a TV show about everyday objects, or I'm working on a pilot episode. I haven't sold it yet but um yeah so it's more it's it's less been like oh i'm working on this big youtube video but more like i'm working on these more long-term goals because i don't know if you've experienced this but like our industry is so young that there's no roadmap for what to do for the next 30 years this is my favorite topic yeah everything that we're doing is pioneering what some future generation of creators is going to follow fully agreed but there's no blueprint on how to like yeah you can't google like what do you do after you make a youtube channel that does this yeah and start a product company that does this like it's just up to you there's nothing yeah and and it's a little bit because i remember being like yeah i don't want to do this for the next 40 years and then what do you do and there's a lot of i mean there's a lot of examples of people quitting most of them being just people like getting canceled or quitting because they're like I can't take it anymore or like but I feel like there hasn't been a very positive way of quitting YouTube unless you can pull off like Eliza Koshy which yeah a lot of people see this like graduate so graduation from YouTube where like obviously you can create your own thing make whatever you want and then use it to like vault yeah Eliza Koshy is a great example um Emma Chamberlain's a good example of people who have like graduated from youtube but then you also see the sort of the opposite graduation weirdly like there are mainstream celebrities who will like will smith their way into a youtube channel and like start so it's yeah there's no blueprint you kind of can just do what you think works with your creative vision what do you think you'll do in 30 years 30 years that's a long time if you asked me in three years i'd still be wrong because i'm constantly wrong about what we're going to do next.

27:41I think I'm lucky enough that the focus of our stuff is products. And I have always been interested in the products, in the tech, in the products, in the cars, whatever they are. And so I suspect that in 30 years, I will still be interested in the products and will still be making this thing that's helpful to people who are interested in products whether it's a video or some other form of media i don't know but that's generally how i think about it um in five or six years i think we'll still be making videos because people are still going to want to buy products yeah generally uh but i think it's interesting with your your product design business which is yetch just so we have the pronunciation yet dot store yet dot store uh you have like a a big variety of different things like we have the calendar and then we have the screwdriver ring like how do you think about what sort of things you actually make for the store you know so we launched the store a year ago we just had our first birthday congrats we celebrated by giving people one percent off nice yeah that's a very that's a dbrand thing which is so yeah i i love that it actually drove a spike in sales and people were actually using the one percent off discount code which is funny because you can just get 10 % off by giving us your email, which also we have very good newsletters and we don't send them very often.

29:10So it's worth it. But yeah, I mean, we started, so we started a year ago and we started with a really small roster of products. I kind of, the everyday calendar is I think the only one that I feel like really holds the ethos of what I want the brand to be. It's the only like real proper product. And the other ones I'm kind of thinking more of as like really ambitious basket fillers. So there are things that you add on, but you're not necessarily going to come there to the store for it. But I wanted to like not sit on the brand for too long because there's so many things I need to learn. A lot of it around marketing and just like what the work requires and the team and like, yeah, just like recruiting, What roles do we need to fill?

29:57So I kind of wanted to like, even though I felt like we're only we only launched it with like four or five products. Like I still want to get it out there and just try it out. But then we have some products coming out probably next year that I think are a lot more like under what I want the brand to be. So, yeah, I mean, it's kind of been the initial product has just been like, what can we feasibly do with this small team that we have? I mean, we have two full-time employees on the product business. So it's like, okay, we can do this. We can do these rings. We have like a screwdriver ring and a screw ring.

30:32Unfortunate name. And like, yeah, just some like fun, weird, weird products. And then how can we use that to fund developing these other products that are a bit more ambitious and that I think actually solve problems? so the calendar is is like there is your sort of ethos product can you describe it it's like it i just got mine so it's this yeah where is it where is it it's not in here but i want to find a place to hang it because it plugs into the wall too and it lights up and it's this 365 button hexagon calendar but what do you how would you describe the calendar this is the i mean i we launched this product i think in 2018 uh on kickstarter and i still don't know how to explain it an audio elevator pitch i did yeah if you can help me brainstorm one yeah but it's a calendar so like imagine that you want to start a habit and you make a grid in your notebook so you can check little boxes for the days that you do it you're like i want to start meditating every day i want to keep myself accountable i'm just going to cross these little boxes to be like yay i did it uh it's like a prettier version of that that you can hang on your wall so it's an electronic calendar that has 365 days if you tap a day you light it up and you can use it people use it to track their periods.

31:48They use it to track if they take medicine, how often they upload content. Oh, wow. Yeah. I've seen some people I have a friend who's in a long distance relationship and I'm like, they use it to count down the days until they get to see each other. I was just talking to one of your teammates. It was like, I'd want to use it to stop quit smoking. But yeah, so people are kind of using it in every possible way. And it becomes this very visual thing. So I've talked about this on the podcast before. I am the psycho that lives my life in a to-do list app and a calendar app and all these other planning things where I can habit track, blah, blah, blah.

32:27And I have like a drink water tracker. And it's a check box on my phone. And when I drink a water bottle, I check the box and it doesn't go away until I've checked it three times during the day. Wow. And I don't really get much of a visual like reward for that other than just checking the box, which I don't know. I like checking boxes, but it's not nearly as much as like lighting it up. And then it's there as a physical representation of what you did. So I feel like that that elevator pitch, I think the way you started it was perfect. Imagine you want to start a habit. Who doesn't want to start something like that's that's definitely the pitch for it.

33:03And then you go into it. No, it's been interesting in like the marketing side of it. Just like because I'm good at making content. I'm very bad at making ads, I feel like. And it's so much like you're selling the habit and the dream of what your life will look like when you have this habit. And then this product just happens to be the tool that can get you there. And that's all like, yeah, it's just a different way of thinking. And it's very like if you look at our social media channels for the edge door, we only really have an Instagram feed. It's like I think like we're really good at making content.

33:35We're making funny, weird content, not necessarily good at selling stuff. I think that still works though as like it serves the same purpose you know yeah as like getting the eyeballs for people who'd be interested in something like that but how do you how do you build your team like you said you have two people full time on the product on the product business and then you have I imagine some sort of help with making the videos maybe you don't some sometimes I assume that and people are doing it 100 % themselves how did you build that uh so you know I I actually very deliberately have wanted to keep my team small because I want to, you know, when you start your career on YouTube, like there are so many ways of defining success.

34:16And a lot of it is just like numbers and scale or how much your growth is. And I really early on told myself that like, I don't want those things to matter as much like the two key metrics of success is how much autonomy do I have and how I spend my time. Like that's something that's incredibly important to me. That's luxury to me is like being able to wake up in the morning and I mean, like, I don't want to do work or like I want to go to New York for two weeks or I want to do this. And a part of that is not hiring a huge team that requires me to be there for them to have work to do. So I've intentionally kept the team really small.

34:56I actually just hired a shooter editor for the first time. And then he quit. so now on the video side it's like my executive assistant who also does some stuff on the product business is like helping me film things she sometimes does like a rough cut of it yeah or like she'll do like an assembly and like take out all the bad takes and then I'll do the editing which is not a good use of my time so if you're a shooter editor or just an editor in LA please send me an email at Simone apply at Simone Yach dot com spelled G-I-E-R-T-Z That was my next question is how do you find these people? Because I assume someone who's both an executive assistant and an editor and shooter is a very rare person.

35:43It's like how do you have a go-to? Every creator I've asked has a different answer. Do you have a go-to for finding somebody or does it just like? I've tweeted a lot of job ads yeah yeah and I think that um I found her through tweeting um yeah and then like people I've kind of worked on a project with and I pulled in one was a fan who like uh he's my engineer who lives in the UK and he was just like very active in the community and kind of just I don't know I just started pulling him in on projects because he had a really good brain and then I was like do you want a job and he was like yeah so it's kind of all across the board but I feel like especially with the product business it's like I need to find a better way of recruiting and how to do it and not just Twitter yeah same yeah I don't have a good answer yet that's why I ask everybody and it's also I'm like I need to be better about like also proactively like I'm feeling a tremendous amount of responsibility and making sure that I have a diverse team and that's like a whole other level of complication when you're running a small business and you're like, I need to be better in this because you imagine, I don't know if you had this, but you kind of imagine like if I got to run a business or if I somehow got unimaginably rich, which I'm not, like that I would do it more responsibly than other people that I see who are in those positions.

37:07And I'm like, I need to walk that talk and actually try to be as decent of a human as they can be. So, yeah. Yeah, 100%. I feel like also building, like when you're building a YouTube channel, there's so many different, whether it's the channel or the business or whatever, there's so many parameters to optimize for. So it's interesting to have goals that are not specifically quantifiable, I guess. It would be harder to define success if you don't have some number that you can say, okay, it's over or under this number. So now I have autonomy of my time or I don't. Like it's a little more squishy.

37:44Nebulous. Yeah. Maybe it's a moving target too. Maybe you feel more satisfied or less depending on how much of that time you get back in different times of the year, things like that. It's a little more nebulous. What's your definition of success? I've stuck it to I want to make things that I would want to watch. and that is not as quantifiable as some of the other goals that sort of surround that which is like oh are we making uh you know a variety of things are we are we making enough things i'm trying to make a channel that i would want to subscribe to by making videos i would want to watch so it like kind of feeds into itself like that um but even just doing that like you you make videos that you'd want to watch and then you notice oh now my audience is like 96 percent male or something just because like I make videos that I'd want to watch now how do I like expand to more people and a more variety of like countries and things like that I don't know if that's even a useful thing to do but we try yeah they all kind of feed back to making something quality that I'd want to watch I think for me yeah it's like pride in the projects that I put out like in the content I put out is really important and like did the people who actually watched it like ignoring thumbnails and what your click through rave is and everything but did the people who watch it like it I think is something I care a lot about as well but I mean my audience is 80 percent male and I don't know what to do about it I feel like it's almost not really up to us but also just depends on who watches YouTube and a lot of like project videos like it depends on the genre that you're in too like i'm making reviews of tech products and gadgets like i can't control who's into that but i try to make it as accessible as possible and whoever watches watches um i kind of i was going to say you kind of remind me of doug dumero in the doug dumero who you haven't seen doug dumero who oh my god okay well let me let me give the elevator pitch for doug Doug is a car reviewer and he started off just making like simple car videos.

39:55He'd review a car, a Honda. He'd review a random car you might want to buy and he'd use his phone and set it up on a tripod and do the whole thing himself and edit the video. And he started like getting a lot more views and so he got to do videos with more and more interesting cars until he was reviewing like supercars in the same style. Like he'd show up in a polo and a smartphone and tripod to review a Bugatti. Like that's what happened. And he has the same, um, the same like anchor point, which is we can't hinge this all on YouTube. It's just a platform that we all happen to be making videos on, but we want to turn it into hinging on into something that we kind of own more or get to do ourselves.

40:39And he started cars and bids, which is a car auction website. Oh, wow. And it turned out to be super huge. His audience loved it. People use it. It's now competing among the best, biggest car auction websites. And like that's the thing that he built. So you're telling me that when I sell Truckla, I should sell it on that one? If you do sell Truckla, carsandbids.com. I'm sure Doug would be the first one. And the thing is he would review Truckla because he would have a hand in there, which would be amazing. I would watch that video. But having some sort of a pivot from making just like your focus being videos and the content and the projects like that and like hinging it into something else is a similarity that I see.

41:23Because it's also such a brittle business because it hinges completely on two factors. One is the platform you're on and the other one is your face. So if something changes with a platform or with like regulatory things on how you're allowed to advertise or sponsorships or whatever, which you have no control over, like everything falls. or if something happens to you like if you're not well enough to be on a stage or in front of a camera everything falls so for me it's also like the product business is really important because i don't want it to all be on my face needing to be there i want there to be work that can happen even if i'm not actively there and that other people can do and that's scalable in a different way because i mean i i had a health scare and that was kind of the big like push that made me like no okay i need to like diversify what my businesses are because also i can't have a team and like have to lay people off if i'm suddenly depressed you know yeah yeah there's definitely a pressure that comes from trying to find the thing to hinge to if you don't have like an idea right off the bat like i we we're trying to do some products like i'm not as shoes yeah we got shoes now like I'm we're trying to figure out things that can live without me that's like the general theme um but is there a way to decide what those products are there's no there's no blueprint like we've said so it's like I find products that I'm interested in and and genres that I'm into and try to build there but I don't I mean Doug was into cars so that made perfect sense and you're into these like projects like the screwdriver ring I've never seen anything like it but it made it just looks cool and I just I kind of I feel like it's yeah I want like I kind of want one of those it's like pretty sweet so like I I need like a method of like deciding what sort of projects for a given creator would make the most sense to pivot to because that doesn't really exist it is yeah it's it's an interesting like business exercise of like how do you diversify how do you expand from this and how do you like kind of build out your universe yeah I could imagine i mean i feel like product development is such a like you got to be all the way in to do it because it's painful yeah like there's nothing to do like half-assed uh but also you're i mean you're well set up enough where you could even if you're not like 100 in it and wanting to pull all-nighters for it like you could still do it but it just takes it takes a while like with the shoes it took like it was a two-year process just for one pair of shoes and it was like a many many design meetings yeah and you're working with an existing shoe company that has the entire infrastructure for it yes yeah so even that is like kind of a head start yeah like trying to build something from scratch is a is an undertaking for sure so maybe that's a maybe that's a maybe that's a whole business of like helping youtubers find the thing that will help them graduate from youtube i mean you have a seven seven or a titans fund as well right we do so i feel like that is like if you don't want to develop products yourself then it's like helping other people vet and develop products yeah but even that is kind of hinged on youtube which is Like the value of that comes from me being able to connect my audience to a product for a company.

44:53Yeah. And have the eyeballs and like connect everything. Yeah, but then it's like you're using your YouTube channel as a tool to do other things. Like the making of the video is in the core of it. So it's like how can you leverage that into – Yeah. So I'm thinking like something – I'm thinking equivalent of like Marques Shark Tank. or like does it have to be other people's products or like your own product not necessarily yeah it could be my own products it could be yeah I'm sure there's gonna be some that go down the path of connecting with other companies and helping other products grow and then they're gonna be some that are like here is this new thing that I made yeah which is like it requires a different type of brain and you can come up with new ideas and products things like that yeah I feel like some people like start schools as well like teaching people doing what they do or like different programs and that and it's a lot of a lot of different paths to go god zach jerry everything he has uh the not a wheelchair project oh right so that's like a again it's very connected to him it makes perfect sense so like there's there's i don't know there's no way for me to go oh here's what would make sense for this creator but every time i see one that makes sense i'm like yeah that's good yeah that's really some people start events yeah and have like big events i mean like vidcon being one of them the green brothers yeah we've seen creator clash okay you're gonna box anybody no no that's probably something i'm not doing either i didn't you could not pay me enough also i'm not allowed to anymore because i've had brain surgery that's fair but i'm very happy to have that as an excuse because there's no way i do it anyway granted i used to be so into martial arts like i'm i tie box for years so you might have boxed somebody before i've boxed a lot yeah yeah no and i was an mma reporter like i was deep people know that yes i did not know this yeah i didn't i think it's on my wikipedia page yeah no i was deep into like martial arts world so yeah just saying i'm not gonna do it but i can then brazenly say that i think i'd do pretty well you'd you could comment for sure i got to a yellow belt in taekwondo i was pretty yeah it's not very far taekwondo is not gonna get you very far though against like a grappler given creator classes only stand-up fighting yeah that's fair um no i can maybe i'd overcome with my my reach or something i don't know yeah it's not a whole lot i could do you do have very long limbs yeah i could use that for something something all right we're gonna take one more quick break and after that we'll be back with more with Simone.

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49:36I don't know. Well, let's find out. Yeah? Yeah, let's find out. We have a system. It's as competitive or non-competitive as you want it to be, but we have everybody type the alphabet A through Z. There may or may not be a scoreboard slash leaderboard, but I am super curious because people who spend a lot of time typing, writing, generally do pretty well. I feel like you do pretty well. Okay. All that happens is as soon as you hit A, the timer starts, and as soon as you hit Z, the timer stops. So you don't even have to hit enter or anything like that. And you would give everybody three tries. Simone, we also have the beautiful Apple Magic Keyboard and a mechanical keyboard if you would prefer.