Passion is Overrated

It's crunch time at work and you need to bring wings to your workday.

Visit redbull.com slash getting it done and answer a couple questions about your work

style to get a Spotify customized playlist tuned to your productivity.

Plus, score a can of Red Bull on us while you go from to do to done.

And remember, Red Bull gives you wings.

Supplies are limited, terms apply, visit the website for more information.

Let's sure how to tackle your taxes.

Are you sweating the small print?

You may be experiencing FOMO, the fear of messing up.

The answer, using TurboTax on into a credit karma, they help you get your biggest refund

and then we help you do more with it, with a personalized plan designed to help you

hit your money goals.

It's time to take your taxes to the max.

We're filing today in the credit karma app.

The first thing anybody should do is get a really good handle on who they are and how

they operate because that seems to determine everything.

Never, never, ever in a million years is there going to be like a one-to-one, here's

your bullet point list of things that you need to do in order to be a successful writer.

Hey, welcome to the Create Unknown, the home of Make Something.

It means something I am Kevin Lieber with me as always is Matthew Taper.

Today's opening day.

It's opening day in Major League Baseball.

One of us is excited, is it you or is it me?

I think that's you, yeah, that's me, that's me.

You know what, opening day, the Red Sox Play, what happens?

Somebody makes me do a podcast, so I'm in here right now in front of this microphone when

I should be watching the Sox Play, the Twins, but no, here I am because I love this podcast,

I love the audience, I love the topics, I love everything about that way more than opening

day of Major League Baseball.

Can I tell you what my hot take on Baseball is?

I don't know if I've ever told you this before, which would be, seems impossible, but

I think it's true.

I think that Baseball is the ultimate sport of the unemployed.

Oh, yeah, especially, well, historically 100%, 100%.

There is a rant, I know I've sent you this, because I distinctly remember sending it

to you like 10 years ago.

There is a manager in Chicago.

The playground of, yes, see, see suckers, if anything good comes out of this podcast,

it's people looking this up and listening to it for themselves.

Yeah, and it's, it's profane, it's awful.

I wouldn't want decent people to be exposed to it.

So don't, don't Google Lee Elia, especially spelled E-L-I-A, Cubs manager 1983 rant

or any combination of those words, because this is beyond our rate, it's like NC17 rated.

But this was, part of his gripe is he was ripping on the fan base and part of it was who's

going to day games on a weekday at, not just Brickley Field, but like literally anywhere.

Who can go to a 1 p.m. game on a Tuesday or a Wednesday?

Not a lot of people, and you'd like to think it's, you know, the retirees, the retirees

who are good fans, you know, but especially back in the day, it was extremely cheap to

go to baseball games and get, you know, bad seats, but there's no bad seat at a baseball

game.

You didn't have to have, yeah, you get some hot dogs in beer and whatever, and you could

have a really cheap day out, but yeah, the nine to fiveers, the salary employees, those

sorts of people have a tough time going to a ball game, Tuesday at noon.

So who's left, not always the cream of the crop?

So listen to that rant, but my, my, you know, my hot take is not based on nothing, it's

based on personal experience because in 2004, the year that they, you know, broke the

curse of the Bambino, and they won the World Series, that is the summer that I was living

in Boston, half a mile from me, even though we didn't know it, we were in the same, literally

the same neighborhood of the same city and did not know.

I had no idea, well, you never would have known because I basically didn't leave the

house, which is not really that shocking.

I had essentially a fake internship, okay, I had an internship at CBS News, like the news

affiliate in Boston, CBS, Boston news, whatever the call letters are, I don't remember.

I don't remember because it really wasn't much of an internship.

I went in once a week, Wednesdays, like Wednesday morning at 9 a.m. or whatever, for like

an hour, basically, until I was sent home because there was not really anything for me

to do.

Yeah, they didn't have any, like, menial grunt tasks where it's like lots of tapes, I had

to log tapes, you know, that was it, and literally, yeah, just pop in the tape, do the log

code or whatever, blah, blah, blah, blah, it didn't take that long, there weren't that

many tapes.

I could bang out the tapes of the week in an hour, and I was just leave, and quite honestly,

there were sometimes where I didn't go in at all.

I would ask.

Nobody noticed.

I would ask, I wouldn't just not, I mean, I had one hour of obligation a week, I wasn't

going to blow that off, so I would ask.

Would you do the whole time?

If you didn't leave the house and you were working, like, 47 minutes a week, watched it

was red socks games, dude, I watched every single red socks game that entire summer.

It was the greatest distraction, panacea, like, something to fight the boredom of not

knowing anybody, like, living in a place, I didn't really know anybody, the housemates

that I lived with were at work all day.

I was literally alone in a house, I didn't have anybody to hang out with.

I was under 21, I couldn't, like, just go drinking at the bar all day.

I couldn't do anything.

Yeah.

People lost in red socks games.

For people familiar with Austin and Brighton, in Boston, it's, you know, 10 minutes down

the green line from Fenway Park.

It is one of, at least it was, one of the greatest places in the world, Austin Brighton,

to be 21, to be of drinking age, truly in the entire world, it is just amazing.

And conversely, I think being 20 in that neighborhood is like the ultimate, the ultimate

let down, the ultimate temptation, unrequited everything.

It must have been horrible for you.

I was like 20 and 9 tenths.

Yeah.

I was turning 21 at the end of the summer in the fall.

And yeah, it's just, but I had nothing to do, I'd, you know, Nesson.

I would draw cartoons and I would watch that Boston Red Sox games and it, like, saved

my life.

Well, it's made me something to look forward to, like, just, just, like, let me be clear

most every day.

I was like, I would look at the clock, bam, there's a game on today.

Now I know what I'm doing for, like, three and a half hours from, you know, one o'clock

before, whatever.

Yeah.

It's awesome.

You know, I would challenge anybody to not get into it because even if you don't care

at all about, about the sport, you don't even watch it, whatever, whoever is, you know,

the commentator guys are for your respective team, you just get into it.

Like you get, you get to know these people for better and worse and you're going to be

either a fan of them and almost like hearing them and hanging out with them, you know,

virtually, or you absolutely hate them.

They are the biggest doles.

They're stupid.

They're boring.

You end up hate-listing.

There's no neutrality with any of this because the personalities just do something, whether

it's in dear you or, or anger you.

And if you do this for, like, 30 games, if you force yourself to have it on in the background,

we're going to feel one of these things.

A bit of kinship or total revulsion and you're going to become addicted to, you know, whichever

one it is.

But yeah, T-Mobile does MLB TV again.

They've done it for years now where it's a free MLB TV subscription.

And that opened up today.

That's, it's actually a really big deal, it's like $150 a year.

So I did that this morning.

Got rolling.

So I'm set for the season.

Yeah, Jen says you've watched baseball with her dad as a kid.

It was the best.

It weirdly is.

It's really good.

We're talking about solo watching, Kevin and I are, but baseball with other people is awesome

because there's 90% downtime and it can be slow down time.

It can be, you know, frenetic, whatever, it can be sober, it can be, you know, a gallon

of beer deep.

It doesn't matter.

Yeah, it's just, you're just hanging out.

It's a really, really good sport for that, whereas everything else moves faster.

NFL, even, like, there's always something important happening, you know, every 30 seconds

there's something important to happen.

Baseball?

No, you're hanging out.

Not really.

You're hanging out.

And even though games are much shorter now than they were, you know, before the pitch

clock, though there were, you know, it was a four hour affair, not too many years ago.

And now it's back to being under three.

It's a lot tighter.

Yeah, he's hanging out.

It's fantastic.

One thing just on the announcer, a bit of it before we move on is that when I lived in

Los Angeles, I would watch Dodgers games almost primarily just to listen to Vinnie

Scully.

Vinnie Scully was like 600 years old, had been calling Dodger games for 580 of those

years.

Yeah.

And the thing that was magical about that, like, no one who has no idea what I'm talking

about.

We'll care about this at all.

But I don't care.

I'm plowing forward with my Vinnie Scully because Rest in Peace to Vinnie Scully, the

best to ever do it as far as I'm concerned, because he did so much research on all of these

players that it became like story hour with Vinnie Scully.

He wasn't just calling a game.

He was like painting this gorgeous, I mean, he really probably came up during the time

where radio was the primary way to call a game.

So you really had to paint a picture for a listener who couldn't see a picture.

And it was just, there was no other experience like watching a Dodger's game.

First of all, he would do it by himself, whereas everybody else hasn't need.

He didn't need a second.

No, no, a second would interfere with like the beautiful oration of him calling the game,

whereas everyone else has at least one other commentator, sometimes two other ones.

And gosh, you'd be sitting there and he would just tell you some story.

Like here comes, you know, John McGillicuddy, when he was 13 years old, he nearly stepped

on a rattlesnake and from, you know, he was building a tree house and all right, here

comes the three, two pitch.

It was just sameless, it was, it was unlike anything I've experienced before or since.

Yeah.

There's really nobody like him anymore.

There isn't the broadcast booths are different, but I'm really glad that you said, I'm glad

that you said the radio thing because, you know, we could go on forever about this.

I'd love to, I'd love to.

I was very much into historical baseball analysis that was and is a major part of my life.

To the point where I even, you know, I took a course at Harvard with William Ganap who

was a Jacksonian scholar and specialized in 1800s baseball.

I did that 25 years ago because it was that much of interest to me, right?

But there's a really interesting thing when it comes to media as it relates to that sport

and it's the radio thing.

Television, television made football explode and was not great for baseball for the most

part.

And it's just, you don't even have to be a fan of either to understand how the medium

fits one better than the other.

And when baseball was primarily on the radio, it could be described faithfully.

It's a game that has moments, it's just moment after moment as opposed to tons of complexity

going on like in one play in football, 22 people are moving.

Every time a ball is snapped in football and you're really limited with what you can

describe as an announcer, whereas with baseball, it's very step by step.

A pitcher has the ball, throws the ball, something happens or doesn't happen.

And then if it does happen, you're describing where the ball is hit and who's moving.

It's just really perfect for verbal analysis.

There's that 90% downtime.

That stinks on television.

That means there's nothing really to look at almost all the time.

Football, I listen to a lot of football games on the radio because I have driven a lot on

Sundays in the fall.

And it's okay, but it's way better to watch that on TV.

It's way better.

It's engaging every 30 seconds.

There's something amazing to process visually.

And the announcers don't matter, Mom.

They show instant replay of what happens to fill in the gap of the place, not happening

yet.

And then you can see a detail that you missed, you know, it works so well on TV.

Those guys like Vin Scully were at their best when they were forced into like a 12-pitch

at bat because it's one thing to talk about, you know, Jimmy McGillicutty in his rattlesnake

for 30, 45 seconds and, you know, three pitches until something happens.

But if an at bat goes two to three minutes, you got to fill that time if you're announcing

that game.

And he was the best at it.

He never had any dead time.

It was just hanging out with a guy the whole, whole time.

Oh, it was cool.

It was so cool.

The most like buttery, smooth tone and level, oh my gosh, like you think about like just

being able to feel comforted by someone's voice.

You know what it, you know, it was like a podcast that you love listening to, almost

like NPR.

I know.

I was going to say NPR, but like NPR, I find a little grating in how like soft, softly

they speak.

It's like a little bit veer's too far into like ASMR, almost, they're like, oh, yes.

Yeah.

No, no, no, no, no.

Scully wasn't like that.

He was so conversational.

It was much more like a, yeah, like your grandpa was just sitting next to you hanging

out.

That's telling you what was going on in the game.

Yeah.

That's great.

But he had the, the majesty and, and energy to make it amazing when something significant

happened.

So the switch would flip from that buttery smooth into pure excitement without it being

weird.

But he, he understood people, he understood fans of baseball, he understood people generally

to the point where probably his best call, he didn't speak at all, which is a strange

thing to say.

But when Kirk Gibson hit his very famous home run in 1988, he let the crowd sound happen

for like 60 seconds.

He could have said all manners of things and it would have been great.

But he had the wherewithal to let the game make it sounds and let the people listening

to that just here, just here.

Yeah.

So, so oddly, this guy we've just lionized for being the best.

One of his best moments was shutting the hell up and it takes a lot to recognize that

that's the right move in that, that moment in time.

Yeah.

I know how we got on Vin Scully, R.I.P. to him, R.I.P. to Chuck Norris, who just passed away

on absolute legend of the internet as well as action movies and Walker, Texas Ranger and

all of those things, his karate pants, whatever that was, yeah, never see that, Chuck Norris,

karate pants.

Yeah.

I'm sure they stretched, but he really was a fantastic athlete in his prime.

And I hope that I saw some of some recognition of that, which made me feel pretty good, that

you know, he was something not only before the main, but before any film roles at all.

There's a reason he was in Enter the Dragon.

And it's not because he was in Enter the Dragon, not in Enter the Dragon.

Oh, it was Return of the Dragon, it wasn't Enter the Dragon.

But he was so accomplished at that point that that he got cast.

Yeah, he's fighting Bruce Lee like in the Colosseum, yeah, that's pretty crazy.

Yeah.

I'm pretty sure it was Return, let me just make sure.

Well, yeah, yeah, yeah, oh, the way of the dragon, way of the dragon it was, yeah.

All I know is it wasn't the last dragon, that wasn't Chuck Norris.

Wow, this is so confusing.

I've always known this movie as Return of the Dragon.

Does it have a couple names?

When you look it up, the way of the dragon comes up, and I don't know why.

And oh, okay, the way of the dragon was originally released in the United States as Return of the Dragon.

All right.

You got it.

The mystery solved.

Yeah.

The way of the dragon was with John Saxon.

I like John Saxon a lot.

It was a way better movie.

Yeah, yeah.

Way better.

They're all kind of what they are.

You know, I was a big Bruce Lee guy for a while, and he only made like four or five movies.

One of them, he literally died during, and you know, they had to do reshoots of some guy wearing his yellow jumpsuit on the back.

And he was fighting cream until the bar.

Anyway, enter the dragon is the one that if someone was like, hey, I've never seen a Bruce Lee movie.

What should I watch?

It's enter the dragon.

That's the answer.

There's not, there's not even a debate.

It's that movie.

Yeah, I can see that.

I can see that.

But you had another RIP.

It was a different P.

Oh, it's a different P.

Yes, it's piss, not peace.

Rest in piss to Paul Erlich, one of the most destructive thinkers in the history of mankind.

That guy just really did a lot of damage around the world.

Actually, global damage done by this man, who just died, I think last week.

Yeah, and what was the title of the video that was on Vsauce 2 about this?

The man who wants us dead.

Yeah, yeah.

He really did.

That wasn't a hyperbolic YouTube title.

He sincerely wanted.

It wasn't clickbait, even though it really seems like it is.

Yeah, truly like subtly, subtly evil man who wished that many, many people in the world were not alive.

Yes.

And that there wouldn't be very many more either.

One of the interesting things, what was the movie that was based on...

Oh, ZPG.

ZPG is a movie that is loosely based off the population bomb, which is Paul Erlich's book.

It's a dystopian sci-fi type thing.

ZPG stands for zero population growth.

The movie is just called ZPG.

It's one of the few DVDs I own I had to buy it for some work in the past.

And when you watch the movie and see a dystopian thing, and know that one of the people...

It's a brainchild of somebody who desperately hoped that we would be in this situation is a really strange thing.

Imagine watching some disaster film and think, man, the guy who thought this up just hoped this would happen.

Take something like Independence Day, and the person writing it is like, God, I hope that aliens just ravaged the earth.

What a strange thing.

But that is the case with Paul Erlich, really bad guy.

And I'm sure that there are good people in his life who miss him, and that's a sad thing.

But I don't think that science as a whole has gotten worse with his passive.

Bad guy.

Yeah, not a great guy.

So yeah, that's the list of the shout outs that I'm finally talking about garbage advice, because I've been...

I've been watching a lot of videos from different authors talking about their process and trying to give advice.

I would say often what happens is some obnoxious podcaster actually is interviewing them and trying to get like deep into their process, right?

Which makes sense. Like, why wouldn't you want to do that? Why wouldn't you want to ask someone who's wildly successful in a creative field?

Hey, what do you do to get to that point?

This episode is brought to you by Indeed.

Stop waiting around for the perfect candidate.

Instead, use Indeed sponsor jobs to find the right people with the right skills fast.

It's a simple way to make sure your listing is the first candidate to see.

According to Indeed data, sponsor jobs have four times more applicants than non-sponsored jobs.

So go build your dream team today with Indeed.

Get a $75 sponsor job credit at Indeed.com slash podcast, Terms and Conditions Apply.

Zootopia 2 has come home to Disney Plus.

Let's go! Get ready for a new case.

We're the greatest partners of all time.

New friends.

Give it this night.

And your last name?

This night.

Dream team.

New habitats.

Zootopia has a secret reptile population.

You can watch the record breaking phenomenon at home.

Zootopia 2.

Now available on Disney Plus rated PG.

Right now you can get Disney Plus in Hulu for just $4.99 a month for three months with a special limited time offer ends March 24th.

After three months plan auto renews at $12.99 a month, Terms Apply.

Where do you get your ideas?

This is one of the things that I always find very pringy to ask.

Pretty much any creative person.

Where do you get your ideas?

Because they don't know.

They think it's like I've always been.

Here's a little bit of a sidebar that relates to this.

You know what people have always.

My entire adult life, Matt,

accused me of when I write something when I come up with an idea.

Whenever I come up with an idea, do you know what I routinely am accused of?

Oh, I mean, I'm trying to think if it's something worse than what I accuse you of all the time.

You would believe the spear campaigns that I run on Twitter DMs regarding you.

You know, especially like when there's like a problem in the world and nobody knows whose fault it is.

It's be like, oh, you know, have you heard of Kevin Lieber?

Have you heard of this?

I like throwing you under the bus anonymously.

This is a real accusation that you get, though, what you're about to say.

Yeah, yeah, yeah.

And you will, you know, accuse me of being mentally ill.

That's a real, but it's not that.

It's not what you're talking about.

Not that it's out of fashion.

It's rude to accuse people of that, but back in the day, all the time.

No, the answer is being on drugs.

Being high.

Really?

How much weed did you smoke?

How much weed do you smoke?

Really?

Like that kind of thing.

Yeah.

Yeah.

What makes people think this is happening?

Well, I'll tell you, well, first of all, I'm not high.

I don't smoke weed.

It's not my thing.

So that's not the case.

But I've always presumed that the people who either do smoke weed.

There must be two camps here.

People who do smoke weed or people who imagine what being high is like.

Like those must be the only two options.

Okay.

So between those two options, I think the people who do smoke weed.

Recognize that it creates a headspace for them.

That is different from their normal headspace.

And perhaps, you know, much more introspective.

Now, maybe they get fixated on ideas in a way when they're high that they don't, when they're sober.

And therefore, when I come up with some sort of odd connection, you know, some joke, whatever it is,

well, I must be in that headspace.

Like the only way to get to a headspace and where you're thinking so deeply about,

I don't know, turtles and straws and making some kind of funny turtle straw joke,

is because you're in, you know, a higher state of mind.

You're in an altered state.

Whereas, like, like, this is just my normal state.

Like, I don't know what to tell you.

Yeah.

This is where I'm at.

This is my baseline state.

Yeah.

We were talking earlier before we, we, we started, we were just kind of hanging out.

And we were talking about things that, that are foreign for a lot of people because they don't,

they don't encounter them anymore.

And I think this is one thing that people encounter a lot less frequently,

a lot less frequently than in the past.

Somebody who can slow down, focus and be introspective.

And so, something that forces them to do that is the mechanism that would make that happen to that.

Whereas, it's more natural for us to slow down, focus, think about something.

Well, I don't think that's as natural as it used to be.

And the way to do, the way to do it, the way to get into that mode is simply to be altered one way or another.

You know, we, we have seen this a lot, not so much with the slow down part,

but with, with ADHD meds, bringing focus to people.

They, they can't do that focus naturally.

And so, I think they, they associate that laser like usually intense focus on something with being.

But, but to us, it's like, no, it's just you've developed that skill over time.

You know, you don't have to swallow something or smoke something to get there.

Yeah, it's just like how you're, that's just like, I don't know how to tell you that that's just how my brain is.

Like, I don't, I don't have to use an illicit substance to create this crazy flow state.

It's like, I'm just stuck there.

You know, like I remember in high school, I don't remember where I was going.

I was driving with some people.

And there was a guy on the side of the road with a mop and bucket.

Like on the side of the road with a mop and bucket, it was really odd.

It was a very funny.

It's a very fun.

Yeah, like imagine a hitchhiker or something, somebody working, walking on the side of the road.

Usually they have like a backpack or, you know, something like that.

Or maybe they're walking a dog.

That would be totally walking.

Yeah, totally normal.

This was like a lost janitor.

It was like a nomad janitor or something.

Like, I don't know how you got where you are with that mop and that bucket.

But it looks really out of place.

Anyway, driving along with some people.

I see this guy.

And instantly I make up a song about a guy walking his bucket.

Like you would be walking a dog.

Except he was walking his pet bucket.

He's got a pet bucket.

Yeah, like walking my pet bucket, you know, whatever it was.

And the one person I was with was like, why is he like this?

Why?

Like, and the other person that I was with was like, he's like this all the time.

Like this is just high.

This is just what it's like to be with Kevin.

He's going to start singing a song about a man walking his pet bucket.

You either going to really not like that or you maybe you do.

I don't know, but like this is what you're going to get.

Exactly.

I can see you, you could have, I can see you filtering like romantic partners by this.

That you're going on like first dates.

And you just, you just hit him with the pet bucket song like five minutes into it.

And if they're not into that, it's game over.

A lifetime with Kevin is going to go very badly at that point.

If they pass the bucket test.

Yeah, it's like, ooh, we might have something here.

The bucket test.

Yeah.

Exactly.

Oh, man.

Exactly.

You know, there's something in the chat here that it really sums up what we were talking about.

Jen says that, you know, the, the, the weed solution says encourages an open playful way

of thinking that it encourages uncommon connections.

And unfortunately, most people struggle to get into that state without drugs.

And this, you know, saving the weed, like forever, think how many people really truly believe

that they need to be, they need to be drinking to do creative stuff.

That, that, like, unlock something.

How many famous writers, like, oh, yeah.

Before I, you know, crack open the typewriter before I pick up the axe.

You know, I need to, to slam some booze.

Yeah, that, that's actually not a necessary component.

But for, you know, somebody who has extremely high anxiety over doing the creative stuff,

you know, maybe that is useful to them.

Well, obviously the point is you figure out how to overcome that, how to advance without,

without drinking half a bottle of whiskey or smoke in a blunt.

You know, you deal with whatever your problem is to a degree where you can continue with normal life

as opposed to needing to unlock it with a chemical of some kind.

But this is really, really hard to do.

It's really hard to do.

Well, so I've been watching these videos about, yeah, like asking different writers how they write.

You know, what does your setup look like?

How do you get into the right, you know, whatever.

And what I have learned, what I have learned watching dozens of these is that none of it is helpful at all.

The only, the only thing really, it, it's an exaggeration to say it's not helpful at all.

It's helpful to just hear the diverse ways that people can get to a finished product.

That's useful to know.

That's useful.

It's also really useful to sort of be able to compare and contrast what works for you or doesn't work for you with other people

just for the sake of like having a broader range of knowledge about a topic.

But in terms of like, I'm going to take some notes and I'm going to follow what I've learned today in like learning how to be creative class.

No, never, never, never, ever in a million years.

Is there going to be like a one to one?

Here's your bullet point list of things that you need to do in order to be a successful writer, for instance.

Doesn't work like that.

No, no, and you know, the generic advice that I'm trying to just like steal man this a little bit, right?

And come up with with what is useful?

What advice is good?

You know, I think the most helpful thing is establishing a routine of some kind.

I think that's useful for anything anybody does ever.

Not even creative, it can be with food, cooking, eating, it can be with exercise, it can be with human relationships.

It doesn't matter.

Establishing some kind of routine increases the odds that you're going to do the thing you want to do and get the outcome that you want to get.

That's true.

But then the question is what is the routine?

And that varies tremendously based on personalities and circumstances and goals and all of that stuff.

To the point where is that truly useful advice?

Well, it's not really actionable is it?

Because it's not a, you know, if you follow a series of steps, you know, you've talked a little bit about when you have the most productivity writing.

And I can't remember the specifics of it because I didn't internalize it because it doesn't apply to me.

Because I don't listen to anything that I have to say because it's pretty boring and useless.

I can't even remember your name.

I actually have.

Yeah, I have the VSauce Wikipedia open in a separate tab so that I can flip over and know who you are.

Yeah, I mean, most of it doesn't apply.

Some people like chaos, you know, in this it always blew my mind to see people working on anything.

Creative or homework or anything at a coffee shop.

I never understood it.

That is the most nightmare-ish thing to me.

I don't want to be there.

I'm not like comfortable in that setting.

I'm at a table that's not mine and a chair that's not comfortable with God knows what happening around me.

This is not what I want.

You know, some people like supreme silence.

And you know, they're the stories of some kind of writer that's like, you know, dad shut himself into the study from 8 a.m. to 2 p.m.

And we only knocked on the door if the house was on fire.

You know, that kind of thing.

Well, I'm not really that either.

I like to be left alone, but I mean, like real life can happen.

And I'm not thrown off by that.

Brandon Sanderson has like two of those a day where he.

Those sessions.

Yes, he has like two writing sessions a day broken up by like, I'm going to live my life.

He dinner with my family, say hi to my kids, sort of.

It's like the meat of the of the sandwich, like the bread or his writing sessions.

So yeah, that's that's what I understand his.

So he has like a block, then a break, and then another block where he writes like all night.

And then he goes to bed at like three or four o'clock in the morning.

Yeah, I don't know how you found whatever routine you liked for things.

But I found it by just doing all of it and some of it sucked.

And some of it didn't suck.

The things that were good I did more of and the things that were awful, like doing homework and a coffee shop.

I'm commonwealth av and Boston.

I never did again.

It's like, oh, that is just the worst.

I don't know if you remember if you had people like this, there was a breakdown of people when I was in school who went to the library and then the ones who didn't.

Some people exclusively went to the library to do all of their stuff.

You went to like a real school.

I didn't really go to a real school.

I had that fake nature.

I, you know, at the States.

Okay.

It wasn't a thing.

Well, we had a giant, fantastic library with like seven stories as well.

So there, you know, there were like many, many places that you could work.

You know, in different environments too, whether it was a big open table or a tiny little cubicle, like people had their preferences.

I wasn't a library person at all.

I like just to be at my desk and do my thing.

But that was the breakdown.

It's like, oh, are you a library homework person or are you a sit at the desk homework person?

Or do you just do none of it and, you know, smoke the ganja.

So, you know, that was the breakdown.

But I don't think that I don't think that you know really who you are until you just do the thing and it works or it doesn't.

You know, I've seen, there's a time.

This is a lot of years ago.

I went down a rabbit hole of like creative advice videos.

I was so curious and maybe we talked about it with somebody on the podcast.

It was, it was hate watching.

It was horrible.

And you'd get these indulgent like many video essays.

That's like, you know, I, I brewed this type of tea.

And then I feed my dog, whatever.

And I put on my favorite sweatshirt.

And I, you know, open the shade so that the just enough sun trickles in without glare on my MacBook.

Right.

I was thinking that this morning, I was like, it's not like, yes, you make your machete.

And then you light your cinnamon roll Yankee candle.

Yeah.

It's like this.

Right.

This ritual is not a ritual.

No.

And everybody does develop their own.

That makes it very tick-tock though.

That's an awesome tick-tock day in the life of a writer.

And then you're lighting the Yankee candle and you're sipping your tea.

You're lowering that, that chair, the blinds just at the right angle so the sun comes in and splashes across your desk.

And that helps you write about sun rays.

It's so cringey.

It's so awful.

And, and I, I don't want to, you know, throw a huge demographic of people under the bus here.

But there, there are a lot of ladies in the world who made those videos back in the day.

They, they weren't so much, they weren't so much guys like, I'm pulling on the oil stained car cart cover rolls, sitting on my workbench stool, and then pulling up Google Docs.

Like it was all a certain brand of person.

And they were exclusively women and urban distinct distinctly urban males.

So I liked watching them because it was so ridiculously foreign to me.

Every aspect of those videos was just had nothing at all to do with me at all.

So I liked them. That was, that was really entertaining to see something so strange, like going to, you know, if you see any, like sporting events or something like that in, or holiday events in some other country.

There's nothing to do with you.

Like I was in India when, when they were celebrating holy.

Well, people were running around all day long with like brightly colored chalk.

And you just blast people with them.

Women, children, men, young old, it doesn't matter if you're outside the house, like the moment you cross the threshold.

You are fair game.

And you're going to get blasted.

I never really seen anything like that.

If somebody, if I'm walking down the street and somebody throws a fistful of powder at my face, it's like a beat down in a 9-1-1 call.

You know, so enjoying this, having fun with it is very foreign.

And it was that same sort of thing, but with people trying to write something that I have to assume wasn't very good.

Or at least, at least, wasn't meant for me to read.

But I like those videos a lot.

They were really entertaining because they were so, they were so crazy to me.

I think that's a different category though, because I almost feel like those are, they are so performative.

It's like cost playing.

You know, you're like the life of an artist.

I moved to New York City and like, here's my apartment and it's $5,000 a month and it's 10 square feet.

And here's the bodega that I go to and it's so inspiring.

You know, whatever.

It's like they're living this fantasy life of what it's like to be an artist based upon what they saw Carrie Bradshaw do and sex in the city.

Yeah.

Yeah.

I guess if that works, that works.

But you know, people do that in sports all the time where they have everything is that they like the idea of doing the thing.

They don't want to do the thing.

Oh, yeah.

No, most people when it comes to doing anything is like, I'm going to, I'm going to get the thing and I'm going to totally going to do it.

And but all of the joy is thinking about doing it and actually doing the thing.

There was an episode of hoarders once.

Sorry.

I have to tell you this.

I just know what I'm talking about.

Okay.

As you said, I'm like, this is that hoarder's guy.

There is a hoarder's episode where this guy's entire life is picking up hobbies and never doing them.

And that was what he hoarded.

His like entire apartment or house, whatever it was, was just stacked floor to ceiling with all of the equipment to like home brew beer or like make knives.

Like make your own knives.

Yeah.

Weird projects and then they were all just unopened and in the box and the just because I'm going to do this thing and I bought all the things and but it's not about doing the thing.

It's about no.

The idea that you're going to do the thing and like the idea of needing this thing is like so much of what hoarders is about to begin.

And that's the hobby.

That's the compulsion is is the prep, the start, the planning, all of that actually doing it.

Not very common at all.

Very few people.

Very few people wind up taking that step because doing the thing.

Doing the thing is a grind and it stinks, you know, and it's not so much a hobby.

But this is like the ultimate example of this is fitness with the New Year's resolution.

Oh, yeah.

Yeah.

Is, you know, the joke that the best time to go to the gym is February because it's empty.

It's kind of crazy.

But people will get the memberships and buy the workout clothes and fully intend to do it.

They're not, they're not goofing off mentally.

Just when it hits the point, hits the point where they have to do the thing.

It stops being glamorous.

It stops being interesting.

It stops being exciting.

And then they essentially chase those qualities in some other arena.

You know, and you do see this a lot.

There are people who are kind of naturally better starters than finishers.

And I'm one of those people.

It's especially bad when somebody has various interests or various experiences.

It's a tremendous problem for me with collecting things.

Part of my problem is that I have a few areas of expertise.

I'm comfortable saying that because I put a great deal of time and effort into

knowing about those different things.

Well, then you're committed to like four different verticals of collecting,

as opposed to there's just one thing you're into.

And that's what you do.

That is so simple.

A lot of things interest me about, you know, other countries.

And I have decent knowledge about those places.

Well, so I like things that reflect those places and my experience in them.

You know, you you've seen some of this.

Like I don't have I couldn't make if I wanted to.

If I had five years of dedicated time to have coherent decor in my house.

I don't know what I would do.

You know, I like Victorian furniture.

I like some of that.

I also like Soviet era Eastern European things.

I like a very specific type of, you know, sort of a revolution era.

Uruguay.

Well, it would be cool if I had like a 15 room mansion.

And you could have themed rooms.

And they, well, then I could expand into that.

What do you do when you just have a house?

You have a nightmarish combination of everything.

Well, that only happens because I've developed all those interests.

You know, I think that I really like.

You know, there's been, I don't know if you see the news.

There's been a bit of a bother in the Middle East of late.

Some stuff going on.

Ayatollahs have come and gone.

Well, I have this fantastic Ayatollah Khomeini, the original from the 80s, handmade rug that I picked up this last year.

That I love the process of finding it, buying it, badly negotiating for it in a language I don't speak.

And it's just a weird piece.

Do you have this like three by five carpet with the Ayatollah on it, who was, you know, on the Mount Rushmore of bad guys in the 80s growing up.

I love this thing.

But what do you do with it?

What do you do with your Ayatollah rug?

I don't know.

Where do you put the Ayatollah rug?

I don't know.

That's a tough question.

Everyone must face at some point.

Yeah.

So you get mission creep with all that.

So it's really hard to focus.

And to bring it back to the creative side, I think there's a problem with not just through routine type stuff, but the generic advice, whatever.

Because I think by definition, almost all creative people are all over the place.

They have intellectual mission creep.

They are into a lot of things.

You occasionally get somebody who is hyper committed to one thing.

And they channel everything in their life toward it.

Those are awesome.

And we've known a lot of those people in like educational YouTube.

They're so good at what they do because they've just made their life like engineering.

Like that's it.

Yeah.

And they become one of the best.

They can be really successful at that because they can focus on one thing and become known for that.

Yeah.

But how do you give advice?

How do you take somebody who's, you know, in the Petri dish of that system and say anything useful to them?

Like, I don't know.

Bounce around like a pinball until you find something to dedicate 20 years to and have total obsession with.

That's not advice.

It's stupid.

No, it's not advice.

Oh, so.

This is almost like a different topic, but not.

So I'll say it anyway, which is something I had been thinking about.

I actually thought about this for a very long time, actually.

Which is sort of the difference as a creative person in creating the thing that you really want to create versus something that other people want to experience.

Watch, listen to something that other people want.

There is a problem.

It is super, super hard to create a thing that like you really like yourself that other people also like a lot of other people also really like.

And I think that there's a technical reason for that.

I think the technical reason for that is that, you know, you are filtering everything through your own sensibilities.

So since you're only one person, you grew up in one place with a certain family and had certain experiences and certain friends and whatever it is, you have that singular vision.

And finding a thing that like aligns with that one singular vision.

That you really, really, really like because it's sort of like ticks all of your boxes.

It's going to be really, really hard to find a lot of other people who have their own experiences and whatever's interests and disinterest.

To align with you on that because it's, so it's such a thin, it's like a really thin, straight, you know, piece of spaghetti line, angel hair spaghetti that you're asking people to walk on.

This analogy is getting weirder, but it's making more sense to me, like you don't want angel hair spaghetti.

You want like a nice fat fetichini or like linguine or something for more people to land a broad lasagna noodle.

Oh, a lasagna noodle now we're talking.

Yeah, now we're talking.

You can stumble down the lasagna noodle bridge and not fall off.

This room for everyone on the lasagna bridge.

Yeah, yeah.

And I have seen a lot of people get some level.

So the reason that I've thought about this for myself has to do with doing Jerry Blue.

So before Vsauce, I was doing Jerry Blue, which was a, you know, fictitious character as playing a character who didn't know anything about video games trying to review them, but, you know, the character couldn't afford them.

We had never played the games.

Never played the game didn't know anything about them and then you just make up what they were about with this imagination.

That really appealed to me.

There were a lot of things about that concept that I personally found very funny.

Okay.

Now there were other people that I found along the way that also thought it was funny.

It's not like this.

Oh, yeah. I mean, you're not too far removed from like understanding me and my sensibilities.

So like, that's not that big of a deal.

It is a big deal if there are strangers who like don't know me.

They don't know how I grew up.

They don't care about any of that.

There's no reason to like me.

And they still thought that was funny and entertaining and really liked and wanted to see more of it.

But, you know, it wasn't a lot of people.

It wasn't enough to be confident that I could continue to grow that fan base into something where I could do it full time, like as a job.

I could quit my job and do that full time.

The Vsauce was that, like Vsauce was a thing that I was doing at the start of doing later, but really was at the same time.

I was still making Jerry Blue videos while I mean Jerry Blue was what was uploaded to Vsauce in the beginning.

The first two uploads on Vsauce that I ever did were Jerry Blue videos, which got seriously mixed reactions.

It definitely is a sort of thing where you get it where you are not into it.

There's no middle ground and Jerry Blue.

No.

No.

Anything absurdist.

There's no middle ground.

There's just not.

That's true.

Yeah, yeah.

Any surreal or absurdist humor, either really like it or really go.

So, I had a decision to make 15 years ago, almost.

Do I continue to do the Jerry Blue thing because I really like it.

Or do I phase that out and work closer towards what a lot of people could potentially like?

Because even those things that we were doing early days on Vsauce, it had a good audience.

It had a bigger audience than Jerry Blue, but it wasn't millions.

I don't remember how many people were watching those videos in the beginning, but.

I was so long ago.

I can't remember what a good maybe 50,000 views was like maybe.

Anyway, obviously we know what I've decided.

I decided I'm going to stop doing Jerry Blue because I think there's a ceiling there.

This is like a totally conscientious move on my part.

This is not like a revisionist history at all.

It's sitting down in like 2011 and being like, okay, like, you know, pick a lane.

I remember you talking to me about this.

And I was like purely in just listening mode at that time because I was doing completely separate stuff.

But I remember you hitting this sort of which way Western man point.

You had a fork in the road.

And there's actually a comment in the chat on this.

It won't make up brings up exactly this point.

And she had this comment like maybe 60 seconds before you went into this story that you have this blend.

You have this balance where do you do the unique thing, which is what you want to do.

What you're good at, you know, there's not competition for it.

You do this super unique thing like a Jerry Blue.

Or do you do what people actually like?

What a lot of people like or what you can have a sustainable job with.

And that that's kind of what you just described is you hit a point where it's like, well, do I, do I.

Jerry blew my way through this and try to make that work.

Or do I redirect my talent into something I also like.

But a lot more people are into it.

Yeah, I remember talking to Fred cyber about this in the next new network days.

We've talked about Fred on the podcast before.

He was just incredibly influential in media in the development of MTV.

The development of Cartoon Network.

You could read his Wikipedia Fred cyber.

Anyway, when he was looking at my stuff, you know, I have told stories about how blunt Fred could be.

He was blunt about the style of content that I was making where he was basically like, why would anybody like this?

That's pretty much what he said, like that why would anyone watch what you know, watch your videos?

Like there's no connection that you're making between anyone else and what you're doing.

And that's that's sort of like what I'm trying to explain is like you can be all alone doing some weird thing that strongly appeals to you.

And maybe you get really, really lucky in a whole other bunch of people like that thing.

But man, that's a really, really hard road to travel down as opposed to saying, well, maybe there is something I could do that like people already like and I can inject my personality into it.

So this was he was like using barely political at the time as an example.

The barely political was one of the biggest channels on all of YouTube back then.

Yeah, the key of awesome and then all the skits that they did were really like, you know,

I don't remember how high they got, but I would imagine top 20 on all of YouTube for subs in those days, maybe top 10.

Anyway, they would do like a Taylor Swift parody or like a Harry Potter skit or something that people already knew and then they would do their version of it.

This is why they get 5 million views and you get 5,000.

It's not like a big mystery.

Like you have to meet people where they are.

You can't just hope that they'll find you and that's probably like the biggest difference.

Get in the game with the college branded Venmo debit card.

Record your team with every tap and earn up to 5% cash back with Venmo stash, a new rewards program from Venmo.

No monthly fee, no minimum balance, just school pride and spending power.

Get in the game and sign up for the Venmo debit card at Venmo.com slash college card.

The Venmo master card is issued by the bank court bank NA select schools available Venmo stash terms and exclusions apply at Venmo.me slash stash terms max $100 cash back per month.

That's what ended up happening in a lot of ways with Vsauce is, you know, doing things that people already recognized or maybe they had an interest in.

Rather than, hey, do you want to watch this video about this guy with a pillow tucked under his Budweiser sweatshirt making up video game reviews?

Like, no, why would I do that?

And no, you just have to get lucky for, you know, a critical mass to hit where you do a thing, the thing you want to do.

And maybe enough people like it and it's go time that's that's totally possible is absolutely possible that, you know, we've talked in the past about Jerry Bloop being fantastic at the wrong time.

Where if that head, if that character had existed like 10 years after, it probably is received very differently.

You know, there are a lot of stories like that, but that's, you know, what you have to do is kind of wait for the stars to align and that's.

That's a tough way to be, you know, Jen says, you know, we're back to the distinction between having a creative hobby and being a creative professional.

The situations that allow for those two things are completely different.

You can have any creative hobby, literally anything.

And people say all the time, like, you know, just do things, people can just do things.

Just start, that is the best advice, like Linus mentioned this, you know, Derek from Veritasium saying that, you know, just do the thing and figure it out after you've begun doing.

That is completely true and probably, you know, the best generalized creative advice is just do it, right?

You can do that with any creative hobby trying to be a creative professional.

Then it gets a lot more complicated because you can just do a thing that nobody wants, that nobody wants right now.

That they do want right now, but a year from now they don't.

You know, all of these permutations are totally possible when you introduce that professional aspect.

And when I say professional, I mean, is this your life in the sense, like, this is how you make a living when people ask you what you do.

This is what you say you do.

Like, that's, to me, the general definition of is somebody a professional with something.

It doesn't mean that they have to have an office and a specific salary.

It's like, is this what your life is about?

And once you start talking in those terms, there are so many factors, so many, right down to where you live.

Tremendous number of these factors are totally outside your control.

It was a big deal.

And this is not a value judgment for both better and worse when health care laws changed in the United States.

And young people could be on their parents' health insurance until they were 26.

That bought a lot of young people time where they could be 21 and 22 and 3 and 4 and 5 and have some runway on a basic thing in life.

Being a, you know, trying to be a creative professional in a place like the United Kingdom where you're not even thinking about,

am I going to have health insurance because it's built into your existence there.

That's a different circumstance too.

All of this comes up when you start thinking beyond creative hobby.

And that makes it extremely tough to me to give somebody or to find appropriate creative advice when the circumstances are just all over the place.

I mean, you see this.

We've been watching a lot of shark tank.

I always just like the business shows. I really like the profit. I like, I like shark tank.

You always learn something. At least I feel like I do watching those types of shows.

But this is something that comes up there in the business world. We're not even talking about a creative world.

In the business world, they talk about, well, this business, is this a hobby for you? Is this a business?

Yeah.

Like that's verbatim that comes out of like Kevin O'Leary's mouth sometimes where someone, yeah, I don't know.

They're making like necker chips for dogs or something.

And they sell 500 of them a year.

And they make enough money to buy groceries with that. It's like that's really awesome.

But that's not an investable business.

Like you can't take on a partner in your dog neckerchief business that sells, you know, that makes $10,000 a year, whatever it is.

That's really like a hobby. That's not a full-fledged business where you're going to have employees and you're going to scale and you're going to mass produce and you're going to bring on investors.

And like, this is a different ball game. You're playing this game over here.

And we're talking about this game over here on Shark Tank and these are very far apart.

So I think that that whole, you know, thought process extends beyond creativity and just into things such as entrepreneurship.

Yeah, there's a tremendous distinction between something that creates a job for yourself and a business.

Okay. This is a distinction and it fits the creative stuff as well.

But it's a distinction that almost nobody makes where most of the time when they talk when they talk about being a creative professional, when they talk about, you know, they want to have a creative business in something like a YouTube channel, whatever, what they really end up thinking about is they just want to make a job for themselves.

It's realistically, if you go on vacation for a week and you have your business is really just a job for you, nothing is happening.

Nothing is happening. When you're asleep, what's being produced? If it's just a job for you, nothing. That's it.

If you're an hour late to work, that's an hour that there is no business.

If you're opposed to, I don't know, if I go by a Burger King franchise, I own a business that operates, even if I sleep in, it operates if I'm in Nebraska, or if I'm, you know, in the back room, there's something going on that is productive that doesn't rely on me and my hands and my mind being at the desk, making the thing happen.

You know, we've gone over many times in different iterations, both scaling YouTube stuff, and also evolving it, handing it off to people.

And this is one of the, like, the tremendous problems is when creative people discover that the whole time, they've just had a job for themselves.

And if they're not going to do the job, there isn't somebody appropriate to do it. They're not good enough. They're not as committed enough. They're completely different. And so it's not a fit. A lot of different reasons.

But that distinction is absolutely, absolutely critical. You've, you've got to make that. And if, if you don't, you're misunderstanding the whole thing yourself, you know, and that, that's along the same lines as that hobby versus professional distinction on the creative thing, where, you know, you, Kevin, you're working on a writing project.

It is absolutely as a hobbyist. You know it is. You know that you're not trying to, as far as I know, open up a 40 year career as a novelist.

You're not trying to launch a series that can then be adapted into other media. You're not trying to start a publishing house.

These aren't the goals. And so it's really clear that you're in the, I want to do a creative thing camp.

Yeah. Yeah. Not only that, but I actually have an aversion to the entire, like, write a new book every year model that you have to be in in order to be a professional writer. Like, of course, you have to come out with your agent is relying upon it.

The publisher is relying upon it. You're relying upon it. You have to come up with new product.

Yep. Every single year. And I look at that and I look at, and this is, I don't know.

I don't think it's entirely wrong of me, but maybe it is.

But I look at the writers who do that, the authors who do that. I'm like, how could these books be any good?

Like, really? You're just cranking these things out. Like, I watched it in an interview with a guy who said he spends two weeks on his world building for a novel.

Two weeks. Like, really? It's been very long.

In two weeks, you come up with everything that there is to come up with essentially for, you know, the setting and the politics and like the factions and the conflicts and the history of those two weeks.

Really? I mean, I've been thinking about stuff for sleep warrior for eight years.

I'm sure at a point you get very good, very good at doing it and can do it efficiently.

But, but two weeks seems, seems quick.

What he does sounds a lot of books. So who am I going to argue?

Yeah.

But that does not appeal to me. The point of me saying that is like, that does not appeal to me.

I do not want to be plugged into that machine and just be like, rrr, must crank out words.

Right. A lot of people do though.

I mean, dude, that's what the goal is.

The goal is to have somebody begging you to crank out 1,500 words a day so that they can, you know, so it only takes you six months to get to a book that's ready to hit the press.

You know, and then you start promoting it and they blah, blah, blah, blah.

That's the dream for that endeavor. And to me, it's like, oh, that sounds horrible. I don't want anything to do with that.

Yeah. You're also not.

So I'm going to pull back the curtain, give you guys a little bit of insight into the mind of the lever that I've been, I've been studying for many years now from a distance.

You can't get too close. You don't want to get too close. You got to be at a distance.

You seem to have no desire at all for validation from anybody else.

This does not factor in to any of your creative stuff.

Like you don't need any kind of ego boost. You don't, you don't do it for gaudy numbers on anything.

So when, so for example, a video comes out, you pay attention to the numbers and the reactions.

You do that purely for like performance, analytics, feedback, that kind of thing, because that's the responsible thing to do to make good content.

You don't do it to make sure that like a high number of people like you.

You don't get a thrill about millions of people approving of your thoughts and rating, you know, rating them highly.

And you also don't get down if it's a small number.

You just don't.

You know, when I, when I think about the creative advice stuff, the reality to me is that the first thing anybody should do is get a really good handle on who they are and how they operate because that seems to determine everything.

And if, if you're a person who, if you're the anti-kevin and all those things that I just said don't matter to you, if they matter to you, then you're not actually into the creative thing.

You're into validation, you're into ego massage, you're into being right.

Being more people say that you're right than you're wrong. I see this a lot with the young people in political stuff.

Some of them think that they're really interested in the topics and when you get to know them or even get familiar with their work, it's so clear that they aren't.

They want, they want to be right a lot and they enjoy the feeling of being right and they enjoy the feeling of identifying who's wrong and they like ever growing numbers of people validating, you know, their world view.

That is totally different than being completely committed to solving a specific problem or advancing a specific line of thought.

You know, and so you wish that you could back up with those people and grab them at like 18 and then really get to know who they are and what drives them.

Then you would be able to say, you know, this path is actually a better fit to you.

Or maybe the thing you want is something that if the person realized it, if they realized it, they wouldn't want it and they need to think about whether they want to proceed.

So if I said to you, you think you think you want to start this YouTube channel because you're so into, I don't know, you're so into baseball since we were talking about that.

You know, I've gotten to know you and it seems now you just really like being part of a community which every sports fandom is.

Well, then you should shift your focus completely.

You don't, you don't need to have a baseball channel.

Maybe you facilitate some community thing having to do with the red socks.

That's what you really enjoy.

You know, or this comes into play with people who do sports betting a lot where betting is the ultimate example of right and wrong.

You're proven right. We're being proven wrong because you have a quantifiable result that you also have stakes attached to.

You pay a price in this world.

You pay a price on whether you've been right or wrong.

And there are some people who are addicted, deeply addicted to being right to winning.

When you know that about somebody, it's easier to steer them away from the bad and steer them toward what the good is.

And I don't think that very much advice that we encounter takes any of this stuff into account. It never ever does.

It's anti-human. It's robotic to me.

Well, I mean, my issue with what you're saying is I don't know how to I don't know how to foster like the motivation for someone who grew up in the era of likes and algorithms.

That being like a metric of success because it was really easy for me to to build a muscle of like not really caring how successful a thing was.

Because there was no mechanism for me to be successful with anything that I made for like a decade, like almost literally almost like 10 years of me making stuff.

I would know if anybody wanted it to see it or liked it or listen to it when I wasn't around or you didn't have a dozen people telling you you were stupid and wasting your time every single day.

Yeah, right. Yeah, there was no feedback mechanism at all. It was really just make a thing.

It was like build a little boat and push it out to see and goodbye. See you. Good luck.

Yeah, of course, little paper both. Goodbye.

And that was it for 10 years until YouTube came along and I had developed, I don't know, a callus to well, as as Jen is saying in the episode chat.

Being able to separate something that you made rather than it being something that you are like separating your identity from the thing that you created rather than being.

And I see this, this is part of a huge problem with what we talked about last week with the Chalamet stuff, where people's identity are all are so closely tied to the things that they like that they didn't even make.

Forget, forget about not like interweaving your own identity to the thing that you made.

Okay, like you made it and you shouldn't do that. It's not healthy.

All you see are people who like you don't make anything. All you did was watch a TV show or you played a video game.

And now like everything that's important about who you are is wrapped up in this thing that doesn't even know who you are.

Like one piece doesn't know you. Okay, so like to make your entire identity that you're like the biggest one piece fan or whatever.

Like, where do you think that's going to end up?

And arguing with people online about it and whatever, you know, getting upset about it.

Dude, you just watched an anime. Like, so what?

I have a hard time with the comment that Jen made here about understanding your creative endeavor as a thing you made instead of a thing you are.

I don't know how to reconcile that. I just, I don't know how to separate those things because I've almost never done any work that that wasn't completely who I am.

I've absolutely done, done a lot of work that had nothing to do with me.

And I really like helping other people execute their visions and the things they care about. I love that kind of thing. That's awesome.

But at the same time, like everything that I've ever written is 100% something I would say out loud in the conversation.

It's what I believe. It is what it is because I believe it.

It's not other things precisely because I don't think they matter as much. I don't believe them. I think they're wrong.

The absence of stuff is just as important.

I think that's almost critical to being good at what you do is being halfway between knowing that the creative thing is something you make and also recognizing it as being a result of who you are.

I think when you get too far on either side, it gets wobbly and it can go badly. If your identity is completely and totally that thing, you're really vulnerable.

Just like you said, if you're so detached that it's just a job or it's not part of your personality, then what is it, a research project?

Here's an example because you mentioned this video at the top, the Paul Ehrlich one. That's a really good example of being in the middle.

That's one that both you and I worked up.

That's a video you made. Your identity is not tied to proving Paul Ehrlich wrong.

You're not invested in that way. Neither am I. That's healthy. At the same time, that video is very personal because it's important to you that there isn't bad science in the world that kills a billion people.

You care enough about humanity to want that information to be out there.

It's absolutely who you are. That's what makes it good. It's a 51 minute video. That's a really good story told well with a powerful conclusion. That is completely you.

But you're not tied into that as identity. There's a middle ground between the two where you're paradoxically making something that is you and you're putting that on display and for consumption.

Well, at the same time, somehow finding a way to be detached from it.

Again, it's a coincidence that there's a baseball analogy that I think of constantly where Roger Clemens many years ago was talking about pitching.

He was explaining the mechanism of him throwing a pitch. In that explanation, he said that as soon as the ball is out of his hand and ceases to make contact with his hand and fingers, his role is over.

Obviously, there's a little bit more to it. You know, he can hit the ball. He's got to potentially feel the ball, whatever. But his point is that everything that goes into the pitch, he does up to a certain point.

And once the ball is not in contact with his hand, it doesn't matter what else is happening in his mind or his body. It's over at that point.

So everything is going in to what leads up to the moment where those two things the ball in his body are not connected.

That's entirely true. It's totally true. You made a field day video back in the day called after the upload. Wasn't that a?

Yeah, and that's along the same lines where the second you publish the thing, you're done.

Yeah, like you have no ball is out of your hand balls out of your hands. Yeah. So I love that analogy because that's exactly the differentiation between being able to understand that.

Yeah, once the balls out of your hand, that's it. That's it. So how people react to it, you know, et cetera, et cetera. You can't make a blanket statement saying that you're not going to care.

But I think in my mind, the point is you can't let it consume you the reactions to it, the criticisms to it, because you'll just get so weighed down by that it will be crushing.

That's the separation that to me needs to happen mentally where the whole thing is you, but you recognize that there's a point where the ball is out of your hand. And then you treat it, you treat it differently because a lot of different things can happen at that point.

You can upload a video and get canceled precisely because you made some mistake where you said the wrong thing and you never saw it coming.

It could, you know, blow up into a thousand different positives. Who know, nothing can happen. Most of the time, nothing happens ever.

Almost never does anything positive or negative happen, right? But it's a different. It's a different.

Spring styles are at Nordstrom Rack stores now and there are up to 60% off stock up and save on rag and bone made well, Vince, all scenes and more of your favorites.

Why do we rock for the hottest still? There's so many good brands. Join the Nordic club to unlock exclusive discounts, shop new arrivals first and more, plus buy online and pick up at your favorite rack store for free.

Great brands, great prices. That's why you rack chapter and there's a line between those two things. There's all the stuff that's within your control and then there's when it goes out, goes out to the crowd.

They're just not the same thing at all. And having that, I think that's the point at which you apply the distinction is that you're making the thing.

I think it's got to be you as much of you as possible. Even in the factual educational stuff, we know so many people who have done it.

It's all the good ones. It's always them. Yeah, Michael Reeves is him. Like every video of his is great because it's him and nobody else could replicate that.

They could do the same informational aspect of it, the same content of it.

But it's going to be it's going to be boring. It's going to stink because it's not it's not him. Right.

But knowing that there's this point at which your role is done and now it's become something else.

You kind of go insane if you don't recognize that threshold.

If you don't see that as being a different story.

Yeah. And I think that you've seen this with authors and and songwriters too.

But I think mostly with authors where people interpret their stories and their books and on so many different ways.

And if you were to get so upset about all of those things that deviated from what you thought it was as the author that you would just go insane.

You just pull the book probably off of all the shells and never let anybody read it ever again.

Yeah, as you couldn't be able to handle someone misinterpreting it.

You know, you see this all the time, it never stops.

It really hit 10 years ago. This is something that is a consequence of Donald Trump entering the arena in 2015, 2016.

Really ramped this up where you got this wave of people saying, if you believe X.

I don't want you watching my videos. I don't want you to be one of my fans.

You see this on both sides now. That's what I'm comfortable saying. It's not some political statements.

This mentality is idiotic. That's the failure to recognize the threshold.

If Kevin, you do you release a video.

And tomorrow you have like 2000 neo Nazis joining your Patreon.

Then yes, maybe you've done something wrong. It's time to ask some questions.

Right.

But if there's a group of people or one or five or anything.

They don't match up perfectly with whatever you think is the right way to consume what you've made.

Well, so what? Who cares?

It's out of your control. It has nothing to do with you or what you've made.

It happens, especially when you've reached a certain level of consumption.

It's a fame, but like a certain number of eyeballs, you get 10,000 people looking at something.

Odds are, there are going to be some unpalatable in your eyes.

But every time I see this and on Twitter, it's a lot.

It's like, oh, if you don't agree with this, just unfollow me now.

And you even see it on stupid like gimmick accounts.

You used to follow a lot of cat picture accounts because I like cats.

I like cat pictures.

And I'd get 200 pictures of kittens.

And then there'd be a tweet that's like, if you don't think the minimum wage should be $18 an hour unfollow me now.

You scroll down and it's like a three second video of a kitten burping.

What is, why are you even thinking in these terms?

But it exposes a complete failure to understand how any of this works.

And none of these people are remotely happy.

You cannot tell me the kitten burping account that's upset about a fan thinking the wrong thing.

The wrong thing about minimum wage.

You can't tell me that person is happy, healthy and has a good life.

Yeah, imagine just posting, you know, fat kittens that have an arrow pointing to their stomach that says,

full of soup full of soup full of soup.

And then they're just raging just raging like what a strange life.

You're raging about whether 19 year olds should be allowed to buy cigarettes.

Yeah, raging about fake laws or something.

Who knows?

Yeah.

Well, I wanted to ask you, is there a particular, is there a particular piece of advice that you have hated that you have that has been destructive that you resent having been given?

Is there something that stands out as bad advice?

I've got one if you want a minute to think on it.

Yeah, no, I don't know, but I also am not good at remembering things.

You've got to remember the bad stuff.

You need hate to fuel you.

Yeah, I know it's part of my problem.

I'm not full of hate.

I'm just full of soup.

Something that comes up too frequently.

And you've surely heard this on all sorts of not just creative advice, but like this notion will come up that some version of never read the comments.

This exposes instantly to me, someone who shouldn't be doing what they're doing, or they're a broken person at worst, usually they're a mismatch for what they're doing.

This is the most awful, most destructive advice that I hear on a consistent basis.

It exposes a mindset that is seriously unhealthy.

And the idea is, you know, don't feed the trolls.

Don't expose yourself to people, you know, saying you're wrong and stupid and, you know, overweight and balding and just whatever, the negativity.

I get the idea behind it.

Obviously, the best solution is if those things bother you, you know, work on yourself to a point where they don't.

That's the ideal solution.

That's obviously very, very hard.

Most people can't take on that personal project and succeed.

But think about what it means when you tell someone not to read the comments.

If you rephrase that, if I told you Kevin, I'm going to give you important creative advice.

Never, ever expose yourself to the feedback of anyone who watches a video you make.

That would be the stupidest thing to say ever.

You're like, no, that's not, that's not good. That's not useful.

But that's exactly what don't read the comments is.

I mean, I will say, as I said, begin at the beginning a little while ago where I spent 10 years receiving basically no feedback when we're the other.

That did not help me.

Like if I was able to get feedback on like the comics that I was doing, I probably would have gotten better at making comics.

Because probably I would have learned what people liked and what they didn't like.

Whereas when I was just making them and sending them off into the ether.

How am I going to learn, yeah, like what another person thinks good or bad and what adjustments could I ever make?

You can't make anything. You're just kind of doing the same thing over and over.

A common thread in the professional situations that have gone badly for me that I haven't liked working with the people.

It's been a difficult process. All of that.

Every single time, at some point, somebody has said a version of never read the comments.

It is so unhealthy. Think about businesses that make kind of any kind of product.

You know, food, for example. They have focus groups that taste test their stuff.

They have focus groups that evaluate their packaging.

They get the opinions of potential customers. It's a science that they employ.

It's not exact, but it's pretty good.

They spend a lot of money in R&D and research and development to get this feedback out of people and then apply it to what they do.

Yeah, they spend a lot of time and money on getting feedback.

And then here you have all these people saying ignore feedback. That's free.

That is free. It's in real time. It's not a potential customer.

It's not a demographic selected. No, this is somebody who has consumed your product.

They've watched your video and you have to take seriously what they think.

And it might be mean. It might be completely wrong.

Think how many like really wacky comments you've got. Some of them are just out there.

But this is real life. If you know, there are a thousand people who weigh in on something.

Like they're going to be some weirdos.

You just accept that that's the cross section.

But if you go out of your way to avoid that, you're getting something that every real operation in the world.

I mean, if you're a band playing on stage, let me let me rephrase the advice one more time.

Kevin, you like music? You play a little bit of music back in your day.

Kevin, the next time you play music.

Close your eyes.

You really shouldn't see the crowd reaction way better one.

Stand up comedy.

Ignore the laughter.

No, you don't want to know.

Close your eyes. Put on hearing protection.

Just tell your jokes with no feedback from the audience.

Do the Mitch headberg and turn your back to them.

On your cone of silence.

How stupid is that?

Because it's obvious that you'd test it out.

You would see what people thought was funny.

People were jazzed about.

Stand up comedians record their sets and then listen to them back later.

It's not even just a real time.

Oh, this joke didn't land or like, you know, I stumbled here, this bond.

They record the whole thing, listen to it later and make notes.

Oh, like this was a bad part.

This was a good part.

I should do this differently.

And you'd a better set up here.

Like, that's the process.

They ask fellow comics who are waiting in the wings or out in the audience hanging out at the bar

to give their opinion on it.

Because they may very well have missed something being in the moment on stage.

It's obvious that this is a good thing.

But you get people saying, never read the comments.

Or you get a magazine online magazine that shuts down the comments completely.

And you can't reply.

You get tweets where people have disabled the comments.

Some huge accounts.

Yeah, that's the default where you can't reply.

I have not seen an exception to this rule that, you know, they think don't be bothered,

don't be dissuaded, don't be derailed by comments.

That's valid.

That's healthy.

That's important.

That is not the same thing as insulate yourself from feedback.

Now, and that feedback is so exceptionally useful.

It is a gift.

It is a gift.

You have a free opt-in.

People have chosen to do it.

Feedback department working for you at all times.

Oh, my God.

Why would you say no to that?

You're an idiot if you reject that.

You're absolutely stupid.

I had, it wasn't quite a job interview, but a project interview, you know, kind of thing.

About a year ago, where I meet somebody for the first time, it was a Zoom-style thing.

And they say this in the first like three minutes of the call.

And not only did I know it was over at that point, and that I was not a fit for this.

But I said, you know, I disagree with that completely, and here's why.

It was a more professional version of, you know, the last five minutes, what I said.

And it was kind of the end of the conversation.

It was like there is such a foundational mismatch between how they think this works.

And how I know it works.

That we are going absolutely nowhere together.

And not only that, I want to find out where you're going.

So I can turn in the other direction and run.

That's how committed to failure this mentality is.

So anyway, that's my big number one destructive bad advice.

If somebody says anything that even flirts with the idea of ignoring any kind of feedback.

It's over.

It's the worst possible advice.

Don't work with them.

They're not going to change their mind.

They have a problem that extends way beyond whatever that project is.

They have literally a mental personal problem with processing the world.

Get away from them.

Don't work with them.

Don't listen to anything they say.

Exit.

You don't even exit gracefully.

You just pull the plug out from the wall and send a follow-up email that's like,

Oh, my computer started smoking.

I'll talk to you.

Never.

Let's reschedule.

You know, I'm free in 2036.

Yeah.

Yeah.

Well, yours is better than mine.

Mine is a lot more wishy-washy.

I think yours is more solid.

But mine is to follow your passion.

I don't really like that bit of advice.

And that's something that you hear all the time as well.

There are a couple of reasons I don't like it.

One is what do you know what your passion is?

Like, I think most people have no, they're not like sitting down, you know,

journaling.

Like, oh, my passion is collecting decorative spoons.

And what I need to do is, if I'm to, well, you should follow your passion.

And you should make a YouTube channel about your spoon collection.

We already have.

We already have.

You remember Brady talking about the little collectible spoons.

We've done.

Yeah.

We've done a spoon-based interview on this show.

Oh, my God.

Yeah.

I remember he, I know he collects astronaut autographs.

I don't remember the spoon.

And little spoons.

Well, yeah.

A lot of people collect spoons.

That's not an uncommon thing to collect.

I like spoons.

Old people like spoons.

And I like old people.

I remember.

Yeah.

I think my grandma might have had like a thing on the wall with some display on the wall.

Yeah.

With the little, uh, souvenir spoons.

Oh, it's awesome.

The spoons.

Yeah.

I get it.

Um, but yeah, I think, I think that just that advice automatically would cripple a lot of people.

Where you tell them, you know, the easiest thing for you to do.

You'll never work a day in your life if you just follow your passion and your lives.

I don't know what, how to even begin.

Let me tell you this.

Well, that, that is another stupid as hell line.

And this is actually an episode we should do is pre-prepare.

Well, I guess that's built into pre-pare.

Come up with a list of like the five stupidest, most destructive things anybody has ever said,

regarded to anything in our lives.

And this is probably number four on it.

Is that line that's like, if you love what you do, you'll never work a day.

This is bullshit.

It is idiotic because the truth is that when you love what you do and you're committed,

you work every minute of your work.

Never stop working.

Never stop.

No, you never stop.

And this is why you get good at what you do.

It's why you're great at what you do precisely because of this.

It's why a lot of great people have abandoned their families because they would much rather work on the thing that they're obsessed with.

Then raise children or they can't help it.

They have such a compulsion that they can't not do it.

And when somebody says that kind of line, they are not a talented person.

They're not an experienced person with that sort of thing.

They're commenting on something that is academic to them.

It is outside real life.

Yeah, because the truth is that when you love it, when you're fully committed to the passion,

you will run your life into the ground every time.

And you're going to do it with a smile most of the time.

Now at the Home Depot, receive 12 months special financing and free basic installation on carpet projects with life proof,

life proof with petproof technology, home decorators collection, and traffic master carpets.

Bring a new look to your floors or give them a durable surface that stands up to life's tough messes.

Get 12 months special financing on installed carpet projects right now at the Home Depot.

Overevalid March 12th, March 29th, 2026, exclusions and additional charges may apply for licenses at Home Depot.com slash license numbers.

But that's the level of commitment.

Anyway, sorry, it's a derail.

Alright, so I have a couple of reasons why I don't like it.

Okay, so follow your passion.

It may be that does work for some people.

That's why I'm a little wish wash on it is that it probably does work for people.

It's not like, you know, out and out terrible advice.

I don't like it though for a couple of other reasons.

One, so the first one is that what if you don't know what your passion is?

And now you're, you're like, I don't have a passion.

So I shouldn't do anything.

And now you're just stuck at not even starting anything because you like trying to figure out about anything.

I guess I don't like anything enough to do anything.

So I just won't.

That's not really good advice at all.

Another one that's really something that is personal for me is.

But I have heard other people talk about this.

So it's not like I invented this and I'm weird.

Is that sometimes when you cross the.

When you turn a thing that you really like into your job.

Now you don't like that thing anymore.

Yeah, because it became work.

And now you hate your work.

And you hate the thing that wasn't work.

And now you hate everything.

That sucks.

That's a real.

That is literally why I didn't do Vsauce 3, which was video games.

Yeah.

Because I did not want to hate video games.

The body, but fantastic example of this concept is there's,

there's an entire line of work that centers on something that is almost universally enjoyed.

And that is pornography.

Being a pornographic actor or actress is doing something.

That the general population values and likes to do.

Because if they didn't, there wouldn't be a population.

It's good that most people enjoy it.

But yes, I think the relationship with that act.

It probably changes for a lot of people when they are doing it for a living.

It probably changes their level of enjoyment and their approach to processing what they're doing,

why they're doing it and how much they like it.

And then trying to deal with taking that outside the work and back to their personal lives.

This is something that I think a fair number of people in that industry have struggled with,

where that's like the craziest example of, you know, well,

if the advice was to follow like the thing you really like, passion or not,

wouldn't everybody be in porn?

That's one of the best thoughts that you've had in 270 episodes of this podcast.

What a great sentence.

Yeah.

Just be like pornography and gluttonous eating.

That's it.

Mukbang and just gangbang.

Mukbang and gangbang.

Mukbang and something else, mukbang.

But that shows the limits of that mindset, doesn't it?

You know, it's a ridiculous example to the extremes.

But when you started talking about the follow your passion,

I think it's a real question.

Like, what is a passion?

I don't know the answer to that.

I mean, that's probably its own episode as well.

I think that we have talked a little bit about how nebulous of a term that is.

Even though everyone seems to have a firm grasp on exactly what that means.

It's like, yeah.

Do you?

I don't.

I don't know what it means.

I don't know where passion stops and obsession begins.

What's the sliding scale of interest to passion?

No.

No.

In that line too about, you know, follow your passion, I'm very happy that I haven't.

Sort of like with your Vsauce 3 example.

I love.

I really love the fact that almost all the work I've ever done is not stuff that is.

It's all of interest to me and it's important to me.

But they're not my passions.

And that's made it.

That's made it a lot easier to do the work at a really high level.

Because I'm not invested and wrapped up to it.

There's a detachment and sort of an objective distance that makes it really comfortable.

And I think has gotten a good result.

So, you know, I would adjust that advice.

Like, no, don't follow your passion.

No, this is horrible.

You find out things that are important to you.

What's of interest doesn't really cover up.

But what's important to you?

And do that.

The videos that you and I have made together.

That's all very important stuff to me.

Everyone.

There hasn't been a video that I didn't consider to be important on some level.

That's healthy.

We've never really had any crises related to creativity or production or self-value or perfectly and completely healthy.

If it was like hardcore passion project all the way, I don't see how you wouldn't have a lot of problems.

But put the passion elsewhere.

There's a lot of ways.

A lot of ways to redirect passion and to use that healthfully.

Is your YouTube video or your novel or something?

Should that be the ultimate passion?

Probably not.

Yeah, I mean, I have.

Yeah, I just I do have a hard touch.

I do think that it works for people.

That that works for where they're like, you know, this is the thing I love.

I love making soap.

And I just can't get enough of it.

And so then I started making YouTube channels or TikToks about the soap that I've been making.

And now a lot of people want to buy it.

And I get to make more soap.

And I'm still having fun.

And that's a thing.

Absolutely.

That's a thing.

I think the phenomenon.

No, that's absolutely a thing.

I think that phenomenon is not passion.

Yeah.

And this is why I have a tough time with that because I don't want to get into the weeds.

It's like what it, you know, depends on what the definition of is is.

That that sort of thing.

Where I think there's something else at play there that I mean passion to me is.

It has an element of irrationality.

You get passionate sports fans.

There's a lot of passion with sports.

Yeah.

In part because it's totally irrational.

You have levels of depression that are unwarranted with your reaction to sports.

You have levels of enjoyment that are unwarranted with the reaction to sports.

You mentioned 2004 in Boston with the Red Sox that year.

That was extremely passionate in sports fandom following the socks that year.

And thank God it was.

It wasn't clinical.

It wasn't rational.

It was a thousand times more enjoyable precisely because it was passion.

I don't think making soap and then bringing that to the world is like irrational stuff.

You know what I mean?

Okay.

It's great.

But there's something.

There's something else.

I don't know what word it is.

But passion is like it's unbridled.

It's unrestrained.

It's it's less clinical.

It's it's less wise.

You know.

In all these great and awful ways.

Passion is is just disruptive.

It's disruptive.

I think when somebody is passionate about something.

They they they run into problems big problems.

They make bad decisions.

They risk too much.

You know.

Good.

Good.

Good.

Great.

And Betsy's soap making tick talk.

I don't see that as passion.

If if she like got a second mortgage on her home.

To like build a soap making facility in her backyard.

That's insanity. There's an element of insanity and passion. And that's what makes it incredible.

Don't don't follow your passion. It's dangerous. Yeah. I don't know. All right. Well, that's

what I have. That's what I have for you. I think that's enough for today. Thank you to all of our

people who join us on the live stream. Thank you all our patrons for passionately supporting

this podcast. You can do that at patreon.com slash the create unknown. We would be passionate on

the patreon. Go be irrational. Check your bank balance and say what can't I afford? Well,

I want to be passionate. I'm going to choose that path in my life. Go crazy. Yep. Yep. Sell your

mattress and give us the mattress mind. That's basically what it comes down to. Sell a kidney. You only

need one. That's right. You only need one. So everybody has a little patreon in the side of

their body waiting to come out. Yeah. A patreon site is all right. Have a great week. We're out

here. See you space cowboys. Thanks for listening to the create unknown. We make this show with the

support of our patrons. 100% of that goes directly to keeping episodes going every week.

And the recent support has been amazing. Sit poke NRM Venture addicts weasered good. You

all really do make this show happen. Thank you to the tauts and the dumpster crew old and new

who saved tiny little lives every month. And thank you to our grizzled battlehard and child

infantry. Clemente de la Santos, Dan the Lash, Demetrius Andrews, Erika Ferry, Kunjenma Fassanti,

Kevin Menard, Mikhail Steinke, Monahem Natsu, Penny Peddler, Ryan Steer, Ryan Kender, Samuel Mancer,

Sean S. Sean Malone, and Tom Videover. And they tremendous shout out to our elite baby gang

commanders. Atrocious scuff, cat, doe jangles, Graham Robertson, James Gallagher, Jeff Davis,

Orange Vanilla Coat, Patrick Pister, TCUs, personal pilot Andy, Ryan Carroll, base weight,

Vimto's, Yitas Delitas, Jonas Walton, Nathan Robinson, and of course, Trev Stead.

You are the elite. Thank you as well to our indentured servants producer editor Ben Webster,

Minecraft mogul laterment, discord, kit and wrangler, Conrad, and producer emeritus Dan

Yosua. Thanks to base weight for use of created in the unknown for the opening theme. Thanks to

electro voice for giving us mics to sound good on top of it and thanks to main gear for powering

all our PC endeavors. The create unknown is an unknown media production and partnership with Studio

71. Liberty Mutual customizes your car and home insurance. And now we're

customizing this ad for your morning commute to wake you up. Which could help your driving?

Science says that stimulating the brain increases alertness. So here's a pop quiz. How many

months have 28 days? What gets wetter as it dries? What is keys but can't open locks?

If you don't want to hear the answers, turn off this Liberty Mutual ad now.

12 months, a towel, piano. Enjoy being fully alert.

Liberty Liberty Liberty Liberty Liberty