Williamson built his show around questions he would pursue anyway

Transcript

Transcribed by machine (Whisper) from the episode’s audio, so a word may be off here and there.

1. 50:16

   Do you think other people can do it, should do it? This is a big thing I see is like folks that want to kind of create a business through this kind of new creator economy. There's all these paths to monetization, build the audience. And they're like, what I'll do is I'll go find people to interview and I'll interview them. What's the barrier for folks? What makes folks really great at this? What's the challenge in the business?

2. 50:39

   And how do you kind of do it better than others? Yeah, I think Christopher Hitchens says everyone has a buck in them. And for most, that's where it should stay. And I wonder whether podcasting may be something similar, but it's certainly a skill set that you can develop. Look, I think the best thing is a project so personal to you that you would do it if nobody listened. Right. And for me, if everybody switched off tomorrow, I did this when no one listened.

3. 51:09

   Your conversations with people that you were truly interested in learning from. Right. It's a private, it's an autobiography for me. It's a repository of my own. I think that's really interesting because it's kind of like our podcast was us literally talking with each other about the things that were going on in the world and how we were maneuvering in COVID and talking about markets, stuff that we would literally do at the poker table.

4. 51:31

   And then we just did it on Zoom and put it on the internet. All of the people that are here, I listen every week. I think the pod's fantastic. I get to tune in and just listen to between three and five guys, depending on who's available that week. Just have a hang. And it feels like you're dropping in on precisely the poker table or the private room of the steak dinner. and that's why I think people are massive fans of the show because it feels like, I know.

5. 51:56

   Genuine, authentic conversations that you want to have as an individual. interested in having. Yeah. It's like if your friend list was just a little bit better educated than you. And you're like, okay, I get to find out. It's a little bit more elevated as a conversation. Yeah. By the way, this is a little different than what we talked about, which is the other side of this creator economy, which is hacking an audience, making stuff for an audience, growing the audience, where your focus is on algorithmically, technically, tactically, identifying things that the audience likes and then focusing on those things and building from there. And this is a very different kind of tack. Both work. This is the right tack, by the way, is to pursue your muse and to do something that's authentically interesting to you.

6. 52:37

   You and I both agree on like film and the importance of great film and great directors are the ones that were left the fuck alone. You know, the great directors are the ones who got the deals with the studios where they were told they had complete creative control. Final cut. Yeah. Look, you can still play that game. I have two full-time front catalogue strategists and two back catalogue strategists as well for YouTube. So we have a big team that's playing the algo game, they're chopping down clips. So look, I think that what is it that Ferris says about in the short term your results are determined by your intensity, in the long term your results are determined by your consistency, but don't trade the latter for the former.

7. 53:15

   And if you try and go too hard, if you try and do things where you're being ventriloquized by the audience, I'm going to try and reverse engineer what I think the audience wants from me. Which means that if they stop loving you, not only do you not have the one thing you used to have, but you didn't even make a body of work that you cared about either. So you end up resenting the audience. And yeah, for me, it's kind of like a bulletproof strategy.

8. 53:38

   You're going to keep going for longer because you like what you do. So can we talk about monetization, how you think about making money?