How to Prepare for the Changing Creator Economy with Roberto Blake

Do you have any idea what's ahead for us as creators in the next 5, 10, 15 years? Do you know what it's going to take for you to sustain a career, but not only that, be able to build a career in this new crazy creator economy? 

If you don't, you're not alone. Thankfully, we have someone on the podcast who does, who literally has written a book on how to make it in the creator economy, but not just make it, how to thrive. 

We're talking about one of the most esteemed and well-known content creators of our time, Roberto Blake. 

He's here on the Garden Geek Show, and he's going to help us navigate the future of the creator economy and figure out what you need to do, not just to be prepared, but to absolutely be in the right position to be the creator that wins. 

Give me just a moment to welcome those of you who are new to our show, and then we'll get right into one of our best ever interviews. 

Hello and welcome to our show. Thank you so much for making this podcast a part of your creative day. And if you're new to our show, let me tell you why you're in the right place at the exact right time. 

As a musician, artist, freelancer, entrepreneur, anyone at the intersection of the arts, entertainment, content creation space, but also with a heart for ministry and a faith-focused background, you want to not just survive, but thrive as a creative in every area of your life. 

And that's what we do here at Gotten Gigs. We help you to become the creative that you were created to be. Now, there is no one that we could have on the show that would be more qualified to share what it takes to become that kind of creator than to talk with our guest today, Roberto Blake. 

Now, I'm just going to tell you a tiny bit about him because if you've been following YouTube at all, content creation at all, you have most likely run into or heard of Roberto Blake's amazing impact on our creative landscape. 

Now he's a creative entrepreneur and the founder of the Awesome Creative Academy. He's built an education platform that helps content creators increase their reach, reputation, and revenue. 

Now he has over $2 million earned in revenue as a full-time creator to date, and he has a silver YouTube play button for reaching over 100,000 subscribers, but he's now over 600,000 subscribers. 

And when I tell you this man has the heart for creators like you and me, but he has the knowledge and the skills of an expert in every area of the business of being a creative entrepreneur. 

So when he speaks today about the future of the creative economy, when he tells you what it's going to take for you to actually have a sustainable income, he's not just throwing numbers or hope at you. 

He's telling you exactly how to do it. He's pragmatic. He's real about this. I love the fact that he has a heart to actually see people achieve these goals, to find a way to make income from your passion, from your creative gift, but not in a way that has you selling out or following get rich quick schemes. 

His motivation is to help us. And so when he gets real about what's not working, the things that we have been sold kind of a bill of goods on when it comes to learning about the creator economy and what it takes to really make it in this industry. 

I hope you're taking notes and you're going to listen to this more than once and send it to a friend because it's absolutely going to unlock the keys to being a creator that survives not just the next two years or five years, but that can do this for the long haul. 

My friend, I'm so grateful and I don't want to spend any more time introducing him. I want to get right into the amazing content and information that Roberto shared with me. 

So without further delay, here's our conversation with Roberto Blake. Berto Blake. It's an honor, brother. Welcome to the God and Geek Show. How are you, my friend? Thanks for having me, Allen. 

Man, I don't know if you remember, but I can't take the number one fan thing away from my son. We met at Podfest right after you did an amazing talk. 

And so you guys were chopping it up about Star Wars and some other anime things you had in the back of your studio for years. 

And I was just like, man, I wish I could have been a fly on the wall for all the times that you guys We're like just watching all these different things. 

So first of all, when you have been in this creative economy, the creative world, is it that kind of stuff, the, you know, the pop culture, the stuff that you grew up with, does that keep you excited? 

Does that keep you kind of engaged, kind of like that kid-like, that child-like enjoyment of the creative life? 

When all this other stuff about monetization, do you, you know, do you still stay in that kid stage sometimes? 

I mean, maybe a little bit and everything. I actually like the tech and business side probably more than most people. Most people probably like more of the creativity and express their self side. 

I'm like, yeah, okay. I actually really am like a big tech nerd. I like, I have all kinds of tech and gadgets. Like my desk is like a treasure trove of gadgets. 

I even got like a DJI Osmo action cam here for sports cam stuff. Um, I barely even use it, but I want to do a review of it for the people who do, um, things like the Osmo pocket for like all the go on the go, all in one vlogging and everything. 

Again, I'm more of a camera camera guy, but it's a nice gadget. It's a, and it's nice for people who are not camera people. It's perfect. So I, again, planning to review it in my like a budget gear for content creators thing. 

So I've always liked the tech. I started adding tech and tutorials on YouTube. I was, um, coding at 13. I was coding at 13. I'm a nerd. I'm a real nerd. So the, you know, not just a geek, definitely not a dork. 

I'm a nerd. I have actual utility. The thing is, though, there are things I'm passionate about, but I'm fortunate that I also have the intellectual capacity to become good at a lot of the things that I'm passionate about. 

and they don't require pure, raw, innate talent. They can be achieved through hard work. So I'm fortunate in the fact that a lot of the things I like can like me back. 

And by that, I mean, they can reward me in ways that keep me motivated and satisfied. So there are things I do that can get praise from the type of people I would want praise for and would make me the kind of money that I want. 

And I tend to gravitate toward those things. Um, That may be how I got out of being a starving artist is I can put certain things aside and I can like things that like me back. 

And I also can get very good at things that have the ability for me to extract some value out of them beyond having to just enjoy the process. 

The good news for me is I usually don't hate the process. So I like the business stuff. I grew up watching DuckTales. I like money. I like capitalism. I love capitalism. I'm capitalism's youth pastor as far as I'm concerned. 

So I like Scrooge McDuck. I think Scrooge McDuck was a good guy. He took care of his nephews when they were orphans. He even looked out for his other nephew, Donald Duck. 

You know, when he was struggling in the Navy, he was a pillar of his community, protected Duckburg from the forces of evil, and he was still an adventurer. 

He wasn't some fat cat sitting on his, you know, laurels. He was out there, you know, getting it, still treasure hunting, still going on adventures, family vacation. 

And it seemed like he treated his employees like family, even adopting his maid's granddaughter. So, I mean, Scrooge McDuck was a good guy. So I like money. I like tech. I love gadgetry. 

I've always loved building computers and coding things and doing things. And I've always drawn and written. And I made comic books by hand at six years old and sold them to my classmates. 

So I'm like, I've always been this guy who is passionate about things, finds a way to be good at them, and then will absolutely monetize them. 

Ah, okay. So two things we can't go past. Number one, I want you to definitely trademark the Creative Economies Youth Pastor. 

That line. You definitely got to keep that one as your own guiding gig. So it's literally a perfect line for people to understand exactly what you are and what your mentality is. 

And the second part though, is where you just hit it, right? I'm seeing the Venn diagrams, not just of the nerd and the geek and everything, but also the one that you did of, and I can never pronounce that I word with the IK and all that kind of stuff. 

I can never pronounce it right. Ikigai, what you're passionate about, what you're good at, what the audience or the world wants or needs and what will pay you. 

There you go. It's Ikigai. It comes from Japan. It's from Okinawa, Japan, where they have literally some of the longest lifespans. 

Translates roughly to reason for being. What do you wake up in the morning for? What is your purpose in life? And here in the West, we've kind of lost the idea of being driven by purpose. 

That's why passion lets people follow it over a cliff. They don't align passion to being in the service of purpose, of a higher purpose that you can't just be all invested in your emotions. 

you have to have a direction to where they are serving you rather than being a slave to them. So people, my issue is to turn your passion into profit. 

Like I talk about in my book, it's literally within the title of my book. I think that you have to be led by purpose. Passion should fuel you on your path, but you need purpose. 

And then you need to understand, well, what process and systems will help me make the most use of that energy So I get where I need to be. 

So, you know, you could look at passion as the fuel, the process as the vehicle and purpose as the destination. 

Okay. Yeah. Now that is exactly where I was really feeling like, as soon as you said the passion part and having all these things that like you back, right? 

So me, specifically music. Music likes me back because I felt like I had no choice. My dad at age, I don't know, 20 or so, my dad's a dentist and he told me at around age 20 or so that I never could have taken over the family business of dentistry because clearly I wasn't cut out for that. 

I didn't know how to take the kind of a backhanded compliment. The other people though do have a nine to five. You know these people and you have a heart for them. 

As a matter of fact, one of the questions that I asked my community about, and a lot of them just wanted to know like your day-to-day, your creative process. 

A lot of them want to know like, obviously it's like you said, how do you monetize and create this lifestyle that where you're actually doing what you love and getting paid for it. 

The way I wanted to put it is this, what gives you the passion for these people when you have figured it out? 

What gives you the passion to teach this, to consistently show up for people who are trying to get over that ledge? 

Because some people say, you know what, just go for the big bucks, go for the big contracts, work with the big creators and let these other people figure it out. 

So you clearly have a passion for people helping get over that hump. What keeps giving you that passion? to help this segment of the creator economy? The quote-unquote good guy answer is not untrue in the sense that I've always had a teacher's heart, even when I was a child. 

If I learned something or learned how to do something, first thing I go and do is go out to my friends Saturday morning after cartoons are over as like, hey guys, I figured this thing out on Mario 3. 

You gotta come see this. Let's go, like, okay, well, let me help you jump over the thing. This is where the boss is and everything. This is how you beat Bowser. I would sit in there and I was the living Nintendo Power Magazine in my neighborhood at six years old when it came to playing the Nintendo. 

I was that guy. When I would see somebody that took an interest in art when I was a kid, I would show them how I draw and I would show them and try to help them with technique or give them hints on their color. 

There was something about wanting to see people be better or reach their potential if they like something, if they're enjoying something. 

Like, can I help you be better at, or if we share something, can we be as good as we can be if we help each other out here? 

And I think a lot of children have that in them. I think they get an experience where they're maybe not appreciated for it or it doesn't reward them or where people only take advantage of them. 

Because I think a lot of kids... do that naturally, you know? Of course. But I think life in the world beats it out of them. I think most kids do share their toys. 

Most kids are excited to tell their parents and their friends they learned something new and, hey, let me show off the thing I know. 

And what it is is a lot of parents don't make time for kids and they'll be like, I already know that or I don't need your help or I don't like. 

Parents will not let children experience the wonder of showing love by sharing something that they're passionate about and maybe even trying to teach about it. 

A lot of parents, a lot of adults in their community don't make room for the expression of that being a way to show love. 

And when that happens, we get discouraged because, okay, I like this and I like that, but it doesn't like me back. 

They don't reward me when I do that. If you learn something new and you try and share it, there'll be people who tell you things like don't out teach the teacher. 

And so, And so this is where people are discouraged from ever developing a service heart when service is not rewarded, when it's not appreciated and what's not reciprocated. 

Also, when it's not your own experience of people showing you love by sharing what they're passionate about and passing it on and teaching it to you. 

When people do that for you, it's why mentorship in communities and in families and in leadership are so important because is because it's a way to show people that, hey, I love this thing, and the way that I express that I love you is by being open and sharing it with you and teaching you what I know. 

And so that's the positive version of it. If you wanna be more cynical and not take me at my word, then the other version of it is there is no greater boost to an ego than knowing the role you played in someone's success and being able to tell yourself that you are the person who brought out their fullest potential and without you, they may not be where they are and knowing that you can do that for hundreds of people, thousands of people, tens of thousands of people, hundreds of thousands of people that you played a role in their success and in all the value that they create may not exist if not for you, if you want the un-altruistic version of it, then it's the supreme boost to one's ego It's one thing to be the champion and the grandmaster. 

You know what's more impressive? Being the ultimate dojo, being Cobra Kai and breeding champions, a legacy of champions, is much more of an ego boost than just being a champion once or twice. 

Having a lineage of champions that came from your dojo. It's like defeat does not exist in this dojo. Like that. is the ultimate ego boost. So you have both versions, however you want to take it. 

Here's the positive altruistic side of it. Here's the ego-driven side of it that's less noble. Yeah. Okay. So I'm sorry. You're on the God and Geek show. There's a parallel that I have to pull. 

There's one part in the scripture where someone says, hey, I don't care if this guy is preaching for his own self or if he's preaching to help God. 

And either way, we're getting done what we want to get done. It's the same concept. By either means, value is created. Exactly. So whether you want to believe that it's my altruism or my ego, that undeniable value is created either way. 

Yeah. I love it. And the fact that you are still achieving that. Now, I want to get to something in terms of the future of the economy, the future of creators, because many, again, like you're talking about this segment of the population, people who are trying to get to that 100,000 YouTube subscribers milestone. 

sell that first download, all those people who you are, again, whether altruistically or ego-driven, whichever way you are, you're helping them, you're creating these products and helping them by serving them in this way. 

Yeah, I'm creating systems because I also think that one of the big problems is this is a real career and this is a real career directory. 

You know, 20 years ago when I was coming up, 20, 25 years ago, you know you couldn't get a degree in web design back then. 

They said it wasn't a real job. Right. Back 25 years ago, you have to remember, Photoshop was demonized as evil 25 years ago and was going to destroy society. 

Do you remember that? Absolutely. I was there. I saw what computers and all, you know, when we thought, oh, you need to have a calculator. 

If you have a calculator in school, you're cheating. I remember that. Now it's a requirement. Exactly. They literally punish you if you can't buy the scientific calculator. 

In a way, you're a lesser class student, a lesser citizen. If you don't have the 80 bucks to buy the scientific calculator, you know, oh, then you're not, you know, set up for success. 

Like, isn't that ironic how things change, right? 25 years ago, Photoshop is the devil, literally. It's being demonized in all markets for the most part of, oh, this is gonna destroy art. 

This is going to give people unrealistic beauty standards. It's all the things, right? It's like the evils of Photoshop. That's AI now, by the way. Now it's all AI. And now it's the Photoshop people demonizing the AI, ironically, in the same way. 

Digital photography and digital video was going to destroy and ravage all creativity. Now it's the standard and no one misses. And now we know all the film chemicals were giving us all cancer. 

So like, oh, we were literally dying for our art back then. I was the last person in the dark room in my community college to develop with film. 

And now I'm like, oh God, I used to lament it. I even thought about buying the equipment when they had to sell it off. I'm glad I didn't because now we know it's all cancer causing chemicals and it was bad for us. 

So, you know, We should have gotten digital sooner, right? You couldn't get a degree in web design 25 years ago. When I was in college, I said that, hey, within, it was 2002, I said, hey, within 10, 12 years, every company in America will want and need a website and will not be considered legitimate without one. 

My professors literally mocked me and called me arrogant and said that, you know, this is what happens when you think you know everything. 

I was proven right and they were proven wrong because I understood the future and I wasn't guessing. 

I was already coding everything before I got to college. So I understood what was happening because they had to defend their position because they came from print shops. 

So they couldn't embrace a technology that makes them less relevant and that undermines the livelihood that gave them a middle-class life. 

They couldn't evangelize for something that in itself represented in their mind, their destruction. 

So that means they couldn't tell us the truth. And I resented that and was frustrated with that. in my early college career, because I felt they were undermining our future to defend their legacy. 

And we were entrusting them to teach us things we wanted and needed to know, and they couldn't do that with sincerity or a service heart. 

And I don't think they were evil for this, but I just think that ideologically, they couldn't tell us what would serve us if it didn't serve them. 

And so we were in misalignment. I say all that to say the future of the creator economy is important to me because there's not going to be, in my mind, legitimacy for additional education if you decide you want to be an independent content creator or even if you want to be a content creator that works within corporate America because the new position is in-house creator in the same way that you have in-house marketing departments. 

And so it's a problem. When if you do go to college and they decide there's a career in content creation and they decide, which they will, to give out degrees in it, why are you going to take a course and a degree in content creation from someone who never monetized a YouTube channel, never got to a silver play button, never made a thousand videos, did not do any of those things, never negotiated a brand deal in sponsorship, never did the Amazon influencer program and made thousands of dollars, but they're going to give you a degree that you can wave in front of your parents and say, see, my passion is validated by a degree from a college institution that you respect. 

That's gonna be unfair and it's not going to make anyone more successful. They're gonna pay thousands of dollars more. Meanwhile, everybody thinks that if you sell a course on this, you're a fake guru when the colleges are going to literally scam you for it in the next five to 10 years because they will not let a hundreds of billions of dollars a year industry, they will not fail to sink their hooks into it and decide to extract value. 

They can't afford not to when it's the career that everyone between 18 and 25 wants and that everyone who's 30 or older would like to retire to. 

So I feel that there has to be something put in place to establish systems, best practices, standards, operating procedures, operations for people who want to pursue this as a career and not a hobby because I think it's that important. 

And I think it's going to be that legitimate. And there's so much value being created and extracted that why don't creators deserve the same infrastructure and protections that other careers get to have? 

I am absolutely blown away by number one, the passion. The teacher in me is hearing you a hundred percent going through college, going to music school, And the exact same situation is happening in music schools. 

You know that the teachers who were teaching me were the ones that didn't make the albums, the ones that felt like, oh, let me just fall back, right? 

Fall back on the secure position, the tenure. And here I am realizing that they never taught me. It's literally why I'm in this position because I did not know how to make a music business. 

I had to start a podcast and talk to other people who are already touring and to figure this out. So you're exactly right about that. And so I- They can't go to a college and their professor will even know what DistroKid is. 

Exactly. Nor will they be able to read off the top of their head the payouts and CPMs for the different platforms, Tidal, for example, Tidal. 

They won't even know about that. Maybe they know about Apple and Spotify and Audible, Amazon Music for distribution. 

Maybe- They know about that. Maybe they know about Deezer. I doubt it. I doubt it. I'm not even in the music game. I'm not even in the music game, as you well know. 

I dabble. But I'm like, and I know more about it than the average person that will be teaching it. And I know more about the royalty structure because as a creator, I went and I built a faceless music channel, commissioned ghost producers to give me 100 tracks that I own the rights to. 

in perpetuity. And I've gone through the licensing process and I've gone through the distribution process. And even I know about what the payouts are. And I know that to make a living, you could probably, you need to do about roughly 20 million streams a year across all platforms to start to make a decent income. 

Or am I wrong about that? No, you're not wrong. And this is where, like you said, the fact that people are addicted to feeling that sense of control. 

So Oftentimes, I think it works both ways, right? It works in the systems of power, which you just talked about, that don't want to see the end coming, right? 

They're saying the end is near, so they protect it. Yeah, the institutionalism. The institutionalism of it. But then I think there's also the level of us being fearful, those of us in the creative, actual creators who are fearful of the new system. 

And you giving us these tools, and I love the fact you're using systems as the model. And so I know part of your model is the memberships. Part of your model is a subscription. 

It's not about simply doing the one-offs, simply trying to become viral in and of itself. So talk a little bit about that. I believe virality is largely, I don't believe it's luck. 

I believe it's rigged. Because I believe there was a point where the so-called luck, I'm not saying it never existed, but you have to remember, I'm an old YouTuber. 

I'm an OG YouTuber, which means I know the different eras and legacy of the platform. And in the early days of the platform, the reason that a random person could go viral is because there was still a novelty to just even uploading a video. 

The average person couldn't do it. Remember, YouTube came out in 2005. I don't think most people who consume YouTube were even OG YouTube consumers. 

They wouldn't know. You have to remember that most of the consumers on YouTube right now are kids who were born post 9-11. 

So they're that or younger. They're post 9-11, so they're 25 or younger than most of those consumers of YouTube. And even the people slightly older than them that were kids when YouTube came out, they didn't have access to the internet as accessibly back then because smartphones didn't exist yet. 

So they only came to YouTube as teenagers in the 2010s. But in 2005, when YouTube was built, and it was acquired by Google in November of 2006, so like about 18 months in, right? 

and then it was sued by Viacom for the piracy about a year later, and then they were litigating that for about seven years. 

Remember, YouTube wasn't a household name until about roughly 2014, 2015, and that was also when the Viners started pivoting to YouTube, because Vine blew up with the young people on the decline of Snapchat after Instagram shivved Snapchat by stealing stories, and Mark Zuckerberg just came in there, just . 

like the ruthless businessman that he is, love Zuck for that, to be honest with you. There is a funny thing where it's just like, man, I can't hate it. 

It's like, that's a nerd that just was about it. He's the most vicious nerd on the planet and I love it, I'm here for it in a way. 

And so the thing about it is YouTube became a popular household name roughly in about the 2016 era, the 2010s era, but it wouldn't have been possible without the popularization and onboarding of the smartphone era and the generation of young people and teenagers who had affordable access to smartphones, both for consumption and creation. 

The scale of social media and the creator economy doesn't happen without the popularity and onboarding of the smartphones and the access of it to young people being normalized. 

It doesn't happen any other way because as you know, Sitting down at a computer and watching content is not the same as just having it with you in your pocket. 

So it's a consumer scale that exploded. And it was also the development of the YouTube mobile app because the original YouTube was a Flash website. 

I remember this. It was a Flash website. And then Macromedia Flash, which became Adobe Flash, was deprecated in all Apple products in about 2010, 2011. 

Steve Jobs just went... So... which hurt me as a Flash developer at the time in my corporate career, but got over it. 

But moved on to better things, obviously. So the thing about that is if you understand the history, and I know this is like a history level, like Roberto, get to the point, but it's a fascinating history lesson because it's about the evolution of all of this and the fact that, okay, YouTube becomes a household name in like 2015, 2016 for normal people. 

Before that, it was this esoteric, very, very nerdy thing. which means if you were a viral creator in those early days, it was because of the novelty of a video not from a corporation existing on the internet. 

That was the key. Also, the people who were making that content were not exactly normal people. They were internet educated people. They had edgy humor at the time, which is why anything that people did go viral for would get them canceled today. 

So anything viral before like 2016 was basically a cringeworthy cancel offense, which is why now even popular YouTubers that came up in the 2012 to 2016 era, a lot of them get backlash and cancel culture that happened to them in the 2020 era. 

Remember, everyone was digging up their old content, their old tweets, their old internet humor. Well, that's why, because the only way to go viral back in that era was because of the novelty of the internet itself And because with the internet, you could make uncensored, unfiltered, provocateur content that was edgy and offensive. 

And that was the culture of the time. And that was the boost because we were organically all sharing this edgy humor in pockets of the real world offline. 

And we were bringing people online because of it, at least in all the small towns of America, like the ones I grew up in. 

So that's what happened. And people need to understand that it was organic. That's the same reason Snapchat was organic, was the word of mouth because it was in the schools. 

The same thing with Vine. So it was the teenagers then became whatever teenagers liked made things viral, and that's still true today. 

Adults over 25 and 30 don't get to really be viral content creators. Think about everyone who's viral on YouTube aside from Casey Neistat, Mark Rober, Gary Vaynerchuk, and Roman Atwood. 

You can't really name anyone over 40 who goes viral on the internet for good reasons, for good things, or for humor. 

It doesn't really exist. Tim Dillon and Joe Rogan don't count their comedians. Yeah, it's a different thing. So the thing is, the only things that can go viral have to be liked by people who are college age or younger is what goes viral. 

Am I wrong about that? I don't think so. And again, you're talking for someone who was an OG in terms of just being around when YouTube, I wasn't on it, but I was watching it. 

I was watching Vine get sucked up. I was watching all that. And the content that I'm seeing now that is actionable, that actually makes a difference in the culture is exactly what you're stating. 

Exactly. So it's that. Now for business purposes, what I believe is the new trend of the middle class of the creator economy is actually built by people. 

in their 30s, 40s, and 50s. It's the people who in their 30s, 40s, and 50s go online and will make content that will help you literally with career advice and get a job or fill out your FAFSA form for college. 

And they don't go viral, but they get niche views, 20, 30, 50,000 views. But those views are also worth 10 times more than the entertainment views. 

$2 CPMs versus $20 CPMs. So less views, but more money. Those people also get to get sponsorships with Zip Recruiter that pays more than a mobile video game will pay you for a sponsorship. 

Got it. You see? And careerbuilder.com and things like that. It's people in their late 20s, early 30s, 40s, 50s that get to make really good travel content because they have disposable income. 

Yes. So then they get the Expedia sponsorship, the Delta Ambassador program. They get those bigger deals like that. And so the creator economy's middle class and the sustainable content creator is somebody that's in their late 20s, in their 30s, 40s, 50s, who gets to leave a nine to five job, real world experience, or make lifestyle content around the life that they live, or around their family and how they raise their family, or about their debt journey, or their weight loss journey, or the travel that they get to do because they have disposable income, or the career that helped them build, or talk about their real estate portfolio, things that are substantive and meaningful. 

They won't go viral, but they don't need to, because a creator economy middle class is a balance of here's just enough views, but they're disproportionately worth more money, versus the younger content creator gets viral views that are pennies on the dollar, so to speak, because they reach a broke young audience, frankly. 

They reach teenagers and children with no disposable income, and There's more people pursuing making that kind of content, whereas every creator over 30 and 40, because there was a barrier to entry, there was a life that had to be lived that qualifies them to speak and to make that content. 

There's less saturation, less competition, less people eating up the pie in any arena that they're in, so it's more valuable by its nature, at least as far as monetary value, and it's something that's utility-based content, which means that the audience, is there for a very specific purpose and they won't move on as quickly from purpose. 

Whereas young people will become passionate about something and be done with it in a year. A hundred percent. You literally laid out my last question right there, which was to the- I've got about five or so more minutes for you. 

You got about five, 10 minutes. No, because I'm telling you, like what you laid it out because that was my heart to let them hear that. 

The fact that at your PodFest keynote that you talked about the sustainable, that's my word for the year, honestly, brother. 

Yeah. Sustainable is the key. It's not about the flash in the pan. It's about those of us who have some life experience, have some creator experience, have something to share. 

And that's where I think the thing that popped into my head, my ADD went off, but I think this will work. 

The authenticity thing, right? Versus the, like you said, the rise of AI and the fear that we're going to be overwhelmed by this kind of low grade content that doesn't really impact us or we think it doesn't impact us. 

And how I heard in your passion right there, how there isn't an argument of authenticity versus the tool. 

The tool is the AI. But what I think you're saying is the authenticity is these people owning what they have, owning the system and actually going out and doing it, using it and not getting so distracted by the noise of the culture, which again is kind of blowing this kind of steam at them. 

It's like a fog machine that's being blown at us. But what I think you're saying here, and correct me if I'm wrong, is that there is a path, a I would say even closer, not easy button, because I've heard you say it's no easy button, but there is a easier path. 

And sometimes we're making it towards sustainable, creative life. Oh, we're our worst enemy for sure. And it's our fear, doubt, and unbelief that's really doing it. 

You know, the funny thing is though, the AI slop only affects you if you create low value, low effort content anyway, because it's the thing that's a disruption to. 

It's a disruption to junk food, because here's the thing. You can't create substantive thought leader content with AI purely, and even if you could, it won't be able to penetrate trust because of the lack of proof of human. 

You just can't trust it. You need someone that you would hold accountable for the information you're receiving, and you need someone to communicate some of their lived experience for you to relate to. 

You can't really make thought leader content that is pure consumption junk food content. And even if you did, it'll be rejected for being synthetic. 

We're rejecting synthetic vegetables and fake meat right now. That's a great point. That is a great, I've never thought about that analogy, but it's exactly the same thing. 

Whereas we have all this worry about, again, like you said, what's happening in culture. The same thing has happened with our bodies. The doctors are telling us every other week about something that used to be good for us and now it's bad for us. 

And we're all just like, you know what? Just give me the stuff that is real and that I don't have to worry about, and then I'll stay healthy with it. 

And it's the same thing with content. Everybody's making better decisions throughout, but then they're going to need leaders like us, leaders like you, leaders that are actually saying the things and actually living it out and creating it in a way that, again, I think the system is then, is the key is getting people to kind of get on board. 

Obviously, that's why they need to get your book. Obviously, that's why they need to get into courses and watch your free YouTubes. 

All of that stuff kind of goes without saying. We have a free course. We have our free creator foundations course. Like, you know, we have that. I have the free for creator foundations course, uh, the same way I have, um, my free YouTube content and my podcast, because look, there's a, the, the problem. 

And I say this with all like gentleness. And I know you will understand cause you're, uh, you've come from that background of like education is, you know, if free content where the end all be all, and we can do everything because everything is free on the internet. 

Why is it that everyone who went to free public school isn't rich or isn't a genius or isn't crushing it right now? 

Because the value that the free content is the same thing as the value of free public education. It tends to serve people the best who are already smart, for one thing. 

And then two, the people who need extra help, a lot of times they can't get it because the generalized thing doesn't target their specific needs, doesn't target their specific circumstances, or the challenges that they have that are inherently unique to them because a public available system that is free, that is subsidized by something, doesn't have the resources or capacity to optimize for the individual. 

It just doesn't. It can't even actually even target a niche group of people with unique challenges even if they represent 20%. 

If they fall through the cracks, it's fine, because we can market off of the 80 that we succeeded in launching. 

So you can allow 20 to 30% of people to fall through the cracks, because you only have to market on the median, and the median will be carried by your exceptional outliers anyway. 

You only have to market on your medians and averages. So as long as you have a handful of geniuses to carry everybody, just like the income levels in America, the outliers of any population grow the average and the median level to where it can obscure how bad things are at the bottom quartile, and then you, if you don't, you can throw money at the bottom quartile all you want, but if you don't build systems that create a means of the bottom quartile transforming their own circumstances through their own inputs, all you do is condition either dependency or you manufacture failure at scale, and that's all you do, but you just consider it a write-off and throw your hands up. 

And again, I know that that gets into socioeconomic theory for people, but I'm translating it in a way that you understand that you know what happens is if you take someone in public school who's struggling and you just give them a one-on-one tutor with enough investment, that C or D student can become a B or A student. 

And they weren't incapable. They needed specific ways of being addressed. They needed something that met them where they were. But that's not accessible, affordable, or practical for most people. 

I understand that. I can't give away one-on-one help for free. It doesn't work for me. It would disrupt my life to do that. But I did create a way for people to get a little bit of tutoring and input things, like with my Friday channel reviews, for example. 

There's also a difference between throwing everybody at the free public library and saying, here you go, do it yourself. 

YouTube is nothing more than the free public library. You could learn anything you want if you're smart enough to know what questions to ask. 

How do we know you even know what questions to ask? How do you know, with unlimited options, unlimited books, where would you even begin? 

Where would you even begin? And how do you know that the starting point you choose because you're excited about it is not taking you down a wrong path because you're doing things in completely the wrong order? 

There's no curation. There's no continuity. There's no consolidation of the information. The only convenient thing about it was the price. So that's the problem with free information. 

You wouldn't even know what to ask. You wouldn't know if you're learning the right thing in the right order to begin with, because there was no curation, no consolidation. 

And then if you have to learn from multiple sources, there's no continuity and they can contradict each other. 

And you won't know, or you'll perceive them to contradict each other because you don't know how to untangle the alignment. 

Because a lot of people think that me or other YouTube educators contradict each other. Our contradictions are only niche specific across maybe 15% of things, but just the inference of that, if it's the thing you care about, makes you doubt all the other information in a way when you know you needed those best practices and you could have focused on the 80% of things we all say are true or prove are true in the way that we do it. 

So, you know, it creates this confusion in the market, so to speak. And that's because unlike every other career you could possibly pick for the most part on this earth, if you pick the traditional career, every non-creative traditional career that you could pick, there's no structure. 

There's no formalized education. There's no order of operations. There's no systems. There's no assignment sheet. You are on your own in the wilderness and you don't got 40 years to make it out. 

Hmm. All right. I don't know how to leave with that one. That was literally the perfect mic drop. But the key is we do have leaders though. We do have, I don't want to call you Moses. 

Okay. I won't give you that. Oh no, I'm not going to have you wandering 40 years. Exactly. That's my point. That what you literally laid out there is why you got to pick your tribe, pick your leader, stick with your leader, but don't keep wandering because you just don't, you must want to wander basically at that point. 

And like you said, look, you, you, you, you, you literally, I want to talk later about just the education piece. 

Cause like you said, we're not going to do Roberto Blake for president, but these are the ideas that I don't want it. 

I don't want to know, but we need more. The only way I can accomplish anything is as emperor. Anyway, no one will vote for reason. No one will vote for reasonable sound, anything and everything like that. 

So it's like, you know, You can't have me fix everything and have democracy. You got to choose. Nope, nope, nope. You got to do your own homework. That's it. But let me just, you know, so we always know people sign off with how to find you and all that kind of stuff, but they already are already looking at the description. 

They already know the show notes. So what is the one- I've heard of Blake everywhere. Everywhere. So just tell them the one thing that right now you're most excited about that you want people to say, hey, this is the most, like, is it the book? 

What's the thing that you say, hey, if nothing else, please check this out. If nothing else, right now, I'm almost through this. We have on my YouTube channel a 12-week course that we've been doing for beginners. 

It's the ultimate beginner's course for anyone under 20,000 YouTube subscribers, even if you're starting from zero. 

At some point, we will literally do something that's just under 1,000 for sure, and we've done videos on that, but I'm saying a workshop. 

We've been doing a 12-week intensive workshop. I jokingly call it night school for creators, but it really is. So about 6 or 30, 7 p.m. Eastern Standard Time, we've been doing these Wednesday workshops. 

We're up to, I think, week eight or nine now. I think it's about, when this comes out, this will probably be week eight or nine. 

And then after this, we're doing a six-week course that's just about the business side of YouTube and the creator economy. 

So that'll be the, hey... setting up an LLC, when you flip to an S-corp, hey, what's the deal with trademarking your brand? 

Hey, what do you need to do about hiring a bookkeeper, CPA, that sort of thing? Hey, what about monetization? What about brand deal contracts? Do you need a lawyer? What disclosures do you need to do? 

It's like the really nerdy business side of things, but it's the things that get overlooked or that people, they keep asking questions about it, but they never watch a video on it. 

That sort of thing. But we do those as live virtual workshops. And I prepared slide presentations for everything. People download the PDF documents for it. I literally do Q&A and I actually impromptu issue out homework assignments for people. 

I'm not joking. It's literally night school for creators. So starting with that 12-week workshop, is probably the most helpful thing for anybody. 

Because even if you are not a beginner or you're a little established, you might need a tune-up on your fundamentals or you might have been in the right place at the right time, but never bona fide on your fundamentals. 

And they can come back to haunt you if you don't know what you're doing or you don't know what you don't know. 

And then when we're done with that workshop, I would say, yeah, definitely watch the six-week business of YouTube workshop that we're going to do. 

Because I think that it is important for people to understand setting up their taxes, saying, look, if I didn't have gear insurance, I had $10,000 worth of camera gear stolen at a conference in Florida a couple of years ago. 

And I had the complete thing replaced and everything covered except for my lost footage by having gear insurance. 

To have that gear insurance and that coverage, I had to have my LLC and my tax EIN number to have the liability insurance that keeps me, media insurance and liability insurance that keeps me from being sued, but also having that gear coverage to where it covered loss, damage, and theft. 

So I was covered and I was able to recoup $10,000 worth of camera gear that was stolen from me because I had insurance and I was set up like a real business. 

If I was still treating it like a hobby, I would have been out 10 grand. Man, this is exactly why, once again, this is your heart, but also your wisdom, your mind that you're putting out and people who are now asking the right questions. 

The right question is who do I follow? You figure it out. You ask the right questions and you follow people like Roberto Blake. Roberto, this has been an absolute honor for me, a pleasure, man. 

And I hope we get to do it sometime again. Maybe I'll see you in Orlando, PopFest next time, whenever. But until then, we're going to continue following, continue buying up the books, create something awesome. 

Go check it out right now. All the links are in the show notes. Y'all, Roberto Blake, fantastic, man. Thank you so much for joining us. Thanks so much. Well, my friend, you now have the blueprint. 

You've heard it from the expert himself on how to prepare yourself to be a creative that has sustainable income, greater impact, and all of the resources you need to survive and thrive whatever comes ahead in the future of the creator economy. 

And I'm so glad you decided to listen in because we are so blessed to even have connections with amazing creators like Roberto Blake. 

So I want to make sure that you are number one, staying connected with him, following all his socials, which are in the show notes, making sure you get your hands on his book, The Creator Economy, which will be coming out very soon as I'm recording, as well as his book, Create Something Awesome, and definitely follow his YouTube. 

Without question, he has the resources there that will help you become a successful content creator because he's literally written the book on it. 

Well, my friend, I also want to remind you that if you want to find more resources, more great interviews and discussions like this, you can do so. 

And the easiest way to get your hands on all of this information is to join our newsletter, gotengage.com slash newsletter, where I can send you all the things that are happening in our membership, our podcast and our community events. 

Well, my friend, that's all that we can handle for today, but I really hope that you'll stay connected so that we can continue to share more resources like we did today. 

So until next time, Continue to become the creator that you were created to be. God bless and we'll see you next episode.