CONTENT CREATION

Podcast 14 min read

The Creator's Guide to Authentic Storytelling w/ David J. Ebner

with David J. Ebner

Chris Do and David J. Ebner explain why authentic storytelling requires craft, conviction, and value.

Chris Do

Founder, The Futur™ · October 9, 2025

The safest story has nothing to say

A brand can remove every objection from its message and remove every reason to care. David J. Ebner, who runs the brand storytelling agency Content Workshop and holds a fine arts degree in creative writing, has built his business around the opposite proposition: artistic craft has commercial value precisely because it creates an emotional connection.

His description of the agency is revealing: “artists in disguise.” The work is commercial, but the underlying tools come from studying narration, character development, dialogue, and structure. Those tools are meant to make an audience feel something, not simply recognize that a company has published again.

In conversation with Chris Do, Ebner confronts a problem that sits beneath production schedules and platform choices. Organizations want the connection associated with storytelling while stripping away the particularity that makes a story worth following.

Do describes the familiar result: a company message passes through strategy, copy, legal, finance, and human resources until it represents the safest available consensus. Every department has had a say. The audience still has little reason to listen.

Ebner does not cast the people involved as villains. Their caution has understandable roots: protecting the business, avoiding criticism, satisfying stakeholders. The problem is what happens when those motives become the organizing principle of the work.

Content designed to offend nobody can give nobody a reason to care.

That is an editorial diagnosis, not an argument for recklessness. A message can be accurate, professionally presented, and thoroughly approved while remaining emotionally inert. The absence of an obvious mistake does not establish the presence of an idea.

Ebner calls the result “a watered down version of a good idea.” The important word is version. Something useful may have existed before the qualifications, compromises, and abstractions obscured it.

His proposed alternative begins with specificity. Say what the company does. Know what it believes. Produce something that reflects those beliefs rather than a statement engineered to survive every imaginable objection.

For an independent creator, the uncomfortable implication is that no committee is necessary. Do sees individuals producing the same cautious material, even when they have complete editorial control. The permission problem has moved inside the person.

The recurring symptoms are recognizable:

Company descriptions that assemble impressive words without explaining the work.
Content that demands attention without making its value clear.
Public positions that disappear as soon as they attract criticism.
Personal posts that conceal the author's actual point of view.

The distinction between having a brand and having something meaningful to communicate also runs through You Don't Need a Personal Brand. You Need an Offer. Here, the issue is not whether visibility matters. It is whether the visible material gives an audience anything substantial to recognize.

Ebner's perspective matters because he approaches that problem from both sides of the assignment. He understands why an artist resists having work forced into a corporate box, and why a business needs creative work to accomplish something.

The solution is not to choose art over commerce. It is to stop confusing commercial discipline with the removal of character.

Craft begins where adjectives stop

Ebner's route into agency work began with a practical question: how could people trained in artistic storytelling apply that training commercially? Not every creative writing graduate would find a livelihood publishing the work originally imagined at school.

Content Workshop became his answer. He describes teaching artists to apply their craft to business problems, while acknowledging that some artists do not want that bargain. Their resistance is not a failure of ambition. It is a different relationship to the work.

Nor does Ebner present formal education as a gatekeeping credential. He explicitly recognizes strong storytellers who never studied the subject in a classroom. His distinction is about where the tools were learned, not who has permission to use them.

Do presses him to make those tools visible. As someone who describes much of his own learning as self-directed, Do is interested in the structure of instruction: the exercises and assignments that turn an intuitive ability into something repeatable.

The first principle Ebner reaches for is show, don't tell. His illustration is deliberately concrete. A writer can state a river's dimensions, or depict a squirrel crossing logs and let the reader experience the distance through movement.

The second version gives the reader something to imagine. Information becomes an event rather than an isolated measurement.

For Ebner, the commercial translation is not difficult. A brand can announce its attributes, or it can make benefits and outcomes visible. The same shift takes place: away from a declaration about the subject, toward an experience that helps the audience understand it.

That distinction also sharpens his account of character. A character is not developed merely because events occur nearby. Development involves a response, an emotional reaction, a change in how the person understands or acts within the world.

“It's always about change,” Ebner says.

His critique of The White Lotus illustrates the distinction. He admires the recurring suspense around a death, but finds portions of the character setup too prolonged. In his reading, the show can spend considerable time positioning people before allowing them to develop.

That is a judgment about pacing, not an established verdict on the series. The useful lesson is the separation between presenting a character and changing one. A setting can be vivid and a premise intriguing while the central movement still feels delayed.

For a creator, that makes biography an incomplete substitute for story. The facts establish who someone is. Their decisions, reactions, and changing understanding establish why following them is worthwhile.

Ebner carries that distinction into personal branding. Different periods of a life become chapters, each with particular concerns and commitments. The connective tissue is not an unchanging personality performance. It is the relationship between what a person values and how that person develops.

The broader connection between narrative craft and brand communication is also the territory of Storytelling Is A Superpower. Ebner makes that connection practical by treating brand development as something that can borrow from character development without pretending the two are identical.

His own account of graduate school adds a less romantic detail. Long projects taught him to organize time and work under real constraints. Craft was not simply inspiration. It was the discipline required to turn ability into a finished piece.

Conviction is not constant commentary

Authenticity is an easy word to print and a difficult standard to maintain. In Ebner's account, it means aligning the material a person or organization produces with the identity and values that material claims to express.

The audience enters with an understanding of the source. When a piece contradicts that understanding without explanation, it creates friction of the wrong kind. Instead of engaging with the story, the audience starts questioning the motive behind it.

That is why Ebner objects to brands adopting public positions and quickly abandoning them when criticism arrives. His concern is not simply inconsistency of messaging. It is that the original declaration begins to look transactional.

Do puts the standard plainly: “There's no point to have values if they're never tested.”

The test is what happens when the position becomes inconvenient. Agreement costs little. Criticism reveals whether a stated commitment guides behavior or merely decorates it.

But neither speaker makes constant public commentary a requirement of authenticity. Do draws a firm boundary around his own platform. His focus is helping creative entrepreneurs communicate their value and run a business, not issuing a statement on every issue that reaches his audience.

He describes occasions when pressure led him to address subjects he would not normally discuss. The response reinforced his decision to stay within the purpose of his work. His boundary is itself a position: a public platform does not have to contain the whole person.

Authenticity requires alignment, not unlimited disclosure.

That distinction prevents a useful principle from becoming another performance demand. A creator can have private beliefs, personal relationships, and conversations that do not belong in the published body of work. Restraint is different from pretending to believe nothing.

Ebner makes a parallel distinction for businesses. Courage does not have to mean taking a position on a social issue. It can mean defending a professional standard that not every prospective client shares.

His example is Content Workshop's preference for quality over volume. Producing work valuable enough that someone would pay for it, then making it available free, is a position with operational consequences. It establishes what the agency will prioritize and which expectations will be a poor fit.

High-quality content over output for its own sake.
Useful expertise shared freely rather than protected out of fear.
A recognizable point of view rather than universal agreement.
Improvement after a mistake rather than a claim of perfection.

Those commitments do not require theatrical confrontation. They require decisions. A standard becomes legible when it changes what a business produces, accepts, rejects, or corrects.

There is also a necessary escape from rigidity. Ebner does not argue that people must behave flawlessly or never revise themselves. He describes acknowledging a failure to meet a value and changing behavior to better reflect it.

That makes growth compatible with consistency. The value can remain stable while the execution improves. A personal brand becomes less credible when it conceals that distance, not when it honestly addresses it.

The emotional difficulty of holding a position under scrutiny gives Dealing With Negative Feedback a natural place alongside this discussion. The challenge is not simply receiving a reaction. It is deciding whether that reaction exposes a genuine failure or merely confirms that a meaningful position cannot satisfy everyone.

Conviction is not the refusal to listen. It is knowing what criticism should change.

The audience pays before the invoice

The most consequential transaction in content often happens without money changing hands. A person gives a piece of work time, attention, and the opportunity to occupy a portion of the day. Ebner treats that exchange as the foundation of the publisher's responsibility.

“More value than what you're taking,” he says.

That phrase changes the unit of analysis. The question is no longer whether an organization filled its publishing slot, expressed its positioning, or included the required message. It is whether the recipient received enough to justify the cost of engaging.

A free piece can still be expensive. A long explanation that provides little help has taken time regardless of its price. Conversely, a paid piece can represent a generous exchange when the value of the result exceeds the cost.

Ebner identifies several forms that cost can take:

Time and attention are the baseline price. Every piece asks an audience to spend both.
Contact information raises the exchange. Gated content requests personal details in addition to attention.
A paywall adds a financial commitment. The material must justify the money as well as the time.

This is not an argument that only instruction counts as value. Ebner explicitly allows entertainment as the promise. A story can earn attention by producing an emotional experience rather than solving a business problem.

The obligation is to fulfill the promise actually made. A piece that offers entertainment should entertain. A piece that implies practical help should supply something useful, rather than merely explaining why the publisher deserves to be hired.

Ebner's more provocative framing is content as a form of “corporate philanthropy.” He argues that businesses with the capacity to help people have a reason to do so, including through advice and knowledge offered freely.

That language introduces a tension he recognizes. Clients could interpret his position as indifference to performance measurement. His point, however, is about why the work should exist, not a declaration that its effects are irrelevant.

The practical conflict is between generosity and the fear of giving away too much. A professional knows something useful but worries that making it public will reduce the reason to pay for expertise. Ebner challenges that defensive posture.

Do responds to the philanthropy framing because it gives content a purpose beyond extracting attention. The business has an opportunity to contribute something before asking for anything further. Whether it uses that opportunity becomes part of the story audiences experience.

Near the end of the conversation, Ebner extends the test beyond usefulness to harm. He wants creators to consider not only who benefits and how much, but whether the work takes more than it gives.

His example comes from conference merchandise. He enjoys swag, yet questions the production of objects that quickly become waste. The analogy is not that every unsuccessful post is equivalent to a discarded object. It is that production alone does not establish benefit.

Something can satisfy the maker's need to distribute while doing little for the recipient.

That is the editorial consequence of his argument. A content calendar records what gets published. It does not, by itself, demonstrate that anyone was helped. The exchange has to be evaluated from the other side.

More output does not settle the argument

Artificial intelligence makes Ebner's concerns about value more urgent, but his response begins with a personal fear rather than a sweeping forecast. He remembers walking through his neighborhood while listening to a podcast account of schoolwork being written with ChatGPT.

The thought was immediate: if people were willing to substitute generated text for their own intellectual work, how long would clients continue paying his agency to write? He says copywriting still accounted for a substantial part of the work clients hired the business to do.

His concern is not simply that a machine can produce sentences. It is that acceptable output becomes so easy to generate that buyers stop distinguishing between adequate material and carefully developed work.

Ebner also worries about a feedback loop in which generated material becomes the basis for more generated material. He presents a future of increasing sameness, with fewer fresh observations entering the stream. That remains a concern raised in the conversation, not proof that such an outcome is inevitable.

Do challenges the implied division between human originality and machine recombination. Much of what people celebrate as new, he argues, combines existing influences in ways the audience does not immediately recognize.

He describes experimenting with Midjourney by pairing the visual references of Blade Runner and Sin City. What interested him was not a machine creating without influence. It was the result of bringing recognizable influences together under a particular creative direction.

The disagreement is productive because it narrows the claim. Human involvement is not automatically evidence of originality, and machine involvement is not automatically evidence of sameness. The quality of the choices still matters.

Ebner ultimately acknowledges that AI in the hands of a strong creator can improve the work. Editing, selection, and curation remain part of the process even when some time-consuming production becomes faster.

That leaves a more demanding distinction than human versus machine: considered work versus unexamined output.

Do sees another possible response to abundant generation. When production becomes nearly instantaneous, visible care and slower methods can acquire new appeal. He imagines deliberate craftsmanship becoming a luxury rather than an inefficiency.

Ebner reaches for a personal analogy. He still buys vinyl records because he enjoys the sound, the handling, and the ritual of searching through them. The attraction is not reducible to the ability to play a song.

His son's interest in the NES serves a similar purpose in the argument. An older format can offer a distinctive experience even when newer alternatives exist. Efficiency is not the only reason people choose something.

Neither analogy proves a future market for premium, human-crafted content. Both explain the kind of preference Ebner believes can survive the pressure to produce faster and cheaper.

The visibility challenge also surfaces through Do's account of a conversation with Daniel Priestley. He recalls a plane trying to climb above a thickening fog as a metaphor for a brand seeking recognition amid increasing content volume. Readers can find Priestley's broader personal-branding discussion in Personal Branding Masterclass with Daniel Priestley.

The metaphor expresses urgency, not a verified deadline after which new creators cannot succeed. The actionable point is narrower: publishing more of what already blends in is a weak response to an environment filling with similar material.

A story has to earn its ending

After questions of conviction, audience value, and production technology, Ebner's practical storytelling model is strikingly modest. It does not require cinematic scale or an elaborate personal mythology. It requires a beginning, a middle, and an end that belong to the same idea.

Do asks for something applicable to a short Instagram reel. Ebner answers by reducing narration to its essential movement: introduce an idea, develop points connected to it, then return to that idea at the end.

The simplicity is the discipline.

A short piece cannot rely on proximity to make its parts feel related. Several useful observations placed beside one another do not necessarily create a coherent story. Each observation has to do work for the central premise.

Ebner's structure can be applied without adding another proprietary framework:

Beginning, middle, and end form one connected argument. The opening introduces the idea the piece will develop.
The middle provides points and purpose around that idea. Each point connects back to the same thread.
The ending returns to the original idea. It delivers on the expectation established at the start.

Returning does not mean mechanically repeating a sentence. The material between the opening and closing should give the central idea greater weight. The audience arrives at the familiar point with more understanding than it had before.

That is why the ending cannot be treated as an administrative sign-off. It is where the piece proves that its details were selected for a reason. The promise and the payoff finally meet.

Ebner's earlier character discussion supplies another editing test. If the piece centers on a person or a brand, the writer should be able to identify the change being shown. Otherwise, the work risks becoming description without development.

His authenticity discussion supplies a different test: whether the published position belongs to the person or organization expressing it. A perfectly arranged narrative still feels hollow when the conviction has been borrowed for the occasion.

And the value discussion supplies the final test: whether the audience receives more than the piece asks it to surrender. Structure can improve delivery, but it cannot manufacture usefulness from an empty premise.

These are connected judgments, not separate production departments. The idea determines the relevant details. The details reveal the position. The payoff establishes whether spending attention was worthwhile.

For the creator facing a crowded feed, the temptation is to start with the volume problem and work backward: publish faster, fill more slots, find another format. Ebner starts with the exchange and asks whether the work deserves to occupy a slot at all.

That does not eliminate experimentation, measurement, or tools. It gives them something meaningful to serve. Faster production is valuable when it helps deliver worthwhile work, not simply when it makes an empty calendar disappear.

The final editorial decision is therefore concrete. Remove the point that does not support the premise. Replace the unsupported adjective with an observable outcome. Keep the position that the author can defend, and make the conclusion fulfill the opening promise.

Then examine the cost from the audience's side: the time spent, the attention redirected, the information surrendered. A polished piece that cannot justify that cost is not finished merely because it is ready to publish.

Attention is already payment. The story has to earn it.

TRANSCRIPT

Welcome to the podcast. We were just chatting a little bit before we went live here or before we went to the recording. And you do something that's very interesting. You work with artists, you're an artist, and you do storytelling and you work with people to help them do their brand storytelling. So those are magical words for me. My name is David J. Ebner. You're listening to the future. So let's just get into it. If people don't know who you are, can you introduce yourself and tell us a little bit of your backstory? I'm David J. Ebner. I like to tell people that J is silent. It's like an SEO joke. If you look me up, David Ebner, you're not going to find me. Put that J in there. I'm everywhere across your screen. So use the J. So yeah, I run Content Workshop. We're a brand storytelling agency. It's And as I was telling you a little bit before, we're really kind of artists in disguise. A lot of us went to school for, we say we're classically trained storytellers. I have a fine arts degree in storytelling, right? In creative writing. And when we got done with school, we were like, what are we going to do? Like, how do we, Oprah isn't going to pick all of us for her book club. So we're gonna have to use what we just learned in school commercially. So we kind of built this mantra of training artists how to essentially apply their craft commercially. And that's turned into a company that's been thriving now for 12 years. I have to ask you, what do you mean you're a classically trained storyteller? Expand on that, please. I'm like, what? Are you sure? Yeah, I'm sure. Trust me. I have the student loan debt to prove it. You know, I've got the, it's actually one of our little taglines on our website. A lot of the people we hire have advanced degrees in storytelling-esque fields, like creative writing, like fine arts degrees for the most part, right? They went to school for this. Now, that being said, there are, many fantastic storytellers that did not study this at all, which is fine, right? Which is actually great. The fact that storytelling is a skill set that can come to a lot of people in a lot of different ways. I love that. More stories are better. But we studied this. We studied narration. We studied character development. We studied you know flow and arc we know the hero's journey not because it was a marketing technique we learned it as a art technique you know in storytelling first um again that's not better or worse that's just the direction that we came to it from okay let's go back in time then yeah you're in school you're in a program as maybe in a creative writing program learning about storytelling What are some of the things you can recall that were meaningful to you that you learned in school? Let's start there before we kind of look at all the permutations, how things have changed. A lot of the skills that we learned were about the technical aspects of storytelling, right? Like when I talk about character development, we talk about the arc of a character over time. And a character can be, a brand can be subbed in for a character and really just about any function. Not all of them, but just about any, right? So when you talk about character development, you're talking about brand development. When you're talking about dialogue, which is something I love, I love dialogue, man, I am just obsessed with good dialogue. You're talking about the relationship between a brand and its audience, right? You're talking about the relationship between a reader and the content that they're reading or consuming. So literally, all these little techniques that we were learning had applications outside. Now, That doesn't mean that it was really tough for a lot of people to bridge that gap. A lot of people were artists, uh, because they wanted to produce art for the world. The idea of getting paid from a brand to put that art in a box that fit their mode of what they wanted the art to be was not something they were willing to do. So they were more altruistic about the art that they were creating. That's okay. We all come to it from different angles. But all those little techniques really played a big role in how we rolled out offering solutions to the brands. Okay. I'm going to ask this a different way. And I want to preface it because Most of what I know how to do today was self-taught. I always admire people who go and study under professionals who have been doing this a long time because I think there's some, if you go to a really good program taught by an incredible, inspiring instructor, the structure of the exercises or the assignments really are the things that allow you to self-discover. So I'm always fascinated by this. So I'm going to pretend like I'm sitting next to you. We're in grad school together. It's 12 years ago or whatever. And you are looking at the technical part of a character arc. what are we learning? Take me back there, please. Don't go to the future. Don't tie it all to the branding yet, because we'll have plenty of time to talk about that. I'm just fascinated by this. Please. Take me with you. Absolutely. Well, I'll tell you one thing that really stuck me in that they preached all the time was show don't tell, which is a very classic technique and storytelling Hemingway pretty much coined it and actually all modern most modern writers today, you can stem back their techniques to Hemingway. And that was kind of like the evolution of storytelling changed with him because he would show you something happening, opposed to saying the river was 20 feet long. He would you would talk about a squirrel jumping across like three logs to get across the span of the river, right? It was showing you distance versus telling you distance. So that was a very big technique in character development too. When we're talking about character, it's about not just giving you the facts, but showing you the benefits and the outcomes, right? And that's how it translates to brands a lot for me. A character is developed through their movement through space and time. It's not developed by specifically actions happening to them. It's their emotional reactions to things in the world around them. All of those techniques were fascinating to me at the time. The techniques of what does an actual narrative flow look like? It sounds so basic, Chris. A beginning, a middle, and an end. And there's so much content that doesn't have that. But those aspects that pull us in emotionally, because it's all about emotional connection. Like in the end, all storytelling is about having an emotional connection with what you're consuming, right? And if you can build that emotional connection, that's the ballgame that engages somebody over time. It builds a relationship between the person and whoever's telling the story. So those are the types of techniques that we learned about kind of like the, what's the end goal? How do we get there? How do you do that with dialogue? How do you do that with character development? How do you do that with narrative arc? You know, it's a tough, it's a tough skill set to develop. It's a lot of people though, as you mentioned, are self-taught in this. And even if you go to school, like I did, like, what is grad school, man? Grad school is like, it's ridiculous. It doesn't teach you how to do something. It teaches you how to manage time and space because they give you this massive project and they're like, you got to do this in two years. You're like, there's no way in hell I can do that and keep my part-time job at the drive-thru or whatever it is. Right. But you have to figure out how to put your skills and ability into some sort of like package. That's what it taught us. And again, that's applicable. I think when I listen to music, because I did not study music, and I hear a beautiful composition, a chorus or melody or whatever it is I'm hearing, I'm like, God, it's like magic. And I know people who are music. No, it's following a pretty specific formula. So for the lay person who doesn't understand art, design, music, or in our case, storytelling, I think helping them to understand the structure will kind of demystify it a little bit. So people have said this to me, Chris, you're a good storyteller. I love the way you tell stories. And I'm like, okay, so I just did this the way that felt most natural to me. So let's break this thing down. If somebody is listening to this and asking this very question, because we know this, we know that the people who understand how to tell, deliver and formulate stories are going to rule the communication landscape on all platforms, in all formats. We understand that Hollywood is a multi-billion dollar industry, maybe a trillion dollar industry, I don't know, but because they understand how to tell stories. Stories is how we learn, how we communicate, how we understand the world. So What are some basic structural things, a framework for telling a good story, say for a 60 second Instagram reel? Yeah, man, that's too complicated. No, no, not at all. And I'm going to even make it I'm gonna make it super simple. And I'm going to cut it down into this this concept of a beginning, a middle and an end. Stories are effective because they circle back to an idea. There's an ability to hold a thread of an idea through multiple points and then circle back to it, right? And in a 30-second reel, whatever you're producing, the concept is you have to pitch an idea. You have to show points and purpose around the idea. And then you have to circle back to the idea at the end. And every single point you bring up has to be connected to the idea. This is actually something that AI for now has not fully like figured out. They just give you bullets, but like all the bullets feel like kind of disconnected or about something broader, but they don't really circle back. And it's not efficient at all. But as humans tell stories, we circle back to the main concept and idea constantly, constantly. And that's what ties us. It reiterates it, like builds that kind of, that stamp on your mind of the story, right? It puts it there. It lodges a memory by having this repetition. So even basic, the short reel, general idea, a couple of transient points that connect to the main idea and then circle back to the main idea at the end. That is like the most basic function of narration. Okay. I like that. I understand that. I've observed that too, luckily. So David, we're going to have to eat our own dog food here. I'm going to ask you to show me, don't tell me. Give me an example where a story isn't so good and can you fix the story and shows a before and after? Well, I'll say one thing that White Lotus does in every season that is a bit difficult. In the first season, it doesn't feel, you don't feel it this much, but you notice it in multiple seasons thereafter. Their character development from a pacing point of view is, is poor. They start with an inciting event. You always see a dead body or somebody's dead at the beginning, which pulls you in. It's like, oh, which character is going to die? It builds a formula. And there's nothing wrong with a formula until it becomes predictable. I can never predict who's dead. I can never predict who's dead. I'm always wrong about who is dead. But it kind of constantly hints at, at that concept. So it's an example of like good storytelling because of bringing back the idea throughout, right? Somebody is going to die. Is it this guy? Is it this girl? They said this thing, this person is trying to find somebody to kill them. So maybe it's them that got killed. You don't really know throughout the main point, but it takes them a long time to get there, too long to get there, in my opinion. It's a saga. The first three or four episodes have, it's kind of positioning the characters and not progressing the characters. They don't progress for like four episodes. And so from a storytelling point of view, it's obviously working because people are engaged in that content. So I want to say it's a bad form of storytelling. But if I turned that paper in, in graduate school, right? I would get a lot of red ink on the first 20 or 30 pages because my characters aren't developing. We're setting a scene and we're doing a lot of showing, not telling, but nothing is happening. It's literally a bunch of rich people at a resort. And for some reason, they never freaking leave the resort, Chris. Who goes on vacation and doesn't leave the place, right? Like I go on hikes. I go do stuff. Who's just going to eat every meal there? So anyway, that's an aside. But I think that's an example of something that, a story that doesn't really follow that arc. It's probably lost some view. I guess if you look at viewership, I bet you the first few episodes are You can see that drop off of people. But it still engages us enough to bring us back around the end because the second half of the season is done really well, really well. Like there's a lot of action, but the characters are developing based on emotion in the second half of the season. So anyway, that's the best example I've got in my mind right now. And it's actually the same show is doing it you know, I wouldn't say poorly, but not as good in the first half and much better in the second half of the season. When you say the characters developing, what does that mean? Yeah, it's change, man. It's always about change. You have some characters that very often are static, and that's okay. It's okay to have static characters that don't change. They aren't going to be major or main characters, though, because you always have to have some sort of baseline. So you'll think of some characters that throughout the whole season, although things happen to them, they don't have an epiphany. They don't have an enlightening moment, whatever it may be, no cathartic activity. And that's okay. But the major and main characters are going to have that throughout, right? They're going to change. Usually it's a change of mentality. Sometimes it's a complete change across the board, right? They are a new character and they're doing crazy wild things. That's what I mean by character development is just simply change over time. Okay, so let's go to the future now. The word du jour really is brand and story. You can't walk anywhere. Maybe we add the word personal to personal brand story. Those three words seem to be thrown around willy-nilly. Everybody's using it. And it's this mistake that I see a lot of students make from design school when I was a teacher. Because you use the word doesn't mean you understand the word or how to use the word. Right. So let's get into the good word now. Build us the bridge. That's narrative, long form, cinematic storytelling, Hollywood. What are we going to do in our everyday stories with our brand or our companies? What can we learn from this? Yeah, I mean, we can apply a lot of those things we just talked about that are in those stories that we love, that we've watched and heard and been told, those bedtime stories from all of those years, into Us as a persona, a digital persona, you know, we all are to some degree a person online. What is our personal brand, right? Brands for a corporation, for a company as well at the same time. And all of it has to do with building kind of like that emotional framework. I had a good friend tell me once that brand lives in the hearts and minds of the people who engage with your company. That's what brand is. So you literally have as many brands as you have audience members. They all feel something different about you. And that's brand. Branding are logos and letterhead and colors and all that kind of stuff, which you want to somehow reiterate or reinforce a feeling. But everything we're talking about, Chris, comes down to emotion and feeling and imparting some sort of feeling on the audience. So how to use all of that artistic storytelling we just talked about in like a commercial or personal way. I think one, authenticity is primary, right? Across everything. If something comes off as inauthentic, people get turned off immediately, whether it's a brand producing some content and it feels like corporate propaganda. It's like, this doesn't produce any value for me. Why are they saying these things? Why should I spend my time, my most valuable resource on this thing? Or it's a persona, an individual, a personal brand, and they produce something that doesn't align with whatever the belief, believed values or brand of the individual actually are. It's inauthentic. So using that authenticity is obviously very important. This is a philosophical term that doesn't really talk about tactics so much. But in the end, what you have to do is kind of match who you are, what you want to be to what you produce. when we're talking about like everyday content, right? Whether it's, you know, reels, video for your, your Instagram, or videos for your LinkedIn, right? For some reason, so many videos on LinkedIn these days, it's, it's quite a bit, you know, or you're producing like a long form piece, like an ebook or something for, for a brand. All of those things we talked about the build, building tension, the beginning, the middle of the end concept, but he taught us this in grade school, right? Like, Intro, three bullets, closing, right? Who thought that all these years later that those core concepts actually can help in like brand storytelling, both for individuals and for companies, right? That's how you apply it though. You build a narrative arc around knowing a beginning, a middle and an end. You circle back to your points throughout, you circle back to the main idea throughout, and then you give some sort of ending that matches the promise of whatever the piece is, right? The promise may just be entertainment as we've been talking about. But usually the promise is some sort of emotional tension that's been built. When you're producing content as a brand or a company, what you want to do is provide more value than what you're taking from the individual. Right? And actually, as an individual, personal brand, you want to do that too, right? More value than what you're taking, right? That's the barter. The great barter of content is like, I'm going to give you more than I take. I'm going to take your time and attention. If I gate the piece, I'm going to take your contact information. If I put a paywall, I'm going to take your money, right? whatever that content is has to supersede that perceived value. Again, that can take any form. That is not format agnostic, right, of what that can be. Yeah, that's how it's applied in today's format. You used a word that got my eyebrows going up here a little bit, and that is authenticity. And I have a theory on this, but I want to get your take on it. which is why people don't connect with corporate brands. Because I don't even know who that is. I always feel like corporate brands, corporate or company pages are an amalgamation of lots of points of view that's been washed down to be what's in the middle. That's run through strategy, copy, legal, finance, HR before it's released. So it winds up being some of the most but all things you can read. There's not a strong opinion. It's so safe and that's why we don't connect. So as far as a corporation can have a personality be authentic, how do they screw that up? This episode is brought to you by PayPal. You know how a mom's bag has everything? Sunscreen, snacks, a stapler? The new PayPal app is like that, but for your money. Shop, pay, manage your account, and earn rewards all in one place. And with purchase protection on eligible items, biometric security, and pass keys, you're protected at every step. Download the new PayPal app to get started. See paypal.com slash protection terms. Well, you know, that's a product made by committee, right? Yes. It's exactly what you're alluding to there, which is a watered down version of a good idea. And it's watered down, I mean, not for negative reasons, like people are worried. It's fear that waters it down. Honestly, it's a lack of bravery. You know, courage and cowardice come from the same root emotion, which is fear. When you're afraid, that's the only moment in which you really are brave or you're not. There's a lot of fear around stock price, you know, providing value to the to the stockholders, right, was the Milton Friedman doctrine, right? All those concepts watered down whatever the item is, and then what you're left with is like a something for the least common denominator, right? Least common denominator content, or whatever it may be, is designed to appease as many people as possible, offend absolutely nobody, but also not incite any type of emotion. So it's just corporate jargon. You'll see this too. You'll read these and I'm sure you have man like you read these things that say what a company does. And it's like that doesn't say anything. Like those words together and string is just word salad. It doesn't say anything. And we deal with this on a daily basis when brands come to us right. Being succinct and short and just getting to the point and being very specific is is void in a lot of that content. So yeah, I think that's why people to your point, they don't connect with a lot of these brands. And also these brands are inauthentic all the time, Chris, like the number of brands that stand up for social justice things and then turn their back on them immediately when it doesn't appease whoever. It drives me crazy. Just don't have an opinion then. Like why have an opinion and then just change your mind. That's no longer, values are only values when they stand up against criticism. If they don't stand up against criticism, they're not values at all. And I think corporate America today has tried to espouse values and then they're inauthentic to them because they turn their back on them the second that it can hurt the stock price. I don't know. Listen to me. I'm vamping now at this point. My issues are broader than storytelling, but I think that's what drives this inauthentic relationship between individuals and brands. Yeah. Do you remember the alcohol brand, the beer brand that hopped on the transgender? It was Bud Light. Yeah. But okay. I just wanted somebody to say it in case I messed that up. Okay. So this is classic. Bud Light did something and let's talk about that and why it cost them. And then I want to switch to another company that did something crazy. It cost them too, but they stuck to it and it worked out. So tell us the Bud Light situation. Yeah. So Bud Light was doing some can design with just, just just influencers, various people that they're trying to get to promote their brand into new audiences. And they were working with somebody from the trans community was just put on the can. Literally, just the picture of the person was on the can. And it upset some people who don't believe in that lifestyle. So they decided they were going to stop buying Budweiser and they started buying Modelo, which is interesting because it's an international brand. Anyway, that's a whole other story. separate piece. So it drove up the value of Modelo in the United States and drove down the value of Bud Light. And then they decided to revert. And they issued an apology, I think, which is crazy. Well, let's talk about this. So there's some context in case you're an international listener to this, why this makes sense. Bud Light is a domestic US beer brand that isn't on the high end. It's an affordable beer and it attracts a certain kind of person, working class, salted earth, and not super progressive in their thinking. You can stereotypically think that they're wearing a cowboy hat and driving a truck and they got a dog or something like that. I know I'm making broad sweeping statements. And this is who they stand for and this is reflective of the culture. I imagine, I have no evidence that this is true, That there was a bunch of young people were like, hey, we need to be inclusive. We need to do this. And they had an influence in moving the needle or could have been somebody from the marketing side or the agency said, you know, we need to expand and we'll do this. And so what they were doing is in a weird way. putting a middle finger up to their core audience and not understanding them, they're quite tone deaf. And it feels largely inauthentic because where have you been this whole time if you're for trans rights and acknowledgement of people that identify this way? Right? So that's really problematic is you have no history of this and they fold it like a house of cards. As soon as there was blowback, it cost them a lot of money to do this. Have they recovered? Do you know? No. They haven't. They've not recovered. I mean, probably inevitably they will be. Yeah. The time span is kind of short. Yeah. Yeah. Okay. And if you're thinking about doing this because it's trendy, it's popular, or some people in your agency or company are saying we need to do this, you got to remember what are we about? Who do we stand for? Or what are we against? And just be clear. Because the last thing you want to do is be a bandwagon person jumping on different trends and social movements. It's just reeks of corporate nonsense. Okay. Nike, Colin Kaepernick. He famously I think San Francisco 49er quarterback who during the Pledge of Allegiance, he would take a knee. Not a Pledge of Allegiance, I'm sorry. During the national anthem, he would take a knee to kind of talk about Black rights and the social injustice, a very passive form of protest and people didn't like it. And he was thrown off the team. And then Nike said, "We stand with you. Sometimes you have to take a knee to stand up for what you believe in." And then all over the internet, People who were longtime Nike fans, true believers, were burning their shoes, throwing the trash and saying, this is wrong. It's unpatriotic for you to take a knee during the anthem. It's wrong. Do not do that here. We don't want that. And they stood by him and their stock tanked, but they kept standing by him. And what they did was they galvanized the people like, you know what? Nike is a company for people like me. Mm-hmm. and we need to stand for something. And they have a history of standing for justice and being inclusive and understanding that it's a diverse audience, even though I think almost everybody at Nike corporate is pretty white, I think. Probably. It's progressive. It's very progressive, right? And so they stood by that and then their stock came right back and they're doing better than ever. Now they had missteps recently for different reasons, but let's talk about that. Like what did they do right? And what can we learn from that? Yeah, I think the core thing that they did right was sticking to their values and those feeling like they had already built that value system with their audience and their core audience is who they're going after with it right If you play sports, you're probably you're playing with people from a lot of different cultures and backgrounds. That's how sports work, y'all. Like, and honestly, a lot of people who, you know, sports are the way that they they improve their lives, right? It's their way to pick themselves up by the bootstraps and climb the economic ladder. Sports do that for people. So your audience is varied. So even if you play sports, you're probably to some degree, a more progressive thinker, as it were, because you probably had just a little bit more interaction with people who aren't like you, right? Sportsmanship, the concept of sportsmanship is that we are all equal on the playing field. We are all equal. It doesn't matter who you are, where you come from, you prove your value on the field. And what you do there is how we measure you, not by anything that you bring to it, right? And that's what Nike stands for. Right? So it makes perfect sense. It's authentic for them to stand with Colin Kaepernick. And if they were to revert, it would literally break, it would break all that trust that they built with not just their core audience, but everybody. Right? You know, so appeasing to the mob was not the right call. And of course, that's not what they did. They stuck with Colin. And Colin, he's never played football again since then. Right? Which is crazy because he is really good. You'd think somebody would set that aside and just say, listen, we want to make money. Let's hire him and have him be our quarterback, right? But he hasn't played and he, you know, makes a living now by, because he made this stand, right? Yeah. He did come at a great cost to him. Sure. Absolutely. He lost a lot of money. He did. A lot of money. Yeah. He made money in different ways, but he lost a lot of money and opportunity and, There's no point to have values if they're never tested. There's no courage if you're not pushed back and failure seems inevitable, but you move towards that despite the outcome. And that's real courage. Because if you can take people on and not worry about losing, that's not called courage. It's just confidence. You got it in the bag. Okay. Let's pull this all the way back to the individual here. I'm gonna make it relatable, I think for some folks here. And people ask me this all the time, Chris, you got lots of opinions, you see things and aren't you afraid of? You know what, I'm not afraid of it, because I owe it to myself to be 100% me all the time. And the few times in which I've done these things where people pressured me to say something about some things I normally never talk about, the blowback was incredible. So I'm like, I've learned my lesson, I'm not going there. As much as you want me to, this is not my thing. I try to help people find and communicate the value that they bring to the world. I teach creative entrepreneurs how to run a business. That's what I want to focus on. There's a lot of personal things. If you want to have a drink with me on the side, we can talk about it. But this is not my platform to do that. And of course, if the things that we're saying today, I'm certain will alienate some people. And I'm okay with that. I'm not trying to push you away. But if I'm not your cup of tea, there's lots of tea out there. Bless you, you do your thing. I'm just going to be me 100% of the time. So a lot of us are afraid when we're creating content, putting stuff out there, that it's going to be met with criticism. But here's the thing, if you don't take that stance, well, what are you standing for? I don't really, this is the problem with the vast majority of the content that's out there. It's just really boring and safe. And it's not even corporate or committee driven. It's really one person who's just not courageous enough to have a point of view. What's your take on that? You're like reading my biography here, Chris, but you know. Oh, that's what that is over here on the screen. Yeah, exactly. It's on that shelf behind you there. We talk all the time about being a brave person. brand. Be brave, not boring as a brand. Right? And and bravery is standing up for those things that you believe in. It doesn't have to be social issues. It literally can be like we stand for high quality content, we stand for producing content that is so good, people would be willing to pay for it, but giving it away for free. That's what we stand for. Right? And we don't stand for for you know, quantity over quality. We don't stand for those things, right? So we are constantly pushing against those things. And there's some people who think volume is the way to go, right? And we're probably not their cup of tea either. But You have to bet on yourself, man. Like if you're not betting on yourself, what are you doing? Right? You're going through a wheel, somebody else's wheel, right? You're just spending time making somebody else money or building somebody else's dream. I think you've got to bet on yourself. And that means standing up for what you believe in. As a personal brand, that's the same thing. I post stuff on LinkedIn all the time. And I'm like, man, I'm probably gonna... if some of my clients see this, they're probably going to think I don't care about measuring the performance of their content, right? Because I post all the time about content being kind of corporate philanthropy to a degree, right? Like you can help people, so you should help people. That was the value system I grew up with, the responsibility of the able. If you can't help people, you have a responsibility to help people. And a lot of these big corporate brands have the ability to give away great advice and help their target audience or whoever's following them in a lot of different ways. And personal brands have the same ability to, are they brave enough to do that? Are they too scared about losing some sort of value as an individual if I give away the secret sauce, right, as it were? You know, so, you know, in the end, I stand with you, Chris, like, you got to be yourself, you have to have espoused values, you have to live up to those values. Sometimes you're not going to live up to them. And values are about, to me, perfection is about change, right? Like to get better at something is to closer to perfection to get the more you have to change. Usually, that doesn't mean changing the things you believe in. That just means improving over time. So you're going to miss the mark, you're not going to live up to your values sometimes. And it's okay to say, hey, I strive to live by these values. I don't think I can always espouse them. But when I don't, I notice it, I call it out, and I change to improve, right? Two things. Number one, I love the reframe. Content is a form of corporate philanthropy as the kids would say that's a bar. Okay. So just great. I assume that's a good thing that kids are saying. Yeah, I think so. When they say it, I'm like, thank you. I think. Okay. But here's the thing. Individually is our character arc, our pursuit of continuing to improve. Yes, yes. Yeah, that's the change, right? The changes us our character arc as individuals, you think of yourself as the the main character of your own story, you really should if you don't like let's have a conversation. That's a problem. You're background character. Yeah, yeah. Like that's rough. You've got to be the main character in your own story. Right? And start to ask yourself, are things happening to me? Or am I making things happen? Right? Um, With all that being the case, though, you've got to, you know, you've got to move through this life looking for ways to improve. I think it was Churchill who said to improve. improve us to change and perfect us to change constantly or whatever it is, right? Our own character development is happening through change in our lives. Think about the chapters of your life. If you're the character in your own story, you have chapters, right? Like I spent a lot of time focused on this thing. I cared a lot about this thing. I spent a lot of time doing this stuff. That's a chapter of your life or maybe a section of your book, right? You're on a chapter right now. And the question is going to be, what's the inciting incident that's going to, uh, Keep people reading, right? Keep your audience engaged that will help them flip to the next chapter. So if you change as an individual, what's the one thread that carries throughout? And for most people, that's going to be their values and what they stand for. Those might, you develop them when you're younger and usually they don't change unless you have some sort of cathartic moment at some point and you're like, whoa, maybe Clint Eastwood's character, right? Like I was going in the wrong direction. I need to reframe my entire life. right, and what I believe in. I want to talk a little bit about what I'm sure everybody's talking about. Yeah, okay, brand story. Okay, we get it. Content. And we're talking the same thing. But who is this? I think it's the CEO of Fiverr, who put something out on Twitter recently. And it's very fiery. He talked about the threat of AI. He's basically saying this is not to scare you. It's to tell you the reality that's coming. AI has made everything easy. like worth nothing because AI would do that. It's basically rearrange the chairs on the deck to say that things are super easy. We just push them off the boat. They're gone. Things that are hard have now become easy and things that are impossible become plausible. Something's going on here. So where do you think this is all going? Like how is AI going to influence and affect what we're doing as content creators or storytellers. Yeah, quite a bit, right, Chris? I think so. The CEO said something like we are all doomed, right? Yeah. Oh, you read this? Yeah. Well, I just Googled it just now. I knew more than the average Joe, but yeah, we are all doomed because of AI. I don't disagree, but don't take such a, I don't know, dystopian view of the future. You know, still 60% of what we do, although we we do a lot of design work, we build websites, we do all sorts of stuff, but 60% is still copywriting that people hire us for, right. And when ChatGPT came to prominence, I remember I was walking through my neighborhood and listening to a podcast with Mark Cuban on it. And he was talking about how his son was turning in his like, schoolwork with chat GPT was writing and he was turning it in. Now I was like, that was the moment that I had, I was like, Oh, man, like, if people are subbing in intellectual thought with chat GPT, like how long do I have left as an agency owner as a content creator, before people replace me or devalue me so much I can no longer do this. Because we do, we still do almost everything by hand, by human. We don't deploy AI, you know, in the end, good content is good content. So I guess it really doesn't matter. The problem is that most of it's not. So essentially what we have here is a giant data set, right? That is deciding what all future content is going to look like. we took a data set, a snapshot of the internet, whatever you want to call the data set, right? It's mostly just public stuff on the internet. And that is going to produce all content moving forward. Okay? I'm just building kind of a framework here. Let's assume that. at some point in time, we constantly update the data set, right? What are we updating it with, man? Like, are we just updating it with more content that was produced by the data set to begin with? Then how do we get new ideas and thoughts? How do we apply old learned knowledge to new problems? Right? We don't anymore, right? We only get whatever has been said before that AI is particularly chat GPT. It's a large language model. It, it, it, tries to decide what the next word is going to be in a string of words. It's predictive text. Literally the same, very similar technology we had on our phone. Since 2008, you could like, it would predict the text, like what word would come next, right? Based on what you would put in there. So like it's predictive text. So it's giving you the most common, the least common denominator. Just circle back to an idea from earlier in the story, right? It's giving us least common denominator content for the most part. And the problem is a lot of people are accepting that as good enough and pushing it out to the world. So now we got this like, future where the snake is kind of going to eat its own tail, or from a content point of view, it's learning from itself, it's producing, there's no new thoughts, no great ideas, no new, exciting, inciting moments. And it's just lost all value, because it's, it's no, it's no blindness, not like everything is just the same. Right. So that's, that's not good for content creators like, like us, right? Because it would devalue content, but it also, here's the caveat, It'll put a premium on like boutique content. I still buy vinyl records today, Chris. I still buy them, man. I love the sound. I love the nuance of it. I love buying them. I love flipping through the thing, right? My son plays, he's 17. He plays NES. You know, he never, he wasn't born when the NES came out, right? But he still plays it, right? Because it's nostalgic to him. It's fun for him. And it's exciting how things have changed. But also there's like little rituals involved in a lot of this stuff. So I think boutique content, crafted content by humans will still exist. It'll be at a premium and only the brands that can afford it will buy it. And those brands will start to stand out because their stuff won't be so predictive, right? Good marketing is about being interruptive. You don't really want to be disruptive. You can, you can go like way in the other direction and like kill your mascot, like Duolingo, right? Like you can go that way and you'll get some virility out of it, right? But for the most part, you just want to be interruptive and you're not going to get that from an AI data set. Now that's just AI, right? as it currently stands, doing the same thing forever in the future and not being changed and us not evolving to put safeguards on it or whatever it may be, right? Anyway, that's what I see for the future. As human beings, I feel like when it's going to start costing people who have money enough money, something will change. If it never does that, if it only makes the rich richer, then it probably won't change all that much. But I have enough faith in the world that we'll probably step in and put some safeguards into place so it doesn't do that. What do you think, Chris? Well, there's a volume of content that's being produced that is kind of unprecedented. And that volume is going to get louder faster. not necessarily better so that our ability to stand out is going to become more difficult but i think it creates the reverse opportunity and it is alignment with what you said which is something like um quality craftsmanship crafting and doing things slowly is the new luxury so when when anything can be done that is at a kind of a flick of a button or or whatever it is a press of a keyboard then Now we want to do things slowly. The ability to just stand there and do nothing or to pull out a piece of paper and write with an analog instrument like a pencil or pen will be a sign that you've made it in life. And so I think companies and brands who want to celebrate this, the crafting of things, I think they're going to pay for it. And the companies that don't want that, it doesn't matter. They're going to run right through with AI generated content, video, text, audio, everything. Now, having said that, I often argue with people and I will tell them very few new things are ever created. What you think is new and fresh is because you have a limited understanding of history, what's come before. And it kind of shocks me because there are accounts on Instagram that say, "Oh, you love this song?" But that's the same song as this song. And they just keep going back in time. I'm like, "Oh my God, same hook, same melody." And we're just too stupid. We're too ignorant to know what's come before us. We're like, "Yeah, this is the new sound." I'm like, "Apparently it's not." So we had Kirby Ferguson on our show many seasons ago, and he talked about everything's remix as his thesis. And that new things are only possible when we combine old things in slightly new ways. Now, this is where it gets really weird. AI is very good at doing that. So when we say like the data set, it's just basically it's like a copy of a copy. And so it starts to degenerate over time. Right. That's not good, but I'm not sure it's doing that because in the early days of mid journey, I would type in prompts, smashing different art styles together. It's like Blade Runner meets Sin City and it would come up with something like, oh dude, that's a hot look. What's going on here? And so then the creativity or the originality is not saying machine, help me do these two weird things. And I remember GPT version 1.0 was much more raw and better than the subsequent versions because it didn't know how to control itself and the parameters weren't put on. So a friend of mine, he had said that he wanted to write a story, a screenplay, where the origin story of Santa Claus was he was not a nice guy and he was a Russian whatever. And that's the, that was the prompt. And he wrote him a really beautiful story. How he was a nasty kid, sorry, nasty man who hated children. Something had happened and wrote the whole story for him as this Russian character. And I was like, that's cool. He goes, he won't write that story now, but it used to. So who knows? Who knows? The last thing I want to say about this is a buddy of mine, Daniel Priestley said, okay, imagine you're on the runway, tarmac, and your plane about to take off. That's your brand. and you're trying to get up to 30,000 feet, so above that point in which it's like not using a lot of fuel, but this fog is coming in and it's heavy and that's the fog of AI content. So he's like the window is slowly closing or fast closing, where if you're trying to build your personal brand today, If you're if you aren't already in the air about to break that fog layer, you're going to be stuck and no one will be able to see you anymore because there will be so much content. Yeah. I'm curious what your take on that is. I couldn't agree more. I think my team members, Riley Manning wrote this on LinkedIn. He's got the greatest go follow Riley Manning. He's got the greatest like he'll post on LinkedIn once every like five months, but it'll be like the perfect gem. He wrote something along the lines of in 22, 23 maybe, if your content agency didn't exist before AI, you're going to have a bad time. And it's this concept about that breakthrough, like you have to understand the foundation of how these things work. We talked a lot about the foundations of stories, what makes stories good here today. If you understand those foundations, you can start to apply that knowledge in new ways when it's never been applied that way before. It's kind of cool to hear that Midjourney and a few other AI tools are really good at mashing some of those things together. And it's unfortunate they put the reins on GPT to not be able to tell stories like that. But in the end, there's going to be this gap between the haves and have-nots. It's growing for brands significantly, for personal brands and corporate brands. the haves keep investing in this idea of craft storytelling. And they're going to keep producing and they're not going to stop. And they're just going to keep going. And if they can break through that ceiling, through that fog, then they're going to stay up there. They're going to float up there. If they don't, then they're going to sink down into kind of this sea of sameness. It's just going to feel like everything's exactly the same. Yeah. Anyway, that's, that's, I think your friend, how they, they put it was, was spot on. That leads me to this whole thing. Well, if this is happening and it's going to get faster and it's going to get more difficult, what do we do to stand out? Yeah, we gotta, gotta be brave, Chris. Um, we've got to tell stories that aren't, uh, for lack of a better word, whitewashed, right? Like aren't just diluted down into something that's just good for all audiences, right? you know, a little less TV PG, right? We're going to have to care about things, talk about those things that we care about, take a stand on them and provide massive value because we know that, I mean, AI in the hands of a fantastic content creator, AI is going to make that person just even better, right? Because they can take something and produce, they're going to do a lot of editing and curating and all that kind of stuff with it, right? Which is the same work that was done before, just some of like the time consuming stuff maybe is sped up a little bit. But with that being the case, they still have to, they still have to stand out and they still have to be brave. So they're going to have to tell stories a little differently. They're going to have to not be so predictive. They're going to have to be interruptive. They're going to have to produce value where value is not right. They're going to have to ask themselves this question, Chris. I've been thinking about this a lot lately about the morality of marketing, which I think is a whole nother topic that we could spend another hour talking about. But are people asking when they produce a piece of content, who does this help and how much does it help them? And are they asking who does this hurt? I think sometimes we should ask ourselves when we produce something is, is this going to hurt somebody? And when I say that, I mean, is this going to take more than it gives? I think about this a lot when it comes to swag for conferences. I'm a fan of swag, don't get me wrong, but like, We produce so much junk that just ends up in a trash can, man. All that being said, I think it's going to come down to asking ourselves those questions. Who does this help? How much does it help them? And then does this hurt anybody? And if we can produce content that helps, doesn't hurt. If we can produce content that is more valuable than what it takes from people, which is their most precious asset, their time and attention, we'll be on the right side. The right side of history, let's call it. But if people want to find out more about you and your process and what your team does, where do they go? Where can we send them? Yeah, so if you go to the Google machine, and again, Jay Ebner, include the J, you will find me. That's right, Chris, I include the J. If you go to our website, contentworkshop.com, simple name, it's what we do. We run content workshops, right? If you go to the chat bot on that site, that's literally it's a picture of me, it comes to my phone. I still answer all of the chats on our website and all the spam. It's annoying, but I love it because every once in a while, I'll have a freelance writer is like, hey, how do I get started in this career? And I love having those conversations. So feel free to chat with me there. LinkedIn is a great way to find me to again, use the J, David J. Ebner. And I'm always open to having conversations with people, Chris. I like to say my friendship is free. So if anybody needs a friend, has an idea, needs somebody else to yell in the void with them, I'm happy to do that. That was a very positive and wholesome way to end this episode. You're going to answer the message. If you need a friend, his friendship is free. My friendship is very expensive, everybody. So we just want to be clear, you know, that that was David J. Ebner's voice who said that. Okay, well, that was awesome, man. Thank you very much. Yeah, thanks, Chris. Thanks for having me. This was a lot of fun. I appreciate where this conversation went. It's a It's been a blast.

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“There's no point to have values if they're never tested.”

— Chris Do

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Topic: CONTENT CREATION

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