Max Joseph is a filmmaker, director, and the co-host of Catfish, which has just completed its fifth season on MTV. Max got his start in online video but has also worked extensively on documentaries and feature films. He is the creator of the powerful and beautiful promotional videos Make It Count (for the Nike FuelBand and starring Casey Neistadt) and Follow the Frog (for the Rainforest Alliance) and he also directed the 2015 feature film We Are Your Friends, starring Zac Efron.

Max grew up in New York City, the only child of hardworking parents who were creative at heart. He grew up hoping to enjoy his day-to-day work more than his parents did, and was inspired by his cousin, who worked for Jim Henson, to follow his creative dreams. He realized at the age of 15 that he wanted to be a filmmaker. To this day he considers himself first and foremost a filmmaker (regardless of whether his work is released online or in theatres) and he calls his time on Catfish "a fun detour in an otherwise obsessive moviemaking career". He considers himself a "dreamer" (in contrast to people like Casey Neistadt, who he calls a "doer") because he sees his job as developing a creative vision which he can then hire and direct other people to develop into a reality.

On this episode of the podcast, Max discusses his philosophy and methodology for great filmmaking. He generally gets started with a general concept or even just a "vibe" and a general end goal, and then follows his creative urges to build a great product. He believes strongly in the idea that great concept + great execution = great art and follows this principle in his work. He talks, for example, about how the Make It Count video was built around a very simple concept -- use Nike's money to travel the world and thereby "make it count" -- and thoughtful execution, carefully blending video clips, music, text, and more to create a powerful flow of ideas from start to finish. In short, Max's goal is always to make "the coolest thing ever", no matter how he has to go about doing that.

Max is also a strong proponent of working together with other creative minds to build stronger, more balanced, and more interesting products. He discusses his own experiences with mentoring, collaboration, and other ways of learning from the people around him. He has worked with clients, professionals, corporations, and nonprofits and has learned the best ways to make any collaboration successful.

If you're interested in taking the art of filmmaking, online video, or any other creative pursuit to a higher, more successful, or more fulfilling level, you need to hear this podcast. You'll learn about following your curiosity, asking the right questions, getting paid to learn your craft, which things are better learned in a classroom, connecting with the right mentors and collaborators, and much more. Join me in this conversation with Max Joseph and let your creative spirit soar!

Quotes from the podcast:

"I like putting puzzles together. I started editing and I love just being in a room and playing around with pieces until they fit together in the right way. And once I get them right, that's when I'm in my flow creatively and that's when I'm probably most happy."

"Guilt is not viral. Making people feel guilty when they watch something is not going to end in them wanting to share it with anyone. You don't want to share something that bums out your friends. You want to share something that makes them smile.... There's a way to marry the two, though, so it works."

"That feeling of 'You are not alone' is maybe the most important part of any video or piece of content because that's where the audience gets on board. And then once they're on board you can take them on a wild ride."

"Follow your curiosity. If you have an idea... do it, and do it with all your heart and soul."

"Do weird jobs. Get paid to learn your craft and treat each exercise as a challenge to make... the most awesome, best thing ever, despite any challenge that anyone's giving you. The more constraints and challenges, the more you'll learn how to get around them."

Thanks to our contributor Edi Gonzalez for writing this description!

Max Joseph Links:

Official website: http://www.maxjoseph.com/

We Are Your Friends trailer: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gZzAeYWXFpk

Also, if you want to link the videos in the first paragraph, they are at:

Make It Count -- https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WxfZkMm3wcg

Follow the Frog -- https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3iIkOi3srLo

Srinivas Rao likes to surf and in the early 2000's he was at a crossroads in his life. As a recent business school grad, he could conform to the rest of society and get on a hamster wheel of a career, doing what he had been programmed to do for his entire life. Or he could surf, play in the ocean and ultimately learn how to become an unmistakable creative person, picking and charting his own path for success. He chose the latter and talks about it today.

Srinivas Rao is an influencer in the podcasting community. He's written numerous books, including Unmistakable: Why Only is Better Than Best, which is a playbook for anyone harnessing their creative ideas and pursuing a career that they define, not the other way around. 

Srinivas spent 8 years interviewing five hundred creative people on his Unmistakable Creative podcast was the ultimate education. He heard how guests including Seth Godin, Elle Luna, Tim Ferriss, Simon Sinek, and Danielle LaPorte blazed their own trails.
 
In this Influencer Economy podcast, we talk about his advice to not "be just one among many—be the only. Be unmistakable." And how we need to define our own success, not rely on what others deem successful.  
 
As Srinivas says "Whether you’re a business owner, an artist, or just someone who wants to leave your mark on the world, Unmistakable will inspire you to create your own path and define your own success."

Listen to the Unmistakable Creative podcast: https://unmistakablecreative.com/\

"Stop trying to beat everyone else. True success is playing by your own rules, creating work that no one can replicate. Don’t be the best, be the only."

Srinivas Rao

Kevin Kelly is a blogger, author, editor, student of technology and future systems, and self-proclaimed "packager of ideas". He is the founding executive editor of Wired magazine and has written for the New York Times, Economist, Science, Time, the Wall Street Journal, and other national and international publications.

Kevin's current focus is the future of technology and its cultural and psychological effects. He predicts that the world as we know it, including human thought and behavior, will be transformed over the next few decades just as dramatically as it has been due to the rise of internet culture. Kevin has outlined this transformation in his new book, The Inevitable, in which he lists twelve technological forces that he believes will shape our lives over the next thirty years. If you're working to build a successful and fulfilling future -- and who isn't?! -- I highly recommend that you read The Inevitable immediately.

Kevin also writes several blogs on a variety of topics. His technology blog, The Technium, contains one of my personal favorite posts, entitled "1000 True Fans". This post describes a big part of Kevin's theory on success and networking in the digital age. He states that almost any content creator in any genre can make a solid living by using some basic strategies to build a base of 1000 "true fans". He defines a "true fan" as someone who will purchase anything and everything you produce. They will drive 200 miles to see you sing. They will buy the super deluxe re-issued hi-res box set of your stuff even though they have the low-res version. They have a Google Alert set for your name. They bookmark the eBay page where your out-of-print editions show up. They come to your openings. They have you sign their copies. They buy the t-shirt, and the mug, and the hat. They can’t wait till you issue your next work. They are true fans.

The theory is that if each of these 1000 true fans each spends even $100 per year on content and merchandise, the creator will have an annual income of roughly $100,000. In today's podcast, Kevin acknowledges a few necessary tweaks to this plan but explains how, in general, it can work for anyone.

More broadly speaking, on this episode, Kevin Kelly discusses his thoughts about the future of technology and how it will affect our lives. He goes into particular depth about the ideas of accessing and sharing, two of the twelve principles covered in The Inevitable. Kevin believes that accessing (renting or borrowing physical tools, substituting digital tools for physical ones, using free or open-source software, contracting for services, etc.) will be far more efficient and useful going forward than possessing (owning physical tools or software, hiring long-term employees, etc.). Similarly, he believes strongly in the importance of sharing, in terms of both collaborative content creation and freely-shared products. He points out that the world that we take for granted, from Wikipedia to Uber and far beyond, would not be possible without these two principles.

One of Kevin's main talking points is the importance of experimentation in our lives. Because he believes that the most important technology of the next 30 years hasn't been invented or even imagined yet, he knows that it's not too late for anyone. Any one of us could be the one to have the next world-changing idea. However, that idea will only come from curiosity, exploration, experimentation, and an open mind. You can begin today to build that mindset -- or strengthen and inform it if you've already begun -- by listening to Kevin Kelly's episode of The Influencer Economy now!

Written by contributor Edi Gonzalez

Quotes from the episode:

"There's one thing that I'm pretty sure about, and that is that the most important product in 30 years, the thing that is kind of running people's lives, does not exist right now.... And the larger point is that that's great news because it means that you could be the creator, the innovator, who comes up with that technology, and that none of us are late. Great opportunity is all before us."

"I would encourage anyone... to do something silly. Do something that is sort of basic science and research... that has no obvious practical value, because we know that eventually this kind of work will become the most essential and practical thing possible. What I recommend people... to do is something that is really, really interesting to them. I'm a big fan of being unproductive in a long-term productive way."

"If you're too many steps ahead, that's just as terrible as being twenty steps behind. But what I want to emphasize is that you want to take that appropriate minimal step in the right direction. We are gonna do more sharing, more collaboration, more accessing, so all things equal, if you're heading in those directions, that's a viable direction."

"The only thing that's not increasing in this world of abundance... is our own attention, which is fixed. And not only is it fixed, but we also have to spend it every day. We can't bank it. We can't store it up. We have to expend our 24 hours every 24 hours and we have no more than that. And so we need technological tools to help us navigate and manage this exponential abundance of stuff."

Links:

Buy Kevin Kelly's books on Amazon by clicking here. (http://www.amazon.com/Kevin-Kelly/e/B001HCY1LE/ref=sr_tc_2_0?qid=1466622579&sr=8-2-ent)

Kevin Kelly's blogs, including The Technium, Cool Tools, and more: http://kk.org/

Brent Bushnell is the co-founder and CEO of Two Bit Circus, an educational entertainment company that provides a wide range of high-tech and hands-on experiences. The company's goal is not only to entertain but, more importantly, to inspire participants to become involved in engineering, computing, inventing, the arts, and other creative pursuits. Brent is himself an engineer and an entrepreneur who has founded a number of tech endeavors, including Doppelgames, a mobile game company; Anti-Aging Games, building games that reduce the risk of early memory loss; Syyn Labs, which creates content for entertainers and large corporations; and Tapcode, which provided self-service and entertainment solutions for the hospitality industry. He was an on-camera inventor for Extreme Makeover: Home Edition, and he also works as a consultant and mentor for game development and entrepreneurship. Brent is the son of Nolan Bushnell, a gifted engineer and innovator and the founder of both Atari and Chuck E. Cheese.

Read The Influencer Economy Book: influencereconomybook.com

Brent believes strongly in the importance of the STEAM paradigm, which integrates the
arts (A) with the more traditional "teaming" of science, technology, engineering, and math (STEM). He works hard to expose young people to STEM topics in creative, engaging ways that will inspire both their intellect and their passion and thereby lead them to become inventors and creators themselves. He targets young people largely through his project called STEAM Carnival, a traveling event that includes a giant high-tech game arcade, a battling robot band showcase, a wearable technology fashion show, and much more. In Brent's words, it's "kind of like Cirque du Soleil for games".

Listen to the archives: http://www.influencereconomy.com/

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All of Brent's projects emphasize collaboration and interaction, and his advice for creators is no different. He has built his own companies and projects by listening to his passions and by seeking out collaborators who have similar passions and are willing to take risks. For example, when Brent started Two Bit Circus, he and his co-founder Eric Gradman started out knowing only the general direction they wanted to take. They spent the next few years experimenting with a wide variety of ideas. They funded their endeavors with entertainment consulting events (many of which allowed them to test their innovations) and invested the profits in further development. Only when they felt that they had sufficiently refined their vision did they seek out investors to accelerate their growth and mature into an established company. 

In this episode, Brent encourages listeners to "get their hands dirty" and make physical things. As an engineer and high-tech entrepreneur, Brent certainly appreciates the value of digital solutions, but he also understands the importance of physical solutions in a physical world and fears that our current education system is alienating young people from that kind of thinking. Inspiration isn't just for the young, however. This podcast will inspire all of us to trust our imaginations, follow our passions, and build our dreams.

Quotes from the episode:

"There's no shortage of hard problems. And, frankly, no shortage of capable humans. But what we do have a shortage of are inspired, tool-capable, invention-capable humans to go out and solve those hard problems.... We've got this perfect storm of needing it badly [and] the tools are easier than they've ever been; we just need people to be aware."

"I love online creation. My background is software. But I think we got carried away with the success of the internet and [thought] that all of the great innovations are gonna be apps. And that's just not the case because there's some things you can't solve with apps. You need other stuff."

"I think that humans are really naturally creative and that our school system kind of beats it out of us in a very heart-wrenching and terrible process, and that what we need to now do is sort of unwind that.... The thing is to not get too much in your head about it. Just start doing stuff!"

"Failure's rad! The second you fail, that means you've been out there trying and that's fantastic!"

"If your motivation is to try to make a buck, you're doing it wrong."

Links:

Personal Website: http://brentbushnell.com

Two Bit Circus: http://twobitcircus.com

STEAM Carnival: http://twobitcircus.com/productions/steamcarnival

Grand Challenges for Engineering: http://www.engineeringchallenges.org/

United Nations Key Issues: http://www.un.org/en/sections/priorities/

Y Combinator Request for Startups: https://www.ycombinator.com/rfs/

• What do NFL players miss after they retire from playing in the NFL?
• What was it like competing every week in the NFL?
• How does an NFL player transition into retirement after their career?
• How did Keith Bulluck lead his teammates on the field?
• How does Keith lead his business team mates off the field in deals now?
• How did Keith become a startup entrepreneur?
• How does Keith Bulluck prepare for his day?

When Ryan Williams began attending VidCon, Comic-Con, South by Southwest (SXSW), TechCrunch Disrupt and other tech and fan-geek conferences. he noticed two remarkable things: these events were celebrating geeks, technology, and modern social media; and no one was telling the stories of the awesome people embracing this new form of influence and the wildly successful businesses they were creating.

---If you can't tell by now, this is my official book description and media release. As always thanks for the support  You can buy the book on Amazon here: http://influencereconomybook.com/ I work hard and focus in giving out practical advice and actionable insights throughout my podcast and career. This a big moment both my career and business life, I would love your support in buying the book, or giving it away to a friend. <3 Much Love, Ryan <3

Ryan Williams is a former stand-up comedian turned tech entrepreneur. He was a founding team member at DigiSynd, a pioneering social media marketing group, acquired by Disney in 2008. After leaving Disney to join the Machinima.com, a YouTube video network for the gaming generation, he drove network growth to over 4 Billion video views a month, focused on influencer-driven YouTube video creation. As a start-up marketing executive, he has lead go-to-market product launches for global companies such as Disney, Microsoft, Activision, and Warner Bros.

In 2014, Ryan went on to launch a popular podcast dedicated to interviewing the pioneers of what he calls the Influencer Economy. After speaking to more than a hundred artists, experts, and entrepreneurs--from world-famous YouTubers to New York Times best-selling authors to the most creative start-up founders and investors on the planet--he reverse engineered their careers, to understand the stories behind their success, and now presents everything he learned in The Influencer Economy.

The three primary steps to success in the Influencer Economy -- launch, share and thrive -- can be applied to both business and life. Ryan tells the fascinating stories of more than a dozen people who turned their visions, ideas, and hobbies into influential and profitable digital media empires. He provides the "Influencer School Lessons" derived from each of these individual's journeys. As well as specific actions that readers can take to follow on the way to launching their own ideas into the online universe.

In order to thrive in the digital age, you don't need to go to business school. You don't need an Ivy League degree. You don't need to know celebrities. And you don't need to have a lot of money. You just need to learn the new business framework from the leaders of the Influencer Economy.
_____________________________________________________________________________

Ryan Williams is an entrepreneur, writer, podcast host and former stand-up comedian. He is the Founder of Ryno Lab; a collaborative influencer-based studio that helps brands and entrepreneurs create digital products, build networks and thrive in the digital age. Ryan's professional experience includes 12 years in marketing, business development, and entertainment. He was an early team member at the venture-backed startups DigiSynd (acquired by Disney), Machinima.com and State.com. He hosts Stories from the Influencer Economy podcast, featured in Apple's "New and Noteworthy" in 2015. He currently lives in Los Angeles, California with his wife and two daughters.

Seth Godin is a marketer, entrepreneur, and best-selling author. He's one of my favorite public speakers and an inspiring figure in the marketing world. I have talked about him a lot on the podcast.

Seth was founder and CEO of Yoyodyne, an interactive direct marketing company, which Yahoo! acquired in 1998. Seth worked as VP Direct Marketing at Yahoo until 2000, whcih is when his career pivoted in the direction of authoring books, public speaking and and blogging.

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Seth Godin speaks in depth about the iizard brain which is something that holds us back in reaching our goals and is an irrational part of our human behavior. Have you ever wanted to accomplish something but there's a voice of anxiety telling us to go slow or be careful? That is the lizard brain, which is a pre-historic lump that is responsible for rage, fear and our reproductive drive. And now it gets in the way of us shipping our work, products or ideas.

Seth Godin explained to me that this happens when we say we want one thing, then we do another. Like when we say they want to be successful but then sabotage a job interview. Or we say that we want our product to come to market, but we sandbag their shipping schedule. Or we want to be thin, but never work out. He quotes Steven Pressfield, who calls this process the resistance. "The resistance is writer's block and putting jitters and every project that ever shipped late because people couldn't stay on the same page long enough to get something out the door." It's something we all face.

And if you have not read Seth Godin's The Dip, Linchpin or Purple Cow, I recommend that you stop listening and buy them from Amazon.com.  The Dip is a favorite book of mine that helped me move on from a job that I wanted to quit. I eventually was laid off from this job, which turned out to be one of the best career moves of my life. 

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Quotes about The Dip from Seth Godin:

"The only way to become the best at one thing is to quit something else. And the thesis of the book is that we live in a culture where supposedly quitting is a bad thing. But people quit stuff all the time.”

“You need to figure out if you quit or stick,” but you also need to know that the Dip is “a temporary setback that can be overcome with persistence.”

Hrishikesh Hirway is a musician, story-teller, and podcast host who hosts Song Exploder, a podcast where musicians take apart their songs, and piece by piece, telling the story of how they were made. He has had inspiring and loved musicians such as U2, Björk, Postal Service and Spoon on the show. Hrishikesh is a podcast mastercraftsman and we talk in depth about his creative process and how he launched his idea to the world. We dive into how he created one of the most successful music podcasts.

As a podcast listener Song Exploder invites you into the mindset and framework of some of the bigger touring acts and indie artists in the music world. You can hear Wilco's Jeff Wilco explain what inspired him to write the song Magnetized. Or U2's The Edge breaking down the process for how the music was written for U2's song Cedarwood Road, and Bono looks back at his life growing up in Dublin where he was inspired to write the song. And Postal Service's Jimmy Tamborello shares the District Sleeps Alone Tonight, and talks about his instruments, his influences, and accidentally making a loop out of Jenny Lewis's backing vocals.

Please Review our podcast on iTunes, it really helps us get discovered in iTunes by new listeners. :) Click HERE to review AND to buy The Influencer Economy Book Click Here.

Hrishikesh doesn't ask the artists about their big hit singles or world-wide hits. The songs are often personal and intimate tracks, composed and created by the artist. Song Exploder is an intimate and personal window into the world of how artists create, write, and score the songs that people love.

Hrishikesh talks in depth about how he created the idea for Song Exploder, launched it to the world with the help of Jesse Thorn the Maximum Fun (a podcast network) and is thriving as part of the Radiotopia network.

And I want to give a high five to my friends Kerri Hoffman and Maggie Taylor at PRX

If you like this episode, feel free to tag @songexploder (https://twitter.com/songexploder) on Twitter to give Rishi some love.

Song Exploder: http://songexploder.net/

RadioTopia: http://www.radiotopia.fm/

PRX:  http://www.prx.org/

Ryan Williams' Influencer Economy website: http://www.influencereconomy.com/

Hank Green is one half the YouTube creators The Vlog Brothers, who he co-creates with his brother John Green. Hank is the entrepreneurial brother who has the leadership role on many of their co-ventures and has launched several of his own innovative charitable and education-based projects. But going back to 2006, when Hank and John Green first started to collaborate, YouTube was the dominant platform. And that’s where they first emerged as pioneers in the Influencer Economy.

“It was 2007, YouTube had been around culturally and people had known of it for about a year,” Hank said of his origins on the platform. So they just started making videos, creating Brotherhood 2.0, a year during which the Green brothers communicated daily with each other by video instead of by phone, e-mail, or text messages. “A fun, jokey, trying-to-one-up-each-other brother project” is how Hank explained it.

One of his vlogs to John, a musical tribute to Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows, made the front page of YouTube. Many fans attribute their discovery of the Greens’ yearlong experiment to that “Accio Deathly Hallows” song—coming across the video and then binging on the rest of the vlogs. After their successful year of Brotherhood 2.0, the Greens honed their vision and created their new Vlogbrothers YouTube channel with similar content and shared it with a growing community that they called “Nerdfighters.” This online community of Vlogbrothers’ supporters joined forces with Hank and John, and their vision evolved over time.

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Here’s how Hank explained what Nerdfighters are fighting for: “I do like the idea that a goal of humans is to decrease suck and increase awesome. That was a saying from early Vlogbrothers. But those are two different things. It’s so objectively better to decrease suck. You know, people have awful lives. People die of preventable diseases, hunger, wars . . . These are problems we can solve. The only reason we aren’t solving them is because we haven’t applied the right amount of resources, both cognitive and monetary. And that’s messed up. But you can’t go through life just playing defense. You also have to do interesting things. You have to send a rover to Mars and have the World Series. These things are good. They help us lead full lives and allow us to apply ourselves to other goals.”

I first knew Hank and John as the creators of VidCon, the largest conference for online video world, bringing together over 20,000 video content creators, the web video online community, and industry executives to an annual conference in Anaheim, California. It’s my favorite conference in the world because it’s the only conference where the community, creators, and companies all hang out under one roof. I have attended VidCon since its inception, when it was just a couple hundred people hanging out at a hotel bar and ballroom in the Century City neighborhood of Los Angeles.

Even before VidCon, the Vlogbrothers understood how YouTube-wide collaborations could help to improve lives. Since 2007, their Project for Awesome (P4A) has been an annual call for videos from fellow YouTubers and Nerdfighters that highlight charitable causes in everything from education and health care to food insecurity. In December of each year, thousands of people post videos on the across YouTube, where both influencers and the community promote and raise funds for these charities. Video creators are instructed to tag the videos with P4A in the video descriptions in order to help The Vlogbrothers and others discover each video.  Joining forces with the crowdsourcing website Indiegogo, the 2014 and 2015 Project for Awesome managed to raise over a million dollars.

By 2013, Crash Course and SciShow had both outlived the start-up money provided by YouTube. This got Hank thinking that it was time to roll out a voluntary subscription service that enabled fans to fund his education programming and the work of other online creators. “It’s tied into this idea that we want to help creators create professionally. We want to do that for ourselves and for other people because it’s a great job.” He and his brother launched the crowdfunding website Subbable, which was enormously helpful to more than 20 artists and creators, as well as the fans who love their work. Patreon, the San Francisco–based crowdsourcing company, acquired the website two years after it went live. Hank said both companies started at about the same time and have obvious similarities. “When Patreon launched, we were like ‘Whaaat?!’ because, of course, we had been working on it for six months. I called [Jack Conte, the founder] because I had known Jack before then and said, ‘Just so you know, I’m about to launch the exact same thing, but we’ve spent so much money on it that we can’t not do it.’”

Hank and John Green's Vlog Brothers YouTube Channel: https://www.youtube.com/user/vlogbrothers

Don't Forget to Be Awesome: http://store.dftba.com/

Hank Green's website: http://www.hankgreen.com/

VidCon: http://vidcon.com/

Project for Awesome: http://www.projectforawesome.com/

Crash Course: https://www.youtube.com/user/crashcourse

SciShow: https://www.youtube.com/user/scishow