Are you stuck in the messy middle of life, wondering who you’re becoming on the other side?
In this episode, the mic turns inward as today’s guest—well, it’s me, Zack Arnold —and I’m opening up about the newly rebranded Zack Arnold Podcast. Along with my podcast producer and fellow coach Debby Germino, we discuss why the changes go far beyond a new name, music, or artwork. Together, we dig into what’s shifting behind the scenes and the deeper purpose driving this evolution—not just for us, but for anyone navigating their own transformation.
Zack Arnold: Here's a crazy thought, what if we didn't overthink it? And you and I just started talking, yeah, if we want to be a new brand, maybe it's time to take the overthinking caps off and just do it.
Debby: Yes, well, the introvert in me does not like that idea.
Zack Arnold: The perfectionist in me does not like that idea either.
Debby: So we're here today, and I for one big reason, which is to talk about the rebrand, which everyone's going to be hearing a couple of episodes when this comes out, and they're going to be hearing and seeing a whole new Zack Arnold.
Zack Arnold: It's so funny that you say that, by the way, because I'm not nearly as aware of the change that I think you're seeing. Because you're like, I can't believe how much you've grown. You're doing this and that. And I'm like, Really, I kind of feel like I'm the same guy with a few less things on my to do list. So I actually find it really curious how you really believe this is a whole new me.
Debby: Yeah, it's been hitting me this whole week as as more of these pieces of the rebrand have been coming together, and we've been seeing the new artwork and the new colors. I mean, we've kind of known these things, but it's all sort of coming into fruition now as we're as we're getting nearer, and I think what really did it was listening to your sub stack articles. I listened to them, and instead of reading them and so and just hearing your voice, the voice is completely different, your tone, your cadence, your energy is different. There's just been a lot of shifts. And so we've gone from the Optimize Yourself brand, you know, with our colors of black and red, and then we're switching over to blue and yellow and white, and we've got different, completely different music now, and a different look. And to me, it's very much a softer side. And so I just, I guess what I just wanted to ask, just right off the bat is to just start off asking, like, where, where did this change come from? And clearly, you've said it's not that drastic to you, because you're living it right? So the small little changes we don't see every day. But if you can maybe put yourself in the shoes of a listener who has, you know, maybe listened to the Optimize Yourself brand and is now coming on to to see this whole new picture. How would you explain the changes that you've made?
Zack Arnold: Yeah, great place to start. I think the didn't, won't necessarily answer your question immediately, but I'll come around to it, which is, you know, kind of my thing is talking in seven different circles, and eventually bringing it to a point, is that when it comes to musical choices, color palettes and otherwise, it's very easy for me to get lost in the details and minutia. And I can be very detail oriented and very much a perfectionist like, you know, ask our poor designer. Right now is doing like version six of a landing page, but what it really all comes down to is, how do I want to make people feel? There's a quote that you had brought up recently in one of our mastermind calls specific to outreach, but it really applies to just about anything. It's the, you know, the famous Maya Angelou quote, people will not remember what you said. They will not remember what you did, but they will remember how you made them feel. And what I've been trying to do is create a different emotional experience. And I think one of the reasons that to me, it doesn't seem like, well, what's the big deal? It changed the color palette and the music, it's because I made this shift a long time ago, and all the things that I've been feeling and all the things that I've seen in my mind, they're now external. And I'm like, Yeah, this is what I've wanted to do for a long time, but I think for you, and especially for the audience, it's going to be like, Whoa, like, what's going on with the color palette and the music? And I think partly for me, it's been a much more gradual process of feeling that emotional shift, and now all of a sudden, all of it's changing at the same time for people that are outside of my own head. But for me, it was really about wanting to create a different feeling. And it really comes back to an intuition that I had really a couple of years ago. And this is one of those things that I think is really valuable for anybody that does creative work, where on the surface, just the mere thought of rebranding a company, rebranding a website, rebranding a podcast, like there are so many reasons that, no, we don't need to do that. We just need to tweak the positioning, or we need to tweak that. But my intuition is known for more than two years, this brand no longer fits, and where that really started to hit me was just as things were starting to fall apart in the industry. So if I'm going to define that, because that's a hard, hard place to pinpoint right now, but if we're looking at early 2023 at the beginning of the strikes, starting to see the slowdown of all of the work. Just as things were starting to crumble a little bit, I was starting to get a lot of publicity opportunities. I had a publicist on the team at the time, and had another business coach that was really imploring me to get out there on podcasts and do articles, and you need to grow your audience. And I had another person saying, You got to build out your LinkedIn. And have you tried Tiktok? And first of all, Over my dead body, Will I ever be on Tiktok? You want to talk about branding, there's never going to be Tiktok. But all of these opportunities to put myself out there, there was this voice inside that was saying, No, do not put yourself out there. And I thought, well, that's kind of dumb, because that's the opposite of what I tell all of our students, like, you really want to put yourself out there, connect with like minded creatives. And I couldn't figure out where this fear was coming from, this immense amount of procrastination, like, Oh, I'll get to the podcast eventually, and we'll, we'll advertise here eventually. But I always kept putting it off because I just wanted to sit in my own little dark room, and I wanted to make cool content for our students. And then I started to think about it more, and I realized it's not that I don't want to put myself out there, it's that I don't want to put myself out there like this. I realized that there was just such a tremendous fallacy in the approach to life that it's about the relentless pursuit of optimization. And it wasn't a matter of saying I've been wrong this whole time. I'm hoping that we brought a lot of value to people and finding ways that they can find ways to realize potential that they feel is unrealized, improve healthy habits, Creative Habits, like I really hope that we brought a lot to that. But I think the end goal of having an end goal, I realized that that just doesn't really serve anybody, and most importantly, it doesn't serve me. And I think where I where this really hit me the deepest emotionally was for anybody that hasn't you know heard the trials and tribulations of my life over the last year and a half. I'll give the very brief version, but right about the same time that I was having these hesitations about putting myself out there with this existing brand. Both of my parents started to fall to dementia at the exact same time, and the decline was incredibly rapid. And not only did my father have dementia, also had cognitive or congestive heart failure, and just watching the rapid decline to from, you know, them being elderly parents, but they were my parents to just all but disappearing and not being able to function for themselves. I just was so overwhelmed by everything that was going on that I just kind of said, I can't handle anything else right now. And then, over the span of less than four weeks, my father passed away, lost my job because of the timing of my father passing away, and then unexpectedly, had to relocate my entire family to another house, and basically my entire system just crashed. And I just realized that this the me trying to be Mr. Optimized when my life was a disaster and I could barely keep my head above water, there was just such a disconnect between here's who people expect me to be, and here's who I am or who I want to be. I said this, this just is not serving me and it's not serving anybody else. And I just kind of went back to my dark, little hole. It's like, well, let me What's something that I can share about three steps to improve your networking, where I don't have to kind of share the massive disaster that my life is. Right now, and it's that's when I realized I don't want to hide behind this brand anymore. I'd rather be completely open and honest and vulnerable about all these things, knowing that everybody's life is an absolute show, and everybody is managing an existential crisis, and very few, if anybody, knows what the next five years of their life looks like, myself included. So I thought, why not just rebuild a brand from the ground up where, rather than creating this image that I don't have all the answers, but I feel like I can be very helpful, as opposed to I'm trying to figure all the shit out too. But I really feel that few people are more dedicated to the pursuit of figuring this out and helping other people do it than I am, at least in our space. So I wanted it to be more let's all figure this out together. And here are some tools, tips and tricks, and I wanted it to come from a much more emotionally vulnerable place. So that all comes back to why change in color, why change in music? Because I want the feeling and the approach to be different. And one of the interesting things that I found is that as soon as I just kind of tested the waters and sent a newsletter, and I said, so I've been thinking about this a lot, and I think it's time to rebrand, to come up with a different name, multiple people responded, and they said, thank God. Like I never I didn't want to say it, but I'm one of your students, and I follow you despite your brand, not because of it. And I was like, That's really interesting. And once they started getting those responses, I knew that we were onto something. Then the fear became, this is a lot of fucking work, and it's such a mess. Like I would not I would not recommend rebranding to my worst enemy. Because you think, oh, what's the big deal? You change your website URL, you change your email address, you switch around a few colors. Like it's reinvention from the ground up in every sense of the word, and as of recording this, like it is just a giant logistical mess behind the scenes. So whatever it looks like to everybody from the outside, that's not what it looks like from the inside.
Debby: Yeah, yeah. And I want to get into that too, and sort of peel back the curtain a little bit for people so they can have an understanding of that. But I also want to bring up that this is not the first time that you've rebranded. So how is this different? If, if different, and what did you learn from the first time around, when you were fitness and post and you went to Optimize Yourself? Well,
Zack Arnold: clearly I've learned nothing, because I'm rebranding again. But the the process the first time was less, it was less an emotional decision. It was more a positioning in a strategic decision. Because I never, I never in a million years, imagined that this is what I would be doing with my time. Never would I have thought I'm putting myself out there. I'm creating educational content. I'm a podcaster. The goal next is, do a lot more public speaking. Become an author, write books like I was always that nerdy introvert that sat in a small, dark room and did the notes, made cool shit, and did the notes, and did what I was told. So I never saw there was never any strategic decision that led me here. And when I started fitness and post, it was I just wanted to get a bunch of my editing buddies together because I was really passionate about better health at our workstations. And like, hey, let's get Fitbits, and let's go hike and let's compete with each other. And somebody said, You should turn this into a podcast. Okay, I'll turn it into a podcast. What's a podcast? And it was really just an exploration of, you know, what does this new world look like, of combining better health with being editors, and shortly after, what really by me doing nothing other than just publishing episodes really fast, organic, viral growth in our industry, not like millions of downloads, not like Tim Ferriss or anything, but the producer that I was working with that had one of the top podcasts in our industry, said these numbers are astronomical. Like this never happens when you launch a podcast. And there was something about just really striking a nerve at the right time. And I had two people independently at around the same time say the same thing to me. One of them said, you know, you should really think about monetizing this and, like, monetize it. Why would I monetize anything? I'm passionate about this, right? And then I had somebody else that was a much higher level in doing this kind of work, that had become a thought leader and an educational instructor, and, you know, doing the kinds of work that I do now. And he was more direct. He said the same thing, you need to monetize it. And, like, why would I monetize it? He's like, because you're going to burn out if you don't find a way to monetize this and make it sustainable, you're going to quit because this shits really hard, and passion is only going to get you so far. So two independent people that didn't know each other, literally told me this in two different states at about the same time. And I said, this is interesting. So I started to dig into learning, what does it mean to monetize a podcast, and how do you sell your skills online? And as I started to go down that rabbit hole, people started to talk about being very specific. Who you're serving and how you're serving them. So I started to reach out to a few different people just to ask them, What would you want me to create? What do you want me to talk about? What content, what educational resources, etc, etc. And what I found was I was getting one of two responses, and it would both of them were brand confusion. Either it was, I'm really excited about fitness, and I found your podcast because I was searching for fitness and better health. But what's post is this like a post workout fitness thing, like I don't understand the post part. And then everybody in post meaning post production, they'd say, I'm terrified of the word fitness. So I realized that from both directions, I had brand confusion, that one was not serving either party. In number two, you want to talk about a niche inside of a niche, inside of a niche. How about editors that are working in post production in Hollywood and that are interested in better health? There's about 12 of us. And I thought, I cannot. I cannot grow this. I don't like to use the word scale, but I can't grow this and expand it to the point where I could monetize it, that this would be my living and at the time, the tagline and the hero banner on the homepage was optimize the most important operating system you have yourself. And I thought, Optimize Yourself. There it is. There's the brand name. No brand name exploration, no research. Just boom. A few months later, here's a new website. Here's a new brand, right? And for years, I feel that that brand served me well, and I feel that it served a lot of other people well, until I realized that it just wasn't the approach that I wanted to take for myself anymore, coupled with and I'm sure that anybody that's followed me for a long time has heard me say this many, many times, the word optimize has just been so co opted and so destroyed over the last five years by everybody in their bro that decided during the pandemic that they were going to become a thought leader and they were going to become a bio hacker and they were going to become an influencer, and everybody's optimizing fucking everything to optimize everything for their optimized Bros. And I just did not want to be associated with that energy or with that approach to life, because it's just exhausting. So that's kind of what happened with the first rebrand. This one, I've learned a lot more about, I hope, learned a lot more about the rebranding process and how to position it and speak to the right people. This is coming from a much more intuitional and emotional place. The other one was a very tactical, strategic place.
Debby: Yeah, and I think that distinction is important, even though I think all of the choices made are still very intentional, right? And in both cases, can you speak a little bit about that, I guess a little bit further into that emotional place where you're thinking about going with this new brand. And I guess maybe speak to the listeners that have been here for a long time, right? And that have maybe, maybe even some that have been through both brands and others that have maybe only been to Optimize Yourself and and speaking to a little bit of where you're hoping this will go, how it will be different. You've talked a little bit about why, like what led you here, but maybe now a little bit about what, what you hope people will feel, since that was kind of the impetus for this one is like you want to make people feel something. What is it that you're hoping that they will feel that's
Zack Arnold: a really good question. I'll start there, and then I have some other thoughts about what you shared. But the first word that came to mind is, I want people to feel safe. It's that simple. I just want them to feel like there's a safe place to exist with all the shit that's going on. And the reason that I chose the brand is that it's much, much broader. It's as literally we can talk about anything now, the website is Zack arnold.com Zack K anybody's listening wants to go to the website Zack arnold.com the podcast is the Zack Arnold podcast. That's the brand, and for the educational part of it, it's the Arnold Academy for creatives. So some would say you need to niche down again. You got to be specific about your audience and who you want to serve. But to speak to something that, coincidentally, I talked about with Oliver Berkman, which is going to be the other podcast that we released today, was this realization, and actually he's one of the really big instigators or inspirations for why I made this shift, and I talk about that extensively with him in that podcast interview. He's the writer of the book 4000 weeks, and it was a completely different perspective and mindset about how to manage your time and how to manage your priorities. That wasn't systems driven, calendars driven. It was really more about accepting our mortality and accepting the very finite nature of what we can and can't accomplish. And one of the things we brought up was this idea that what if you were to just to accept the thing? Okay, the trait, the challenge about you, that you hate the most, you're never going to change. It just is what it is. Rather than saying I need to fix this, this is just who I am. And the one that I expressed to him is that it frustrates me to no end that I cannot do just one thing. Everybody tells me, I've had every business coach, every advisor, says you need to pick one thing. You need to be the networking guy. You need to be the calendar guy, right? You need to be the fitness guy. And my reaction is, no, I don't want to be one thing, because I love talking about a lot of different things. And we created this new brand so that I have an open forum to essentially talk about whatever the hell I want with whomever the hell I want, without it feeling like, well, is this really about optimization, or is this about fitness, or is this about filmmaking and post production? I wanted the ability to do that and just have it be really, really broad, right? So I still want it to be focused enough that it's not, you know, a bunch of accountants that are looking to 5x their revenue for the next quarter. Like we're still going to be clear about our positioning, that we're largely speaking to those that are not just creative, but consider themselves a creative and their creativity is their livelihood and their passion, and they want to find meaning and purpose in their work. But outside of that, I didn't want to niche down to something very specific, so that's kind of the first part of why we decided to broaden the brand. The other part of broadening it and why it wasn't just like the there were, I mean, dear Lord, there are so many lists of so many names of potential podcasts and brands and academies and everything else. And I'll never forget this moment in one of our team meetings, and I know you already know the one I'm thinking about where I said, All right, so I've got this list. I've been doing a lot of brainstorming about potential podcast names and business names, and one of our fellow coaches, John said, So just before we start this meeting, I just wanted to share that unless the name of the podcast is the Zack Arnold podcast and the brand is Zack Arnold, we're wasting the next 90 minutes of this meeting. And it was like a bullet shot to the center of my chest, like fall. And immediately the voice said, he's right, but emotionally, oh my god, I can't be the brand me. Who the hell am I to think that I can be a brand? I'm not Tim Ferriss, I'm not Andrew Huberman, I'm not rich roll. That's insane. But immediately I'm like, Yeah, Occam's razor, simplest explanation is always the correct one, right? And what I realized is, number one, it solves so many problems that I was creating so much complexity as the founder and president of overthinkers Anonymous, I'm like, That's the simplest solution. But what I also loved about it is that it gives me a platform, going back to this question of, how do I want people to feel, where now it can just be me being more personal about the things that I'm going through, rather than through the lens of we're working towards optimization. Here are the mindset, strategies and tactics I can share with you. It's here's my life. It's a shit show. Here's what I'm feeling, here's what I'm dealing with. Maybe you feel the same thing. And the reason that I launched the sub stack was so I had a very different place where I could essentially just write whatever the hell I wanted without any form of niche. It's got to have this targeted direction, and that's really why we decided to broaden the brand the way that we did. And essentially I just want anybody that is not just somebody that dabbles with creativity, but really defines themselves as a creative they need, they desire, they seek out that meaning and purpose in their work. They want to make a difference, and their livelihood depends on it. I want them to feel like there's a safe space for all of us to talk about all of the challenges that that entails.
Debby: Yeah, and I appreciate that number one. That's one of the things that really struck me in all of this new branding stuff as, like, Who is this guy? Because just you bringing just you saying that word safe. I mean, I don't know if you realize how different that is, but from the beginning, like that is not something that would ever would have come out of your mouth that never would have been like a feeling that you were consciously trying to create.
Zack Arnold: Well, here's the interesting thing, I always feel like I've created that kind of space, I think the outward impression, and by the way, this is not something I want to get away from. I still very much encourage putting people in places of discomfort but safe discomfort. And you've seen me do this many, many times, whether it's literally on the Spartan course, whether it's doing a coaching session, I really believe that a lot of the hard work comes from a place of discomfort but very, very safe discomfort. So I hope that I've never created an environment that was the opposite of safe, where it was an unsafe environment. But I don't think I've ever been as explicit about that's really the foundational priority, and everything else goes around it.
Debby: And I think that's the difference, right? Is like making things explicit. I think you also mentioned if it was one of the articles or not that you said. Making the quiet parts known, or something like that, like bringing them out. It's like that was always the subtext underneath everything. And certainly you always had empathy and and compassion, but it was more, more of a sternness to it, or a bit of a hard ass, right? Like, we're gonna, we're gonna do this kind of thing, and the safety, I think making that explicit is is really important for a lot of people, just to help them again. Like, like, you said, say the quiet parts out loud, right? Really, really, bringing that into the forefront, I think is helpful for people to to feel that way, because just assuming that it's it's there, doesn't always, doesn't always quite touch that place. And
Zack Arnold: one of the things that I am thinking of when it comes to the these internal branding discussions have very explicitly stated, literally, in the old open for the show, that I'm Tim Ferriss meets Ted lasso, minus the mustache, right? And I think that there was less Ted lasso than I thought, right? I think the outward like in my mind I was, I was bringing the TED lasso energy. But I can't remember the name of the episode, but there was one of those episodes where all of a sudden he literally, very deliberately, flipped the switch and just became a crazy, hard ass, like, screaming at everybody, because it was a tactic for him, right? I think I was more that version than I thought I was when, like, I thought that I was creating a safe and warm, inviting environment. And I think that there was more, there was more just intensity to it. Because I've, I've been told many, many times throughout my entire life that one of the first impressions that I create is people say, you know, you're really intense. And I think I come off more intense than I think that I'm coming off as intense. And I think it's becoming more aware of that and tapering it back. So I'm actually, I'm remiss to share this on a podcast publicly, but I would put it out there, because that's the whole idea of why we're doing this. But in trying to figure out what is this new brand, just like any great log line for a story, like the one that I always share when we're when I'm workshopping a log line with somebody is, imagine it's Die Hard meets A Christmas Story, and they're like, what's that? And like, it's home alone. It's Die Hard meets a Christmas story. Really simple to kind of see that that's where Tim Ferriss meets Ted lasso came from. And the one that I've been using just internally for myself and in some of our branding conversations to really bring out kind of that, that softer approach and feel is that it's Mr. Miyagi meets Mr. Rogers. And I know that when I said that, like, you're literally laughing at me now, but I needed that reminder, because I've had, I'd literally had a student say to me today, just during officers. I I know that you're Mr. Miyagi ing me right now. I can't tell, like, what you're leading me to, so there's still very much that sense of, yeah, I'm going to make you paint the fence and wax the cars, and you're cars, and you're going to be a little annoyed with me. But the reminder is, we got, we have to find the Mr. Rogers too. So that's really what I've been trying to change in my approach and thinking that has changed the approach to what colors am I choosing, what fonts am I choosing? Again, what is it that I want people to feel right? You're never going to catch me in a cardigan sweater like we're not going that far, right, but it's what is the emotion that I want to create. And I would say that one of the most important things that Mr. Rogers created in all of his conversations was safety.
Debby: Yeah, yeah. I would, I would agree. And you brought up a few paragraphs back your sub stack. And so I wanted to also talk about that and how that is really an extension of this new brand, and maybe just introduce people, because there was a lot of back and forth about the name of the sub stack and what that was going to be. And so maybe you can talk a little bit about that and introduce people to the sub stack that maybe haven't heard about it yet. Yeah,
Zack Arnold: welcome to another meeting of over thinkers. Anonymous. Again, I have a list of probably 200 different names that I thought of for this and deliberated forever and ever and ever, and anybody that's in our community saw the many slack conversations where I said, What about version A versus B versus C? Should it be this word? Should it be that word? And where I landed was pivot with purpose, and there were a lot of different names that I threw around. But what I wanted was, first of all, again, a place to just really have open discussions about my own challenges, insecurities, struggles, but I didn't want it to just be like the diaries of Zack, like there were even versions of that that I explored, like it's just literally one of them was from the desk of Zack Arnold, like it could be anything, but I wanted a little bit more focus to it. And this is something that I've unofficially known for. A long time, but for me to be able to put it in a single sentence has probably taken me all of a better part of the last decade. Whenever I workshop with any student, they want to write the copy on the home page of their website. They think it's going to take them a couple of sessions. I'm like, it's taken me about a decade to write that sentence, and I'm still not even sure though this the right sentence, and I'm probably going to continue to overthink it and revise it, but this is the closest I've ever come to feeling like it's quote, unquote finished, and that is that the purpose of my work is to help you find the meaning and purpose in yours. And having said that, I wanted something that was purpose driven, and part of it is that so many people are going through massive career transitions, massive pivots, either by choice or, frankly, most people, it's not by choice. And I see a lot of resources out there to help people navigate to these transitions, but it's very tactical. It's like, well, here's how you leverage your skills and put them on a resume to find this new job. And we do that too, like we offer very tactical surface level things to help people prepare for interviews, write better resumes and websites. But to me, it has to have meaning behind it, like, if we're stuck in this position, we have to pivot. Let's at least do it, working towards something that's actually meaningful. Because isn't that? Why the hell we got into the creative industries in the first place? Right? It wasn't to be a drone that's an assembly line on the you know, being a widget for somebody and doing it for their dreams, right? Rather than being a widget on the assembly line of somebody else's dreams, what if, maybe it's my turn for a change, right? So I wanted it to not just be managing a career pivot, like one of the sub stacks that I found is literally called career pivot, and this is what I ran into with branding every time I had a brilliant idea. Oh, my God, I'm a genius search fuck three people have the exact same name happen over and over and over and over and funny enough, I've actually found some really good podcast guests because I did a search for the name that I wanted, and they had it. But there was one that was literally called career pivot, like, that's interesting. So I dug into that a little bit. And this was somebody that started a sub stack relatively recently, but specifically to help people navigate career pivots that have lost their jobs in the federal sector. Imagine how fast that grew. Wow, like, boom. Like, it's skyrocketed, because you want to talk about meeting a need at exactly the right time, yeah, but it's very tactical. And I'm not saying that's a bad thing. I'm just saying that's not what I wanted to be. I didn't want to be like, here's how to update your resume if you worked in the federal sector and you want to get a job in the private sector. Immensely helpful for the people that need that right now, right? That's an amazing service that that person is doing. That's just not the service that I wanted to provide anymore. I wanted to provide those strategies and tactics, but I wanted there to be purpose behind it, so that was the idea behind the name pivot with purpose. And I feel like it's just specific enough that it's speaking to the right people that have that need, but it's broad enough that I can still kind of talk about almost anything.
Debby: And and with pivot on purpose, or with, is it on purpose or with?
Zack Arnold: See, isn't that funny? There's been pivot with purpose. There's been pivot on purpose. There's been pivot towards purpose. I've been through all the iterations my chat, GPT conversations, so many of them. So it's pivot with purpose. I still have to correct myself, because I can't remember the one that I chose
Debby: pivot with purpose. So that could really apply to anything. It doesn't have to be a career. It could be
Zack Arnold: exactly that's why I chose it, because it's specific enough, but it's general enough,
Debby: yeah, yeah, that's great. And I think going back to all the stories that sort of led you to this rebrand and all the things that were happening in your life. It really speaks to that as well, right? All the things that happen personally in your life, and all the pivots you are making along the way, I mean it, it almost seems like really natural that that would it would be like an easy name to come up with, if you think about I think
Zack Arnold: So in hindsight. Well, duh, right? It only took me two months of 1000s of conversations with chat GPT to come up with the answer. But yeah, one of the things that I realized in just becoming more aware of my own journey and how it's helpful to people, largely because others are reflecting it to me, I'm basically an expert at pivoting, like I've done four completely from the ground up, pivots. And part of that is going back to what I said earlier, where, what's the one thing that you hate about yourself the most, and it's my inability to just stick with something like, why couldn't I have just been a successful trailer editor for 20 years? Do you have any idea how much more money I would have right now, all the awards I could have? Same thing with, why couldn't I just stick with editing features. Why couldn't I stick with editing network television? Why couldn't I stick with documentary directing? Like it just never ends, and that's the thing that drives me the most crazy about myself, is that I can't focus on just one thing this week. Oh, it's all about this thing next week. Oh, it's all about this thing. I want to learn this. I want to learn that, right? And you've seen the level. Of enthusiasm that I have for just the most innocuous guests, right? Like most people say, Oh yeah, Oliver Berkin, I enjoyed his book, and for me, it was like getting Michael fucking Jordan on the podcast. I was two and a half years it took me to get this guy in the podcast. He's done all of them. He's done Tim Ferriss, he's done Rich Roll, he's done the humor, he's done all of them, right? But I said, I really want to talk to this person about this thing. But does that mean that my obsession is only time management and productivity? Nope, that's just the obsession yesterday, tomorrow. The obsession is understanding the creative mind. It oh my god, I get to talk to Scott Barry Kaufman. This is amazing. Next week I talk to somebody else, and as much as it drives me crazy now that I'm learning to accept it, the question becomes, how do I harness that, not just for my own advantage, but to everybody else's advantage, right? So really accepting that this can kind of be about just about anything, as long as it's focused enough that it's not like, Well, this week I'm going to talk about my recipe for making lasagna for my family, you're like, need a little bit more focus than that. So I needed some foundation to build from knowing who I'm talking to and realizing that the fact that I've navigated multiple pivots, and I have a lot of varied and different interests, and even though I've talked about it before, going to be much more open about the process of me having ADHD, and like how ADHD is both a superpower and a kryptonite, I realized that this constant pivot, or being a multi hyphenate or being a generalist, is kind of a skill that most people don't have, and it's the skill that's going to best serve them navigating all the massive uncertainty that's in front of us. So that's when I realized that pivoting is really something that I'm actually pretty good at doing. And the other thing that I've realized, and it's been harder to accept this, and I'm still working through it, but I'm very much of the mindset, well, I just want to help everybody. If you're a week out of college, I want to help you. If you're a week away from retirement, I want to help you. And it's not to say that I don't still want to offer these services to everybody, but I realized that again, where I think I'm really good is helping people navigate midlife. It's kind of like when you look at where the demographics have gone. I was really surprised when I started to do surveys. Very few people followed me. They were under the age of 30. Like, Oh my God, if you're a grad, I wish I had all these strategies when I graduated from college, understanding how to reach out for jobs and interviews like this is perfect. But then I realized, but the the way that I approach it, and my own stories don't resonate with somebody that's, you know, 22 years old, minus the tristans of the world, right? Tristan, if you're listening, you know, I'm talking to you. So we, you know, we have a few outliers, but by and large, what I've realized is that most of the things that I talk about, especially about burnout and purpose and your time being in alignment with your values, you don't hear that shit when you're 25 years old, because when you're 25 you're a machine, and you're going to prove yourself, and you're going to pay your dues, and you're just going to get to become successful at all costs. Ask me how you know that's how 25 year olds think, because I did the same thing. So I find that one of the qualifiers for people that will find us is the first one is I achieve some level of success, then I realize there's got to be a better way. Once I realize this is not sustainable, and I'm sacrificing way too many things, whether that happened at 2545 or 65 that's usually the threshold that somebody crosses where they say, Zack, I'd like to introduce myself, and I need some help. So that's where, again, it's about that pivot where I don't think somebody that's right out of college is going to see themselves as somebody that's pivoting, and they're certainly not going to have enough life experience to realize the importance of purpose behind their work.
Debby: Yeah, absolutely. So I think what I'm what I'm hearing, is
really this whole, this whole pivoting. I mean, we can see how it's it started from your your career very early, and has continued to continue to pivot and grow as you've grown. And the purpose, I think, and you can correct me if I'm wrong, but it sounds like that purpose has been always there, but also slightly pivoting or growing or expanding and shifting and changing, along with all the different pivots, right? It's because all of our experience. And so I wonder, if you can talk about a little bit about purpose and what you're meaning by purpose, does someone have one single purpose, and they have to figure that out before they can do anything, or what like, what does that mean? Because it sounds really daunting and overwhelming like, oh, I have to find my purpose in life before I can really call my life successful.
Zack Arnold: Yeah. Well, first of all, optimize. Zack would have a really good answer for this one. The host of the Zack Arnold podcast is going to start by saying, I have. Fucking idea. That's what I'm trying to figure out, too. Do I think that there's one singular purpose? No, I do not think that people have one singular purpose. But in every single piece of literature that I've ever written across all disciplines, what you find, by and large, from all the research, from all the anecdotes and otherwise, is that it is much easier to endure the suffering of life. And I look at this more from like the Buddhist perspective that you know all life is suffering. In some way, it is so much easier to endure the daily suffering and all the problems and challenges that arise if there's meaning and purpose behind the work that you're doing. And one of the the seminal books where this really stuck for me, and it took a while for it to actually stick. But if there were one person that I could get on the podcast, dead or alive, this is a very common question. Oh, if you could have a dinner party and you can invite five people, dead or alive, who would you invite? Without question, the one person I want on this podcast is Viktor Frankl. Viktor Frankl is the author of the book man search for meaning, and you want to talk about practicing what you preach. He went through what I would most, I think, would consider the most harrowing experience that a human being could go through, which is being in a Nazi concentration camp and just watching all of his peers around him literally die off like flies. And he writes first about the just the experience, personally, what he saw, what he felt, the way that he was treated in the first half of his book. But then he starts to put meaning behind it and the way that he got through it. And this is very much paraphrasing, but essentially the way he got through it was saying my suffering and me surviving this is going to be valuable to others once I get out of it and I tell this story and his entire life's work was then saying, Here's what happened to me, and here's how I was able to find meaning in my suffering, and how it's now brought more purpose and meaning to millions of people. So if I could have one person on the podcast to talk to, I would want to talk to him about that and that mindset of, how do you literally go through the worst thing imaginable and human experience and say, I see meaning and purpose in what I'm doing right now? I just I can't even fathom what it must have been like to have that kind of a mindset. So by and large, all the science, all the research on happiness, on creativity and everything else, says that you find more contentment in it, you have more motivation. You can get into a state of deep focus much more easily. If there's some purpose in the work that you're doing, and is the important part, there's purpose in it outside of yourself, which is why I think you're seeing such an epidemic. And this is not a new thing. It's just now being amplified. But I don't have any scientific studies to prove this, but I'm sure that the data would be there if somebody were to do a study of this, that especially in the entertainment industry, that as somebody's notoriety and success goes up, their fulfillment goes down. Some of the most miserable people on the planet are the ones that are the most successful with all the Oscars and the Emmys and all the money and the houses, because they haven't found the meaning and purpose in their work. And not that I was, you know, going to have a house in the Hollywood Hills and have 12 gold statues. But part of what I talk about in this three part sub stack series is realizing that I was climbing the ladder to the top, and at least in the area of the industry that I was in at the time, I was getting pretty close to the top, but I saw no meaning and purpose in the way that I was spending my time, and it was completely misaligned with my values. And was when I started asking the question like, why am I doing this, and for whom am I doing this? And if the only question was because they're paying me well, and I love to be able to tell people at networking events that I'm working on this show, and have them say, Oh, my God, really, you work on Empire? Like, yeah, ask me how long that lasts and how long you care. Because I'm sure that, you know, with all the coaching you've done, you talk to a lot of the creatives in our industry, and they say, I just, I want to, I want to do different work. Like, you know, I'm working on an okay show now, but nobody really watches it. And I just when somebody asks me what I work on, like I want them to be excited about the show that I'm working on, and I want them to say, I watch that too, and I know where that's coming from, but you need more than that, because, trust me, that doesn't do it. It does it for a little while, but then after a while, it just doesn't do it for you anymore. So we definitely don't have one purpose. Knowing what our purposes are. I don't know, still trying to figure that one out. But basically, all the literature and all the science says that until you find some meaning in the work that you're doing, and that meaning is attached to others, you're going to feel lost and you're going to feel a sense of emptiness and lack of fulfillment.
Debby: Yeah, and I love the story about Viktor Frankl, and I think what I take from that and how I can also tie it back to kind of your experience with Optimize Yourself and how that's grown is, for me, the Viktor Frankl. Purpose and meaning came from from him somehow
still living his life while he was in this concentration camp, still being able to open up and experience it right. And I don't know that he knew that purpose while he was in it, and woke up every day with this thing like, Oh, this is my purpose.
But it evolved along the way because he didn't close himself off. I too, can't imagine being in an environment like that and not closing yourself off, and it seems, it seems impossible to me, but somehow he was able to still keep himself open enough, and even if you do have a purpose, he was open enough to letting it shift. And that's where I want to draw a parallel to Optimize Yourself. Because I think there was something when you started Optimize Yourself, you had one idea in mind about what the company was going to be and what we were going to provide education and coaching and mentoring and and I think what you ended up finding that became the most valuable thing out of it was the community. And so I think there's
something to finding purpose or or having a maybe an intention of what your purpose might be, but at the same time being open to the world and the universe, showing you different things and steering you in different ways. And you can also say that about your career as well, where you thought that that purpose was, was gold statues and prestige. And now coming to the realization that it's, it's its purpose and impact,
Zack Arnold: yeah, if, if somebody were to time travel to me 10 years ago and said you're going to become a community builder, bullshit me. No, not my thing. I am not a joiner. I am not a joiner. Ask every single person that's ever asked me to join anything. Literally, in the last month, two people have asked me to join committees, people that I really like, for organizations that I really respect, hard pass not a joiner at all. The business model was, I'm going to download all of the knowledge and strategies that I have in my brain, and I'm going to package them for other people to use, no secrets, no barriers, like, boom. You want to achieve these things. Here are the strategies, and that's where I started. And that actually started to gain some traction. And that worked. I built two online courses in the Optimize Yourself umbrella. There was move yourself, and there was focus yourself. I also wanted to develop advance yourself. I wanted to have balance yourself. And then, just for the fun of it, there was going to be one on setting boundaries, that was going to be called Go fuck yourself, right? There's also one that we were investigating about potential Gio, gastrointestinal, intestinal tract issues that was going to be shit yourself. So anyway, those are the kinds of conversations we had behind the scene, but it was going to be all about self guided educational content and focus yourself. Started to gain some traction, like I wasn't making bank, but I was generating real revenue, not revenue to be able to replace my income and retire. But I was like, this is becoming real money. And one of the great things about the learning platforms that are available to people that create content is you can see statistics behind the scenes. You literally see how far has everybody watched every video, what percentage of completion, just like you have on YouTube now, 10 years ago, you had this available to you in your learning platform, and I started to look at the data, and I said, nobody's doing anything. Like, what? What am I doing wrong? Like, am I is this stuff really that bad? Like, I'm getting good feedback? I feel like the material is working when I'm working with people privately, life changing results. But it was like, five, seven, 10% completion rates. And I started to ask around, and I started to do some research, and people said, you've got a 10% completion rate, Dude, that's awesome. Like, be shitting me. Like, yeah. Like, most people get like, two to 5% like, you should totally scale that. You need to build funnels. You can do Facebook ads. Like, that's amazing. Like, that is not the business that I want to build. I don't want to be in the business of optimizing sales funnels and Facebook ads and click through rates and make a bunch of money like a lot of online entrepreneurs and creators do. I'm in the business of creating impact for others. And I thought, I'm going to have to find another way to do this. And that's when I started digging into doing small group coaching groups. Then all of a sudden we, you know, grew it to office hours, but it was really about ways for me to work individually or in small groups with more people. Never Was I going to be a community builder, because I'm not a joiner. But then the community started to build itself, and then when COVID hit and we were locked down, it was like throwing gasoline. On a fire, and the community just expanded. And I was like, what is happening here? Like, all of a sudden, I Mr. Community builder, but to be honest, I didn't do shit. I created a few Slack channels, and I let people talk in them, right? But what I found that was really interesting. And this goes back to this idea of branding, and I think everybody that's thinking about their personal brand needs to consider who are you putting out there? What are the values that you're putting out there? And what that I found is that people, number one, they were in that safe space that I wanted to create, but most people had very similar values. There was nobody that was in our community saying, Hey, what are you guys doing to you know, weather the 90 hour weeks, it was instead like, what are the boundaries you're setting so you can have a life and not work the 90 hour weeks. And that wasn't by design. That was just me being very honest about what my values were. And when you put an energy out into the world, you attract that energy in return. So essentially, by just being honest and authentic and putting that energy out there, the community built itself. We just provided some of the scaffolding where, oh, you guys want a channel about this. Great here's the channel about that, right? And really, I still kind of suck at being a community builder, like, it's how many years has it taken for me to actually do live in person networking events? Like, still really struggling and very uncomfortable with the in person networking events. Side note, anybody that's listening, we're gonna have a live in person networking event on Friday the second which at least when we're recording. I think it's going to only be a couple of days after this releases. So yeah, if you want to come on down to McLeod's and Van Nuys, get yourself ride share, because the parking shit, but great venue. We're going to be there in person. We're going to be doing what I we now call a meeting of introverts, anonymous.
Debby: I love that. And just to speak to any of those people that are in the community already and maybe have some fears or questions or wondering, like, what's going to happen to the community now that it's a different brand should is, are there going to be changes? Is, what's what does this mean? What does this mean for them? Sure.
Zack Arnold: So I'll, I'll speak a little bit more broadly, then I'll get more specific. Obviously, the brand name is changing. Some of the topics that we're going to be talking about are changing. What's not going to change is the values of this brand and the values of this community. So I, my hope is that nobody feels like we've abandoned what we were and we've changed into something totally different, unless we're abandoning the things that weren't serving us and weren't serving our community. So as far as, like, the logistics of it are concerned, yeah, learning platforms. We're going to be moving away from slack, moving into a different platform, but we're going to make sure, and we're gonna do our best, knowing that there are gonna be mistakes along the way, but we're gonna move everybody into this new community, technically and logistically. But as far as the quality of the community and the quality of the people, the only thing that I hope changes is that we attract more people in other disciplines, because I think that with the massive correction that not just our industry, but pretty much all the creative industries are going through right now. I don't think it service serves us to live in silos anymore where it's like we're all the scripted editors talking to the other scripted editors, and this is the community for all the assistant directors talking to the assistant directors. Like that does I don't think that that ever served us, but I don't think in this great correction, that that serves us at all. So one of the things that I'm still accepting is maybe something I'm good at, but is again, hard to accept. Being an extreme introvert, I'm really good at connecting people, and I'm really good at blending different communities together. So what I'm hoping to do is take the existing creative community that we have, but interject a whole new energy and a whole different perspective from other creatives in either different sectors of the industry or totally different industries. And whether or not I'm successful with this, I don't know. I hope to rewind to this in five years and say, nailed it. I don't know if that's going to happen yet, but I think there's tremendous value in bringing the creative community together with the Creator Community, you've got these two Venn diagrams. You overlap them. I think it's a game changer for all of us, because there's no doubt at this point, and all the statistics prove it that the Creator economy is the future of media. There's no question at this point, YouTube is eating everybody's lunch when, whenever I ask people whether it's just general people like, you know, if I'm at a family event, or even when I talk to people in the industry, I say, what's the number one streaming platform? What do you think? Everybody says, YouTube? No, everyone. Everybody says Netflix. Like, Netflix is the number one streaming platform because they don't think of YouTube as a streaming platform, right? YouTube is by far the number one streaming platform where everybody consumes their media, right? And the tipping point, I believe, and a lot of people see this in slightly different ways, but the tipping point is now more people watch YouTube on their TVs than on their devices. That means it's a game over for everybody else. And what YouTube has done is it's removed the gatekeepers. Yes, it's no longer well. If you want to be seen by a mass audience, you must go through our Hollywood studio system. You must be approved by our gatekeepers. You must be approved by all these workflows, all this technology, all these specs, none of that matters anymore. You think Mr. Beast had a giant laundry list of specs that must be adhered to by NTSC, Mr. Beast has put shit out there, and now he gets more people to watch a single video than people to watch the Super Bowl. The Creator economy is the future. However, this is a conversation that I haven't recorded yet, but I hope to have recorded and will be part of our upcoming virtual summit that will be in the last week of June. I'm going to be talking to one of the one of the the influencers or thought leaders in the Creator space that helps other creators grow their audiences. And what you're going to find is that a lot of creators, they're not artists, they're entrepreneurs, which means they're really good at understanding how to game the algorithm. Here's the messaging, here's how to get people to like and subscribe. But a lot of them are not good storytellers. And I think anybody in our industry, when they look at YouTube, not anybody, but a lot of people, because they've told me this, they cringe. They're like, Oh, do not tell me, I have to get a job on YouTube, because we have a much higher standard for the quality of storytelling and what we deliver, and the thought of lowering our standards to what many would consider bargain basement creative quality. I think we're going to see an equilibrium, and I think the equilibrium is going to be creatives don't really understand how to manage their lives as entrepreneurs and as business owners, creators, they're great at this. They're so good at understanding here's how I diversify skills, and I've got this on Monday, and I do this on Tuesday, and I've got these different revenue streams. Here's how I bring them all together and have a cohesive brand. But they suck at storytelling. So if I can find a way to combine these two communities, and you have creatives lending their storytelling abilities and creators lending their ability to build businesses around themselves and be brands. I think there's tremendous power in bringing those two worlds together. So that's going to be my first intentional attempt at being a community builder and bringing two groups together. Whether or not I'll be successful, only time will tell.
Debby: Well. And what I love about that too is that there's there's an opportunity there for both both sides to elevate the other side right. And so it doesn't have to be like, Oh, I'm lowering my standards. I can't believe I'm, you know, doing this work on YouTube, or whatever it can be, the opportunity to say, hey, look how much better we can make this. Look at, look at what level we can bring to this. So I think that's, I think that's a really interesting kind of intersection to make and a hopeful look to the future.
Zack Arnold: And to my knowledge, I can't find anybody else that's doing this, because I've been spending a lot of time digging into the Creator space, and there's a lot of really high level creators that are doing things at a high quality level, but there's still the perception of and I'm I think it was in a podcast with Mark Manson. Mark Manson's playing this game at a very high level as a creator. He's a best selling author, one of the top names in the world in personal development, got a very successful YouTube channel. He had a podcast that he decided, I'm gonna stop doing this. He got 30 million downloads in less than a year. This isn't fun. I'm gonna do something else, right? But he's doing it at a very high level. But he had a podcast that he talked about a few months ago where he was looking for some help as far as, like, editorials, something, you know, on the creative side. And he's like, Oh, I just cannot stand these Hollywood creative types, because they come in with just these ridiculous expectations of what they think they should get paid, how they should get treated, and it's like, you gotta understand the game that you're playing, like YouTube is not Hollywood, and there's, there's a line that you have to walk between. Well, YouTube is just exploiting everybody and treating them like garbage, and it's a race to the bottom, and that is a real problem. But there's also the side of it where we have to be willing to step back into learning mode, and not so much performance mode, and think, Well, do you know what I've worked on in Hollywood? Have you seen my credits? And here I am doing your little YouTube video like we got to get out of that mindset. We have to be willing to take a step backwards, not to be exploited, not to devalue what we do, but we have to be more open minded to exploring this new world, because this new world is our new reality. It just is like there's no way to get around it at this point, YouTube and that form of content creation is our new future. And what's even more terrifying, and this is just starting to come together, but I just saw a video yesterday where Netflix's new initiative is less scripted content and more user generated content. So Netflix is now going to become another YouTube, because that's what works. So for anybody that says I don't want to be a part of user generated content and the creator. Economy, good luck manufacturing those buggy whips while the Model T starts hitting the streets.
Debby: Yeah, and this is another case where we can, I think Oliver Bergman's work speaks so well to all of this and this idea of perfectionism that we can approach things with right especially having had a certain level of experience in a certain industry that has a lot of money, and going to another industry that maybe doesn't have as much money, or maybe it does. It's just not spending it in the same areas or the same ways. And how do we sort of let go of that, that tendency there's, there's a fine line between letting go of your ego, but also letting go of your standards and what you take pride in. And so like, how do you differentiate that? How do you approach a situation where you might be taking less money than you normally do, and you want to elevate it, rather than say you're lowering your standards. How do you switch into learning mode in that situation?
Zack Arnold: Again, optimize. Zack would have a lot of great answers to this. The host of the Zack Arnold podcast, he's still trying to figure this out, too, but I'll give you my thoughts on it anyways. There's an extreme example that I've used with my students before when they're negotiating rates for something that they haven't worked on before. So I'm going to give the most extreme example. Let's say that I am a film and television editor. I work on high level network content, streaming shows, Emmy winner, etc, and let's just say that my rate is $5,000 a week. But in the industry downturn, the only opening that I can find is an assistant manager job at Home Depot, and they say, well, here's what we're offering. And you say, Well, no, actually, my rate is $5,000 a week. What is the person at Home Depot going to say they're gonna laugh at you, they're gonna laugh at you and say, you realize that you're living in a totally different universe, and that just doesn't make any sense, because that's not commensurate with the value that you're bringing to me in return. So there has to be and again, that's a very extreme example to exhibit a point, but we have to be willing to accept that just because we got paid something in one area for one job, like I am an editor, doesn't mean that automatically, my value on YouTube as an editor is going to be the same value. They're very different worlds. Now the slippery slope is devaluing ourselves to the place where editors on Fiverr are literally getting paid, you know, $10 a video to spit out videos like a farm, right? I'm not saying that people should devalue themselves and allow themselves to be exploited, but the mindset shift have to has to be, I'm playing a different game with different rules. And the rules of this is my job title, and this is what I'm worth, they no longer apply. Which means you then have to ask the very difficult question, what am I willing to take to do this work? And whatever that number is, you have to see, is there a market for that? Maybe there is. Maybe there isn't. And that's where, again, where I think that once these worlds start to converge, I think you're going to see an equilibrium somewhere in the middle where YouTube is going to start to realize, if it isn't already realizing, and I think that it is that higher quality content is going to get more views, is going to get more retention, is going to get more money. One of the things that I feel so many people are missing about this great correction over the last two years is they're getting so overly complex about what they think the problems are. And this is where it's really interesting being an over thinker, because when I'm looking at other people's arguments, I'm like, Duh, this is so simple. Why don't you see it? Can't do it for myself, but it's so easy to do it for others. And my belief is that underneath everything, it's really, really simple. We don't know where the eyeballs are anymore. That's it. Everything that's going on with our industry can be brought down to we don't know where the eyeballs are. And guess what? If you don't know where the eyeballs are, you can't make money, because eyeballs are what make money the streaming system. Streaming system is a bust. It just doesn't work, right? Only really one studio has figured out how to make a profit. Disney is still losing billions of dollars like at this point. Can we just say this doesn't work, right? And I remember, I think probably would have been pre COVID, like late the late teens, when Netflix really started to take off, not just for like, you know, being a digital blockbuster, but literally shows like House of Cards, Orange is the New Black. And I would just scratch my head, and I'm like, the fuck does this work? Like you didn't make any more money on me because I watched House of Cards this week. Like that was the time when you wanted to bulk watch something. You either bought it on DVDs, and dear Lord, am I dating myself, or you'd buy the digital copies. So the idea of watching a season of TV, you just assumed it would cost me about $40 to watch a season of TV. Now, all of a sudden, I can watch five seasons of something for nothing other than one flat fee. And I kept saying, I've got to be stupid, like I've got to be an idiot, because this. Doesn't make any sense. And then about two years ago, I'm like, Oh, they're the idiots, because this doesn't make sense, and nobody has it figured out, and it's always been, they're the wizard behind the curtain. But then all of a sudden, the curtains open and you realize none of nobody has this figured out, except Netflix. And even now, with Netflix changing their positioning, I'm not even sure Netflix has it figured out long term, which is why they're transitioning to the YouTube model. And guess what? YouTube knows where the eyeballs are.
Debby: Yeah, and this is like a whole can of worms that we could dive into for hours. But I want to get back a little bit, take us back a little bit to the rebrand, and actually something you mentioned a little while back the summit. So I want to let people know about the summit coming up and what it is, in case people have never heard of a summit, and what it's about, and how they can sign up if they are interested.
Zack Arnold: Awesome. So welcome to the shameless self promotion portion of today's program. It's interesting that you say, can you explain what a summit is? Because yes, in our industry, it's a new thing. But in the other industries where I'm reaching out to people to be guests in the summit, basically the response is in so many words another person with another summit, they're so overdone, right? But that's the great thing about bringing something that works, that's tried and true, to a new industry and a new audience that doesn't know what it is. So for those that don't know what a summit is, it's basically an online conference where for five days, it's going to be a series of interviews, and each of those days is going to have a very specific narrative threat. So essentially, it's kind of like the podcast, but on steroids. A lot of people do summits in a lot of different ways. They have panels, they have presentations. For me, it's just going to be as simple as I love having conversations with really smart people, and it's just going to be organized conversations around topics and themes such that you're learning the things that you need to learn right now. You're getting the questions answered that you so desperately want answers to. And then the one thing that I'm adding as a twist is that when I think about all of the you know, whether it's in person, conferences or panels or networking events or whatever it might be, my problem has always been that you go to them and you say, Wow, those were such great conversations. So what do I do with this? Right? It's just a fire hose of information. It's basically a bunch of really successful people that are all saying the same thing in different ways, and they say, thanks so much for coming like that was awesome. But how is this going to change my life tomorrow? So the goal of our summit is to bring together a multitude of people from multiple industries against this idea of overlap, where we're going to be talking to people in the entertainment industry, we're going to be talking to people that come from the Creator economy. We're going to be talking to New York Times best selling authors that have nothing to do with either. But it's all about helping our audience answer very specific questions. And the question underneath all the questions, is it game over for creatives? Is this it like is there a future for us? And spoiler alert, I do believe that there's a future for us, but I don't believe that future belongs to the people that are waiting for things to go back to normal, right? So the summit is all about, how do I just understand? What does New Normal even look like for us? How do I navigate it? So my hope is to bring in people that can really speak to technological shifts, historically and how we've managed as societies to navigate these technological shifts. Because AI the technology itself, sure, it's new, but it's not unprecedented that there's a technology that's coming in and upending all of society, that's happened throughout history, many, many times, and there's a lot to learn from that history. But then, when it comes to AI, what do we actually need to learn? What are the tools? What are the mindsets? How do we make sure that AI is a creative tool that enhances my value rather than it replaces me? But then, in addition to that, how the hell do I manage this pivot like my career is in crisis? What the hell do I do with this? And again, another thing that we talk about all the time that's a foundation of our work, how do we make meaningful connections? How do we support ourselves with people? How do we build our network without networking, right? How can we actually build meaningful relationships? And then we have all these new ideas and strategies. How the hell do I implement any of this? How do I bring this together and actually turn it into something that goes on my calendar tomorrow and next week and next month? So it's going to be a five day virtual summit where the interviews themselves. The goal is to have three per day for five days. So it would be like I said, podcast on steroids, 15 interviews over the course of a week, the registration will be totally free for people if they want to take a deeper dive and they want more learning resources and all kinds of other bonuses, there will be paid upgrade if they want it. But essentially, if people want to participate live, this is 100% free, because I think this is what people need right now.
Debby: Awesome. Um, and if people can't make it live, do they have another opportunity to participate? Or does it have to be they have to good
Zack Arnold: question. Bye. So yeah. So essentially, the way that we're going to do it is that for all of the interviews for that day, there's going to be 24 hour replay access. So if it's a matter of and I don't even have the schedule say, Yeah, but let's say that interview one comes out at 10am the next one comes out at one, the next one comes out at four. If somebody says, Well, I can't do the one at 10am I'm working and I want to do it in the evening, we're going to offer 24 hour replay access for everybody, so you can still on your own time, as long as you've got it. You can go through all 15 interviews in those five days. If they want lifetime access to it, they want, you know, we're going to be creating course materials and, you know, a whole bunch of like, AI infused resources and summaries and all kinds of cool stuff that we're working on behind the scenes that would be part of the paid upgrade. But yeah, as long as somebody can make the time for the interviews, they'll have access to each day for 24 hours, which means they can get through all five days without having to pay a cent.
Debby: Awesome. Okay, so I think one thing I wanted that I sort of alluded to in the beginning, and I didn't quite hit the way I wanted to, was just sort of peeling back the curtain a little bit more about this rebrand, and now that you've talked about the summit, I mean 15 interviews over five days that that alone sounds like a ton of work, and put on top of that a rebrand and all of the work that we know goes into that sounds to me like a recipe for burnout. What have you been doing differently this time around to to manage all of these moving pieces that are coming together at all at seemingly the same time?
Zack Arnold: Yes, good question. I would say that there's two things that are seemingly make this different, and maybe this is just the frog in boiling water, and I'm going to get a really strong I told you so on Fourth of July weekend, we shall see. But the first one is that I am being much more deliberate about managing all aspects of health, the most important being sleep. I mean, I'm tracking sleep like a hawk. Sleep is an immovable object. Sleep, right now, is Fort Knox. In the past, when I've had these kinds of initiatives, there was always wiggle room. It was a boundary, but it wasn't a guardrail. I know I told myself I'd be done by eight, but just I can just write one more paragraph, or I can send a couple more emails now, boom, like I am done at eight, I am decompressing. I am literally passed out by nine or 930 what's been interesting? Not really deliberate, but I now wake up fresh and alert without an alarm at 5am I don't even know who I am, so I actually get a lot of really good creative work done from about 530 to give or take about 730 or eight. But I've also re established, and being a part of the mastermind group, have re established, using my morning to do physical exercise and move before I start my day. Took months to build that up, and I'm still implementing and tweaking it, but I would say that by and large, one of the biggest differences is that I'm being much more protective of healthy habits, and when those healthy habits, even if it's not just a matter of I'm not going to sleep at all, or I'm not going to exercise just when it starts to edge towards, well, just today I'll skip it. That's the slippery slope towards burnout. And again, does that mean that I won't end up there? I mean, I've got a lifetime of evidence that says, you know, good luck with not getting burned out after some form of finish initiative like this. But I would say that so far, I'm not feeling any of that sense of this is a slippery slope when I'm going down there. So I think that's the first reason. I think the second reason is because I've never, I've never felt more motivated to do something that I really believe is going to help people right now. So it comes back to this conversation about, you know, pivoting with purpose, pivoting towards a purpose, right? It's not a matter of man. I think I finally found a way to make a bunch of money and support my family. It's I really think I'm onto something that can be tremendously helpful, and I feel that I'm doing a disservice to people if I don't put this together. And that's probably being very grandiose delusions of grandeur, because that's one of the symptoms of having ADHD. But at the same time, I really do believe that what we're putting together can be genuinely helpful to people, but what I always am careful of this is one of the, one of those quotes that I just randomly read scrolling through Facebook, but it really stuck with me, and I'm gonna have to paraphrase it, but it comes from Tim Ferriss, who, as you know, if we're talking about, you know, you are the five people you surround yourself with the most. Tim Ferriss is one of my five. Not like, literally, but as far as you know, consistently following his content, really, you know, gravitating towards the way that he approaches things. And when it comes to this idea of burnout, depression, mental health, again, paraphrasing. But it's something along the lines of, be very careful about thinking that your work is important, because that's very slippery slope, right? And I come back to, you know, one of those quotes in severance, which is one of my favorite shows of the last few years, where they say the work is very mysterious and important, and you're like, bullshit, right? So as soon as I get to the point where, like, No, I must do this because it's important. Is it as important as you think, probably not, but I do still believe that what we're doing is going to help a lot of people. That's what gets me moving through the long days and the drudgery of changing email domains and URLs and picking brand colors. Because I can assure you, if this were just about me, holy shit, what, I have quit by now. Oh my god, I would have quit months ago, because this is just awful. This is just a horrendous process.
Debby: Yeah, and I think, I think what you've done, personally in your in your own way, that you've sort of tried to prevent burnout, has also led into the company and how we've approached things as a team, and that it hasn't been as like we have to keep everything moving all at once while we're still adding all these extra things on right and so listeners probably know we didn't have as many podcast releases this past year, and there was, there was some breaks and and things and because, and it was because we knew this rebrand was coming up. We have, there's a lot that goes on behind the scenes to to work through that. And so we had, we had to make trade offs, right? We had to make some decisions about what we were going to continue moving forward with, and because of the team itself being everyone's part time, everyone has other things that they are doing that there's certain sacrifices you have to make when you know, like everything. Can't keep going as usual. We didn't have classes as as usual, and so there were a lot of things that used to sort of feed into the burnout cycle that were pulled back and that. So we, I, I say all that just to sort of again, pull back the curtain a little bit and say that all of the things that we talk about, we are living through experience and and we are learning along the way, and then hoping to share it with others so they can, number one, see that we're not perfect either, and that we're figuring this out and and that we can learn, and that we want to share it with with everyone else so they can learn for themselves too.
Zack Arnold: Yeah. I mean, what? Something that we talk about a lot with the team, and when you talk about branding, is really having a core set of values, and one of those core set of values is authenticity. And I'm so tired of hearing about thought leaders and influencers and the wellness space, the meditators, the ones that espouse work life balance, and then you hear from people on their team that say, Are you kidding? That person's a nightmare. We work like 90 hours a week, and it just dispels this entire image of everything that they're sharing, right? So I'm a really big believer that the message is important, but the messenger is oftentimes more important. And the sacrifice, the cost, is that everything takes way, way, way longer than I want it to fast, cheap, good, pick two, right? Good is not even an option. There is no world in which our world, our work, is not going to be good. The challenge is just trying to not make it perfect. That's where I've had to dial back. But there's no amount of like, I guess we could put it out there. It's shit, but whatever, right? So it has to be good, right? And it has to be cheap, because I'm broke, right? So it can't be fast. And the two costs were, either we keep doing things exactly the way that we were doing them, while we're changing everything, probably not even assuredly, because of the state of the industry, but probably would have generated more revenue, but it would have come at the cost of my sanity. So I had to make the trade off. Well, if I want to get through the same I have to be willing to sacrifice a lot of income in the meantime. So for everybody that's thinking, Well, you know, must be nice to have all this income coming in while you're branding, nope, like our revenue has plummeted over the last two years, and I've been trying to figure it out, like everybody else, and making very, very difficult financial decisions, but because I just continue to have, and I don't even know if it's, you know, a ridiculous amount of misplaced optimism or not, but I still continue to believe that what we're doing will work, and I believe that it will help people, and until there's literally no other way to get where we want to get, I'm just going to keep trudging through the trenches right and it that's costing a lot right now, literally, like numbers on spreadsheets. The way that we're doing it is costing us a lot of money, but I believe that we're going to come out the. Other end, and I'm going to be able to fill those gaps, but I'm just not willing to pay the cost to my sanity anymore.
Debby: Yeah, and I think that's an important lesson that we all need to remember and over and over, right? Yeah? So before we wrap up here, I just want to give the listener just a preview of like, what can they expect now from the Zack Arnold podcast? What is, what's sort of in the pipeline, what's the future hold in terms of this new rebrand?
Zack Arnold: Well, I would first defer to my Podcast Producer, because I'm not sure what the answer to this is, because we're still figuring it out, but I can tell you, in general, what I want to explore, a few different things that I really want to explore that we haven't touched on a lot in the past. Is I really want to much better understand the creative mind and how creativity works, like in what one of the very first interviews we're going to have, assuming it gets recorded, so at least as of recording, this is not in the can. Debbie will tell you that just because they're on the calendar doesn't mean it's done, but as of tomorrow afternoon, if we get it in the can, one conversation I'm so excited to have is with Scott Barry Kaufman has both an amazing personal story, but is such a brilliant mind talking about how brilliant minds work, how creativity works, what comes with creativity, how creativity is a completely different form of intelligence from IQ. So just really delving into understanding creativity, the creative process, why we as creatives are wired differently as human beings, so we can better understand our own operating systems. That's something that I want to explore a lot adjacent to that similar but not the same, is understanding it specifically from the neuro divergent perspective, understanding ADHD, Understanding Autism, understanding what are the what's the tremendous value that these kinds of minds bring, but what are the challenges that they bring to right? I can't speak to the autism side of things. But boy, can I talk about the obstacles that come with ADHD, but I can also talk to the tremendous superpowers. So really digging into understanding the brain from the neurodivergent perspective, and then I think another one is just understanding, again, adjacent to creativity, or being a creative is understanding the emotional side of how we're wired. Because you find that by and large, people that are highly creative and highly intelligent are also highly sensitive and very challenging managing emotions. And that has been probably the biggest, most important journey I've been through the last two years, is I have not had a choice but to learn how to understand my emotions and manage them, because the amount of emotions the last two years has been absolutely overwhelming, between grief and fear and anxiety and uncertainty. It's just like my system said, Nope, I don't know what's happening. I don't know how to process any of this. So I think helping helping us better understand how we're wired emotionally. That's another area that I want to explore. And then one thing I alluded to before getting a little bit more strategic and tactical, is really understanding how do we manage the transition and stay valuable and relevant as we transition to the Creator economy? Because Hollywood is dead. Hollywood is not on life support. Hollywood is dead. I can very confidently say that at this point, at least as we know it, what Hollywood was pre 2022 dead. It is gone, right? There will still be a Hollywood, but it's going to be very different the way that it functions and the services that it provides. And I want to help bridge this transition for everybody that does creative work that loves to tell stories, so they don't have to end up working at Trader Joe's and Home Depot, and they can still be creative and they can still thrive, but managing that transition and helping us find our value and find our new place. So that's the short list of the things I want to explore, which is the great thing about having a much broader brand is I don't give a shit what we talk about. I can talk to anybody now, but those are kind of the three areas that I'm the most excited about right now.
Debby: And then the thing I would add on to that is the other thing we've discussed is just having some more personal stories and having on not necessarily always talking to experts or authors, right, but just having more personal stories, more like we say, ordinary people doing extraordinary things, and yes, filling down that. And I'm
Zack Arnold: going to add another piece to this. We've talked to ordinary people that have achieved extraordinary things. That's not anything new. I think what's new and what's really scary and uncomfortable for me is exploring the direction of me not having a guest right now, that's the scary thing for me, and I'm going to put out a blatant plug. I get nothing from this whatsoever. But I have discovered another podcaster recently, and I'm like, I want to be this person someday. It's not Tim Ferriss, it's not Adam gray. It's not Rich Roll. It's not Andrew Huberman. It's a guy named Andy J pizza, and he has a podcast that's called Creative pep talk, and he just talks to the microphone for an hour, and it's mesmerizing. And like, how the hell does he do that? And the thought of me just talking to a microphone for an hour terrifies me, which makes no sense, because I've been talking into a microphone for a decade. But there's always structure, and there's always somebody to bounce it off of, which means that I can just sit there and let them talk. I'm just the facilitator. They're the expert. But the thought of structuring a conversation and talking to people one on one with no guest for an hour terrifying. That's something that, for better or worse, we will be exploring. But anybody that's listening right now, Andy J pizza create a pep talk. It is a wonderful podcast,
Debby: and yet you can sit down and write a 3000 word sub sack article with no problem. What is the difference
Zack Arnold: perfectionism? Because if I'm writing a 3000 word article, I can stop after every sentence. Was this the right version of the sentence? Oh, I'm going to go another couple of sentences. Oh, you know what? I need to redo the opening. So by the time you see it, I've worked through all of it, right? So by the time this comes out, we will have released another one of my sub stack pieces that's all about procrastination and perfectionism and how when you're not procrastinating, it's about laziness, it's about fear, right? And I talk about these two approaches to creativity, and I, by and large, have talked about this with editors, but I think it applies to writers, painters, just about anybody. You can either be a builder or you can be a sculptor. The builder is I'm going to do this piece by piece. I'm going to make every little bit perfect. I'm going to build on the last on the last so like, if I were to look at my process as an editor, one shot goes in, I'm confident that's the end point. That's an out point. Now I go to the preview window. That's the exact in frame. That's the out frame. Put it in block by block by block, right? Sculptors, they just throw a bunch of shit in a timeline. They've got a big lump of clay, right? I have no idea how people do it that way, because it's, it's so overwhelming, and I think this is part of the ADHD I can't look at a bunch of shots in the timeline to do anything with it. When I've been asked to recut things, I have to start from scratch, which is so inefficient, like, well, we just need you to tweak this. I can't I have to start from scratch, and I have to rebuild it, right? So I have the ability to be a builder when I'm writing, because I can rewrite, and I can rewrite, and then I can release it when it's just me talking to a microphone. I can't stop after three minutes and say, You know what? I'm going to go back and I'm going to say that thing over again. The idea of just free flowing stream of consciousness terrifies me.
Debby: But actually you can stop and go back. There's this thing called editing, right?
Zack Arnold: But what I don't want to do is fall into that same trap. What I don't want to do is send our editor this and say, here are the 72 notes that I need you to go through to make this perfect. I just want to say, here's that bit where my dog started barking, and I want you to cut that out, otherwise, release it, right? I really want to embrace that, even though it scares me. So that is one area that we're going to explore, maybe not immediately, just for lack of time and all the other things we have in front of us, but yes, putting it out there, very blatantly right now, that is something that we're going to be working through. Because I do think, especially because I've just been so inspired by his podcast and what he does, and he's now done 500 episodes. And mind you, he does have other guests on, but I would say 25% of his episodes are talking
Debby: to other people. Well, it looks like we're gonna have to get him on so he can talk about his process. Uh, let's
Zack Arnold: just say that he's already in the outreach queue, and I've been working very hard at making that happen. I can't confirm nor deny that that has happened yet, but let's just say that he's very high on my outreach list at the moment.
Debby: All right. Well, we covered a lot of territory here today. I think is there anything that we did not get to, that you were hoping we would get to?
Zack Arnold: I mean, I could probably answer that in about three hours, because there's always more things that I want to say, but I would say that you've done an incredibly good job at structuring this conversation and covering the things that we need to and off the top of my head, I feel very, very good about today's conversation and laying the foundation for where we're going next. So you might have a podcasting host in your future, pretty good at this.
Debby: We will see, right? You never know. Always leave the options open. Well, okay, so let's just tell everybody what they need to know about the rebrand and where to find us, how to find you on sub stack, all the things, sure.
Zack Arnold: Yeah. So the the simplest place to start is it's now Zack arnold.com and I always have to be very clear about this. It's Z, A, C, K, A, R, N, O, L, D, because I have had my name spelled Z, A, C, H, for most of my life. Does that mean that it's wrong? No, but I was bullied as a child incessantly and called Zach. I just can't do it. I cannot look at Zach and not get just flashbacks. So Zack zackarnold.com, is where you're going to find the website, which, again, recovering perfectionist. It's still the old design, the old WordPress layout. We have not done our redesign of it yet, but we've at least switched the URL. And the fact that we're telling people to go there, and it's not. The new website is killing me right now, but they're still going to find all the same resources that they would, and they can go to zackarnold.com/substack if they want to subscribe to my sub stack. And then, even though it's not quite ready, as of releasing this episode, we are working feverishly behind the scenes to build the infrastructure for the Arnold Academy for creatives, and hope to be debuting that either in late May or early June.
Debby: Awesome. Well, thank you. Thank you for sharing everything you shared today. Hopefully the listeners got a better idea of what this rebrand is all about, and a little peek behind the scenes of what it's like for us, and I'll talk to you next time.
Edited by: Curtis Fritsch
Produced by: Debby Germino
Shownotes and published by: Vim Pangantihon
Music by: Thomas Cepeda
Oliver and I dive deep into why chasing productivity is a trap, how to stop waiting for life to begin “someday,” and why there might be freedom in not only accepting that we’re never going to finish our to-do lists, but ultimately we’re going to die without having accomplished all of our goals.
