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How can we prepare for whatever the new job market holds? And when do we think it will even open again? And how can we make money in the meantime?
With all of the speculation going around the interwebs right now about when Hollywood is going to roll camera again, I and the Optimizer coaching & mentorship community decided to have a frank conversation about when we honestly believe production will ramp up again – and more importantly, what will our jobs in post-production look like when that time comes?
How important will it be to have remote workstations ready to go?
What are the new skills that will make us hireable & desirable?
How can we set ourselves apart when the flood gates open and hiring becomes a meat market?
Can we expect to go back to work earning the same rate if budgets are going to be cut everywhere?
We do believe there is A LOT you can do to prepare for when the job market opens again. If you’re still emotionally working through everything that’s going on right now, don’t worry – it’s okay if you’re not ready to be productive (but that ship is about ready to sail..just saying).
If you do want to accomplish something meaningful with the time you have available to you (besides catching up on Tiger King and Ozark that is), this is required listening for all of us.
Zack Arnold: My name is Zack Arnold. I am the creator of the Optimize Yourself program and podcast, and today I am here with my Optimizer coaching and membership community. As we have been congregating 1pm on Fridays on Zoom and on Facebook Live, so everybody in the Optimizer community, wave, say hello, and we’re all stuck in our little boxes all across the world together. So the reason that we are congregating at 1pm on Fridays, I think maybe I’ve talked to you guys about this already, and maybe I haven’t. What I have done for the last several years is I have always prioritized putting myself out there and networking with new people, or people that want to reach out to me, and they want to network. I would always set aside from about one to 230 or 3pm on Fridays. That’s when I did my lunch meetings. Now that I can do that, I want a way to continue connecting with people, so that’s why we’re doing this specifically at 1pm on Fridays, because this has always been my time block. No matter how crazy I am about getting down the rabbit hole, and I’m in tunnel vision, and I’m working on something. I’m in the edit cave. I always make sure to pop my head out, look around 1o’clock on a Friday, and make sure that I reconnect with the world. So, this is me doing that, but on a virtual level, as opposed to on a real level. So, I am excited about doing this, as always. And what I specifically want to talk about today is. What do we think the job market is going to look like someday when it opens up? How long do we think it’s going to take, and when it does happen, do we think it’s going to be slow? Do we think it’s going to be fast? I’m going to give a giant disclaimer. I have no idea. I have no answers to any of it. This is all just a bunch of people individually speculating their ideas, their opinions. Nobody has any answers, obviously, but where I want to start first, before we dive into this topic, is answering what is now always the most important question that I have for this community, which is, How are you doing? So, is there anybody here that would just like to share how they’ve been doing, want to give us an update, say hello, and just share where they are in their own little world right now. Who would like to volunteer? Show of hands. All right, we’ve got Phil.
Phil Habeger: Hi, Phil Habeger. Basically, I’m doing all right, but I’m having a hard time staying motivated, so start on something or start on a project that I think is going to, you know, help me career wise, and I’ll get maybe five or 10 minutes into it, and then just turn on Netflix, and that’s where I’m the rest of the day. So that’s kind of my mode of operation right now, is just starting on something and then thinking I’ll just finish it tomorrow. So that’s part of the reason I got on the call today, was just to maybe find some inspiration to stay motivated.
Zack Arnold: Got it. So, you’re dealing with a steady dose of Netflix and procrastination. Does that sound about right?
Phil Habeger: Yeah.
Zack Arnold: Is there anybody else in this group that is thinking, “Huh, this sounds kind of familiar.” Anybody else? Yeah. So, don’t worry, it’s not just you. This is a fairly common problem. This is a problem even for me, so I can definitely relate to this as well. Where, if I had a default mode right now, where I could say this is ideally what I would be doing, it’s me with a never-ending gallon of mint chocolate chip ice cream and Netflix, that’s it. That would be my entire life. That’s what emotionally I want right now, but because I’ve given myself all these things to do, and I put myself out there, so I have the external accountability, so I’ll say, “Hey, I’m going to write this, or I’m going to be on this call. I have no choice but to shower, to shave, to put on a shirt with a collar, and put myself on Zoom.” But that’s because I’ve set up external accountability. So, my question for you, and for anybody else that’s struggling with this, is, Do you have any form of external accountability, or is all it about you have to maintain that yourself?
Phil Habeger: Yeah, for me it’s just me maintaining it myself, and it’s that like I have no external accountability, and I have no deadlines. I haven’t even set any deadlines for myself, so there’s no, like, you know, there’s no like goal to reach. It’s just kind of like, oh, I kind of want to do this, and so I think that’s where it stalls, because there’s there’s no accountability, and there’s no goal.
Zack Arnold: Yes. Well, and I think the other problem is that there’s no external accountability from the world at all right now, because usually the external accountability is eventually somebody’s going to call you, they might be looking for work, whatever it is, there’s going to be an external need that somebody has of you, but right now all that’s disappeared. So, what I’ve seen over and over and over in many of my conversations with people is I’m basically having what I’ve always wanted, which is all my time to myself, and I now have no idea what to do with any of that time, because I don’t have a boss, right? And I don’t know how to micromanage myself. People always say they hate to be micromanaged, but they don’t realize that a large reason they’re actually doing what they’re doing productively is because they’re being micromanaged, and they need that. So, this has been a challenge that a lot of people have had for years working in this program, that now we throw gasoline on the fire, there’s no external accountability. It’s now perfectly acceptable to sit around, do nothing all day long, and watch television. I mean, there’s entire memes going around the internet about we’re in the middle of a global pandemic, and how do we save the world by doing it from our couches in front of our televisions? I’m sure everybody in this group has probably seen those memes or something to that effect, right? So, culturally, it is finally acceptable to be as lazy as humanly possible, and something that we’ve talked about already in our previous calls, and one of the people on our call, Debbie, you can wave your hand and let everybody see you. So, Debbie has been kind enough to come on board and endure me being an editor with her, and has written some amazing content with some new good stuff coming out soon, but we talked about this idea that it’s actually okay if you don’t want to be productive. We have to accept that emotionally we’re going through a very difficult period of time in human history, and maybe just because we have the hours all day long in our day that maybe we don’t have to be productive with all of them, and we don’t have to learn five new skills, and we don’t have to organize our closets in x and Y and Z, we just need to sit with what’s going on and accept it and become okay with it, but I think people are starting to really work through that, because I have a lot more people coming to me saying, “All right, I’m over the hysteria, but what do I do now, right? And I think that’s a, that’s a really good segue to bring us into. Our topic of conversation today, and we’ve talked in the past, for anybody that is on Facebook Live right now, we’ve already talked about different ways that we can do some time blocking. I workshop extensively with Debbie for about an hour to help her build a writing habit and identify the one thing that she can accomplish throughout her day, but I think what the topic of conversation today specifically would be is what can we be doing with our time to prepare for the job market, and what the hell is the job market going to look like when it actually opens up, and when is it going to open up, and what is it that we do? Right, so I want to throw this out to you guys first. So I just, again, we don’t have any of the answers, this is just a group of people, all very smart people, all very motivated people, just talking about this. So, I want to throw this out there to anybody here. What ideas or what theories or hypotheses do you have about what we’re looking at as far as our job market? I’m just going to throw it out to you guys, and we’re going to start a conversation. So, I’m going to throw it out to Ann, because your hand flew up first.
Ann Trulove: Thank you. You know, as, as I sit here, sort of, you know, day after day, quietly, and my, and my thing is, is that I’m on the tail end of my career. I don’t want to be, but let’s also say that it be my second act, and I’ve discussed this with you too, setting up home system and stuff like that, but it seems like what’s happening is this isolation is giving the studios and the people who work at the studios ideas about how to do more remote work, you know, assign work remotely intellectually. I keep thinking they have this infrastructure to go, you know, then they’ll have empty cutting rooms, they can’t run out to shows and stuff like that, but there’s always this sort of underlying, you know, underlying intent to sort of deconstruct the unity that has come with our guild and stuff like that, so you know it may be sort of a feeding frenzy, in the sense that, hey, do you have a system? Okay, you can do the job. It’s just it seems like there’s going to be more remote, remote work asked of us than ever was before, and we’ll have to provide our own systems and stuff like that, so it’s going to be more faithless communication, and we’re also going to end up having to operate individually. There won’t be that sort of area where we, you know, come together, work together, and that’s the thing that concerns me, is it just has completely this, the virus is completely torn apart the paradigm, and we’re going to come back to a completely changed attitude by the people who’ve been giving us work over the years, I’m a little concerned about that. I also have this feeling that, you know, there are so many films that are being put on hold, yet have release dates, and there’s going to be this huge panic on the part of the, you know, on the part of production production teams say, oh my god, we have to get this all done, get this all done, so you know there’ll be this hiring frenzy, and you know we’ll all be working 12 to 15 hours a day trying to get a film out, you know.
Zack Arnold: We’ll be working 12 to 15 hours a day, more than the 12 to 15 hours,
Ann Trulove: Exactly. We’ll have to be working
Zack Arnold: You’re already working ridiculous hours. Yeah, so yeah, I think that you bring up a lot of really good points, and it’s almost like you saw my, my agenda in my head for the day, because it hits so many different areas that I think are important to discuss. The first one that I want to hit on is this idea of working remotely, so let’s assume best case scenario, and this is best case scenario in a hypothetical world, because I guarantee this is not going to happen. Let’s assume best case scenario that all the scientists say the virus is dead, we killed it, right? So we don’t even have to worry about the safety of the virus, so in this hypothetical scenario, there’s no more virus, there’s no more safety issues. Even in that hypothetical scenario, the expectation is going to be that so many other people are now going to ask us to work remotely, because for years there’s always been the excuse of, oh, it can’t be done, or it’s too expensive, or we don’t want to take the time to figure it out, but this inflection point has forced us to learn how to do this, because there’s no other survival mechanism. Most people in post are already unemployed, because, frankly, we survive, and we need footage to be able to do what we do for a living. So, most people aren’t working anyway, but those that are working have realized, oh, it’s kind of a pain in the butt, but this is totally doable, and. Think a lot of realizations are, huh, this is actually kind of better than the way that we were doing it before. Not in every scenario, but I think in a lot of scenarios I’ve talked to multiple people that have said, I don’t want to go back to the way that we were doing it before. I like being able to work from home, having more freedom of my time, and not having to be in the car for 234, hours a day. So I think that’s going to become one of our new normals, even if we’re not talking about safety now. When we introduce safety into the equation, obviously that’s going to exacerbate it. This is not going to be a matter of the stay-at-home order is lifted and all of a sudden we all just go back to the office and we make sure that we wash our hands. It’s not going to be that simple. This is going to be done in multiple phases, and without going into any politics whatsoever, the government and the states are already talking about what do these multi-phase plans look like. So, I think that you are definitely going to have an advantage for the foreseeable future if you’re able to provide your services from home, you have a solid internet connection, and you have the infrastructure to be able to edit quickly and be able to handle large amounts of data, that’s just a given that needs to be on somebody’s roadmap, where if they’re thinking, I just got to wait this thing out, and then I can go back to the office, and I’m not really going to have to invest in a home system, that’s no longer a reality. So, I think that needs to be on somebody’s radar, no matter what. Now, there are going to be certain cases, depending on the budget level of the project, whether it’s studio level or whatnot. I know a lot of people where they’re just basically handing them an edit system because they want them to keep working and they can’t expect that person to build it for them. You’re in a unique situation, Anne, where you’re not actively employed, but you’re thinking, I want to be able to provide these services, but nobody’s going to build it for you. Nobody’s going to invest in that for you. But for example, I just did a coaching call this morning with one of my private clients, and she has been asked to come on to a documentary project and be a fixer, and it’s only for maybe a couple of weeks, and they said we’re just going to bring the whole system to you, just going to come up, we’re going to set it, you know, on your front doorstep, you take all the pieces out, you build in whatever room you want, and you cut no cost to her. So, having the ability to be able to provide that yourself is going to get you ahead in the job market. Yeah, and that’s actually it’s like you read one of the questions that I had on the live. Somebody said, any suggestions for those of us considering building our own Avid setups in case the remote economy stays with us after we reopen? The simple answer to that is, this has to be on your to-do list. It doesn’t have to be like a giant $15,000 mega system, but if you want to be able to work consistently, I think for the foreseeable future you have to be able to provide some level of consistent service from home.
Ann Trulove: Yeah, what you had suggested was, you know, setting up a company. I actually had a conversation with a friend of mine who likes the idea, so we may go into partnership with an LLC and set up an LLC where both of us are working. He’s still actively working on want to be actively working, but at least we have, you know, we can set up our own business and work. It’s like it would be like a writer partnership, only an editor partnership. And I also had an idea about setting up some sort of co-op where people of my vintage, you know,
Zack Arnold: I like that term, by the way,
Ann Trulove: We all work, yeah, we all work together, you know, or we all gather projects, and we have, you know, we work within a company or a system that allows people in my, you know, my vintage to keep working, because, of course, there are the prejudices that we’re still dealing with, but there’s this incredible wealth of experience and wisdom that is being wasted, so maybe anyway, I might – I have somebody who’s interested in doing something like that, so it’s just kick-starting it all.
Zack Arnold: Yeah, and what I love about that is that this is something you probably never would have thought of had this situation not arisen, and there’s so much innovation that I think is going to come out of these circumstances. A perfect example being this call. Never in a million years did I think, oh, there would be value getting my whole group together and doing a community Q and A call and streaming it to Facebook Live and involving the public. Why would I ever think of doing that? What a waste of time, right? But then all of a sudden I realize how important community is, and this becomes a top priority for me as a way to innovate given present circumstances. And I think there’s going to be a lot of innovation going forwards, where people are going to come up with more unique ways to offer their services remotely, and I think is one way to kind of cap this off, and then I want to make a slight transition when it comes to building a full home edit setup, again, this is going to be based on how much budget you have, what you really want to invest in for the future, or if you’re somebody that says, man, I’ve got four kids running around the house, the last thing I want to do is work from home for 14 hours a day for the foreseeable future, I get it. However, I think at a. Bare minimum, what people need to learn to get much better at, and this is an area where I have been geeking out for years, and people are finally coming to me saying, okay, now I get it, is communication for all of those people that have been using communication largely in a group space where they talk in person, and they just kind of rely on email as a crutch, what I’m seeing, not just in our industry or the people that I talk to, but in multiple articles in multiple industries, people don’t know how to manage the overload of communication, because all communication is digital now. People say, “My God, I’m on Zoom calls for nine hours a day, or “I’ve got four times the amount of emails. At a minimum, I think people need to get better at learning how to communicate digitally, because that’s not going away anytime soon, and that means basic knowledge of how to manage and participate in Zoom conversations, or Google Meets, or Microsoft Teams, or whatever it is. And I also think it’s better understanding how to organize incoming information, so I can chat on Slack versus email versus Trello, or whatever the platforms are, I’m not trying to sell any specific platforms. What I’m trying to convince people of is the concept that we have to get better at digital communication, because it was pretty bad already, but now that we’re in the situation like this is just the dam is bursting open. The dam was leaking before, and we saw that people were spending three to six to even eight hours in their inboxes, but now it’s so overwhelming, because we have no other way to communicate. So, I think this is identified some of the chinks in the armor as far as remote communication is concerned. So, at the very least, if you’re not willing to invest in a full home edit system, you should at least invest the time to learn how to better communicate remotely, and the vast majority of the tools are free anyway, so it’s really not going to be much of an investment of money, it’s just an investment of time and education, but where I want to go next, the conversation that I think is even more important than talking about remote edit bays or remote workflows, I want to look at this from the ground level, and the ground level, like I alluded to a little bit, is this idea that as people in post production, our entire livelihoods depend on people handing us footage, and right now our industry cannot create that footage for us. That’s why we’re all here. As far as I’m concerned, me personally, my lifestyle hasn’t changed at all. And yes, my family is home, and I get a lot more knocks on the door, and you know I’ll be in the middle of a focus block and it’s like, Daddy, can we make a cake for lunch, right? That’s how my life has changed, but it hasn’t been a drastic, monumental shift in the way that I live my life. I’ve been doing social distancing as an Olympic sport for the last 15 years, so none of this is new to me, right, but the big thing that’s new is that if I solely relied on editing for my income, I still can’t work, even though I can still work, I still have the system, I’m not being fed footage on a daily basis. So, what I want to talk about is an article that came out a couple of days ago, it was in Deadline, I believe, and basically it’s called Reopening Hollywood, and we don’t have to go too much into the details of it, but again, thinking back to how long is it realistically going to be before we even need these remote edit stations, and we need to be able to serve the public as editors and take in this new footage. The logistics of making that happen are going to take a while. So again, going back to this hypothetical scenario where the world just magically opens up, and there’s no more disease, there’s no more virus, just that alone to get production ramping up, and get everybody to make sure that they’ve booked their studios on time, and they’ve got their crews together, and everybody’s hired. If we’re not worried about safety at all, we all know how slow the bureaucratic process can move when you’re trying to coordinate all of these teams, so think about hypothetically again in a world with zero virus, where we flip the switch and we turn it off, and we all wake up and the president and the governors and everybody says no more virus, we can go back to work. I’m curious, how many out here in the group would say, how long does it take before they’re actually rolling cameras and they’re organized again. Thoughts from the team. Here, I have my own thoughts. So, Aaron, what do you think?
Aaron: I think that it could be.. it depends on the production and the how, how staff they were to begin with, and how, how, and if they’re prepping right now to think about the future. So, I think it could be anywhere from two to eight weeks of a company coming back and getting you back into production, and it’s interesting, because you know the people that are working, that are editing right now, they’re gonna run out of footage probably in another month. I mean, there’s, unless somebody’s got a documentary that’s sitting on, like, you know, hours and hours, otherwise, like already regular content, they’re not going to have any, so it depends. How long this keeps going, obviously, but this could end up being a lot worse for a lot more people than there already is.
Zack Arnold: Yeah, I would agree with all of that. That best-case scenario, and we would scale this based on the size of the crew and the budget and whatnot. If we’re talking really, really tiny productions, if we flip the switch off and said no more virus, everybody’s safe, we’re probably talking at least a couple of weeks before you’re getting footage again on a regular basis. Realistically, if we’re talking more at the studio level, at the corporate level in the article it even alludes to this, we’re talking a minimum of probably eight weeks before things start to really get back to normal. Now, remember that’s in a hypothetical scenario where it’s just about planning and logistics and coordination. Now we introduce safety into the equation, and this is no longer hypothetical. So now all of a sudden we’re slowly getting away from the stay-at-home orders, we can start to go well, whatever kind of waves they’re creating, whatever small businesses start to open up, like I think I read somewhere that they’re going to do movie theaters first, and this, like, it’s there’s this whole tiered system, right? But when it comes to a shooting, it’s going to take a long time for them to figure out how do we actually get large crews together, so if you think about, all right, well, we have to get a camera crew together. Well, nobody can share equipment, and everybody has to stay six feet apart. And camera crews are like, like, that is ever going to happen. It is impossible for us to not be breathing in each other’s faces all day long, right? And then another argument in the article is, well, we’re just going to have to trim back staff and use minimal crews. And again, the reaction is we were already overworked and understaffed, so how are we going to do the same level of work with even less people if we can’t touch the same equipment and we can’t be close to each other. Now you exacerbate that with you have people that are going to be in front of the camera that can’t wear masks, that can’t wear gloves, and right before the take starts there’s going to be somebody literally right there fixing their makeup, breathing on them, spritzing them. This gets infinitely more complicated. So, if we think about the timeline for when they’re actually going to consistently shoot stuff, I’m not saying little bits here and there, but when the market actually opens up and they’re going to need the volume of editorial that they needed right before this all started, we’re talking months and months. So, my feeling is that best case scenario, the virus – hopefully we’re past the curve, or we flatten the curve, like everybody’s saying. Let’s assume that happens accordingly, and we do start to phase all this in. My prediction is, best case scenario, we don’t see any consistent production, probably until August or September, so is there anybody here that either agrees, disagrees, wants to add to that? That’s again my own personal opinion, but that’s what I think is going to happen, best case scenario. So, Scott,
Scott: Oh, hey Zack, yeah, I totally agree. I think it’s going to be three to six months minimum. I think there’s going to be a log jam for resources. I think all these productions, once the quarantine is lifted, they’re all going to be buying for the same cameras, the same lights, the same crew, and so things are going to get log jammed, and I really don’t think it’s going to be four to maybe four to six months before post season kind of consistent work, that’s what I’m, I’m anticipating, and trying to plan for.
Zack Arnold: Yeah, I would agree with all that. And I think, you know, saying three to six months is probably more realistic. I always err on the side of trying to be more optimistic, you know. Sometimes I’m right, sometimes I’m wrong, but I, I think that anybody that would argue, “Oh, we’re going to be shooting in June or July, never, you know, maybe, maybe some outliers are going to be experimenting with some stuff, but having a business that’s actually back and moving, no way, like
Scott: theatrical or TV with crews, and no, no, yeah,
Zack Arnold: So, so the, so I think that we’re all kind of in a general consensus that we know that if we’re going to be waiting for the footage to start coming to us, we’ve got a fairly long wait.
Scott: Yeah,
Zack Arnold: we’ve gone into in previous calls, and I have some articles about this, and I have another one coming out soon about the most important fear and anxiety that most people have because of this, which is the financial fear and anxiety. Well, if I know I can’t find work, well, then what do I do to generate some income, whether it’s a stimulus, whether it’s unemployment, whether it’s a loan. The easiest and simplest update I can give for anybody that’s following along from all of that. What a disaster. Oh my god, like it has gotten so monumentally worse since I wrote that post, myself included. Just as, like, a very brief aside, I don’t want to get off track too much, but I have gone through the PPP loan application process. It took me almost two weeks to actually get it just to be able to hit the accept button, because the bank’s online system kept crashing, and then it would reopen, and they say, ‘You can finish your application, and they’d send me a different passcode, and the passcode didn’t work, and I was on with support, like two weeks of that straight, and I pardon the French, but I do not. This is what happened yesterday in this exact sequence. I finally got through, like, oh my god, I can upload my paperwork, I can enter the loan amount, I can click the accept button, and I got an email as I was doing that, and the email said we wanted to notify all of our customers that the government. Program has run out of money, and we can no longer offer loans. I’m like, come on, really. And that’s happened to millions of people. So the short version is that if you’re counting on the stimulus programs and whatnot, it seems like unemployment is the only one that seems to be kind of figuring it out, because they had a system, they just needed to modify and improve the system if you’re trying to use these other loans or grants. Good luck with that. Like, I’m going to keep trying, but I’m not counting on any of it. So, what that means is that if we are going to, as a collector group, figure out a way to spend our time wisely over the next what looks to be at least three to six months, what is it that we need to do if we want to prepare for the job market? So, any thoughts about where we can put some of our attention, things that we can work on to feel like we’re not just sitting on our hands, and then all of a sudden this log jam happens, and you’re like, oh crap, I guess for the last three months I probably should have been doing something, but now I’m kind of starting from scratch, but at least I caught up on all three seasons of Ozark, right? So, so any thoughts about where we could be putting our attention if we want to prepare for the pending job market. Oh, so, and so, what are some thoughts that you have?
Ann Trulove: What I do know is that I think what’s going to be in demand is people who are as technically adept as possible, because there’s going to be a lot of reliance on not just your art, there’s gonna be more reliance upon your technical ability. It’s the same as the digital blood bath that happened many, many years ago. Is they were hiring, hiring tech, you know, computer nerds instead of instead of assistants and editors, people who knew how to run the advent, as opposed to knowing anything about editing, but it’s people who are technically adept, not just, not just in terms of software, but hardware, because you know it’s just like they hire an assistant who knows After Effects, as opposed to someone or an editor, as opposed to someone who doesn’t, so the more you know, but there’s a lot of technical shortcomings in our, in our field, and everywhere else. I just saw an article about how they, the one of the reasons we’re having problems with unemployment and everything else is that their systems go back to the 80s, and you know they’re using something short of dial-up for people to access, and so anybody with some sort of technical adeptness, it comes in handy.
Zack Arnold: Yes, I would agree with all of that, and I think that’s a, that’s a good addendum to what I was already mentioning, where I think the communication, communication is going to be a really, really big positive for people. Where on a technical level, those then can coordinate and communicate with teams on a remote level. I think they’re immediately going to be more in demand. So, I think you’re right. If we, if we look at the digital blood bath, as you call it, when everybody was cutting 35 on their cams and their flatbeds and their movie olas and whatever their tool of choice was, and all of a sudden the studio says, “Hey, we’re going to cut digitally, and they’re like, “I don’t know anything about computers, and they find somebody instead they can cut with an avid that maybe doesn’t have nearly the storytelling ability, but they can assemble the pieces, and they can have the storyteller sitting on the couch behind them, which there are still some editors that, until a few years ago, actually still work that way. Then, yes, those technicians are going to be more in demand, and I think now the people that are going to jump to the head of the line are the ones that can do that when it comes to remote workflows and remote communication, so I think let’s use, let’s use an assistant editor as an example. Let’s say that you were an assistant editor in television or features, and you were really good at the tech stuff, but now you’ve enhanced your ability to be able to coordinate remote workflows and talk about communication and talk about media management. I can guarantee you, walk into that room when they’re interviewing 100 people, not that they would interview 100 but if there’s all of a sudden every single assistant editor in the business is available, are you going to choose the one that has the basic skill set or the one that brings the added skill set of being able to manage and build an entire remote team, manage the media, manage the communication? I know who I would hire first, even if maybe they don’t have as much experience with turnovers or dailies, or whatever it is. The most important pain that I have as somebody that’s building a post-production team is, how do I make this thing work remotely? Because I have no other choice. If I can find team members that can augment and help me with that, they’re the ones that are going to go to the front of the line, and I think that’s for assistant editors, that’s for editors, that’s for producers. If you’re an associate producer and the studio is putting together their team, well, I want to hire an AP that knows something about remote communication, because we may have another flare-up. That’s another thing that we haven’t even talked about yet. It may be August, September. October, we slowly start going back into the workforce, and I talk about this extensively on my previous podcast with Dr. De Mello, but he said that just with the cyclical way that a virus works, as far as the family that the COVID 19 virus is in, it behaves just like a cold or a flu. I’m not saying, oh, it’s just the flu, that’s as far as the severity, we all know that it’s much worse at this point. As far as its behavior, it’s just like the cold or the flu. So, what a lot of scientists are predicting and modeling is that we’re going to go through the summer and this is going to die out, but guess what happens in the fall? People start getting sick again, they get colds, they get the flu, because the weather changes, and that’s just the cyclical nature of a virus, so what that means is that we can’t say, well, we go back to the office and everything’s good and we flatten the curve. Oh crap, now what do we do? So again, if you’re somebody that can manage this communication and the media management and everything else, you’re going to be the front of the list for any team that they’re looking for. And there was actually a really good question about this that I saw with all of these productions that are on hold or on hiatus that they were working on beforehand, wouldn’t they just want to pull back the same crew and staff that they hired beforehand? I don’t think that’s going to happen. I don’t think that they’re going to hire everybody fresh from scratch, but I think it’s going to be more complicated than that. I want to go into why I maybe think that, but I wanted to throw it out to you guys first. Is it an automatic and easy assumption that if you were working before, when they start shooting again, they’re just going to hire everybody back, and it’s going to be across the board. We just fill all the same spaces. What do you guys think of that? I’ll take Phil, and then I’ll do Itai.
Phil Habeger: I mean, I was thinking the same thing, because it’s going to be a lot of editors, you know, out of basically out of work now, so it’s going to be like they’re going to be like, oh, this person wasn’t available before, but they’re available now, and that’s who we wanted in the first place, anyways, so let’s hire them, so that might bump somebody else out, but it’s going to be, and also there’s a thing of like it’s not really about the best person that they hire, it’s the last person that they spoke with that they hire, so it’s kind of going to be a thing of like being in communication with the with the people that were, you know, working the job that you wanted to be on, or within the job you were planning to be on, or were already on.
Zack Arnold: I think the first thing that you point out, which I think is just spot on, is this idea that, well, we had a crew built, but we built this crew because certain people who were available, certain weren’t, some fit into our budget constraints, maybe some of the people that we wanted were too expensive before, but now everyone’s available, so this is our opportunity to build a dream crew. I think the the other thing to add to that is this is going to be a feeding frenzy, which means that before the creatives were in charge, right, so right before this happened, like days before all this fell apart, everybody was saying I literally cannot find a qualified assistant editor. Everybody is taken. I heard that all the time, like every single assistant editor that I know is on a job. Does anyone know anybody that’s good enough that we can hire on the show? Heard that all the time. Now it’s going to be the opposite, so if I’m in a hiring position, and this wouldn’t be me personally, but I’m just speaking for the people that are in the hiring positions that care about money. Guess what? Guess what’s going to make this a more competitive environment? People just want to work. So, what does that mean? Who’s willing to do it the cheapest? Because everybody just wants something, so it’s no longer, hey, you want an assistant editor, there’s nobody else available, I can do the job. Here’s what’s going to get going to cost. Same thing if I’m an editor, but now if every editor, assistant editor, producer under the sun has been living off of unemployment for the last six months and they just want to get back to work, I think it’s going to be a combination of you understand remote workflow technology and you’re somebody that’s not going to cause a lot of bottlenecks with these new remote systems, and how little are you willing to do this for? Again, that’s just my own prediction. I don’t know if that’s going to happen or not. And I think that in the union world we have more protection than in the non-union world, but I do think that one of the challenges that this is going to be just the blood is in the water, and it’s going to be a feeding frenzy, and Who’s willing to take the scraps that they’re willing to offer, because they know how desperate all of the creative professionals are going to be. Whereas right before all of this, we were finally in the power position. So, I think this is going to definitely be a real exacerbation of this issue. And, I know that you had your hand up, so did you have something you wanted to add,
Itai Levin: some of this, some of what I was going to say was already brought up. Keep in mind that not all productions that were lined up just before all of this happened are going to have the same funds in place for their production if they are able to keep the production going. And go back to production, they might not have the same amount of money from investors, they might not have the same amount of sponsors, you know, because the economy took a big hit that remained smaller budgets, so they would probably cut positions where they can if they don’t cancel the production altogether.
Zack Arnold: Yeah, I think this is a really good point. I mean, let’s talk about the top of the top, Disney. They are hemorrhaging billions of dollars right now because they have all these theme parks and all, like, they’re furloughing all these employees, and again, if we’re talking about this light switch concept in this hypothetical crazy alternate universe where we flip the switch, no more virus when we go back to work. These companies can’t even afford to hire who they were hiring before, so it’s going to be smaller groups, lower budgets. So, my assumption is, and again, just an assumption, it’s just my, my personal opinion, I think they’re going to start to figure out how to do the same work, not only with less money, but with less people. So, here, this would be an example of our specific world. When I first started in the scripted television space, I was on the show Burn Notice. Talked about that a couple times before, so I’m not going to go into that too much, but we were on a two two, and what that meant is that over an 18 episode season, I was doing every other episode and I had one assistant looking at that 10 years later, like why anybody would go through that insanity, I don’t know. It was like the hardest nine months of my life. So nine episodes in less than nine months, 42 minutes a piece. So basically, when we were in producer’s cut doing producer’s notes, we were already getting dailies on our next episode. It was insanity. Then they realized we can’t sustain this anymore, because they made the switch from film to digital, and going from one hour a day to four hours a day of dailies, and you realize, oh, we should probably do a three editor rotation, but we can probably get by with two assistants. So, for a long time, three two is a very common system, and then the assistant editor responsibilities got to the point where they said we really need a dedicated assistant for each editor, and then I’ve even been on shows that have a four four rotation, and those are a dream. Oh my god, where you have four editors, four assistants on like a 13 episode season, that was wonderful. Nobody’s going to allow that when we go back, nobody’s going to let that happen, and I think they’re going to go back to, well, we did three twos before, so what does that mean? If you were to do that across the board mathematically, that means a third of the workforce of assistant editors and scripted TV gone. I’m not saying that’s going to happen, I’m just looking at one extreme end of the of the spectrum that mathematically they make that decision to cut costs, that’s a third of the workforce that disappears. So, on some level, I think that some of those variations are going to happen, and I’m curious if there are other people in the group that have other specific scenarios or ideas that are similar to that, just to really kind of round this idea out, because I live in one world, you guys live in other worlds. So, Aaron, you’ve got your hand up, and Rich, I also saw that you had your digital hand up, so I just caught it, and I’ll come back to you in a minute.
Aaron: So, in the freelance non-union world, this has been going on. What you’re describing has been going on anyway, like it’s harder and harder to get decent money for a gig because of the YouTubers, or just because technology became easier. So, this is something, a fight that’s already been going on, you’re just now joining the forces. If they end up doing this with, with the, with the union shows and the TV shows, and trying to eliminate crew via remote. I mean, I think remote has a good side to it too. You get to work at home. I’ve already been doing this for a while. I mean, I work at home all the time. I go out and work at home at the same time. It’s like a hybrid thing, and I think that I don’t think it’s going to disappear to the point where you’re never going to see anybody. You’re going to go in for meetings, or if we can go in for meetings, you’re going to go in for meetings, and you’re going to be able to go home and work instead of having to sit in an edit room for 12 hours a day, there’s advantages to this in a big way, but at the same time, with the, with the money thing, I mean, that’s been going on already in the freelance world, non-union world, for the last five years, it’s harder and harder to get consistent, good paying work, and so I don’t know. Welcome to the fight.
Zack Arnold: I was just gonna say, Welcome to Aaron’s world, right?
Aaron: It’s been going on, it really does.
Zack Arnold: Mr. Cushy, scripted editor, got my own assistant and my union job, like you’re just like, dude, welcome to the rest of the world, welcome to the real world, right? So
Aaron: People talk about, oh, you know, you do, you rent your system out, no, I mean, you build it into your fee of whatever fee you can get.
Zack Arnold: Yeah, that’s been a big question that I’ve seen floating around a lot as well. Now that I’m working from home, do I do I do a kit rental? I’m like, if you’re pricing out an expensive kit rental, everybody else that’s willing to do it for free is going to take the job ahead of you. Do I think that’s right? No, I, of course, think you should be paid for the equipment that you have in your. House, but realistically, in this market, where the blood is in the water, whatever you can offer for the least amount possible, that’s who’s going to win the jobs, right?
Aaron: And you have sites out there like Fiverr, which is, you know, it’s a misnomer, but basically I’ll do an edit for $5 the first credit, right? You know, you work it from there, but I mean, all these outlets for people to get people to work for less than they want to work for, basically less than they should work for. It’s been going on for the last, you know, five six years. So this is nothing that new. And if the union world is just going to be a part of that, then I mean it should be. I don’t know, it, I don’t know how to fight it, I don’t know what you do, because you always have a some, you always have somebody who, who doesn’t need the money as bad as you do to pay your bills, maybe they’re they’re sitting at home with their family and they can do that, do the work to 15 year old kid or whatever, because some 15 year olds definitely know how to edit, not taking anything away from them, but I mean, basically they’re willing to work for 50 bucks a day instead of whatever it is, you know.
Zack Arnold: Yep, yeah, exactly. And we could go down that rabbit hole a lot more, and that could maybe be a topic of discussion for another day. But I think that the one thing I.. there’s a couple of things I want to add to that, and then I’ll jump to you, Rich. Going backwards a little bit. I know one of the things you said is that there are a lot of positives to all this, the idea that you will have the freedom to work from home. And me personally, I’m like glad you guys caught up. Like, I’ve been trying, I’ve been pushing for this for a decade and a half. Every show I go into, you know, there’s a more efficient way to do this, where we don’t have to be in the car all day, every day, and we can work remotely, and the technology is there, and the speeds.. oh no, it can’t be done. Okay, I’ll show up to work every day, and now all of a sudden it can magically be done, right? However, the caveat to that is, for a lot of people, like, for example, I just had somebody that I worked with on a show a couple years ago saying I’m not working from home if I have a choice, because I’ve got a seven month old, like I can’t be a focused assistant editor on a TV show with a newborn, it’s just not possible. So, for some people, I think there’s going to be a lot of advantages to these circumstances, and for some, it’s going to make it even harder for them to find work specifically. So, I do agree that a lot of positives are going to come out of this, and that’s actually the one of the upcoming articles that I know Debbie’s working on that we’re collaborating on, is there’s a lot of really cool things happening right now in the world, where I think we’re, we’re going to be more hesitant than we realize to go back to normal, because there’s going to be things we don’t want to let go of, like who here that lives in Los Angeles has gone outside and said, are you flipping kidding me, this is gorgeous. For anybody that doesn’t know, LA scientifically proven now has the cleanest air on the planet. Like, what bizarro world are we living in right now? Where Los Angeles has the cleanest air. Has anybody seen some of the photos that photographers have taken in Los Angeles? I see those pictures and I say, I want to live there. What an amazing place to live. Oh, wait, I do, right? But I found myself more than once taking walks just around my little neighborhood and thinking, if it were like this every day, I could live here, right? I’ve been here for 20 years, complaining about the air and the traffic and the constant drone of noise, and there’s, you know, you can’t see the stars at night, and all this stuff. There’s a lot of really good stuff coming out of it for me. The acceptance of remote work is a big one, but I do want to acknowledge that for some people this is going to create a real challenge because they need, they desire to be able to get out of the house and feel normal because they have young kids. So that was one of the things that I wanted to acknowledge, and then the other one was, oh, the other one I wanted to talk about, as you said. Well, if they’re starting to compress this workforce, I think that what’s going to start happening even more, and even I’m doing this myself, and I actually thought about this partly because I saw that the resident expert on this topic, Terrence Current, the guy that owns Alpha Dogs, is on at least at one point, was watching this, and it’s thinking to yourself, what can be replaced very soon by technology, because I think that the first step that people are going to think about much more actively is, what can I replace with automation and AI? If I need to save money, how many of the tasks that I need from my three assistant editors can I remove, so now I only need two assistant editors. So, I think one of the biggest questions that we all need to ask ourselves is, what service can I provide that AI is not going to replace in the near future. And, beyond the shadow of a doubt, the one thing that, at least in our relative lifetimes, I hope AI doesn’t replace is creativity. If you do something that’s repetitive and it’s data driven, even coronavirus aside, it’s disappearing in the next five years. We knew that already. I think this is just going to amplify and speed up the situation, where for me I was already starting to build out a team and bring more people on to help me with the volume of things that I’m working on right now, my. First thought isn’t where can I spend more money and find more people. My first thought is, how can I automate this through technology, right? And I’m not talking about I want to make sure that you know I’m not able to employ anybody, but if there’s a task that would cost me $25 an hour to have somebody do repetitively that I can replace by paying $50 a month for a service that does it in the background. I’m going to pay the 50 bucks a month, that’s just for my own survival. And I think that’s going to start happening in film too, where either the technology that’s there is going to be discovered or new technology is going to be innovated, that’s going to make it easier for a lot of things to be automated and done through artificial intelligence. So, if there’s anything that I would be focusing on as a skill set right now, it would be getting better creativity. It would not be like, why now is finally my time to learn how to do script sync, or whatever. Like, those things aren’t going to hurt, but they’re not going to sustain you for the next five to 10 years. So, anything you can do to develop your creative skill set, I think, is what’s going to help job proof you both for the near term and the long term, and I’ve been promising for like 45 minutes now, I was going to get to Rich. So, Rich, I haven’t been ignoring you. It’s ironic, because you’re actually the first one on the call before everybody else.
Rich: Going back to what you said about being prepared to work at home or having a home system, when all this went down, I’m working for a reality show right now, and they gave me equipment, and I got it, and it was terrible. I mean, it wasn’t terrible, it was just really old and outdated. Was it giving me like a Mac Mini from 2010 or something, and it just, the operating system was bad. So, anyway, I got full of fear, and I was like, “Oh, I don’t want to go to him and say I can’t work from what you gave me. I didn’t want to pass me by, in, you know, there was, you know, everybody was laid off at that point. It’s like the second or third day that we were supposed to be at home, and, and they could have found somebody like that, you know. So, I, Melrose Mac was open, I ran out, and I got, I got a system that’s kind of forced to get something rather quickly that they had, and I’m fortunate, I’m glad I did. Glad they were open, and I got internet, and I’m working. As far as scripted, I worked in both, and you’re saying going forward, like everybody’s – they’re going to minimize, you know, people are going to work at home, and they’re going to, you have technology. I imagine there’s always there’s going to be an office somewhere, and they’re going to be an assistant there, at least one with everybody would remote in that way, they can take care of the footage, because the amount of footage and the bandwidth you would need to pipe everything and deliver like your dailies or somebody else’s dailies, that’s like an industrial, as I understand, industrial bandwidth that’s not available to homes, and imagine they’re voting into a central place and having somebody there that can manage the teams and other assistants with the producers there, who, or whoever’s at the AP, the showrunner, not reduce the office size in the future, and short, you know, coming future is probably more like what it’s gonna look like, you know, coming up.
Zack Arnold: Yeah, I think that you’re, you’re probably spot on there, where once we get over the worst of it, and it’s, you know, not illegal anymore to go to the office and be around a group, because this, this process of phasing in is going to be slow. I think you’re right, for a while. I think it’s going to be, we still have a central office, there’s a producer, a PA, maybe an assistant, maybe even, you know, an editor coming in and out on a fairly regular basis. So, there’s still going to be a hub, and then there’s going to be spokes that come out of that hub, and most people are going to work primarily remotely, probably for the next 12 to 18 months, while we really get through this, because until there’s a vaccine, we’re always going to be worried about safety and security, and whether or not we’re creating a flare-up, so that’s not going away anytime soon. And again, without having to go into politics or anything, we have a vaccine for the flu, and it still kills millions of people, or maybe not millions of people every year, but it still kills a lot of people every year. So, a vaccine is not going to solve our problems anyway. So, I think that, yeah, for the foreseeable future, there’s going to be some level of an office space, and there’s going to be some remote people as well. I don’t want to get into the tech specifically of how all this works, because I did a super deep dive into this a few episodes ago with Michael Commas, where we talked all about cloud computing and remote syncing drives, and all this stuff. So, I don’t want to get into any of that, but from a lifestyle perspective, I think you’re right that a large percentage of people will be home, but there’s going to be some in and out influx of people, and I think that there’s still going to be some, once we get to the point where it’s acceptable, some in-person collaboration when it comes to features. Features were already kind of most editors working from home, and directors either working remotely or going to some editor’s garage and sitting on the couch. Like, features have kind of been doing this for a long time. Anyway, TV is where it gets really interesting, especially in reality and unscripted, because in scripted we’ve got a team of six, 810, people. In reality, you’ve got a team of what, like 40. 50 plus people, like, you’ve got a lot of people on a reality show, so yeah, you’re going to need a, you’re going to need a local team as well. But again, I think that the important thing to focus on is how can I provide my services, and like you said, they were kind enough to provide the equipment. It sucked, but you weren’t gonna say not working with this iMac, are you kidding? They’re gonna be like, okay, fine, we’ll find somebody else that’ll do it. We can get it in five minutes, right?
Rich: Yeah, actually, as far as they’re giving me box rental, which is nice, something like 25 bucks a week for the computer and internet
Zack Arnold: Beer money.
Rich: So, yeah, it was the what they gave me didn’t even work, that’s the thing. I couldn’t upgrade to the highest operating system to even use it, so that’s kind of, you know, it’s like that’s forced to do something I was going to do anyway. It just happened sooner because of circumstances,
Zack Arnold: right? Exactly. So, one thing that I want to mention real quick, as has been brought up by a member of my community, so thank you, Cody, for bringing this up. You’re always a good proof reader. When I said that LA had the cleanest air in the world, cleanest air of any city in the world, he is correct, because my guess is that the air in the middle of Wyoming and Montana is still probably cleaner than it is in LA. So, I misspoke. I appreciate the correction, Debbie. You have had your digital hand up, so go ahead, Debby.
Debby: Hi, so you are going back to what you were saying about skills we can kind of learn and develop during this this time that would make us more valuable when you know when we go back to work. You just mentioned creativity as being one thing I wanted to go back to what you were saying about digital communication and wanted to ask you what types of things you find most valuable, or what, like what you would suggest ways that we can improve our digital communication. I know you’ve talked about things like Frame IO before, which I don’t really know anything about, but I feel like I, it’s probably something I should know about. So, maybe you could talk a little bit about about that.
Zack Arnold: Yeah, I’d be happy to. Does that sound like a good topic for everybody? Because I think this is a good follow-up question. So, to specify, I don’t think that it’s going to be about specific communication platforms like Frame IO versus Media Silo versus DAX PICS. Those are things that the studios and the producers are going to say, here’s the system that we use, you need to learn it. What I’m talking about is basic fundamental communication skills in a remote digital world. The first place that I think everybody needs to reexamine their workflow is email. I’ve been talking about this for years, so I’ve just.. I’ve.. the soap box is in my other room, so I can’t go into it for too long, but I’ve been banging the get out of your email inbox drum for years and years and years, and people are now seeing that they kind of maybe had sort of a system with email, but with the influx of communication that’s happening digitally, they realize their system isn’t as good as they thought, so first learning how to better organize and manage the volume of communication via email, I think, is going to be key, and you’re thinking, well, as an editor, why would I spend time learning email skills? That seems dumb. Well, think about how much time you spend in your inbox that you’re not in your timeline, and think about your ability to meet deadlines and your ability to not burn yourself out creatively, because you’re in your timeline, you’re in your email, you’re in your timeline, you’re in your email, that’s going to make you a more valuable, creative professional, just not being in your inbox. And then once you eliminate yourself from your inbox, you need to get better at communication workflows, where you can chat with your team, or with your clients, or whomever it might be, without getting sucked back into your inbox for that communication. So, my personal workflow that I’ve talked about before is email is for all outside communication, even with this community. How many of you, when you send me a Slack message, I respond for the most part either immediately, within five minutes, 10 minutes, maybe a few hours at the most. Pretty responsive, right? How many of you have tried to email me and get a response? Never days, you’ll be like, “Dude, I sent you an email. Yeah, I know. I don’t really care about email. I just.. I’ll see it, but for me, it’s not a priority unless it’s in front of me. And for me, Slack is where I live, and I do all of my communication, so I know if I hear a ding and it’s the Slack ding that’s important to me, and I need to prioritize it. No offense to all of you, but I will even put Slack on Do Not Disturb if I’m doing important creative work. But within one to two hours, I always come back to it. That’s my home base. I want to make sure that everybody is taken care of, their needs are met. I do the same thing on all of my shows. So when I go into a new season of a new show, I basically say to the producer, you want to get a hold of me, don’t do it via email, do it via Slack. What’s Slack? Oh, I’m so glad you asked. Let me show you. So, I built a Slack communication workflow on all of my shows. Some people use it, a few people choose not to, and that’s fine. But the point is that it streamlines communication, so I’m not stuck in my inbox all day long. And then, beyond that.. Oh, go ahead, Ann.
Ann Trulove: Just a quick question that I was on, I believe it was Angie Tarbeck, where we had, we used the Unity also to communicate, so that there were like little, if somebody needed to communicate, the little, a little, you know, a little message would pop down, and then you know you had an automatic response where you couldn’t get back to them. I always thought it was a great idea. I couldn’t exactly remember how it was set up, but you know it seems like it would be a great way to communicate. You know, being a little message, you’re tight, you know, you’re editing away, you know, you can just bing and say get back to you soon, but it worked out really, really well.
Zack Arnold: So, yeah, so I would agree that whether it’s the Unity, whether it’s a Google Chat, anything you can do to get out of your inbox is an improvement, even if it’s text message. However, if we’re talking specifically about Slack, and why I think it’s so much more valuable, it’s its ability to function and organize your communications right. So, if it’s just instant message, let’s say that 15 people on your team are all using the same Avid Unity thing, and you’re hearing the dings all day long, that’s almost worse than email. But with Slack, you can have specific channels where you organize this editorial team, this editorial team, the producer team. Here’s the channel where we talk about lunch. Here’s the channel where we have meme wars, and by the way, I make sure that’s a requirement. We have a meme channel, so you better bring a really mean, mean game if you’re going to work with me on Slack, right? But then at the end of the day, I can turn all that off and just communicate with my assistant editor, so I know that if he and I need to collaborate, I can mute everything else. Nobody can bother me when I’m in the zone, whereas if you’re just using text messages or Google chat or whatever it is, it’s on or off, it’s binary. So I believe that to a certain extent that can actually get worse than email, but it can be better if it’s managed correctly in their communication guidelines on your team. So I think that if I were going to go back to Debbie’s question, and I were going to break this into a step-by-step process. First one, learn to better manage your email. Second one, learn alternative communication tools, and not just, oh yeah, I know how to use Slack and send a message. Actually, learn how to organize it, learn how to make it more productive conversation. And then, number three, this, of course, is going to be a big one for me, is learning project management virtually. So, if I didn’t have my Trello workflow, and all of a sudden all this was thrust upon me, and I had to figure out, well, how am I going to work for my big giant binder of paperwork when somebody is over there and they were making my binders for me, and they were organizing it for me, and I have to do it myself. Well, crap, maybe I don’t want to do this anymore, but when you have in again, when it comes to project management, everybody probably knows I love Trello. I’m not saying you have to use Trello, but if you learn virtual project management, it doesn’t matter where you work, whether it’s in the office or from home, you have a more efficient way to organize all of your materials and keep yourself on track, so when I go back and forth between working in an office and working from home, and of course I never work from home ever when I’m on studio projects, I would never do that for security reasons, of course, but if I do end up working from home for some reason, my digital workflow is identical, I have my hard drive here, I have my timeline, I have my Trello board, I have my Slack channel outside of the physical environment. Nothing about my workflow changes, but for all those people that went from having a physical office and dependency on everything around them with no digital workflow, they can’t bounce back and forth between home and an office without tremendous amounts of friction. Whereas for me, all of my digital muscle memory and habits are identical in one environment or the other, because it’s a 100% virtual paperless workflow. So, I feel like those are the areas that, if you’re going to start developing skills that are not necessarily creative ones, but get you ahead in this new virtual world of working remotely, it’s all about digital communication, collaboration, and project management. Patrick, you have had your little blue digital hand up for a while now. Are you still good?
Patrick: Yeah, I mean, I have a sort of a slightly different tack on some of this. Yeah, we’re ready to switch topics, or
Zack Arnold: No. Let’s, let’s do it. Bring it.
Patrick: So, you know, I’m running into this hurdle, and I wonder if anyone else in the group is sharing this with me. But the issue I’m running into is this: you know, we don’t really know how long this is going to last for, and we’re like, we’ve said we’re looking at a scenario under the best case, which gets maybe some of us back to work in six months, which would be right at this time that another one of these waves might hit us, which would push employment back even longer. So, on the one hand, I’m trying to be as productive during this downtime as I can be to sort of sharpen the sword and prepare myself for the eventual run on work. The problem is that I don’t know about any of you guys, but if the prospect of not having a like reliable source of income is at best six months away, I have a really hard time going through my very well documented list of skills that I could brush up on to sharpen my sword when there’s no money coming in person. Six months, because you know our bills haven’t stopped and our rent hasn’t stopped, so I find myself sort of freaking out a little bit, and going, well, okay, do I need to then divide my time and start working on some other source of income, because there’s no editorial work, like, where else should I look, should I build a business, and I just wind up in this sort of like panic mode, because again, I know exactly what I would dive into in terms of preparing myself for the job rush, but I don’t know that I can wait for the job rush to happen, and so I’m wondering if anyone else is feeling that same sort of anxiety that pulls them away from that, and what they’re doing to combat it.
Zack Arnold: This is a really, really good topic to bring up. So, first of all, I’ll throw it to both the group here and also to Facebook Live. How many people are mentally in a space where you’re thinking, yes, I should be focusing on my skills, and I should be getting better at Trello and Slack and Avid and Script Sync and After Effects, and all this crap that’s been on my list forever, but I can’t mentally focus because all I’m thinking about is I’m broke, and I have no money coming in, and no money’s coming in for the foreseeable future. How many people find themselves in that spot right now? So, it’s little more than 5050 This is a conversation that I’ve had with multiple people privately. I think we talked about it very, very briefly in maybe one of our earlier calls as well. I can’t remember, but how many of you have been thinking to yourselves, huh, if my entire livelihood depends on other people shooting material on set and me being there and available to edit and sort through it when the time comes, maybe my livelihood shouldn’t depend on other people creating footage for me anymore. Has anybody been having that thought in the last month or two, so it’s a fair amount of you, so I know you and I, Debby, we’ve had this conversation already. I would like to bring it back to you for a second. What are your thoughts on all of this, as far as, like, you and I were talking about this even before there was even a pandemic to speak of? So, what are your thoughts right now about, well, I could be working on my skill set and gearing up to be a better scripted television editor, and maybe you can give a little bit of context for the audience about what you do for a living, but knowing that maybe you don’t want to rely on this for your future livelihood.
Debby: Yeah, no, I’ve had this for a long time, this thought, I’ve been a, you know, mostly a television editor for 10 or 15 years now, and you know, I’ve, and I’ve gone through, I’ve gone through a lot of phases with it, and, and you know, ultimately I love what I love, the job, I love what I do, but I’d also love a lot more flexibility with it, it’s, you know, you get sometimes you feel like you always have to say yes to a job. I’d love to be able to, you know, feel like I have the flexibility to turn a job down if I don’t, if it’s not the perfect project or something that I’m really interested in. And so, having another income that I’m not reliant upon someone else to pay me for has always been kind of something I’ve been looking for, which is why I started writing, and kind of doing some of these other things. So, yeah, that’s always.. I feel like it’s.. it’s definitely a skill I’d like to have. I guess I’m still kind of searching for what that skill is, thinking now. I mean, now I’m even just doing work for free, because
Zack Arnold: Myself included, actually not completely free, but you’re, you’ve been providing a lot of support, which I very much appreciate,
Debby: But I mean, and right now I’m happy to do it, like it’s actually making me happy, I don’t actually don’t have a lot of anxiety, because I feel like I’m working, and I, you know, I know I’m, I’m not, I’m not gaining anything in my bank account for, for it, but I do feel like I’m somehow being productive in some way, and for me it’s always been, I always wanted to do something a little, a little more fulfilling, not that cutting television shows isn’t greatly fulfilling, but
Zack Arnold: No comment,
Debby: But you know, I’ve always wanted to do something that kind of would touch people in a different way or help people in a different way, even if it meant, like, you know, working on documentaries or something that was a little more kind of educational, or that can get a specific message out there. So those are the kinds of things that I’m thinking about right now, as far as, like, you know, how could I maybe create something, you know, with material that’s already out there, or is there some, you know, something else that I can create on my own, and then use my skills as an editor to finish a project, or, you know, you know, talking to my friends who are editors and have these same thoughts too. And are there things that we can create together? I love what you were saying, Anne, about trying to start a business. With you know another editorial business or something, I think these are all really good ideas that we should all kind of be thinking about, and it’d be great to, you know, have this community to kind of bounce ideas off each other, and maybe, you know, who knows what partnerships can form. So,
Zack Arnold: Yeah, I love everything that you said, and I think that the one advantage that I have in this conversation is the freak out moment that so many people are having right now, about, oh my god, my entire livelihood is dependent on other people having footage for me, and if there’s no footage and no ideas, I have no livelihood. I had that freak out moment five years ago, so that’s the only reason I have a bit of a head start, as I realized I don’t want to spend the rest of my life until I’m retired counting on other people’s projects that I maybe or maybe don’t want to work on, and they don’t align with something that I’m fulfilled by. I don’t want to rely on them anymore. I’m a very hyper independent person, for anybody that has gone into Gretchen Rubin’s four tendencies, and most of the people on this call certainly have I’m a lethal combination of both a questioner and a rebel, so I question everything, and then I defy all expectations, and I will not do what other people tell me to do. And the thought that you get to tell me what I’m going to work on, and I have to say yes, because I don’t have the financial stability to be able to say no to things that don’t align with my creative needs, that freaked me out, so I thought to myself, what value can I provide to the world, and I think that’s the key. Right, it took a long time to figure this out, and I’m still figuring it out to this day. Literally, on this call right now is me figuring out how can I provide value to other people, and that’s the key. So, it’s not necessarily what skills do I already have, or you know, well, How can I make a buck right now? I mean, there’s all kinds of scams where I’m sure you can make some form of income given what’s going on presently, but you, like you said, that the key here is you want to be fulfilled, and the first step is you have to ask the question, How can I provide value to other people? All right, that’s really where it starts. I can stay with you, Debbie. I can go to you, Patrick, or I can go to the rest of the group. This is the first question that I asked myself when I had this freak out moment. It actually wasn’t five years ago, it would have been probably six or seven. So it was around the time that I started Fitness and Post. So Fitness and Post was not begun as a business. It wasn’t like, oh, I have this idea to make a bunch of money online, I shall call it fitness and post. If my idea were to make money, I would have failed miserably. So that started as just like a community organization and a hiking group, and it started to grow into something else. But at a certain point, I said there’s I’m able to provide real value to people, but I need to identify what that value is, and I need to learn how to deliver it more consistently. And that’s how it all began, so I’m curious, not worrying so much about here’s how much money I need to make, or what marketable skills do I have, or etc, etc, etc, for the people in this group, and for the people that are on Facebook Live that are watching right now, if you’re thinking to yourself, one of the best ways I can prepare during this hiatus, this forced hiatus that we all have is not only getting ready for the job market to open, but building some freedom and stability, so I can say no to things and have, for lack of a better or more unique word, a side hustle. How many of you here feel like in some way, shape, or form you have a value that you can provide to others? I just want to start this conversation about brain, so let me go back to Patrick first, because you’d kind of started this thread, and then I’ll bounce around. So, Patrick, if we just said, you know what, whatever you’re doing before the pandemic started, you’re not going to offer that service, or you’re going to offer less of it, or it’s going to be harder to find work. How can you provide value to other people?
Patrick: Well, my prior plan that I had, sort of cooking for a while, is an online business that I’ve already been sort of during my free time, you know, is fleshing out, developing, building resources for, so this has been something that’s kind of been in, I want to say, the back burner, but sort of factored in for a long time, because I’ve been in the same situation where, as someone who’s ultimately trying to direct, it’s the same thing, like I need to have the freedom to do the projects that I want to do, and more than that, the freedom to turn on the projects that will distract me from the things that I’m trying to do, and the only way that I could figure out how to do that was some other form of passive income, and for me, I thought, okay, well, I could, you know, without getting too specific into it, just develop an online course based on certain things that I’ve done in the past that have turned out to be beneficial or fruitful, that I know that there’s a need for in our market, but it’s the same thing. It’s like that’s always what I wanted to do. I could pivot to putting that on more of like a focus right now, but it’ll still take time, as you well know, to develop a course and start marketing it. And my other fear about doing something like that is we’re in a situation right now where I feel like so many people, specifically in the post production community, who have similar services or courses, but even beyond post production, because of coronavirus, people are offering that stuff for free, so you’re kind of like, okay, well, like that was sort of the model of what worked before this scenario that. Now, and I don’t know to what degree that would help me with where we’re at now. If universally everyone you know can’t afford the money for additional training or resources or things like that, so I, I find myself going, well, yeah, all right. Here’s my, here’s my pivot, and here’s what I would do, but is that still viable? I have no idea.
Zack Arnold: All right, so that I’m really glad that you brought that up, and I want to get to other people that raised their hands as well, but I think this is a really, really important point to hit. There’s a couple of different ways to go about this. The first of which is, I think, the approach that you’re taking, and if I paraphrase this in the wrong way, please stop me and correct me, but it’s mostly thinking about I kind of need to find a way to make some money online, because I’m freaking out about money, but I’m not totally sure what that needs to look like. I guess I could do a course, I guess, I guess I could do this, but if I put in all this time and I launch it and I don’t get any money in return because nobody wants to pay for anything right now, what a gigantic waste of time. And now I’m worse off than I was before. Is that a fairly decent paraphrasing of what you were saying,
Patrick: Yeah, more or less.
Zack Arnold: Okay, so the reason I say that is there’s a way to flip the script and look at this differently. What if, like Debbie was saying right now, it wasn’t about how do I generate income? What if all you did was learn and iterate and become better at discovering how you can provide value to the right people. You didn’t worry about money. I’m going to give you a perfect example. I just got a comment from Editor Monica Daniel, who’s a friend of mine. She’s a high-level assistant editor that was just transitioning to editor in the Greg Berlanti universe, and she says that I’ve been teaching creative editing to people through Zoom to stay in touch with storytelling. Right? I guarantee she’s not making money doing that now, but let’s use that as an example. Let’s say that Monica puts herself out there, which she always does. She’s always providing free value to our community, so she starts putting that value out there. She starts doing these Zoom calls, talking about storytelling, and all of a sudden somebody says to her, “Oh my god, the last hour of you and I and Zoom talking about storytelling, I totally would have paid you for that. She goes, ‘Hm, all right, that’s interesting. How much would you have paid me for that? Oh, I easily would have given you 50 bucks, right? Or I would have given you 100 bucks. Well, that’s interesting. What if I can find a few other people that I can do more of these free Zoom sessions with? Talk about storytelling, just pick their brain and see what they want. Maybe they’d be willing to pay for something, and maybe they wouldn’t pay for the session that we just did, but how could I enhance the value that I provide to them that then makes it so they would pay money? How many of you in this group are here for free now? I don’t mean right now, I mean like are on this call because you’ve always been here working and getting value from me for free, and you’ve provided no money in return. I should see one hand up. Debbie, your hand should be up. Other than Debbie, every single person here has put money in my bank account, and I am not ashamed of the fact that I asked you for money, because my feeling is, and you guys can disagree with me if you want to, I have bent over backwards to provide you way more value than you provided for me, would anybody disagree with that statement? Where you’re like, man, this is kind of a rip-off. Like, yeah, I paid for, and I kind of got what I wanted, but it kind of sucked. Like, would you guys agree that I provided more value than you paid for? It took me years to get to the point where I could get a group of people on a Zoom call and all collectively agree that more value was provided than you paid for, and that took me a long time of doing free sessions and talking to people and picking their brain and going to lunches, like Debbie and I had, like, a 90 minute lunch right before all this started, and I had even said to her, we went through all of her various challenges and this and that, and I said, you realize that not only was this valuable to you because I was giving you some advice, but I was using this as a research session for me to understand how to better provide value to you and people like you. So, how many of you, at some point early on in the process of discovering the podcast or the website or something else, said yourselves, this is creepy. It’s like the guy’s inside my head, and he’s writing to me. How many of you had that experience? Just about everybody, right? I want you to look at how diverse the people are on this call. This is not a bunch of 33 year old males that all have the same haircut in the same job, but somehow everybody in here is saying it’s like you were talking to me. Well, how is that possible? Years and years of talking to people, providing free value, understanding what they really need, what problems need to be solved, and identifying how I can solve their problems. So, looking at it that way, Patrick, or anybody else in the group, can you see a valuable use of your time for the next few months, not thinking so much short term, got to bring in cash, got to bring in cash, but doing the really hard, deep work that’s necessary to learn long term. If I want to pivot and I want to remove this sense of reliability or this necessity for other people to provide me footage. Could you see it being worth your time, even if you’re not getting paid, doing the research and discovering how you can provide value to people in return? And you can answer, by the way, that’s not hypothetical.
Patrick: Okay. Yeah, I mean, I, again, I can certainly see the value in that, and I would, I think the only struggle I would have is doing the same kind of thing, where I’d have to find a way to calm myself down enough to really focus on that, because my only fear is that setting aside the time that I would do to focus on those things, I would run into the same obstacle that I’m running into as I try to sit down and focus more on, like, my editorial stuff, my directorial stuff. Is that at the end of the day, you know, again, I can think of all the valuable uses of my time that I know would pay off in the long term. It’s just a matter of going, okay, but the runs still do so now. So, and I totally agree. I mean, I think that there’s long-term value in that, and it’s something I planned on doing, but there is still a part of me that honestly just feels like it’s, you know, it’s worrying about changing whatever they’re saying is, the drapes in the living room, while the kitchen’s on fire, and you know I’m doing everything I can to stay on top of it, but it’s just a matter of sustainability, you know. It’s like I find value in putting my time and effort into that, but it’s just hard when you’re like,
Zack Arnold: So what if we looked at it as not a binary choice? So you’re saying, well, I know that I should change the drapes, but the kitchen’s on fire. What if, instead, it was I’m going to spend most of my day putting out the kitchen fire? Maybe it’s not going to be completely out, but it’s enough that I can leave it for a few hours and my house isn’t going to burn down. Just for half an hour a day, I’m going to work on the process of changing the drapes. It’s not, I’m all of a sudden going to change my approach, and all day long I’m going to ignore the kitchen on fire, and all I’m focused on is the drapes, but what if you just said for an hour a day I’m going to get out of this zone of panic, and I need money short term, and I’m just going to dabble, just going to get a poke and prod a little bit, and I’m going to maybe reach out to a friend or two, or somebody that that I know well, and just have a conversation with them, conversation over. I’m going to go back into the world of figuring out how the hell do I make money now, so it’s not a matter of I’m going to change my whole strategy, but you just picked at it a little bit. Is that something you feel like wouldn’t be too overwhelming?
Patrick: Yeah, I mean, that’s that’s sort of the tech I’m taking right now, where I’m going, like, all right, where do I absolutely need to focus my attention? What’s the biggest priority? What can I do on that today, so that I feel better to approach these other things, and I’ve been just trying to take the baby steps, whether it’s clearing out an hour or two to focus on training stuff, because I know I’ve gotten all my sort of fires put out in the morning, like that’s kind of where I’m at right now. I mean, you know, I even did the super optimizer thing, of where I was constantly checking the stupid unemployment system in California. I finally just set up a service to monitor that for me and alert me of any changes, because I’m like, I’m not going to just spend all my time like frantically refreshing this page, like I’ve got other stuff to do. So, yeah, I mean, I think that that’s really the only solution I’ve come up with, is get to a point where I feel like I’ve done all I can for today, and then I’ll try to use that to convince myself to work on stuff that will benefit me tomorrow, but some days are better at it than others,
Zack Arnold: Of course. Yeah, so I’m not saying that this is going to be a magical switch that’s easy, but I want to plant the seed, both for you and for other people. So I want to start to wrap up, because once again it’s been almost 90 minutes, and it disappeared, but I don’t want to ignore the fact that when I brought up this idea of what value can you provide to others, I saw a bunch of hands shoot up, so I want to go through kind of rapid fire. Debbie, you have your hand up, and then I know a couple other people did as well, so I’m going to bring it back to you first, Debbie, and then we’ll hit a couple others, so you had your hand up, so go ahead, Debby.
Debby: Oh, I was just going to ask you quickly if you could kind of tell us how we can focus that conversation, like you asked if he would spend that half hour, you know, working on whatever that value is you can provide. Well, how do you learn to focus? How do you have that conversation with someone? What are the questions you’re asking them? How are you best getting that feedback as to what the value is that you can provide?
Zack Arnold: The there’s a larger version of that question that I could go into for hours, I could totally geek out on the survey process and the psychology of it, and anybody that’s on my email newsletter knows that I love my surveys and my research, and I love gathering that information. So, I won’t be able to answer all that now. The place that I would start is the simplest question. Think of a way that I provided value to you in the past, not even that somebody’s paid you for something. Like, don’t go to a producer and say, “You hired me to cut your show, what value did I provide? So, an example would be for you specifically. You’re trying to get yourself into this niche of talking about mindfulness and meditation, and combining that with the creative work that you do, and just having a more fulfilling, happier life, right? So you’re there’s a reason why you and I found each other, and you’re helping to contribute content, because there’s there’s a lot of alignments in what. We’re talking about, but you’re even more niched and more specific than I am. So, is there at least one person in your life that you know that has come to you for some form of advice in this general area, and you sat down and chatted with them and gave them some advice, and it was helpful?
Debby: Yes.
Zack Arnold: So, I would find that person, and I would just say, let’s get on Zoom, you know, maybe we can make it a lunch or a dinner, whatever it is that you want to do, and just talk to me more about that. Like, let’s go back to that first conversation where I told you to do x or y or z. What about that really helped you, and what was the process that you went through? And what they’ll do is they’ll clarify for you, well, you said this one thing and it totally stuck in my brain, and because that stuck in my brain, I did this and I did this and I did this, and now here’s where I am. Right, it’s just understanding the seed that you planted and what it is that people come to you for. So, the other thing you can ask is, what do people continually come to me for, over and over and over? Where it started for me was everybody would come into my office and say, dude, the standing desk is awesome. Wait, there’s a button on it. Like, again, this was like 12 years ago. Now it’s commonplace. Everybody has height adjustable workstations. When I was doing height adjustable workstations, there were hand cranks, so I could go up and down, but I still had my topo mat. I had my adjustable desk. People say that’s awesome. Why are you doing that? Show me where I can find that. How do I build an office space like this, that’s where fitness and post started. The value that I was providing, the reason people kept coming to me is, how is it that you’re healthy, insane, and you’re stuck in the same dark room that I am all day long? That was the value that I was providing for free, which turned into a free podcast, which turned into free hiking groups, which turned into a blog, which ultimately got us to the point where we are now, and in every step of the process there have been iterations, so if there’s like an example, would be in some of the people that are on this call were part of this process. Never in a million years did I ever think I would specialize in writing emails ever, never on my radar, but like clockwork, the same week in the coaching program, everybody would say the same thing. I know we’re supposed to focus on this one thing right now, but I’m really struggling with writing an outreach email to somebody. Can you walk me through it? One person asks me, “Fine, I’ll help. 20 people ask me the same question. There’s a pain point that I can help people solve. There’s value that I can provide. So I did a super deep dive down the rabbit hole. How can I teach people to systematize and simplify writing a great outreach email that somebody will respond to? I didn’t know that value was there to provide. Other people told me it was there to provide, but it all started with a single conversation that led to something else that led to something else. So, does that help at least get you get started without going into the psychology of surveys and immersion research and all that good stuff.
Debby: Yeah, it’s a good start. I guess I just never get good feedback from people.
Zack Arnold: If you’re not getting good feedback, this goes back to your original question. So I’m just going to be reinforcing what you already know. Poor feedback means you’re not asking good enough questions. You can always get good feedback from somebody if you’re asking the right question. So, again, that’s something that we could go into for a long time. I don’t want to get into it too much today, but if you want to learn a meta skill, learn how to ask better questions, both of yourself and of other people, which also applies very well to the creative world of being editors, because if you learn how to ask a better question of your directors and your producers, you get better and clearer feedback, and you’re able to give them better work in return. So, yeah, if you’re going to do anything, learn how to ask better questions. I think that’s going to help, but I know that you’re kind of saying, I know I need to ask better questions, what they are. So, I’m acknowledging that I realize this is a little bit of circular reasoning, but with the amount of time we have, I probably can’t cover it deeper, but I have a feeling we’ll talk about it again. So, it is already 230 but I don’t want to neglect that there were a couple other hands up, so we can go a couple extra minutes. Was there anybody else that wanted to talk about this concept of providing value? So, we’ve got Ann. So, Ann, we’re going to go real quick, and then we’re probably going to wrap it up. So, thoughts on providing value?
Ann Trulove: It seems to me that the principal value all of you is your intelligence and your creative ability, and what we’re talking to Zack about is not just that, but how to facilitate how to best facilitate it. I’ve worked with a lot of editors, some have died since, but it was always a belief in their own individual creativity, like, you know, Patrick, you were talking about, you wanted to be a director, believe in your own vision, believe that you are unique in that vision, and the only thing, and this was from an editor that I work with, who passed away, was that that’s what makes us unique, that’s what makes each one of us special, if our concern becomes all about. Money, then it sort of distracts us from what makes us individuals and people who have something important to contribute.
Zack Arnold: I would say that that is an excellent point, and probably a good, good place to start wrapping it up. I think that what maybe we’ve, we’ve stumbled upon. You guys can correct me if I’m wrong, but I think we found a really good topic to talk a lot more about in future sessions. I’m really excited about this topic, because I never talk about it in this community. I live like these multiple separate lives, and I have multiple identities. I’m basically a split personality, and I’ve got three of them. One of them is the one that everybody here knows very well, which is editor, creative professional, podcaster. The second identity is crazy American Ninja Warrior, trying to, you know, would-be athletes – that’s another completely different personality, where I have totally different networks of people. But the third one that I love talking about that, I never get to share with this version of my identity is how to build a sustainable online business. I love talking about this, and I have a whole network of people and a whole community in this space that are completely separate and walled off from this community, and I’m getting the sense from this call that maybe it’s time to start blurring those lines and start to bring that into the equation, because people would come to me wanting to know more about creativity, but now they’re saying, well, I can’t use my creativity for the skill that I provided. How else can I use my creativity to provide value and services to others? I’ve had to answer this question a lot over the last six years, so again, this, this would be the perfect example of why I’m using these calls. First reason is I want to provide a sense of community, like everybody here, just seeing the little boxes as we identified when all this started. Just that alone helps. Secondly, it’s talking through our issues, so I can understand where to provide value to people, and what I’m learning now is that maybe a place to go next for us and a lot of other people is we do much deeper dives into how do we create a side hustle so I don’t feel so dependent on outside work from now on. Does that make sense? And do you see how I use this conversation, Debbie specifically? Do you see how I use this conversation to identify value that I had no idea existed 90 minutes ago, and that’s what I do with every single call that I do, I’m always thinking, where is there an area where I can provide value that I’m not doing it already, and if there’s an area to provide value and I don’t know how to do it well, now I have a new skill that I need to learn, because people want to learn that skill. So, I think we may have a topic for a future session or two. So, on that note, we’ve gone well over the allotted time here, but I very, very much appreciate everybody that’s here, all the squares that show up every Friday to do these calls, and I meant squares, as in people, not the Zoom squares, because we’re all squares and nerds. So all the people that showed up to this call today, I appreciate all of you. I very much appreciate everybody that is in Facebook Live land, if you’re out in Facebook Live, and you enjoy this as soon as the session is over, please do me a favor and share it with people in your community, because I’m seeing that this is this movement is starting to grow, and again, I want to be able to provide more value to as many people as possible. Totally free, all people have to do is show up, listen, and participate. So, on that note, I appreciate everybody that’s here. I appreciate everybody in Facebook Live land. I plan to do these as long as all stay-at-home orders are in place. Might even do it beyond that, not making any promises yet, but as long as we’re stuck at home, you’re going to find me here 1pm Pacific every Friday as a group. We’re going to talk through our issues, so everybody that’s out there. I want you to be safe, stay healthy, and be well.
Transcribed by https://otter.ai
This episode was edited by Curtis Fritsch, and the show notes were prepared and published by Glen McNiel.
The original music in the opening and closing of the show is courtesy of Joe Trapanese (who is quite possibly one of the most talented composers on the face of the planet).
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