The Chris Voss Show - The Chris Voss Show Podcast – Magician and TikTok Star Justin Flom Talks About Hacking Algorithms and Creating Viral Content

Starting point is 00:00:00 You wanted the best. You've got the best podcast. The hottest podcast in the world. The Chris Voss Show. The preeminent podcast with guests so smart you may experience serious brain bleed. The CEOs, authors, thought leaders, visionaries, and motivators. Get ready. Get ready. Strap yourself in. Keep your hands, arms, and legs inside the vehicle at all times. Because you're about to go on a monster education roller coaster with your brain. Now, here's your host, Chris Voss. Hi, folks. This is Voss here from thechrisvossshow.com.

Starting point is 00:00:39 The Chris Voss Show. There you go, ladies and gentlemen. There are ladies and gentlemen. Welcome to the big show The Chris Voss Show is a show that loves you but doesn't judge you At least not as hard as your mother-in-law Because she never liked you anyway She wanted her to marry Bob

Starting point is 00:00:52 But the great way to get on your mother-in-law's good side Is to refer the show to her and her family and friends So she can just get more entertainment And have more fun in life And maybe she'll start to like you Or not So go to goodreads.com ForrestS christmas linkedin.com for test christmas christmas one of the tick tock and all those crazy places on the internet i'm really excited for the guests we have today he's

Starting point is 00:01:13 an amazing young gentleman and you may have seen him across the youtube the tick tockety all those crazy places on the internet justin flom is joining us on the show. He is a maverick creator and known as a magician. He's known as a magician. There's going to be a lot of editing on this show, evidently. Before entering into the realm of social media, has garnered billions of views, about 1.5 billion a month, as Carl Sagan used to say, yet maintains a relatively anonymous presence in his videos, defying

Starting point is 00:01:46 trends, algorithms, and even the primary rule of magicians. He's formerly seen on tours or television, tricking celebrities with his magic, and he dominates platforms like YouTube and TikTok, crafting content that hacks algorithms and captivates audiences worldwide. Renowned for his spray paint artistry and the whimsical trapdoor house featured in his videos, I've watched a few of those, his creative genius transforms ordinary spaces

Starting point is 00:02:13 into realms of fantasy and amusement. His kids love it. He's unconventional in his approach and views himself more as a data analyst, allowing back-end data to dictate his content strategy rather than personal preference. And his success lies in his ability to align his creations with the preferences of the internet embodying the adage that it's not about what he likes it's about what the internet likes that's

Starting point is 00:02:35 true always listen the audience welcome to the show justin how are you what's happening i'm great man thank you thank you i'm great as well it's wonderful to have you thank you for coming on the show give us your dot coms where do you want people to follow you on the internet anywhere google my name and you'll find some cool places justinflom.com is the official website but there's nothing there except for some fun pictures you got to go to youtube youtube and just go to that shorts tab hit most viewed and you'll see all of the billions of views that we've been getting over on youtube it's been totally bonkers this month in particular last week i was the number one u.s based creator on youtube seven spots above mr beast uh which is totally crazy we did over 500 million views last week it was wild congratulations i mean there's a lot of work and stuff that goes into

Starting point is 00:03:24 this sort of thing give us a 30 000 overview of some of the different how you look at what you do and and how you do it sort of thing and and we've alluded to a little bit but i think people want to hear it from you yeah look you can look at it as oh wow this justin guy he's an entertainer he's getting 500 million views last week it must be really special what he does. And yeah, maybe, but actually I think, no, I just looked at the data side and am thinking very differently about the influencer economy, which is this social media world. And instead, if you look at what the audience wants and you look at retention, I think anybody can hack that algorithm and end up at the top of the feed as I was last week, as I've been many times. And it's a really cool place to be, but

Starting point is 00:04:13 it's all about different swipe feeds or scroll feeds. And YouTube Shorts, that's a scroll feed. So that's an algorithm that you can hack. TikTok, also a feed and you know TikTok's in the news this week it'll either stay or go we'll find out what do you think is going to happen you know I really don't know I think they they gave it a year and I believe any sort of law like that has is probably going to end up in the supreme court litigated I think right I imagine TikTok or whoever the powers that be will will file appropriate lawsuits, usually probably under free speech. I don't think it's ever going to be something that's going to stick. I don't know that there is a legal way that they can say that it can be shut down. I just don't know.

Starting point is 00:04:56 Yeah. If they force a sale of it, it kind of goes to a monopoly side of things. To me, it appears as though some platforms have better lobbyists than TikToks and that they've figured out, all right, if we ban our competition here or force a sale of our competition to us, they can win. But that's on the big boy side. What about us, who are actually on the platforms creating? The thing is, I made a journey from live entertainment or live interactions to the digital. I've had a chance to speak for Walmart, brought me into their headquarters so that I could speak. What was it like transitioning from in-person interactions with your clients, your customers, your audience to digital? And the biggest thing when I talk to people like you, when I talk to

Starting point is 00:05:48 anybody who asks me, hey, I want to do this online thing, or hey, I've got my company, I've got my small business, how do I get in front of the eyeballs that you are? So there's a term I coined back in 2020, when really the algorithm was taking off and during this COVID lockdown, and that is barrier to exit so we all know barrier to entry right barrier to entry easy common thing that we talk about but barrier to exit this is how easy is it for your client your audience a person you're engaging with to leave now when I was doing live shows I would have to suck really bad for somebody to get up and leave my show. Why?

Starting point is 00:06:29 Think about it. They've got a babysitter. They've parked their car. They've come out. They've bought a ticket. There's the social thing of there's a thousand people all sitting there. To get up and leave, you have to be like really not enjoying yourself. So, very high barrier to exit exit if i think that it's good

Starting point is 00:06:46 that the audience sat through the show that's not that impressive however on any sort of social media platform the barrier to exit is one inch one inch swipe of that finger and they're gone so very low barrier to exit and the lower the to exit, the better you have to be or the more tailored to that audience member that you need to be. And this is what I spoke about with Walmart because you are in the store in person, high barrier to exit. You're already in the store. You have to have a pretty bad interaction to leave. However, on social media, they can just swipe, and the entire Internet's worth of content is at their fingertips.

Starting point is 00:07:33 Not only that, we've been trained to understand that that news feed is about to feed you something tailored for exactly your tastes, for what you want to watch. So, of course, they're swiping like crazy, unless you can stop the swipe grab their attention and engage them for the length of that content having the highest watch time possible and that's how you win the feed is stop that swipe keep them till the end that's everything really that explains why my twin tinder gets a lot of left swipes actually that's right it might be a different algorithm sort of thing

Starting point is 00:08:05 but yeah we've all been there the one i never thought of that the one is the you know that's how people do and tiktok is it's so interesting how it's consumed i've always been fascinated since covid when it really kind of came to scale about how addictive it could be i mean i was sitting and watching i would i would sit and start at like 11 o'clock going i'll watch a couple tiktoks before i go to bed then suddenly two hours yeah it would be 4 a.m i'd be like this is bad it's amazing and now and here's the here's the crazy thing tiktok to me is the everyman right and you and tiktok is we say that but it's you know it's like kleenex it's it's the brand name for the swipe feed, whether it's TikTok, YouTube shorts, Facebook reels, X, any of these things. It was put up directly against Quibi, which was this

Starting point is 00:08:54 little startup from Hollywood, which was going to do short form Hollywood content. And then you have TikTok, which is any grandma can put up a TikTok thing. And you've never heard of Quibi, if you're listening to this, because it's gone. It failed miserably. It had the best chance of success ever, which was everyone was at home on their phones during lockdown. And it still failed because the public chose the everyman. The public said, you know,

Starting point is 00:09:22 we don't want to see Leoo dicaprio do short form content well we'd rather see him in a tarantino film but we do want to see what if we're if we're swiping through our phone we want to see us we want to see things we can do or at least that we think that we can do so as i've taken this is my house here in the background i've got a stage there's a repelling thing above my head where you can come down from the second story. There's a trap door room, a foam pit room. It's insane here. But every one of these pieces of content that I've done, I'm lucky enough that my job allows me to make my house a silly fun house. My kids love it. Every piece of these, all these little silly videos are filmed from a perspective of, hey, you could do this too.

Starting point is 00:10:06 This wasn't that hard, actually. This didn't break the bank. I just, you know, just a couple holes in some sheetrock and you can have a secret passageway too. And that's all calculated. I don't want this stuff to seem crazy impressive. Actually, we'll dumb down the content way lower because it's just more fun to swipe through content that feels like

Starting point is 00:10:25 you know i'm going to save that video i might do that you're never going to do it but you might you might yeah i i guess one of my first question is i'm watching a video different videos right now of you destroying stuff on your on your main page how early on when you started this how did you convince your wife who appears in a lot of your videos to i'm gonna take some hammers and punch some holes in the wall how did you luckily when the money starts coming in to that amount and it's very easy i so i've got a really crazy situation here i'm very lucky so my wife anna she also does content she's also been very successful so the cool thing is is my wife lives across the street from me. We have, she lives in her own house.

Starting point is 00:11:07 I have this house. We got married. We did not move in together. This, my friends, is the secret to marriage. It's the most bougie way of living. I mean, I know that that's a, I don't want to be ignorant. Of course, not a lot of people can't live that way. We're very blessed and very lucky.

Starting point is 00:11:23 But the reason that it's nice is this house. Look, in that room right there, in the other room, we are currently taking a chainsaw to a wall and hiding a safe behind a picture frame that will explode with 100 spring snakes when you open the safe. Who hurt you, Justin? No, I'm just kidding. Yeah, it's insane. So that's just happening over there. And then upstairs, my daughter's bedroom is turning into a foam pit. I'm just kidding. Yeah, it's insane. So that's just happening over there. And then upstairs, my daughter's bedroom is turning into a foam pit. That's just today. Yeah, my wife is

Starting point is 00:11:51 over at her little spa retreat. And she goes, yeah, you do whatever you want to do. Your house. Yeah. What are you doing over there? Okay, that's fine. You keep that going. But we spend every day together. So every night we get to go, hey, do we want to sleep in the foam pit or in the bed across the street? I like this idea because I'm 56. I'm at the point with relationships where I don't want you in my house and I don't want to be yelled at about the toilet seat and stuff and whatever. So you keep your house, I'll keep mine and we'll just visit each other. It's a very silly setup, but I think we cracked the secret to marriage. There you go.

Starting point is 00:12:24 Tell us a little bit about yourself. How did you grow up? What were some of your influences? Were you always this creative? What are some of the ways that you became who you were? So, man, I was listening to John Cleese speak on creativity the other day, and he was saying that IQ actually doesn't have anything to do with creativity they found in the research. Instead, it's about getting

Starting point is 00:12:46 any individual into a state of play that's where the creativity comes and that's why all kids are seen as creative but slowly we beat that out of them with the school system and government jobs and just so eventually a kid is 30 years old and they're no longer creative because they've just had a beaten out of them. But if you can get into a state of play, and I was lucky because I was raised by a magician. I was born into a family of magicians. So from the age of two, I was jumping in and out of magic boxes. I don't remember most of my childhood because most of it was spent in a magic box. It's not child abuse.

Starting point is 00:13:23 It's just magic according to court documents i guess but the thing is i so i got out of high school and i went straight into show business i started a little show in branson missouri this little sleepy showbiz town in the middle of the country and that was the first business venture totally failed lost half a million dollars that was a huge learning lesson because if you build it, they will come. No, that's such a lie. It's a great film, but wow, what a lie. And so I was able to see what it was on the ticket side,

Starting point is 00:13:59 on the in-person side of having to sell yourself to get somebody through the door. I will never do that again. So I live in Las Vegas, but I don't want a Las Vegas show by any means. Instead, I get to be here and send the content out and it's become ambush content. A big piece of the swipe feed is nobody has ever chosen to watch one of my videos by choice. No, they swipe up and there's my big dumb face taking a chainsaw to my banister. And someone goes, why is he doing that? And I will show you why. It's only going to take a minute and then you get to see something cool at the end of it. It's good payoff. So that's what I do now. But growing up, it was magic.

Starting point is 00:14:45 I had, it was very lucky. The market told me how much value I had as a magician. It was just shy of a million a year, which is amazing. That's one of the top magicians on the planet. You know, you've got the big guys, David Copperfield and Penn and Teller, and those guys doing the millions and millions. But then there's guys who are at my level and we're working for corporations like Coca-Cola got to do some ad campaigns with Coke and Heineken benefit cosmetics. It was cool. Then COVID hit and,

Starting point is 00:15:17 and all of those live things went away. What do you do? And you can sit and wait for the market to come back to do what you want to do. Or you can say, all right, let's take a look at what the market is doing. Can I fit? Can I shift? Can I change? Can I evolve?

Starting point is 00:15:36 And that's what I ended up doing is changed everything. And I actually found way more fulfillment and freedom in creating without magic tricks because not to get too esoteric, but magic is actually quite limiting. It's the impossible. You'd think it's the most freeing thing in the world. Oh, you can do anything. You can do the impossible. There's only 10 impossible things. Like when you categorize it down you can appear you can disappear you can

Starting point is 00:16:06 teleport yeah but teleporting is really just appearing and disappearing in different places so once you limit it down you got 10 effects that you're going to do different iterations of and that's what we've magicians have been doing for the last 500 years but when you're not a magician and you don't have to fool somebody now now you can do the coolest things ever. And what I love is we've started revealing magic secrets for all of our videos because magicians have the coolest secrets that we don't tell anybody. Because previously to an open source world like we live in now, it was imperative to keep all these secrets so that we could have our job. Now it's not necessary. Now you can have 100 million views in a magic secret and it doesn't damage that secret.

Starting point is 00:16:55 It doesn't ruin it for other magicians. And you can just show off really cool things like trap doors and invisible thread or or fake thumbs where you can hide things it's it's crazy really fun how does your family feel about you exposing the magician's secrets it's a great question i have been kicked out of some magic organizations it's actually big news right now in the magic community because there's a couple magazines doing stories on it and and they're unhappy with me exposing magic secrets and it's kind of this debate where some of the heavy hitters in magic have come over to my side and they realize no this is different this is something new this is a new way of presenting magic in fact i believe the world would be a better place for magicians if everyone knew about as much magic as my dad, who, you know, he's a magician.

Starting point is 00:17:51 He's an amateur magician. He's an insurance salesman, but he does magic. And he loves it more than anybody. So even though he knows how David Copperfield does like half of his stuff, he's going to enjoy the show even more because he really values when he's fooled. And that same thing for regular people, I think. So I agree with you.

Starting point is 00:18:10 I would agree. Right. We, when I, we had a, when we had an acting and modeling agency, the nine in the two thousands, I got to sit on casting things for movies and TV.

Starting point is 00:18:21 And I would sit with the casting directors and stuff. And you would see the bad actors yeah who just didn't act well and then you see those magical actors that could just transform a scene and now i appreciate going to the movies more even though i kind of know the back end of what goes on with the work of it but now i can appreciate movies so much better because like you say i enjoy the show i think that's you know look when you go to jurassic park it's we understand that those are you know special effect dinosaurs or whatever the thing is it doesn't take away from the magical sense of what you're watching even though you know it's

Starting point is 00:18:59 fake and even though you know oftentimes exactly how the thing is done, you can totally get sold into the illusion, especially if it's an optical illusion, something that fools your eyes. So what we're playing with in a lot of the videos is we'll show you where the mirror is for the magic trick. And you're watching it and you're like, wow, that fools my eye. I know where the mirror is, but look, it looks like he disappeared or whatever. So the magic still works in that fun little spot in your brain that it tickles, even though we've given them the secret. And giving them the secret is that thing that stops the swipe. They go, what is he doing with that mirror? It's an interesting thing. Yeah.

Starting point is 00:19:38 I've watched the mirror with you. I think you're on the lawn or something. It's a recent video. Yeah. It was enthralling. I'm like, what's going on? Where I kind of know, you know, what goes on with green screens and things like that. It definitely was intriguing.

Starting point is 00:19:49 And yeah, I like your videos because they, from the moment you see the first second or two, you're like, what the fuck is going to happen next? Exactly. What's that? That's the thing. So you, you talk about data and analyzing and how you built your career on Tik TOK and YouTube. How did you, when you first

Starting point is 00:20:05 started doing these videos on TikTok, how did you know things were working? Did things initially hit for you or did it take some time to dial it in? Yeah, I used to do magic on social media and this would be an example for any of your listeners who do social media, either for their small business or for their own entertainment. You always start by doing what you like on social media, either for their small business or for their own entertainment, you always start by doing what you like on social media. And I could not get magic to take off the same way that silly things would take off. I just did one stupid thing where I had a gag, just a trick bar stool thing, just a comedy joke. And boom, it did 10 million views in a day. And I was like, okay, all right, maybe I've got this thing. So let's throw up some magic tricks.

Starting point is 00:20:51 Nothing, nothing, nothing, nothing. So it took looking in the back end to the watch time and what the viewer was investing in what they wanted to see just in watch time. And highest watch time is always going to win we don't really have any other metrics we've got likes and emojis and other things that platforms will track but it really is watch time that is king we just saw i saw as i'm looking at the data of magic tricks people kind of all right, my life isn't going to be any different after the end of watching this magic trick. A, this bastard is not going to tell

Starting point is 00:21:33 me how he does the trick. He's a magician. They never tell the secret. And B, I don't know if it's a camera trick, if that's an actor or anything. There's this digital screen in between us. So even if it's the best magic trick ever, I can't trust it. So you know what? Swipe. All that happens in a half second calculation in someone's head. And if there's not something really visually enticing, they're out. But then early in the first week of COVID lockdown, I put up a little bar bet, a little betcha that I invented with my previous wife. I had her hold a credit card in a certain way that just physiologically, you can't drop the credit card if your fingers are intertwined this way. It's just an old bar bet. And that thing

Starting point is 00:22:21 got 50 million views in a couple of and i was like whoa okay hang on what is happening here this was a stupid video like we're in our pajamas in the bathroom and we're just doing this stupid thing but it went banger so i was like all right let's try some other things then pretty soon you're able to see okay people want to see things where there's stakes so in this one i told my then wife if you can figure out the secret to this bet you get to buy whatever you want on the credit card oh that's interesting it's more interesting than a card trick and then next it was what's something that you can do because people are selfish man we you're swiping the feed and you're looking for something for yourself something that you would like to veg out and just enjoy watching or

Starting point is 00:23:12 something that maybe you want to try yourself whether it be a new way of making a s'more in the microwave or a new you know special thing that all these life hacks like oh wow that's a nice way of getting toothpaste out of the thing or whatever so as soon as you put the viewer as the centric part of the creative process what do they want to see everything changed and that changed the focus the first month of creating content it was forty thousand dollars brought in from splitting with the with the platform and i was like whoa next month next month, $80,000. And I'm like, holy shit, this is insane. And then the next month, it kept going up until about a year later,

Starting point is 00:23:52 we had a million-dollar month. It was insane. And it's ebbed and flowed. As people, as friends get into the social media world, I go, hey, buckle up for the roller coaster where you're going to think, do not make any decisions as though this is a sustainable income forever. It is just craziness because now I'm on YouTube. So that was mostly Facebook earnings back in the day. Now YouTube is this YouTube shorts. So I have a billion views and that'll equal 70 or $80,000.

Starting point is 00:24:26 Wow. Now that 70 or $80,000 is a lot of money. Also 1 billion views puts you as one of the top earner, one of the top viewed on the platform, 70 or $80,000 doesn't sound like that much again. You know, when you're talking about billion views, because a billion views, if it was long form because remember we're talking youtube shorts a billion views long

Starting point is 00:24:52 form would be like a hundred thousand dollars yeah as opposed to you know so it's it or no sorry is that no sorry a billion views is a million dollars oh is it okay yeah a billion views would be a million dollars which is a lot different than sixty thousand dollars so it's it's gonna ebb and flow that's why they call them shorts because the money's shorter on the short that's right we're in the short war right now who's gonna win the short war facebook with their reels t TikTok, soon to be banned, maybe banned, maybe selling. YouTube Shorts with shorts. Or now X is getting into the game. And the rumor, the big rumor, is that Vine is going to come back.

Starting point is 00:25:36 It's funny because Vine is the original TikTok. Right? Six second looping. It was really successful, yeah. So it was successful. i don't know why you know there was a meeting done between the top creators of vine and twitter who owned it and you know the creators were asking for money they said hey we gotta we gotta get paid we're bringing all these people to the platform i forget the exact dollar amount but Twitter threw out a dollar amount, and this is 20 creators in a room or whatever.

Starting point is 00:26:07 And the creators go, ah, no, we'd need probably, you know, double that for each of us. And Twitter goes, each of you? No, I was, this was the lump sum we were saying that you guys would all split. So they were way off in what the creator and and this was the first real social media company that went down because creators left in my opinion at least yeah i'm a jack of business zone they're all fucking idiots they're the clown car that crashed into success right they've i mean that is that is the definition of twitter the clown car that crashed into success. And they tried their hardest for 10 years to destroy that platform with self-sabotage because they're the Three Stooges.

Starting point is 00:26:55 And somehow it succeeded. I mean, it's hard to measure Twitter's success, really, considering it lost money most of its life. Now it loses even more. We'll see how it goes. But Vine had so much potential. I mean, that that's it that's kind of the way it works at what how do you come up how do you come with all the energy to do the creative stuff and come up with the creativity because your stuff is extraordinarily creative uh thanks man you're either a madman and yeah or you have a good team around you how do you keep how do you keep the so lucky look as far as team goes i it's it's me and a guy i got my guy russ and and when people

Starting point is 00:27:36 hear that that's what breaks their brain they go wait a second are you the guy building your trap door i'm like hell yeah i am it's it's it's disconcerting because then you're like wait a second i don't know if i want to stand on this trap door you didn't get a contractor in here come on uh code yeah we've got as far as the team goes i've got me and my guy russ i brought him out from branson missouri he worked for me when he was like 15 years old when i was doing a magic show and i called him you know 15 years later i go hey there's some crazy stuff happening out here you should come out but we bring out other people contractors and other things to help us do things but as far as the

Starting point is 00:28:15 idea goes right now we just go what would be fun what would be like like you just go what would we do if we could do anything you know like a slide in the bedroom yeah sure let's do it a trampoline in two closets stacked on top of each other yeah let's go let's do it and now i'm lucky because i was able to build up to an audience that was paying for these ideas to happen it'd be pretty difficult to do this starting from square one and invest into putting all these secret passageways and stuff in but the ideas are a lot of watching a lot of cartoons okay a little bit of marijuana and some cartoon watching it's good yeah this is las vegas's allowed. And then the other thing is you have to track what the viewer is watching. As I said, data is making all the decisions.

Starting point is 00:29:13 But spray paint art is also a big piece of what I'm doing now. It's really surprised me. I did a spray paint video a couple years ago, and it did millions of views. And I was like, I love spray paint art I've always had an interest in on the side let me do some more of it and it just kept going up and up and up and what really got creative was when we started combining real world problems with the spray paint art so now the creative process is what problem do people run into like a hole in the wall or a broken sink or something that we can fix with a painting and the painting doesn't fix it at all in fact it

Starting point is 00:29:53 usually highlights the problem more which makes it fun so i knock a hole in the wall and instead of fixing the hole with just an easy patch we draw tom and and Jerry with Tom, the cat smashing the mouse as he runs out of the hole. Now the hole's fixed because it's art. So we've got some cool ones coming up. We've got Darth Vader stabbing Obi-Wan with a lightsaber that's shooting out of a wall that we're painting coming up. And we've got Thor's hammer, which will be stuck to a wall. And if you are worthy, you'll be able to take the hammer off of the wall

Starting point is 00:30:27 with the painting of Thor right there. Most people won't be worthy, but that's a lot of hidden electromagnets in the wall now to hold a Thor hammer. But you just go, what would be cool to do? We should paint Thor. Obviously, we need a hammer coming out of the wall, you know, that sort of thing. I think you're keeping Home Depot in business. Yes.

Starting point is 00:30:47 Yes. Or Lowe's if they pay. Home Depot, Lowe's, I'm open to sponsorships. You need a sponsor for one of those two people there, man, because you're using that. The biggest problem with these, so we've pitched these sponsors, but we end up moving too fast for the companies. So six months ago we pitched hey we're building a trampoline room we're using either a lot of ryobi or a lot of dewalt you tell us which

Starting point is 00:31:12 but then you know by the time they get around to talking to us we go oh yeah we already built it it's it's in the house it's at 200 million views right now we told you guys about it six months ago we got to keep moving we got to go some opportunities again on screen time there yeah i mean they really are look it's it's a fun game but you it's a monster that has to be fed every single day yeah that's the hard thing yeah yeah i mean that's the other thing that youtubers go through i was an early youtuber and we used to make pretty good money back in the day being reviewing products yeah the the constant this the you know constant creating and the constant doing and the filming sometimes people

Starting point is 00:31:57 get burnt out how do you keep from getting burnt out i'm burnt out right now. It's just, I, we, we have, luckily it's a lot of fun and we, we blow off steam in a good way. The, you have to be surrounded by, yeah, but here's what we did to blow off steam last night. This was the best. So again, this is the fun, crazy fun house. There's a tunnel of doors, moving bookcases. There's a lot of secret crazy stuff

Starting point is 00:32:26 in the house i had over like 20 friends last night because it was my birthday this week happy birthday me thanks 38 it's it's getting there 40 almost but we did a lights out household hide and seek with that everyone's a grown adult okay we're all almost 40 and i thought maybe they were you know i thought people would hang out and and like hide behind doors and stuff these people there was one woman we couldn't find in our house for almost an hour okay it was great and this is my house i was the seeker so i'm looking under the trampoline in the closet. Again, this is a very, very weird house. And it was pitch black.

Starting point is 00:33:11 All the lights were out. We were playing Alfred Hitchcock music loud over the speakers. It was creepy. It was fantastic. That's how we don't get burned out. We have a lot of fun doing stupid stuff. We should have filmed it because it was. That would have been fun. Yeah. That reminds me of a party I went to where you had to put your keys in a bowl at the door

Starting point is 00:33:28 yes i don't know yeah that was a different different kind of party yeah yeah yeah swinging good time it's a lot of darkness and finding people anyway so there you go so i overall i mean a lot of creators would be probably hurt a lot of great people that are entertaining people would be hurt on TikTok if it were shut down. I'm hoping they're just going to take it to SCOTUS and, you know, the First Amendment sort of issues and fight the law that's done that. I don't know. Look, TikTok doesn't pay enough anyway. So I wouldn't be unhappy with them leaving because they've done a couple very problematic things.

Starting point is 00:34:06 So first of all, I'm a TikTok user and I like the feed and I like what it shows me. But also the theft on TikTok is rampant where TikTok has become actually the first place that me and my friends will upload to because if we upload anywhere else, some thief in another country will immediately rip that video and put it up on their own channel on TikTok and start earning money on it. And TikTok goes, we wish to help you. And that's it. They don't help. There's no help. There's nothing they can do. They just go, you can't earn on your video here because it's uploaded by somebody

Starting point is 00:34:45 else over there. First to upload is the winner. Really rough for the creators on that platform. And if you are monetized and you have your piece of content monetized, the dollar amount return is so low. It's really, really rough. So as a creator you feel like you have to be on tiktok because your content is going to be on there anyway but you just are bummed by how many views you're getting and not being paid for so i hope if tiktok goes away we want i don't know if elon's gonna do it or somebody to create some place that has some good competition for the metas and the googles to go hey we're paying like come over here maybe it'll happen my bet is google these days yeah that's my bet i think they've just they've historically got the best the best system to pay creators it's kind of

Starting point is 00:35:46 facebook all roads lead back to them eventually if they don't buy you it's just they're just the bms of whatever i heard that i was reading the other day and i and i think i read that because india shut down tiktok i think it was india shut down tiktok and banned them it was India? Shut down TikTok and banned them. It was over some military crap. That's the real reason YouTube Shorts and the other one got started in competing with TikTok is they saw that there was an opportunity there.

Starting point is 00:36:16 Do you have the ability, like on YouTube as a creator, I have the ability to go in and cut off all those people who stole my videos and file copyright. Yeah yeah youtube is a lot better at protecting content for sure tiktok does not have that and even meta you know is better it's it's glitchy but meta has a system of rights managing your content and making sure that you're getting paid on your content and historically meta's paid me more than any other platform.

Starting point is 00:36:45 So I should be kind to Meta. It's a really rough time over on Meta right now. It's very glitchy and rough. And I want, if they're listening, I want to post to your platform, okay? But it's really hard to, and pages get flagged. There's no transparency on Facebook. You can get in a lot of trouble, and you don't know it. Whereas YouTube, man, they tell you everything because they want creators to have the knowledge,

Starting point is 00:37:23 to create the good content, to keep the user base there. And I think that Meta just has too many products for them to be able to be thinking about the video world. Meta has Marketplace and Messenger and WhatsApp and Instagram. They've got all of these other places. And we haven't even talked about Instagram where there is nothing but theft and no payment it's rough but you know look there's never been more eyeball eyeballs on content on smartphone devices it's a really fun time to be a creator and there is money there it just might end up being monetizing the content not through the platform but through sponsored content and that's probably the future so whoever figures out how do we connect creators with brands

Starting point is 00:38:12 in a better way they'll win x i know x is i'm not a big fan of elon musk but he he i i would hope that it would work we we've been for the past two or three months on the live show, getting more live views on X than ever before. Yeah. He's been trying to do that thing with, you know, Don Lemon was a huge fallout. Right. There's been some huge fallouts. And, you know, Facebook did that.

Starting point is 00:38:37 They screwed a lot of people. You know, they tried to get YouTube creators to come over and do stuff. And they really buggered people, and they just didn't have trust. And so people just stayed with YouTube and went, we're not doing that. So it'll be interesting to see if they can do it. But I have been surprised we get more lives now on Twitter than everything because we don't have a big account over there. Yeah, it is this magic thing that platforms can do where they go,

Starting point is 00:39:02 hey, we want to attract people and they can boost. They have a switch. They have a magic switch where they can go, yes, we're going to give you a lot of reach because we want you to be motivated and they want you to consolidate your follower base over there. Facebook would love to have a Mr. Beast. But also, so there's a big difference between destination content and algorithm content. And I'm mostly an algorithm creator. You got a Dude Perfect or a Mr. Beast, that's destination,

Starting point is 00:39:35 meaning you see a thumbnail and a title and you decide, I want to watch that click. And you go to the destination to view the content as opposed to swipe feed stuff which is tiktok and shorts and reels where you swipe up you don't have a thumbnail you don't have a you get a title and the video started and then you decide whether or not you're going to hang out there so like i said no one's ever chosen to watch one of my videos. They swipe up on my stuff. But that's how Facebook is built. And the most money is always going to come from long-form content, meaning something longer than a minute. And there was only one swipe feed that had long-form content. It was meta.

Starting point is 00:40:18 It was Facebook. Everywhere else, it was short. So Facebook paid me. I've got a lot more money in my bank account from Meta than any other platform because that was where my long versions of all these videos lived. Now, since then, the algorithm has shifted and there's different things with Facebook where, okay, looks like my 20 million follower page over there isn't going to be given the reach that it was previously. That's a meta thing. You deal with it, but that's just, it's kind of the way the platforms work. You know, are you a creator in the long form space or the short form space? Money's in the long form. Yeah. And see, that's been our challenge. We love the long form and short form, especially for what we do, is really hard to do.

Starting point is 00:41:06 I mean, you can try cutting little bits out of the podcast. YouTube did do something that was interesting that maybe foretells their future from what we've been talking about, where they recently, it looks like they're trying to give Apple a run for its money on podcasts. And so they recently reached out to all the podcasters like us, and they actually sucked up the space for podcasts and put it recently reached out to all the podcasters like us and and they actually sucked up the space for podcasts and put it on youtube music i think it's it's on there and of course it's on my youtube channel now where there's a section for our podcast i don't know how well they're going to do it because itunes is dominant in yeah in that space but i can see how they're

Starting point is 00:41:42 just trying to you know stay stay the best of everything. Look, we've got four companies battling for the same thing. And look, I wouldn't be surprised if all of a sudden we see friend requests on Netflix. Like it all blurs the line between just viewer content and the friends thing. Who knows what's going to happen,

Starting point is 00:42:02 but it's a, it's an exciting, it's an exciting thing and i think everybody should be creating and putting into it because what we've found is that everyone has the ability to create content and get paid for it like even my mom who you know she's 60 she can throw up a video and get millions of views accidentally and if if we create a system that gets creators paid even better then it's a really cool marketplace for the creator there you go you give me hope because i was about to give up everything go to only fans so yeah working on

Starting point is 00:42:37 this tiktok thing a little better yeah the you if you think the competition is hard on youtube go on only fans oh my goodness that there's a lot of competition that's hard on YouTube, go on OnlyFans. Oh, my goodness. There's a lot of competition that's hard on OnlyFans, I hear. Yes. There's a guy called the Girth Master that I heard about, and evidently there's some hard content over there. I'm not sure what that means. Yes.

Starting point is 00:42:58 Excuse the pun. Right, exactly. That's what we do. As we go out, final question to you. Any quick advice you give to creators that want to grow up and be like you and have the success? Yeah, man. The cool thing is start. Just start.

Starting point is 00:43:13 If you are a creator and you want to get in the game, okay, who was the, there was a great story. I think it was Rodney Dangerfield. Could be somebody else, but it might have been whoever it was hanging out at the comedy store. And some guy walks up and says, hey, I'm thinking about being a comedian. And Dangerfield goes, oh, you'll never do it. You're thinking about it? You'll never do it. Never.

Starting point is 00:43:36 You just got to do it because you're going to suck and be terrible for years until you're good so you just got to get that out of the way as quickly as possible because no one has ever not been terrible at the beginning okay even justin bieber okay when he was 15 when he was discovered yeah but he started when he was 10 and he sucked and you got he got the five years of being terrible out you know invisibly kind of anonymously so that by the time he struck success he was good the beatles went to hamburg germany before they were the beatles and they they sucked at a bar where they just played night in and night out other people's music some of their own but by the time they got out of hamburg germany they were the beatles and they were good because they got all of the bad out for me i did it on

Starting point is 00:44:31 the road touring around doing magic shows in front of people and got all of that bad out in my early 20s i've seen footage of the shows and it was bad i thought it was awesome it's totally fine it was bad and same thing i had to be bad again at social media at the beginning so if you're a creator and you want to start just start and and just start putting up everything don't think about times of wind to post don't think about oh this is my niche and i don't want to do this kind of thing i want to do all of it, all of it, because the algorithms are such that they're going to help you find your audience. And even more, I can do a short video of home renovation and then another one of art and

Starting point is 00:45:18 another one of how to make turkey broth after Thanksgiving dinner with your turkey carcass. And each of those will find the audience because these platforms know the viewers' tastes better than us. And they're going to say, oh, I think you want to watch this one. And this person wants to watch this one. Do all of the things. Do it all right now. And don't worry about the production value or how you look. Take your ego out of it because nothing is more cringy than when somebody wants to be seen. In fact, here's a secret. The secret is oftentimes we'll make ourselves look more disheveled on camera because then it really appears like this guy does not want this to be on the internet right now. Look at how terrible he looks and and if and we want to see something that people are not supposed to see

Starting point is 00:46:11 that's the thing now if i come on screen and i'm wearing my you know fancy leather jacket and i look you know nice and good like this was it took on learning for me because i'm an entertainer like i'm from the wayne newton school of entertainment where you like you be good and you do wayne newton lives down the street that's not the internet so instead you want the the footage to be like oh my gosh are you recording okay here look at this thing and people feel like they're being let in on something so at least that's the trend right now it could go back to shiny floor content again in the future doesn't seem like it right now it seems like we're way more interested in seeing you know somebody come out of the bedroom just as they are and show the thing that they've got that's what we're showing up in a

Starting point is 00:47:01 bathrobe then to the show absolutely hey. Hey, it worked for you. I don't know. I don't know if people want to see that. That might be for the OnlyFans content. So there you go. There you go. Justin, it's been wonderful to have you on the show. Thank you for coming on. Wonderful discussion as well, too.

Starting point is 00:47:14 I really appreciate it. Thanks, buddy. There you go. And then give us dot coms. Where can people find you on the interwebs? Yeah. Just search my name, Justin Flom, F-L-O-M. JustinFlom.com is my official website.

Starting point is 00:47:24 That's where you can get in touch with me those emails they come straight to me so go ahead spam me up if you didn't like something i said or if you didn't like something chris said you know if you enjoyed all this talk my name is justin flom if you hated this talk i'm chris angel uh and no i like chris i like chris it's it's david copperfield who doesn't like me. Oh, seriously? Wow. It's fun. That's a long story for another time.

Starting point is 00:47:48 Oh, yeah. I love David. He doesn't like me. I think he's a great guy. I don't know personally. Yeah, he's probably not a great guy, but I like him. I like his art. I like what he did for magic. And then YouTube, Facebook, Twitter, all of it's just under my name, Justin Flom.

Starting point is 00:48:02 You can find me, and there's lots of silly stuff. It's too much fun. And if you're in Las Vegas, come visit. I will. I actually half live in Vegas half the time. It's a great place. Isn't it such a wonderful city? Especially right now, before it gets all hot, this is like the best.

Starting point is 00:48:19 The best time, yeah. And I'm a Raiders fan, and I'm just so happy that that Raiders thing moved there. But the town's getting a little too popular for me. Buddy, that Super Bowl, that was great. We did a good job with it. I was talking to a guy at the NFL, and he said, oh, yeah, we'll put you on the short list now, I think, for the Vegas Super Bowl on the short list so we don't have to wait 20 years to get it again

Starting point is 00:48:41 because that was fun for the town. That was great. We do shows like nobody does shows. Every show should move here. Anyway, thank you very much, Justin, for coming to the show. Thanks to our audience for tuning in. Go to Goodreads.com, FortressCrispFast, LinkedIn.com, FortressCrispFast, CrispFast1, the TikTokity.

Starting point is 00:48:57 I have about five followers over there, so check them out. Thanks for tuning in, everyone. Be good to each other. Stay safe. We'll see you next time.

The Chris Voss Show - The Chris Voss Show Podcast – Magician and TikTok Star Justin Flom Talks About Hacking Algorithms and Creating Viral Content

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