The Rich Roll Podcast - Chase Jarvis: Creativity Is Our Birthright

Episode Date: October 10, 2019

Conventional wisdom frames creativity as the purview of a certain select few — a rare gift that eludes us mere mortals. This is a lie. We are all born creative. More birthright than blessing, creativity is a practice. A habit not unlike any other skill or discipline. A muscle that can be built and flexed. This week's guest takes the notion one step further, asserting creativity as a biological necessity — a transformative force that resides within us all that when unleashed delivers vitality to everything we do. Chase Jarvis is many things. One of the most influential and award-winning photographers of the last decade, he is the recipient of numerous awards and accolades. Dubbed by Forbes as ‘the photographer everyone wants to work with', Chase has created hundreds of campaigns and commercials for the likes of Nike, Apple, Samsung, Google, and Red Bull. As a photojournalist, Chase contributed to the Pulitzer-Prize winning New York Times story Snow Fall and earned an Emmy nomination for Portrait of a City, his documentary chronicling the legendary Seattle music scene. As an entrepreneur, Chase is the Founder and CEO of two influential companies. His iPhone app Best Camera earned ‘App of the Year' accolades in 2009 from Wired, the New York Times, and Macworld. The first app that allowed users to share images direct to social networks, it is widely credited with kicking off the multi-billion dollar, global photo-sharing craze. CreativeLive, Chase’s second (and current) company, is the world’s largest live-streaming education company featuring the top experts in photography, design, music and entrepreneurship. In addition to being an in demand public speaker, Chase hosts the wildly popular YouTube series and podcast The Chase Jarvis LIVE Show and has authored 2 best-selling photography books. The focus of today's exchange is Chase's latest literary offering, Creative Calling. A fantastic primer on the power of developing your innate creativity to infuse your life with greater meaning, purpose and fulfillment, I can't recommend it more highly — a book that earns it's place alongside my personal favorite practice guides, The Artist's Way and The War of Art. A long-time fan, I have been an avid consumer of Chase's high quality content dating back to the early days of the internet. A kindred spirit of sorts, I had always wanted to meet him. Today's encounter exceeds my expectations. Enjoy! Rich

The people that you are inspired by, that you moved by, that you're connected to, that you admire, their lives were created intentionally. There's all kinds of circumstances, but they created the puzzle that is their life and they're expressing themselves in a particular way. And it's intentional, it's designed, and it's's created the creativity is a muscle it's a habit not a skill it's a process not a product it's a muscle and the only way you learn is through practice and this is why i advocate action over intellect like if you're sitting around trying to figure this out and make the perfect chess move, like that's not how it happens.

It's the action, it's the doing that actually creates the learning. It's great to get information from the internet or your mentor or whomever, but learning, like actually doing that part is incredibly valuable. It is the riskiest time in the world to play it safe. That's Chase Jarvis, and this is The Rich Roll Podcast. The Rich Roll Podcast.

Greetings, wonderful people of planet Earth. My name is Rich Roll. I'm your host. This is my podcast. Greetings, wonderful people of planet Earth. My name is Rich Roll. I'm your host. This is my podcast. Welcome. So let's talk about creativity. We tend to think about creativity as something that is reserved for the purview of a certain few, those blessed with some kind of innate talent or disposition, this kind of gift that eludes us mere mortals. But it's simply not true. And if you were to ask this week's guest, he will dispel that lie. Because first, creativity, just like any other skill or discipline, is simply a practice. It's a habit. It's a muscle that can be built and flexed. But even more than that, creativity is a biological necessity. It is

a force that lives and breathes inside all of us that, when unleashed, transforms our lives and delivers vitality to absolutely everything that we do. Chase Jarvis is many things. One of the most influential and award-winning photographers of the last decade. He is the recipient of numerous awards and accolades. He was dubbed by Forbes as the photographer everyone wants to work with. He was dubbed by Forbes as the photographer everyone wants to work with, and he's created hundreds of campaigns and commercials for the likes of Nike, Apple, Samsung, Google, and Red Bull. In addition, Chase was a contributor to the Pulitzer Prize-winning New York Times story Snowfall, and he earned an Emmy nomination for Portrait of a City, his documentary of the legendary Seattle music scene. As an entrepreneur, Chase is the founder and CEO of two influential companies. His iPhone app, Best Camera, earned App of the Year accolades in 2009 from Wired, The New York Times, and Macworld.

And it's this amazing story that he recounts on the podcast. Basically, Best Camera was the very first app that allowed users to share images direct to social networks. And he's widely credited with kicking off the multi-billion dollar global photo sharing craze. Chase's second and current company is called Creative Live. And it is the world's largest

live streaming education company featuring the top experts in photography, design, music, and entrepreneurship. In addition to being an in-demand public speaker, Chase hosts the wildly popular YouTube series and podcast, Chase Jarvis Live, and has authored two best-selling photography books. And Chase's latest offering and kind of the focus of today's conversation is his new book, Creative Calling. And it's this really fantastic, and I don't say that lightly, it really is a fantastic primer on the power of developing our innate creativity to infuse our lives with greater meaning, purpose, and fulfillment. Highly recommend everybody check that out.

This one is great. I can't wait for you to hear it, but first. We're brought to you today by recovery.com. I've been in recovery for a long time. It's not hyperbolic to say that I owe everything good in my life to sobriety. And it all began with treatment and experience that I had that quite literally saved my life. And in the many years since, I've in turn helped many suffering addicts and their loved ones find treatment. And with that, I know all too well just how confusing and how overwhelming and how challenging it can be to find the right place and the right level of care, especially because, unfortunately, not all treatment resources adhere to ethical practices. It's a real problem, a problem I'm now happy and proud to share

has been solved by the people at recovery.com, who created an online support portal designed to guide, to support, and empower you to find the ideal level of care tailored to your personal needs. Thank you. disorders, gambling addictions, and more. Navigating their site is simple. Search by insurance coverage, location, treatment type, you name it. Plus, you can read reviews from former patients to help you decide. Whether you're a busy exec, a parent of a struggling teen, or battling addiction yourself, I feel you. I empathize with you. I really do. And they have treatment options for you. Life in recovery is wonderful, and recovery.com is your partner in starting that journey. When you or a loved one need help, go to recovery.com and take the first step towards recovery. To find the best treatment option for you or a loved one, again, go to recovery.com. Okay, Chase, Chase Jarvis. So, by way of background, I've been a big fan of Chase for many years.

I've followed his path and gorged on his content, I think, all the way back to the early days of the internet, because Chase has just been posting forever amazing information. And I'd always wanted to meet him. I saw him as a bit of a kindred spirit, and I would say that today verifies that suspicion. In addition to recounting Chase's fascinating personal story, this is a conversation about the very nature of creativity. We bust myths surrounding its mysteries. We talk about why creativity is innate, our birthright, an essential aspect of being human, and why establishing a creative practice is our most valuable and urgent task. Establishing a creative practice is our most valuable and urgent task, as important, I think, to our well-being as exercise or nutrition.

I think it's fair to say we make a bit of magic today. I might even feel a new bromance coming on. You guys decide. So let's get into it. This is me and Chase Jarvis. That time has arrived, my friend. You are here. It's been many years in the making. It's so true. I've been looking forward to this for a very long time. I'm delighted that you're here. And I want to just say, before we even do anything, this fucking book is awesome, dude. You did an amazing

job. And I think it's going to inspire and help so many people. So hats off. Thank you so much. It really is an accomplishment. When people ask me, you know, what are the most influential books in your life? There's that list is long, but generally at or near the top of that list is always The War of Art, Turning Pro, and The Artist's Way. Like the three primers that I return to year after year after year to stoke my creativity and refresh my perspective. Those are timeless works, but they were also written years ago, right? And I look at this book as perfectly positioned to be the modern iteration of those timeless primers. Well, that's huge.

Thank you for saying that. And I will also confess that those books were influential in me and my career. We talked about it on my show last year. And yet I also felt like there was a gap between where those books stopped and modern culture and new tools. And it didn't talk about a lot of the, both things that can set creators and entrepreneurs free and also the things that trap us. There's just some like constraints that are out there in the world or that we place on ourselves that didn't get

brought up in some of those books. I felt like there was a little bit of a gap. And I also, you wrote an amazing book, You Have to Go Deep. And there's a ton of research and the research takes many forms, right? The research is your own personal experiences, your own empirical experiences. You look at, see, talk to your community,

all the people that have been on my show on CreativeLive, you in particular, like that conversation impacted me. And you start to see patterns and you start to see windows and you start to see cracks that both need to be opened and cracks that need to be filled. And so it was a fascinating process to be writing a book about creativity and creating something. Yeah. Just go ahead and cycle on that for a second. Well, meta is a big theme of your whole career, right? It's crazy.

There's definitely a meta aspect to that. And I think you're absolutely correct. Like those other books, they're timeless perhaps by virtue of the fact that you can't specify when they were written. Yeah. But our culture has shifted and changed. The gatekeepers are gone.

The tools of creativity are more accessible than ever. There's a democratization of this universe that didn't exist back then that I think has stimulated and motivated and inspired a lot of people to think about creativity more broadly. You nailed it. And whether that means quitting your job to be an artist or just finding a hobby or like, you know, being intentional about the images you put on Instagram. Sure. And, and, and really what you've done is brought in the aperture on what creativity means while also underscoring the importance of it in everyday life for everybody, no matter who you are. If you took that away, I am done. I am out. This podcast is over.

No, that's exactly. I mean, literally you just sort of, you know, I don't even need to introduce the book because that is the,os behind the book that was specifically broadening the aperture on creativity. Because right now there's people going, I don't know if I'm not really identified as a creator. I'm an attorney or I'm an accountant or I'm whoever's listening. And it's like, no, no, no, this is exactly why you, and if you're a creator, you identify as that, great.

This is like right in your sweet spot. But there's a whole universe of people who are what I call creative curious that understand that there's some power there that I can't kind of like the je ne sais quoi, I don't know how to grab onto it. And I want to understand that a little bit more. And when you broaden that definition of what creativity is, which to me is part of the challenge that we've had historically with how art and creativity have been viewed in our culture, when you broaden the aperture a little bit, you can all of a sudden sink your teeth into it

and find immense and powerful meaning. Yeah, I think historically the word creative or creativity isn't necessarily pejorative, but it's exclusionary. People either identify with that or they don't, or they're scared of it. And in truth, it is part and parcel of what makes us human. It is a universal aspect of the condition of being in one of these bodies. Yeah. Literally we are creating machines and that's part of like

expanding the definition to understand that, wait a minute, you know, my decisions on which, how to get to your house today, do I go this way or that way? What I decide to do with my day and my time on a minute by minute basis, but also on a life scale basis. Those are all wickedly, wildly creative acts that have been discarded into,

if you were thinking of them in neural pathways, just like the base neural pathway that you always go. But there's an opportunity for in all of those places to do something different. And when you start to realize that this creativity in small daily doses is the same exact muscle that we use to create our life, it's just creativity, different scale, your head starts to go like, okay, I need to pay attention here. Right. Well, so then if I was to ask you how you define creativity, what is the response to that? It's such a, the way that I approach it is so simple. It might

be painful for some people, but it's the act of putting two things that might not have gone together just a moment ago of putting those two things together to create something new and useful. So it is a very broad definition, but that's to me what actually makes the book really relevant because there are people like, this is not about changing your lifestyle. This is not about moving to Paris and wearing a beret and smoking a cigarette. It can be about that if that's your deal. Totally. It can be, but it's also, it doesn't have to be about a new set of friends. Instead, it's a new way of operating. It's a new way of seeing what's in front of you. And, you know,

just at a super top level, it's like I operate from the principle that A, every person is creative, that it's the thing that separates us from every other species on the planet. And it's fun. I'll just walk into any first grade classroom, right? Who wants to come up to the front of the room and draw me a picture? Every hand goes up.

And then do the same thing with the sixth grade class and then a ninth grade class. And you see that this is a thing that is innate and we're training it out of us. So if that's principle one, principle two, sorry, one is that there's creativity in every person. Two is that creativity is a muscle. It's a habit, not a skill.

It's a process, not a product. It's a muscle. And I guess Maya Angelou said it well, like the more you use, the more you have. Just think about training or anything else, right? So it becomes more available to us. And then if you follow one and two, the simple argument number three is,

so then all these small creative acts that we do every day, yes, playing the guitar, making a meal, building a family, writing code. Yes, those things are literally the things that are going to give you the insight that you have agency over creativity with a capital C, like creating the arc of your life. So to me, though, like it, from a very simple definition, you just have to make a simple three-step argument. And all of a sudden you're at this, like, I need to pay attention.

argument and all of a sudden you're at this like i need to pay attention yeah that creativity is a non-depleting renewable resource that it's not something that certain people are struck with but that they cultivate through a deliberate and intentional practice over time yeah that is divorced from the results of it and all about the process of doing. You've got it. Again, I'm out of here. This is like amazing. I think you say in the book, like, it's not fake it till you make it. It's make it till you make it. So the process of being a maker in whatever form that is for you.

Yeah. Yeah. And when you think about it, like, let's talk about it away from the sort of small c creativity of making a meal or building a business or whatever and talk about it on the life scale the people that you are inspired by that you moved by that you're connected to that you admire their lives were created intentionally there's all kinds of circumstances but they created the puzzle that is their life. And they're expressing themselves in a particular way. And it's intentional, it's designed, and it's created. It's not just you just fell into this thing one day. And so when you start

to look at creativity with that sort of capital C on the life arc, you're like, who do I am? And it doesn't need to be someone famous or fancy on the internet or some well-known entrepreneur or artist. It can be your next door neighbor that lives in amazing integrity and they have a mindfulness about them that you really, like, that's not on accident. That was created. That person set out with a vision for themselves and slowly but surely got there. There was no overnight. There was no, it was a creative process and that's available to you. Yeah. We don't do, we're very good at celebrating, you know, the masters of our culture and, you know, across all disciplines, but we're not very good at peeling the layers back

and really objectively examining the journey required to get to that place. And that leaves us as a culture with this false sensibility that these people just came out fully baked and they're touched by God in a certain way that we're not. Totally. And what do your parents say? Oh, go to Harvard, then go to get this degree and then have this job. And then because, and that's gonna, and you're like, wait a minute, the people that I admire, most of them didn't do any of that.

Right. In fact, they led this really disjointed, like weird puzzle that they put together over time. They didn't do X, they didn't do Y, or they did it partway and then they quit. And what parent is coaching their child to do that? Yeah, no, nobody. Nobody, exactly.

I mean, very rare people are. I mean, that's very similar to, I just put up a podcast yesterday with David Epstein, I wrote this book, Range, and he deconstructs the career paths of all these amazing people to kind of upend the 10,000 hour rule. That basically these people weren't people that just ground themselves down to become great at what they do at the exclusion of everything,

but actually live very broad lives in which they had many different kinds of experiences that ultimately inform their craft and elevate it beyond their peers. Yeah, that's so true. And to me, that is, they are crafting that. You know, they are saying, I'm taking a little bit from this

and a little bit from that. And yet, to me, this is a really fundamental piece of the book. And look at right now, if you're sitting there judging your life, like, oh my gosh, I am the person he described. I did what was prescribed. And don't worry.

That's the culture is designed to do that. You're not a weirdo. In fact, you're normal. And what we're trying to do here is to get you to see this framework and realize that you have some power to change it at whatever stage you're in. Take it from me. Like I did all the mistakes. I've like hundreds of thousands in debt and student loan, 10 years off course doing everybody else's thing. 10 years. You think at the end of my life, I'm going to say like- I got you beat there, but go ahead.

But I mean, honestly, but that's part of like what, why I feel like we connect when we're together. It's like, there's a shared sort of like, oh my gosh, I did the thing. When you're in it, you can't see it though. Totally, totally. Looking back in retrospect, we look at your career and you see, oh, all these dominoes line up perfectly

to create this person that is Chase Jarvis. When you're working in the ski shop or whatever, you're not consciously aware that this is all going into the hopper and is gonna pay dividends later. You're like, what the hell am I doing with my life? What am I doing here? Right, right.

And that's both, I wanna to be, to frame it as, hey, you might have not intended to be where you are right now, but it's never too late to sort of shift gears and whatever you have in your backpack is going to be very valuable on your journey forward. Because especially if you can shift gears into this act of creating the next chapter of your life

rather than being the cork in the tide and that you ended up here, wherever here is, act of creating the next chapter of your life rather than being the cork in the tide. And that you ended up here, wherever here is, don't worry. Like to me, that's a really important thing to grasp for everyone or almost everyone. There's a gap between where you are and where you want to be. And it's just what we need is a framework of A, thinking about it and then B, getting there. And that's part of what I tried to bake into the book. Yeah. And it's primarily prescriptive, but there's this kind of subplot of memoir that is threaded through it.

Like it's not overtly a memoir, but you divert from the prescription from time to time to go into these lengthy stories of pivotal moments in your life that help kind of underscore the point that you're trying to make. And if you looked at them as a unit in themselves, they're all things that historically

would be massive diversions or things that were a part of what you shouldn't do. And so that's like, I'm trying, there's nothing more than books that are like, okay, take perfect little acorn A, and then if you take perfect acorn a and you do b c d and e with it you're going to get this great oak tree fgh yeah life is messy creativity is even messier totally and so i'm like through my own because like i don't want to throw rocks at other folks so through my own sort of messy path i try to deconstruct that and deconstruct the lives of people that I

admire and know well, and that I've had the chance to be around or study and, or create, cultivate with. And it just so happens that there's a real pattern of recognition, deciding, even think of your journey. It's the same thing. Like we did what we did. We recognize some stuff. We made some changes. The cool part is while we might be 10,000 hours or 10 years or five minutes or eight books or whatever away from what we see for ourselves, the number of decisions, it can be like single digit, one or two or three decisions away

from an entirely radically different life. And to me, that is exciting and powerful. Yeah. I mean, I'm a living example of that. You are as well. And I think one of the reasons why I also feel like we're kindred spirits is that despite the fact that our stories

and our career paths in many ways are very different and our upbringings are very different, there's a lot of similarities yeah in our story and the more i dived into you know your path the more i was struck by how similar they are so like let's let's go back to the beginning here man all right way back yonder the son of a cop and a mom who works in a biotech company. I mean, you grew up only child. And I don't want to project here, but perhaps- You're nailing it. Perhaps like a sensitive and creative child

who also had prowess as an athlete. And maybe the first big choice that you had to make was who am I identifying with and what tribe do I want to belong to? Yeah. And I think this is part of like in the particular lies, the universal, right? My story is in second grade, um, miss Kelly, I'll never forget her. I loved her as a teacher. She was amazing. And I also, that was when I was second grade, I was like, I just did my first film it was called the sons of zoro we washed cars in the neighborhood a gang of us got together we bought

eight millimeter super eight film you know asked a buddy's brother to film us wrote a little script and did costumes recorded this film developed it screened it and actually made more money than we spent so like you made 30 bucks and it cost 15 or something like that. Exactly. Very Robert Rodriguez. Well, there you go. And so in about that time, and then I roll into second grade, I'm like, God, this is amazing. I'm performing magic tricks for my friends at school. I had a comic strip that I did every week. My character's name was Clyde. And I took Clyde through a bunch of

different aspects of his life. And then the parent teacher conference happened and I was around because it was also an ice cream social going on. And, and I overheard miss Kelly tell my parents, Chase is so much better at sports than he is at art. And at the moment I actually wasn't even hurt. I was like, no to self change gears. Cause what like, note to self, change gears.

Because what do we want to do as an eight-year-old? That one sentence. Yeah. And as eight-year-olds, again, we're social animals. We want acceptance. We want to fit in. We don't want to disappoint. And my story might be about Miss Kelly in second grade.

But the reality is we've always got, all of us have some aspect of that story. And maybe it's not one moment, maybe it's 10 moments. And there was a bunch of other moments, but I just, I did, I ran to sports. And to be crystal clear, it served me very well. I went to college on a soccer scholarship, played in the Olympic development soccer team. Like it did everything that culture said it was gonna do.

And yet, what did I turn my back on? I turned my back on, and I wasn't even cognizant of it because the thing that I chose served me well. I didn't feel like I missed it. But when my grandfather died, whatever it was, 12-something, 8 years, 10 years later, dropped out of a heart attack when I was a week before my college graduation, I was just completely struck. He was an amateur photographer. He had taken

pictures of me growing up, my soccer games, he and my father, we used to trade pictures and, and the obviously it was horrible, but the silver lining was that I was given his cameras and it was like I was transported back to that second grade. And like, wait a minute, I've always been curious about this. Skateboard culture gave me a little hint of it as a little skater punk. And it was like spray paint and punk rock

and the DIY ethos. And I started feeling that a little bit, but then it was really like, okay, are you going to be a skateboarder? Are you going to go, you know, try over the Olympic development soccer team? And so to me, I made a choice then, but until that moment where my grandfather died and I was given his cameras, I really had turned my back on this thing largely to fit in. And I don't think it's that unusual when I look back at other people's stories, whether it was partying or whether it was going to the right college, or there's just so many shoulds and oughts and musts that we get in our culture. And especially when they come from

people that we love, that we respect and admire. And what do they want for us? They're not trying to get you to not be an awesome creator. They're trying to get you to be more like them, more like the images that they see on TV, which is average. Well, they're afraid. They just want the best for you. As long as it's in- They're terrified about the uncertainty that comes with blazing a unique path. So it's well-intentioned. Totally.

It's not malevolent or anything like that. And to me, that's worth talking about. Yeah. These people are not trying, there's no evil genius. They're not trying to repress you, nor is culture. They want the best for you.

Of course. In their own way. But it manufactures a certain outcome. Right. It becomes more incumbent upon you to develop that sense of self that can lead you on your own unique path. And that's difficult. And, you know, for me, it came much later than it did for you.

But what's interesting about that story, and I've heard you tell it before, you gloss over one aspect of it, which is this, what feels like an assumption. Like, so you're gifted these cameras from your grandfather. So obviously this was a message from the universe, but it could have very easily just been like, oh, thanks and go about your way. Like, I'll- Hot these things on eBay. Yeah, or put them in your closet or something like that.

So to me, what I hear in that is that that creative sensibility, albeit repressed, was percolating just beneath the surface and unconsciously or consciously you were almost looking for an excuse to explore it. And I think that is a very common paradigm. That's part of why the book exists. To me, that, you know, again, if you assume that first principle that there's creativity inside of every person and that culture shapes it in a way that it does

so that we fit into some boxes because that's easier to define and manage. And again, no evil genius, but the school system, the employment system, all those things have had a very specific track until recently. Now the wheels are starting to come off. Yeah.

And so that's the part where I'm trying to let you know that you're not alone, that the thing that's just below the surface that you really feel about yourself or that you want to explore, but you haven't, you're not alone. Everyone's been handed a bunch of shoulds. And to be totally frank, the shoulds never go away.

They change as you get older, but there's always going to be a set of expectations. And your job as a human is to navigate that, to be able to develop tools, to take what is helpful and repel what is not helpful and manage your own belief for yourself. Most of this has to do with this cool thing that I love, which is intuition and your self-awareness. And when you can start to pay attention to that, that whisper, that's what I talk about being the calling. And I'm not saying as that whisper that's at eighth grade that said you needed to be a hippopotamus veterinarian,

but mostly that there's something in there and you don't have to know exactly, but you just know that there's something that if you start to pull on that thread, great things happen. Life starts to happen for you, not to you. And that you start to be on a path. And when you're exploring this, unfurling it, again, this is to me where everyone has felt this. Everyone has felt that time in their life that felt effortless, whether you call it flow, you were with the right people, doing the things that you love. And then you kind of go, okay, great.

Now we got to get practical. We got to get back to, this is naive to pursue this, all these other messages. And again, no evil genius. This is just a product of mass culture and being a social species. Fine, let's now develop some tools to manage our way out of it.

Yeah, and I think practicing those tools becomes mission critical as a pathway out, because what happens is over time, as we age, those intuitions and those instincts become calcified as we settle into this life that we think that we've chosen for ourselves and that we work double time to convince ourselves are good, even if we're not happy. Totally.

Because shit, man, I'd fuck this whole thing up. If I wanna change course now, that's gonna upend everything and my life's gonna upside down. And that's terrifying. And I'm sympathetic to that. I've been in that situation. You've been in your version of that situation. And it becomes harder and harder to connect with that little wisp that's trying to speak to you because we've constructed denial mechanisms around it to prevent it from percolating up because it is a reminder that maybe we need to course correct a little bit yep and it's always there for us that's the thing that why if you're in that place of despair right

now or there's the big gap between where you are and where you want to be because you and you know maybe you're listening to this right now going like, damn, like they got me, they figured me out. You're not alone. And that to me, just that little moment of realizing that you're not alone, hopefully is enough to kickstart again, the way I frame it as a practice and a practice is like, it's, it's, it's intentionally called a practice because sometimes it doesn't go well, right? And I don't want to paint a picture, again, go back to those books that told you exactly how to do it. I take you on my journey too, which is like one of pitfalls and of near death and of doing the wrong thing. And by wrong, I mean, not accordance with who I was and my values.

And by wrong, I mean not accordance with who I was and my values. And it's recoverable. The thing that we need to know as a culture and what I'm trying to prescribe is start. And start small. You don't have to go from zero to 100 miles an hour. In fact, that's going to make the wheels come off. What you need to do is listen and then start moving towards the thing. Yeah. And the call to action is that no longer can you persist in this state of creative repression. To do so is to do so at your peril. And you open one of the chapters with that great Brene Brown quote, where she basically says like, to repress your creativity

isn't benign. It's like like it's an actually a dangerous thing because you're living at odds with your true makeup and that's going to provoke all kinds of damage in your life in various ways so true and just look at a culture that has repressed this key thing a thing that differentiates us from all the other species our ability to build tools and rocks and create look at around wherever you are right now, you're on a run. I'm in your ears listening to the, you know, you're running by the ocean, everything, that park bench, the car, the light post, it was all designed, all created. It was a drawing before it was ever in real life.

Literally everything around you was created. And so if you start to think about creativity in that sense, you start to say, okay, great. You got my attention. Now I'll pay attention to this creative force that supposedly I've got. This is, you know, Chase and Rich telling me I've got this force. And you start to pay attention to how valuable and how important that force is. And then think of the messages that you get from culture. Then think of the messages that you get from culture. Oh, you know, pursuing that whimsical thing that you want to create for your life. That's just naive and foolish. The pursuing a career around creativity, playing the guitar. How much is, you know, starving artists.

You hear there's all these mythologies that, like Brene said, when you repress those, that's your, it's like literally fundamentally your DNA to create. And when you start to as simple as deny the words like, oh, I'm not creative. That is really a toxic thought because it affects so many areas of your life. I can't create my way into a good meal or out of this relationship or into this relationship or create a child or a family, or if you start to think about it, you're doing all of these actions and you can acknowledge them rather than repress them, there's a sense of agency that you gain. And again, that's the Trojan horse of the book, right? It's creating in these small ways and recognizing and acknowledging them, changing up the recipe just a little bit to be a little more like what you'd want it to taste like actually helps you see that you have agency over your life. Yeah, and create fulfillment and purpose. For sure.

That's the reason to create, right? Right, right. You're not creating- For sure. That it is elusive and that we have in our culture and that we have a culture that doesn't really, or I'll say, is on the cusp of actually starting to acknowledge our creative faculties. That those things coincide is like, I get it. The fact that we're starting to acknowledge it, I think we're on the sort of the cusp of a completely new era of invention and reinvention. And there's plenty of things to be scared of and I get all that stuff, but just like the Gutenberg press shifted literacy,

I think we're on the cusp of shifting our focus to creativity as the sort of the, the, uh, complete reawakening of our culture. Yeah. As you've said said many times creativity is the new literacy yeah the best example that i've seen lately of this bernie brown notion is uh the movie in the book where'd you go bernadette have you seen this yet no oh my god you got it first of all it's set in seattle you gotta see but it's this incredible no one saw this movie i thought it was wonderful but basically it's a story i'm- I'm thinking of one friend right now who's just, they're gonna listen to this and there's people going like, dude, I just like,

just 20 lashes with a wet noodle from this guy. But basically it's a story of this genius architect who then gets married and has a family and spends the better part of 15 years or so repressing her creative impulses to the point of lunacy. Like she starts to lose her mind and it's the journey back towards rediscovering what her essence is, which is to create. And the idea being like, she cannot be her best self or the person that she wants to be unless she is in the process of doing that. And I think that's a universal

thing that comes across in your book, that this is what it means to doing that. And I think that's a universal thing that comes across in your book, that this is what it means to be human. And we all have our version of that. Yeah. I'm perfectly said that. And I don't want to like invoke too much drama with the, like, this is toxic because while I believe that it's also recoverable. Like we have a filter in our bodies to take care of toxins. We also have a filter in our heart and our soul that knows what it's supposed to feel like when things are working. And I say you can look backwards and connect the dots to the times when it felt right. What we're doing is we're actually trying to sort of reconnect with that. And what's the new manifestation of it? What is the, okay, great. Whether it's,

you know, what does a daily practice look like for you? Well, you know, connect the dots looking backwards to what brought you joy at some point in that part of your life. What would you like to do? There's a book called Play It Away by a guy named Charlie Hone. Charlie. I know Charlie. to do. There's a book called Play It Away by a guy named Charlie Hone. Charlie. I know Charlie. Yeah. Great author. Used to work closely with Tim Ferriss. Just a lovely human. And in his book, Play It Away, he literally talks about finding time to play every day. And he talks in the book about going, he like bought a five gallon bucket full of baseballs and he and his buddy would go to the local like park and one guy would pitch the other guy and they'd full of baseballs. And he and his buddy would go to the local park and one guy would pitch the other guy

and they'd just rope baseballs all over the place and then walk around and pick them up. And it was just such a joy and something he loved as a kid. And now he's doing it for 30 minutes as an adult. And it just completely cracked him wide open. Right. So it's not about the beret and moving to Paris.

At all. Simple things like that. Super simple things. And they're available immediately. like that. Super simple things. And they're available immediately. And that's the cool thing. Like, I'm not asking you to do any of that crazy stuff, move to Paris, new set of friends, anything. It's like right there. Right.

So you're on the pre-med, go to school track we're gonna go back to the uh the timeline narrative here um that was the plan and i relate to that that was my track as well i was pre-med for a couple years in college before i lost interest in that for reasons similar to your own um you discover this treasure trove of cameras and then you proceed to walk the earth, as you said. You'd be like Cain. Yeah, you go to Europe with your then girlfriend, now wife. You've been married for a long time now. Yeah.

College sweetheart. Yeah, yeah. And this is where you start to really deliberately explore creativity and become this self-taught photographer. So talk about that a little bit. Well, I don't know, again, just if you think about the experience that I just went through as my grandfather and hearkening back to, you know, that's the moments of trauma or fear or like a big change in life. And it doesn't have to be negative. It can be the birth of a child.

They cause us to reflect and end up being really convenient milestones or markers to like, whoa, whoa, whoa, whoa. What am I doing? I just don't want to have to wait for those. That's part of what the goal of the book is like. We can be awakened to that right now, but just so happens.

Why is pain and trauma so necessary? It's like, this thing happened and then i realized that that realization is available to us but for some reason it's so intangible unless we're triggered in a certain way and you've had like this is not the only i mean you've had like three or four of these sorts of things that have like helped you know sort of reconfigure your trajectory yeah to get back to your timeline though so i those things happen no those things happened and and i i did manage to create some space for myself to acknowledge that and and

by that i mean my creativity and just be a little bit more thoughtful and it's important for me to put a pin in this because the space that i did give myself, okay, great. It was in Europe. Yeah. Great. Sorry, Chase. I can't get to Europe. I'm okay. Just to be clear, I had given, been given a little money from my grandfather and my grandmother gave me some money for my grandfather's passing. And it was like a 13 stop ticket with half miles and 13 legs to get to where I was going. with half miles and 13 legs to get to where I was going. But it's not required that it's Europe and it's not required to be six months. And it literally is available to you.

For me, this is what, you know, I decided to spend my money eating beans and tuna fish and sleeping on the ground in a sleeping bag in order to just give a little space to start to look inward. Because that's the cool thing about all the biggest dancers in life. We're chasing them out there. I want to be more like X or live the life of Y or whatever.

The cool part, and this is why I keep saying it's always available to you, it's all in here. It's all intuition. It's all, what does this speak? Does this speak to me? And the interesting thing about a calling, and this is, again, not necessarily a calling to be a vet or whatever, but it starts out as a whisper and you get better at listening to it.

And over the course of days, weeks, months, or sometimes years, you start to be able to listen to that truth inside of you. You had a very clear experience of hearing what changes you wanted to make in your life. And I had some version of that as well. And the people listening at home, whatever your calling is, it's there. You just need to sort of tune into it. Yeah.

I would say, I agree with that, but I would add that I'm not sure it was so clear. It was that little wispy sense of like, this is not right. Like I kind of like that thing over there. And that's about as clear as it was. It wasn't like, here's what I'm going to do.

And here's the five-step plan, you know, sitting across a table from Chase Jarvis. Like, it was nothing like that. But what it was, it- It was the tiniest, faintest whisper of an instinct. And I liken that not to a map because a map right would be like here's the red dot here's all the dotted lines and then here's the red x and you follow the map and you get to where you're going if you had the it's do that it would be the equivalent of a map for me the whisper that little thing the call it's just over there somewhere that's what i think you used

i'm just i think i'm parodying you you said it's that thing over there i'm saying that that's what i think you used i'm just i think i'm parodying you said it's that thing over there i'm saying that that's a compass right and and so it's not a map this is the both the cool and the terrifying thing it's a compass a map is reassuring because i can see what it's good i can see the waterfall and then i can see the bridge that i, there's a giant crevasse. I have to go around or there's a bridge. I might have to, you know, jump across this thing in order to get the thing. And it's not knowing what the path is going to bring that creates so much pause and inaction in people. And I get it. I was the same way. You're not alone. But it is that compass rather than the map. And that is that faint call that you walk toward. I use the metaphor of a path in the book that starts to deliver. It starts to I use the metaphor of a path in the book that starts to deliver. It starts to like make it clear that you're doing the right thing.

You start to be around the people. You start to be closer to the thing. You can smell it. You can feel it a little bit. It's still not clear to go back to yours. It's not this like gong. It's like something over there in the bushes. I'm encouraging you to walk to the bushes. Yeah.

like something over there in the bushes. Yeah. I'm encouraging you to walk to the bushes. Yeah. I think prefatory to that though, it's important that people's compasses are properly calibrated. I think there's a lot of people out there with broken compasses.

For sure. You know, look, if you're fucked up on drugs or your priorities are out of whack or you have some kind of unresolved psychological thing going on, it's conceivable that your instinct, that thing that you might misidentify an instinct as being one of those whispers.

And yet that's not correct because you haven't done enough internal work to be in a place where you can trust that impulse. Yeah. And I think you, you get burned by that impulse a couple of times and it starts to easy. It gets easy to turn it off. Right.

The universe will give you the message. And this is what I advocate. That's like when you get there and it's a false idol or it's the thing that you thought it was, it's not the thing that you thought it was. Then you're like, okay, I just walked all the way here for this. And then what do you do? You gut check in, listen again, and

it gets truer over time. And that's the willingness. That's the fear that we all have is that I just, I walked toward medical school. I walked toward professional soccer. I walked toward a PhD in philosophy. None of those things, all of those things were very expensive in cash and time and emotion, and none of them delivered. And yet in a weird way, they all delivered. Yeah. They all informed what you do today. So they all had purpose and meaning, but they were all examples of you chasing a life that was not your own, but somebody else's idea. And the cool thing is after you've done that a couple of times, you start to realize, okay, that was expensive. No, no, what do I really want?

And then so there's this sort of like the, I think a sensibility develops an honesty where, again, go back. That's why moments of trauma and loss and joy, extreme joy, they can be useful. Of course. Because it'll pause you just enough to go, okay, let's be real. There's an episode I talk about in the book

where I basically should be dead by every, every measure I was caught in a horrible avalanche, which is a very scary thing. It's sort of like getting eaten by a shark, you know, it's not awesome. And for whatever reason, I made it out alive. And that was also one of those moments. And having already had a couple of them, I was like, do I really need another one of these? Yeah. I mean, that was gnarly reading about that in the book. Yeah.

And again, they're useful, but wouldn't it be better? And what I've tried to do with the book is like, let's just pretend we don't need those things. I don't need that reminder. Totally. Let's try and get there without it. Yeah. I think it's also important to underscore that there might be this idea that your mom or your dad were taskmasters saying,

Chase, we want you to be a doctor or we want you to be this. And that's what kind of propelled you onto that track. But that's not fair to them. I mean, I read an interview with your mom and she sounded like it was, it was like on your blog, it was like, you know, how to raise a creative child. And I got the sense from her that she was very aware that you were creative and was trying to support that. So it wasn't coming from them necessarily. It was more of a social thing. Yeah. And this is why it's complicated right you know when your career counselor is saying something and it can be as subtle as do you

think miss kelly was trying to complete throw a spanner in my plans to be a comic artist no way right but those are things that we ascribe as young impressionable social animals that when i talked about earlier we talked about it like, what's our toolkit now for managing that? You might have something going on right now where your boss or your mentor or whatever is just really hammering on you for one thing. And you're just like, what is the purpose of this? What am I supposed to take away from here? And these are advanced tools, right? Especially as a young person you're just

like oh geez my uncle says i should be a you're just bouncing around totally and and this is why this sort of small this this pattern that i keep repeating is this like small creative acts on a regular basis they start to to inform you or remind you that you have agency and so you you the goal is to shift gears from this sort of quirk in the tide to intention. And then there's going to be a whole new set of challenges, right? You're going to say, wait a minute, I've got a couple of kids. I got a mortgage. I got it. And then that's a new set of obstacles that you're going to have to manage. And as you strengthen these muscles and these tools to navigate life, to create your life, things, again, start to happen for you rather than to you.

And sometimes it's two steps forward, one step back, to be clear. Oh, most of the time. Imperfect. But it's about living your life with intention and not living reactively. Yeah. Like you said, agency. It's really about having the mindfulness and the presence of mind to be still long enough to ponder what it is that you really want and then take the actions that set

you on that trajectory as opposed to just reacting to stimuli around you or being a people pleaser and just trying to assuage the people that you love. Totally. And that happens and it's easy to understand why. Who wants to disappoint the people that you love. Totally. And that happens. And it's easy to understand why. Who wants to disappoint the people that you love the most? Nobody does. Nobody does. Yeah. And yet what is required to live the life that you want?

You're going to have to disappoint some people because it's not their script, it's yours. And how many goes do you get? Just to be clear, how many goes? You get one. So to put it in perspective, the number one regret of the dying is that they lived somebody else's prescription for their life. Number one, not number three or eight or 10. Conveniently for this discussion, it's number

one. So if that's so, that's science, that's, that's the research says, like, do we need other proof? Turns out we do we need to go around bump bump into a bunch of stuff before we start to figure it out i just want us to figure out as soon as possible rewrite the cultural narrative a little bit about creativity and about what's possible and get us to take action right um in terms of you developing your own creative voice i mean you learned photography pre-digital. Not recommended. And not in some kind of scholastic setting,

you were walking the earth and keeping a journal like F8, 250 shutter speed, ISO, whatever, like trying to, and then the delay that comes with developing it and then comparing it to your notes to try to figure out like how do you actually use a camera totally and then remember when you actually forget to record one exposure and the other 18 after it are then incorrect yeah i mean it's just like little small errors like that made learning so difficult but but i've heard you say

yeah it made you pay attention like you had to, you know, like present for what you were doing. For sure. And that's a wonderful gift, right? And that's another thing that happens when you actually care. Speaking of lifelong learning, it's not an accident that I started Creative Live, which is a lifelong learning platform, like, because I'm very passionate about it. And part of the way I developed that passion was from seeing how hard it could be. There's something interesting though, when something's hard that you really want. And that's why that honesty of like this cut to brass tacks, like what matters it's it's, it has this

mechanism of focusing your attention, which I love. And to me, that's cool. You know, when you can actually latch onto something and you can decide that this is something I actually want to learn. For me, it had a completely new definition of learning. Like I was able to go through school and like, quote, learn, get decent grades and, you know, do what I was supposed to do, check the boxes. But it wasn't until like deciding that I wanted to learn photography that my mind went to a completely different, like, I don't know if anyone, I went to college and I remember there would be like 29 year old or 36 year old people in the class

and they would always have read all the stuff. They were super prepared and they pissed me off so much. You're like, you're making all of us look bad. And it's because they were there because they really, really, really wanted to know about ancient Greek mythology or whatever. And I was there because I was in school. Or they're just brown nosers.

Totally. Yeah, come on. It's quite a possible outcome. But the point is when, you know, you start to put a lens of lifelong learning on something that you actually care about is really, it's a cool way of looking at the world. And I think you can unpack learning in a different sense. Yeah. That's when the lights go on. Um, many, I don't want to say most, but many professional photographers of your, of your caliber malign the advent of digital photography and the democratization of this art form, but you all the way from the beginning have celebrated it. So I'm interested in how you think about that

as somebody who learned in a very tactile analog way. Now you just pick up your iPhone, you can take 10,000 snaps of the same thing and just pick the one that's good. And you don't really learn, you're not really learning about what you're doing you're playing a game of chance and luck as much as anything else so how do you think about all of that well i think about the process of learning slowly and painfully and focusing your attention um largely in the way we just talked about it's useful. I, it's true. I did look at digital photography as a

mechanism to subvert the pain that I had experienced. And as much as the technology at the time was being debated, like, oh, is this going to be as good? Or, you know, it was just like such a tired conversation two weeks into having it when the first digital camera started to come out that I was, you know, I was able to sort of see on the corner a little bit and it's like, okay, let's take this to its logical connection or large logical conclusion that cameras are gonna be really good is whether it's two years from now or 10 years or whatever. And let's, what's this thing called the internet. Okay. Information is going to move and it's going to move a lot more quickly. Like I literally had to go check out books from the library on the history of photography,

read them and then go take, you know, 36 exposures and then drop it off at the place to be developed or develop it in my bathroom, my poor wife, that I turned into a dark room. Before you start breaking into that dark room. Oh, we'll have to go there for a second i'm a felon what's the statute of limitations i don't know i hope they don't know i hope they don't come after anyway go ahead um and and so i selfishly was like this is going to accelerate

learning and i am going to be able to take a picture and then look at the back of the camera and immediately know is this good, bad or ugly and repeat. And so to me, it was an unlock. And you've got to remember, if you've made your life in this for the previous 20 years and these new tools start to come out that threaten your existence and then, quote, anybody can be a photographer. photographer would have created was a bunch of sort of acerbic grumpy photographers. And I chronicled this in the book, uh, that there was like a new school in the old school and it, it, um, my end goal was just figuring it out. And so because it was beneficial, digital was beneficial to me figuring it out. And I saw where the universe was going. I just like, okay, look at, you can either put the brakes on or you can try and lean into this. And I just started celebrating it, which I turned out was, it turned out was very unpopular time.

And so, I mean, I don't want to overdramatize it, but I literally had death threats. Like you're taking money out of my pocket, you young young punk and you put it on the table of photographers who don't deserve it and blah blah blah just from sharing my experiences of trying to master digital uh and and learn photography in a way that other people hadn't because the technology didn't didn't exist so i ended up never assisting another photographer for a day in my life the first time i ever got paid for my photography, it was substantial. I went from like zero to making an income and I realized, oh my gosh, this is actually possible. If I could do it once, all I need to do is like do it a couple more times and then

I've actually got a thing. And I think that that was a, that both gave me perspective and underscored a really cool point that I think cements in the book. You know what? Nobody cares how you got there anymore. It's about getting there. And the cool thing, there's a million paths to get to wherever you are right now

and your path is just fine. All the trauma that you went through or that you didn't, all of the experience that you brought to the table or that you didn't all of the experience that you brought to the table or that you didn't no one cares you're at the table and or if someone cares it's temporary and then you move on and that's it yeah that will fade and so to you know this is where imposter syndrome comes from like i didn't earn it i shouldn't be here i as an example that my when i arrived at my college, which was, you know, we had lost

in the national championship, the division one national championship the year before, I'm like, how am I the only freshman on a scholarship at the number two school in the country for soccer? I'm clearly not supposed to be here. I'm here because there was a guy who in the class ahead of me was world-class, and they just happened to see me when they saw him.

And they're like, oh, this is a new younger kid coming up. And I just told myself a whole set of stories of why I was supposed to be there. But you know what? There I was. You were there. Yeah. And I think that's what matters. It played out in your photography career.

You didn't become an assistant to a famous photographer like most people do. You lep-frogged your way up, you hustled, and you got a couple campaigns that probably predated your skill set at the time, and you made it until you made it, right? And you were able to establish yourself in a manner that was unconventional for that field. But I think, you know, there's a couple interesting things that happen in your career, which are timing related in that, you know, you're starting to develop your proficiency and your professionalism at a time when the internet is starting to profligate and people are acclimating to this idea of free-flowing information. And rather than adhere to the paradigm of your profession, which is this is a black box

and we don't share our secrets and that's how we maintain our stranglehold on this profession, you go the opposite direction pre-YouTube, pre all of this stuff and start telling the secrets of the trade, which was not well received. At all. But ultimately garnered you like, you were getting like a million readers on your blog. I remember stumbling upon your blog around that time.

And you were doing something no one else was doing, which is basically taking people step-by-step through your process as a means of educating a whole new crop of young aspiring photographers, which really set the stage or prefaced what would come with creative life. For sure. And you know what? I was terrified the whole time because I didn't do it right. I didn't do it the established way. I didn't do it. And it was only- You're honest with all of that. Totally. And that is to me the cool're honest with all of that. Totally.

And that is, to me, the cool thing. Because wherever you are in your space right now, whoever's listening, you're there. You're supposed to be there. That was your path. And the cool thing is the world of established paths and the paradigms on how we get there and that there is only one track that's largely being exploded, I would say to your benefit. And if you're looking at it from the perspective of this is to my demise, that anyone can, you're in the wrong headspace. Well, yeah, you're looking at the world through the lens of a zero sum game. And that's at odds with the premise of this book, which is that creativity

is not only abundant, it's infinite. And to explore it just creates more of it, which is an abundant perspective. It's an abundant mindset. Yeah. And you characterize it accurately. I found myself maybe before I was supposed to be there at a place and I was like, okay, I got there. And all the while I was battling the same head stuff that we all do. But somewhere in there, it was just enough. It was like one click above, like bravery had one click above shame. You know? And it was just enough to keep going.

And I guess I'm living proof that that's all you need. Right. So now when you go on YouTube, I mean, there's just a billion instructional videos on every, you know, the most detailed, tiniest little aspects of not just photography. Sure, anything. We're using photography as the baseline, but it's anything, right?

But when I like watch a Peter McKinnon video, for example, it's impossible for me, and I love what he's doing. I think he's brilliant and very engaging, but Peter McKinnon doesn't exist without the example that Chase Jarvis set. Like you created the foundation for the Peter McKinnons of the world to be able to do what they do.

Oh, that's very, it's very large and very. But it was the seed, you know. For sure. Because it was before YouTube even was a thing. That's true. And even like conceptualizing that is still like, oh, geez. And I'm aware of it. And it'd be like, oh, geez. And I'm aware of it and it'd be like, oh, that's bold of it.

Or even like- But in a proud way, not in a- No, no, totally. But also being sponsored as a photographer, that didn't exist. I brought sponsorship from action sports where I was a photographer watching athletes get free gear and then start to be paid a living wage.

And I'm like, wait a minute, why can't I apply that here? And I remember the first time I started like pushing on this with the camera manufacturers and they're like, and I'm like, I see, you know, famous photographer X on the back of a magazine posing with a Canon camera. And then Canon would reach out or Nikon would reach out and say, Hey, we see the work you're doing. We loved it. And I'm like, okay, cool. Like, yeah, I'm willing to do that. And it's like, what do I get? Oh, you, you, what do you mean? What do you get? You get to pose with a camera on the back of a, on a thing. And I'm like, we're giving you exposure. Totally. And I'm like, I got a million person army over my shoulder here.

I think I can actually make an impact on what it is you're doing. And you know, of course, when anytime you're ahead of the paradigm, people start throwing rocks. And without a need to unpack all that, the same as you mentioned about just sharing what was in the black box or whatever was unconventional. And it would become normalized over time to me in a very positive way. Like information wants to be free. And now we take it for granted. So it's really hard to uncork a very positive way. Like information wants to be free and now we take it for granted. So it's really hard to uncork that and look backwards. The same is true for mobile photography.

Like my industry threw tons of rocks at me when I was saying this one megapixel camera was actually more interesting than my $100,000 digital Hasselblad. And that was blasphemous, completely blasphemous. And then I was like, well, wait a minute. Instead of like fighting over the same size pie, let's make the bigger pie with, you know, billions of photographers rather than just 20 million of us toiling in the corner trying to protect a small pattern that i continue to see unfolding today in different areas of culture like let's go there and let's blow this up see if we could reinvent it in in whatever image we want let's try it yeah respect for this snapshot you know i can't remember

exactly what you said but you put it really beautifully. Something along the lines of, you know, we can all appreciate the high art that is what is created with that Hasselblad and a lot of production value, but let's not overlook the beauty and the artistry and the authenticity that comes with the, you know, sort of downgraded snapshot of everyday life taken by somebody who's not a professional, that there is something truly valuable about that. And to the extent that now the internet is making that widely available, that's something to be celebrated and respected as a legitimate art form. Yeah. Rather than the other way around. And again, what is it? I hang on the Bezos quote because it makes me feel better.

Being willing to be misunderstood for long periods of time is sometimes required to make your way in the world. And with all of these things that we're talking about here in photography in particular, we're using these as, again, this is sort of a metaphor, but the same is true for everybody in all their different areas of life. Like I bet you were misunderstood as a fill in the blank when you were in a band in high school and you had long hair, what you really wanted was X and you were really getting y and so again in the particular lies the universal i'm talking about my story right here but you know i want i believe that

everybody can see themselves in this story the part being misunderstood and starting to you know breaking something open even if it was just your relationship with your parents or or or whatever so yeah the the whether it's um sponsorship and photography or learning you know teaching creativity on the internet um or getting people to val you know doing a gallery show where people could actually value the snapshot that was a fun little i did a show in the ace hotel lobby where i invited um 10000 photographers from all over the world to submit images. And I hung a fresh show every day for 30 days using those images.

And it attracted the curators from the Met and the MoMA and they all came by to see this thing because it was totally absurd and yet really, really cool. And I remember there's a woman who was the curator at the Met at the time for photography. Mia Feynman was her name. She's like, oh, I hear there's some really famous photographers hanging. And it was true.

Some of the best photographers in the world had submitted images. Also true, dogs had submitted images and five-year-old kids had submitted images and I hung them right next to each other. But that's so beautifully subversive and really is your version of the people images and I hung them right next to each other. But that's so beautifully subversive and, and really is your version of the people that influenced you from Warhol to Basquiat. Like

these are people who, you know, you've talked about this. We're very meta in making art about art in the way that kind of Banksy is most famously doing right now, making a statement about the art world through that kind of expression yeah so it was fun and you know my answer to her was she's like i hear which could you point out some of the and i was like you're the curator from the met why don't you tell me yes and it was it actually started a nice i'm sure that got a scowl from it was it actually was a little bit of a light bulb and it actually created a friendship we we had lunch the next day that's the conversation totally right yeah yeah and it just underscores the point of like doesn't matter how they got there they were there and which is true for all

of us like i don't know how you got to where you are in this case you're the arbiter you're making the decision about what's going up and what's not but um but it begs the question of like who who gets to make the decision about what is art and what isn't yeah yeah and you know if you tie it back to you know the themes that we're exploring here in the book it's like it doesn't matter how you got there you know just claim claim who you are where where you are, what you are, and move forward. Right. So you sell your first photo, 94, I think. You're working in, you know, in the ski shop.

You've done your research. Snapped an awesome photo for 500 bucks and a pair of skis. And this, you know, fast forwarding all the way to, you know, commanding massive budgets and shooting with, you know, Fortune 100 companies, Nike, you know, everybody basically, Red Bull. Apple. Apple, yeah, I wanna talk about that too.

One of the things that is kind of a hallmark of how you established your career was to really value yourself, right? And I think we're in this disposable economy now where I don't think creativity is adequately, let alone financially appreciated. We think that, well, he took a picture. I should be able to use it wherever I want, however I want. And we don't think of the inherent value of what's entailed here. And you're somebody who's always, you know, been very deliberate in making sure that you established your own value and used

your experience as a voice piece to encourage other people to do the same. And so the question that I have about that is how do you square that with kind of the, the Gary V message of just go out there and like do a ton of stuff for free, like say yes to everything, you know, get in with, you know, people who can advance your career and just be a team player. Like, I think there's wisdom in both of those, but somehow you got to find a mix that works where you're still valuing your input while also trying to build your pedigree free or cheap never never in between yeah like having the seth godin thing what he always says about public speaking it's either full fare or free great i didn't know seth that said that he's a dear friend i was just talking to him the other day great guy

we're gonna do a thing in new york together on the 24th when the book drops. Yeah, free or full price. And I think free is fine because free gets you portfolio, connections, experience, and those are valuable things. But what's the worst is like, hey, what's your rate? $5,000, I have 80 bucks, okay. That's the worst because then you've, you know, you've then taken what you've posted as your value and burned it versus saying, I'm going to do this because I'm

going to get something out of it. And here's my requirement. I will make the creative decisions. And if you don't like it, you can't use it or whatever the paradigm that you establish for your work is. So I think they're reconcilable. I don't think it's either, you know, value yourself or don't. I think it's okay to find other aspects of value to place on you and your work besides money. Yeah. I think what happens with a lot of young people is they, they, they do end up, you know, doing a lot of free stuff as they should, as they're learning, but they don't then also learn the skill of knowing when to say, okay, now's the time to pay me.

Or they start at these very micro amounts and they're afraid, they don't wanna alienate anybody or like piss anyone off. And so they end up toiling in this netherworld where the work isn't getting valued, even though the quality of it would substantiate that. Totally true. And that is a learned skill.

And the only way you learn is through practice. And this is why I advocate action over intellect. Like if you're sitting around trying to figure this out and make the perfect chess move like that's not how it happens you make a lot of little imperfect moves you learn a little bit of a lesson and then you move on just trying to make the same mistake more than you know one or two times ideally one but it's the action it's the doing that actually creates the learning. It's very hard to, and it's, it's great to get information from the internet or your mentor or whomever, but learning, like actually doing that part is incredibly

valuable. So, you know, again, I think it is reconcilable. You can still value yourself and you can still work for free. And I do believe in connections. And I would choose to use the word community. You're building a community of people who are there to teach you, to learn from you, to be supportive, and for you to support. And that's all valuable. And I think that's something that's wildly overlooked in, you know, talk about it specifically through creativity. Yeah, it's a whole section of your book, basically. Yeah, it's a quarter of the book is about the benefits of community and how it's wildly

overlooked as key to the success in anything. Even if it's, you're a solo artist or whatever, like whole, sorry, there's a whole slew of people who make this possible, this experience that you have created possible. And to keep that thread and maybe put a period at the end of it, I think it's reconcilable. I think that experience is the only way you can navigate it. And I understand why you'd want to think about it before you entered it which i encourage you to do but in the end you can't actually be paralyzed if you're just so precious that you're not willing to do anything for free and you're getting no work that should be that should be a sign yeah yeah yeah and again extrapolate this to away from

photography to anything that you want to move into that's the that's the big conundrum right is like how do i start something in a world where i have no experience right it's whether it's get a job or shift gears or you want to move to a new career or like how do i start when no one will hire me yeah i think the the this subject of preciousness is one that that doesn't get enough attention or discourse like when you don't have a tremendous amount of experience, but you're overly precious about what you're doing, then you tend to overvalue yourself and you misstep, right?

Because you're not objectively judging the business landscape. Yeah. And one of the things you talk about in the book is like not being, like, just make the next thing, just keep moving on, just keep moving on. Like i have a friend who's this very successful screenwriter and his whole thing is like as soon as you finish a script like it's very easy you know we're in hollywood here i know a lot of people that are in this world like they get they're so precious about their thing and they can't move on to the next thing and they're just waiting to hear if it

sells or you know they get very caught up in all these externalities that they have no control over so his thing is like you just immediately start the next thing so you're immersed in the next creative project and you're divorcing yourself very mindfully and purposefully from the results of your creative output yep the judgment ends up being a really toxic aspect of of any creative output and i do mean creative with a capital C. Like, you know, we start to judge too soon. Warhol had a great, like, when everyone else is busy judging your work, you go back to making the next thing. Right, right.

Let them judge it. Yeah, yeah, yeah. You move on. Well, on the subject of community building, I want to get to that because that is kind of an exclamation point in this second act break that is the Chase Jarvis movie. You basically realize all of your dreams. You go from this fledgling, you know, photographer working in a ski shop to working with these huge brands. And like I said earlier, commanding these huge budgets and, you know, like helicopters and the, you know, the craziest stuff you can imagine.

Like this is your dream realized. Like you have everything that you ever aspired to have. You are successful probably beyond what you could have ever predicted for yourself. Way, way, way, way beyond. And then it took this other tragedy, which you touched on, this avalanche, to really recalibrate how it was that you were living.

So maybe dig a little bit deeper into that. What, uh, what I've come to know is that I feel like there's two arcs in a life. There's an arc where you're accumulating wisdom, knowledge, friends, connections, perspectives. And at some point, most of us know not what or when, there is a shift. I think this is really a beautiful shift if it's possible to like, okay, I have enough, my fear sense, my biology, I can override my biology and start to think in terms beyond just me.

And that is one thing as a, whether, you know, parents probably understand that or people who used to be a one woman shop. And now you have many employees or like whatever the analogy or the experiences there's at some part, you're like, wait a minute. And again, we can choose that or things in life can choose it for us. And if you're sort of ignoring it, then you're going to get a lesson. And my lesson was, as it turns out, this avalanche. And despite living, as you said, what I had carved out as my dream,

it's sort of like, as soon as you have something, when you don't have anything, you got nothing to lose. And then when't have anything, you got nothing to lose. And then when you have something, you have everything to lose. You have a life, you have community, you have resources, money, reputation, all these things. And so this sort of fear instinct, survival mechanism, biology,

what are you gonna call it, kicks in. And then you stay in that mode versus this sort of open mode that I'm trying to be in, in just being aware of our own mortality and creativity and all this stuff. And so in my universe, I got caught in this bad avalanche and somehow got out. And I remember didn't sleep, maybe like 15 minutes the next night or that, that night. And it was about just like really calling everything into question. And it sounds a little bit too movie scripty, but like straight up, that's how it went down. And I, I just did

an interview with, uh, on my podcast with a guy named Ben, who was one of the Nike athletes that I was actually filming when it happened. Oh, wow. No one was hurt, by the way, right? Correct. Everybody got out. Yeah, minor, minor. Everybody got away.

Alaska? Yeah, it was massive. I'm talking like entire mountain phase ripped off, like enough snow to fill up multiple football fields 50 feet deep. Like this is not a thing you walk away from. And I remember talking to Ben and we literally never talked about it. Like when I was reunited with the rest of the athletes and the guides and stuff

at the bottom, we just flew off and like shut, you know, there is skiing uncharted stuff in Alaska. This is like where all the films that you see are made and all the best advertisements and whatnot. And we like, we, like, there's a, actually we have the moment of me being caught in the avalanche on film. And then the person who's filming that, like they go, oh shit,

and they drop the camera and they run. And it's just, it's very dramatic scene. And then the next piece of footage is the person goes and picks up a camera. And, you know, this is some time later because I, whatever, escaped. And then I'm reunited with the group and i skipped with the group and the camera's running on me and they just say whoa and i'm like do not tell my wife about that just right but that is literally the extent that we talked about it right well in the moment it's

so it was so overwhelming that you have to minimize totally yeah and so fast forward to that to that night, and honestly, the next several weeks, but that night in particular, like, what am I doing? It's sort of like, as soon as you get there, you think that you're, it's like a false summit. You see a summit if you're a climber. You think, okay, cool. And then you crest the mountain, and you're like, only to realize that this is the first summit, and there's a whole nother mountain behind that. And to me, that was deciding to try and paint a bigger picture of what was possible for my experience. And that was trying to help other people. I had just been given so many gifts or earned so many gifts through that journey that I'd been on that was like, wow, this is a thing that like, what if we could like reproduce this

and give this gift to other people? What's the, you know, the message. So that is in part what inspired me to do the iPhone app. That was the first iPhone app that shared photos to social networks. It was like, I started creating tools and platforms for other people to try and tap into what I had the chance of experiencing. I mean, it wasn't a complete departure because you had been sharing, you've been blogging, you've been transparent about this journey all along, but it was more an epiphany about how to contribute at scale, right?

Yeah, totally. So you create, you got to tell this story. You create this iPhone app, best camera. I know it's painful, dude, but a lot of people haven't heard it. Sure. Best camera predates Instagram, but in many ways, extremely similar to the earlier versions of Instagram. You upload a photo, there's filters, you could scroll through all the filters at the bottom. We created all those paradigms. I mean, it was, yeah.

It becomes the app of the year. It's getting written about on all the tech blogs. The New York Times covers it. This is what the people who work at Apple are using. And you're positioned to- Steve Jobs, Phil Schiller, all those people quoting it, talking about it.

They use the name of the app was Best Camera. Right. After a phrase I popularized, the best camera is the one that's with you. Apple start, I have a trademark to that. Apple starts using it in their advertising. People, I mean, that's part of the modern vernacular now. A lot of people say, you know, the best camera is the one that,

some version of that is the one you have. Never enforced it. But be careful. Go ahead. No, you tell the story. Why am I telling the story? Because you're, it's it, but be careful. Go ahead. No, you tell the story. Why am I telling the story? Because I love hearing it through your experience. You got it right. I think the shortest version is just created the first app that allowed you to take a picture at a cool effect that we call filters, which is a term from photography. And was the same thing we basically decided that i wanted to be cool if there was like a set of filters at the bottom of the app that was loosely based on the dock concept of an apple

operating system that didn't exist it used to be like a tile across all some of the other apps had of course now it's ubiquitous yeah totally and but again everything has a yeah as an origin and then you could just you know press one button and submit it to as many social networks as you wanted at one time or there was a community at the best camera which was the first photo feed like the live photo feed in an app and then just to for context like i remember when i originally submitted it um you know apple was interesting as was interested in the app and I was developing it and they knew about it. And I had launched some products for them. I had done some work in the photography universe.

Can't really talk about it because you get snipered sometime if I talk about it. And so they knew about this app and they said, no, you can't do this. I was like, what do you mean you can't do this? Like, oh, we can't have a photo feed. The concept of just photos that you post and then are in a feed, that's just not something that we can do because, you know, we can't validate the image or, you know, might violate community or, you know, our policies or whatnot. So I so had to like this is how early it was had to work with them to literally validate the concept of a feed of photos wow without yeah and and again this is something people don't understand how it wasn't all that long ago yeah you know because it's so ubiquitous now but okay 2009 2009 yes yeah so the to to cut to the chase bum bum bum um put the thing out in September that year, it went straight to number one within a matter of days and lived there for a long time. As you mentioned, it became were in the contract.

Some of it was with, I had an external partner develop the app. I told them what I wanted. They built it. We massaged it. And in that era, it was really hard to have an account that would allow you to submit software to the app store. Even getting the account, you didn't know how long it would take. Would you be validated?

It was like, it was a black box also because it was just so new. And there were still hundreds of thousands of apps. So rather than me having my own account, I just used the developer's account and come to find out that that actually means that so even though contractually I own the code, it was in work for hire, if I can't touch the code, I can't move the code,

I don't have access to the code. Once it's on their account, it can't be transferred over. Right, and now all those things are transferable, but none of that was true. So we had a contract that stipulated that there would be 13, I think it was 13, new releases over the course of the next year. One right away if we found bugs or whatever. And then one a month for the next year. Because we thought that that's how long it was going to take. They developed the app for free on the back end of,

it was a 70-30 revenue split, and then when they had been paid back, it would flip 70-30 to me. Well, we had figured out that it was going to take about a year on average to pay us back, and we were paid back in six days. Or they were paid back in six days. And then when that revenue share flipped,

when then suddenly they're only getting 30. Their desire to. Right, right. Yeah, their desire to. And it's important, like it's still like, it seems now looking through the lens of 2019, well, there's still a lot of money to be made at 30%, but back then that's not the perception of apps.

These things come and go. Yeah. They have a very short shelf life. You just, it's a cash grab and you move on. Yeah, and that was the paradigm. not the perception of apps these things come and go yeah they have a very short shelf life you just it's a cash grab and you move on yeah and that was the paradigm i'm sitting there saying no you don't get it these are going to be huge multi-billion dollar companies this is the future of software development is decentralized and blah blah blah blah blah and of course it falls on deaf ears so in about that time when the app is now sort of it's full-blown just peaking and starting to crest and

there's not a lot of updates coming up because rather than you know do add a friend and follow geography and all the things the things that we had spec'd out together you can't like predict what's going to be in a software release nine months from now and that'd be a bad contractor right because you're locked in so they would do things like um release it in french that was what how they got they they managed to navigate the contract right so they were still in alignment with the contract but not the spirit for sure and without going into the weeds any further than we've already gone that obviously um creates a space where you're not innovating anymore and despite you're the you're the you know number one app in the app store um that creates a space where you're not innovating anymore. And despite you're the number one app in the app store,

that creates a place. So there was an app called Bourbon. Yeah, there's a guy called Kevin. Kevin Systrom. Hold up in an office. In San Francisco. Studying what you've created. Yep.

And there used to be a video on the internet where Robert Scoble was interviewing him and said, isn't this just best camera? He's like, oh yeah, well, we've looked at a lot of, a lot of the apps and obviously Kevin's an amazing business person who created a billion dollar company in just a matter of months. Um, short story long, it is, they threw 50 million bucks at it, supplanted it and, you know, just started innovating and doing great work. And meanwhile, I didn't have access to the code. I was roughly speaking paralyzed, both conceptually and I didn't have any way of managing code that I couldn't put my fingers on. And we just got smoked.

And then, of course, when Instagram sells for a billion dollars a year later, let's just say my phone was ringing. Yeah, I would imagine. Oh, bro, too bad. I would imagine that was a challenging period of time. Yeah, honestly, it took me. And I was off Instagram for, I think, almost five years. Right. Just because my lawyers wanted to preserve the right to sue because I was damaged.

And I just got caught it up. You can't establish damages if you're on Instagram. Totally. And it's just like lawyer stuff. And at some point, I was just like, this is useless. So after a lot of litigation, I actually did get the code back after like a number of years. And the company was purchased by Deloitte partway through this process that I

had contracted. So then it wasn't just me against this other contractor. It was like me against Deloitte, which is unpleasant. So, you know, again. So you couldn't even do any kind of exit out of that. No, it's just, I got a zero. Right. That's a- Well, and to be fair, there is another chapter which is not well documented.

This story is very well documented on the internet. You did a very long blog post about it and a video. I'll link it up in the show notes. And the- And it's in the book. Yeah. And it's in the book. Yeah.

I did get the code back and I did sort of like throw some cycles at it and revived it. And I did have an opportunity to sell it to some other companies. But at that point, it was still like never work again money. But my ego was so smashed. And my soul was like, no, I think I'd rather take it it's sort of like free or full price. Taking my own advice, which I would regret now. It'd be nice to not have to work, but I just leveraged everything that I learned in that experience

from not having venture capital, being in cap table of one and a team of just a small hardworking team that I'll never forget at my photo studio who really put the zhuzh into this and just leveraged it into CreativeLive. So I learned a lot of lessons along the way. Yeah. I mean, it all went into the hopper. It goes back to the dominoes all lining up, like would CreativeLive

had occurred? Well, listen, if you'd become Instagram, there's like, you're done. But it provided the fuel and the experience that birthed this amazing platform that you're now running. So tell people what CreativeLive is for those that don't know. Sure, happy to do it. CreativeLive is a platform, largest platform focused specifically for creators and entrepreneurs. It's where 10 million people have gone to learn photography design filmmaking entrepreneurship it has the you know pilcher prize winners new york times bestsellers the best of the batch and each best of the best in each of those disciplines and um there's we've

given away billions and billions of minutes of free video there's always something free playing you can go learn about any of those things from those types of people and there's also a subscription and and if you want to buy an individual class you can go learn about any of those things from those types of people. And there's also a subscription. And if you want to buy an individual class, you can go there to learn. So it was, yeah, it definitely came out of the ashes of my Best Camera experience. And today, it affects way more people than Best Camera ever did. Not, unfortunately, than Instagram. But no, we're basically a decade in now

and, and, uh, it's cool. It's cool. I've gotten, um, I've gotten a lot out of it personally just to be on the journey. And I, I love to see that it's impacted a lot of people. And, um, that's the part that I wish I could share and I wish I could package it up and put it in the book. And I struggled, I tried a bunch of different ways to, in part, that's what made me want to write the book, honestly, because I think about being the second grader and being told that I really shouldn't pay attention to this creativity stuff

and then figuring it out in a very imperfect, messy, crappy way and then starting to acknowledge that creativity, building a living and a life for myself, then starting, basically becoming the creator that I was denied. I look at that as refusing to betray myself. So acknowledging that, then starting to develop tools for creators

like the iPhone app. Well, first of all, I guess the community around creativity and the photography community, and then tools like the iPhone app. Well, first of all, I guess the community around creativity and the photography community and then tools like the iPhone app and then platform for learning. You can see this like progression a little bit. And now there's a platform there. And what was missing in all this is the why.

Like, why is this valuable? Is it just for photographers? Is it, and that was what has been sort of lingering for me for 10 years is, wait a minute, I have come to know creativity as this ubiquitous, incredibly powerful force, arguably like creativity and love are the things that are human being superpowers.

And yet there's the, you know, we can talk about love. And I think if I say love is a superpower of human beings, no one goes like, hmm, everyone go, yeah, I guess you're right. And yet creativity has been sort of left out of that conversation. So for me, you know, writing the book was a little bit about, I need to sort of put my arms around this whole process. It's the best work I've ever done. And it's in a package that I didn't want to write a book.

I wanted to make an internet video and call it good, but it wasn't the right format. How did it come about then? In a very reluctant manner. I'm a visual artist. I am fast at that and it's natural to me. And I have written a thousand blog posts on my blog in graduate school.

Yeah, you're a graduate. I mean, you're a graduate student in philosophy. You're no stranger to writing. Sure. But when it comes to deciding to write a book, I was an unwilling, unwitting author, but I knew it had to be a book because of the potential, the vehicle, it's the right package to get into popular culture.

Because, you know, if there are people who identify as creators who are listening to this, they're like, right on, dude. This is representing my tribe, my identity. I get it. Go. There's a whole other cross-section of the universe that I call creative curious. People who are stringent, there's no way I'm not creative. I don't want to be, I don't want art. I want fill in the blank. I don't know what you want if you don't want that. But there's a huge population of people who I think can, their lives can be transformed. And even for the creators, like if you start to get out of the creativity, the small C,

like art and you get into like, oh wow, this is actually an architecture for life that needed to be in a book. That's not an internet video yeah and so i um i have an amazing great creative horizon for you though right to like tackle something like this is new totally and it was my own medicine big time yeah like you had to rely on on the book that you were writing that was not yet written in order to write the book so many times i literally had to go back or many times. I literally had to go back. Like an Ouroboros.

Yeah, I had to go back, like I would just see page 37 or see this sticky note on the corner of my desk that I wrote a year ago that said this one thing. And you're like, God, I gotta take my own advice. So it was both a beautiful, incredibly painful, but also beautiful experience to feel the process actually work.

And it was a little bit of a litmus test while you're doing it. It's sort of like doing your subtraction to check your edition or whatever, like writing a book about creativity and being neck deep in it and having to just continually extract yourself, go look at the rules that you'd set out in the previous chapter, follow them. And that it worked, I think is in part a testament um but it was also really humbling and i think that's you know i've talked a lot in this you know conversation about the cultural shoulds and inputs from all the people that you love and and learning to navigate those it's also really important to know that a those never go away but nor do a lot of the fears around creativity and the

struggles and it never becomes just this easy greasy path which i hope it doesn't turn anyone off because that's where the best stuff i think it's super important to point that out somebody who's who is as creatively uh productive as you are to acknowledge that you still struggle with that, I think gives people encouragement and permission to feel like they can then be included. Good. Well, yeah, I lived it. And that's what these dark circles under my eyes are from. And there's that torture between when you send it off to the publisher and when you get to start talking about it. And I'm over the moon to be sharing this with you and your community here. Long appreciated it.

And we've had a lot of inspiring discussions. You've been on my show. And I just love the approach. And to be able to be, I'm like right now, I'm using my own medicine to be creating the first experience or the first impression of this book on the world. So also clearly struggling, looking for words, not knowing what I'm talking about. I mean, I think you've said it all in the book and I think it's beautiful. that I want to address is another myth of conventional wisdom, which is that creativity and financial well-being are mutually exclusive.

Like a huge part of your adventure isn't just becoming creatively literate, it's becoming a successful business person and entrepreneur and learning how to grow into this idea that these two worlds can, are not mutually exclusive and can coincide and, and support each other. And I will get an endless array of shit for putting those two sentences or those two words in the same book, creativity and money. And that's, you know, but they, they don't, they, they can't exist without each other. Bingo. Okay. So this is, you opened with some of the, your favorite books, you know,

the war of art artists way, like be damned if they talk about sort of money and those things, because it's so pure, it's art. And to me, that was a thing that I needed to put in the book was this, you know, there's one section called the big three.

And one of the big three is the, is the, is money. And it either comes in in like, Oh, you'd need some money to get started. Or you, at some point,

if you do this, someone will say, I like your work or, and you just have to have an opinion on it. And I'm, I And part of the mission is to dispel this idea, this toxic myth of the starving artist, which, as it turns out, just comes back from the period in the early part of the last century where these French people were hanging out. It's basically La Boheme, the musical. these French people were hanging out. It's basically La Boheme, the musical.

You get Simone de Beauvoir and Jean-Paul Sartre hanging out at this Café Le Domego. And the starving artists, they hang pride on this because it's how they identify. And it just comes to find out that's a really toxic myth because it's the reason that so many of us are not hearing how powerful creativity is until now because there is a myth of the starving artist and who wants to pursue art when you realize you're going to starve. And sadly,

it's stuck, right? This is a powerful vision that we are narrative-based creatures. We learn through story and that sad, toxic story has been responsible for uncorking many a creative life because of the woods and the shoulds and the and understandably like do your parents want you to be starving no if they hear this myth they and i'm oversimplifying it but the reality is that creativity and money creativity is also you can tell this to whoever's telling you otherwise it is the it is a vehicle for creating the most impressive you know opportunities for access to wealth that the world knows the same we were just you know joking about kevin sistrom and instagram dude created a billion dollar company that had either nine or 13 people in it.

Right. And did it in two years. It's insane. It's insane. So, you know, and that's a wildly creative experience that they went through in order to pull that off. So I like to marry those things in an unpleasant, messy way and just, you know, we can talk about it. But that's, they do have to be in relationship to one another if you're going to move through an actual life. Yeah.

Art doesn't exist without commerce. There is a healthy tension also, because look, if you look at the movie business, like there's the artistic vision of the filmmakers and there's what the marketplace will tolerate. And the tension that exists between those two things sometimes produces a work of great genius, depending upon the people involved, or it craters the whole thing and turns it into a disaster, you know?

And you never know what you're gonna get. Nobody goes into making a movie thinking they're gonna make a bad movie. Totally. But how you balance that tension and navigate the vicissitudes of commerce with respect to how it informs or does not inform art

ultimately is, you know, an essential discussion and component of any, of any creation. So true. And I, I like that little move that you made there at the end of that phrase was like at any creation, because we're talking about art and commerce, but the same thing is true with life, right? When you're creating something, you can create it. Money can be part of what you desire because you're trying to create the ability to sustain the thing you're doing. And there's nothing wrong with that. Whether that's baking a cake, making a family, writing code, whatever the thing that you're doing, whatever you're engaged in.

And that should be okay. Like money is not a dirty word. Money, you know, facilitates, especially if you can do some good things with that. Yeah. But we're so afraid to bring it up. I know. And again, that's like I'm trying the good things with that. Yeah, but we're so afraid to bring it up. I know. And again, that's like,

I'm trying the same thing with creativity. Like you just picture the beret, the cigarettes, the painting, that's not what I'm talking about at all. Sure, it'll supercharge those things if that's what you're into. And I hope that folks who identify as that or with that will get a ton of value. But I'm trying to make this like more accessible draw a bigger pie put our arms around a bigger population and include these things that have

historically been like no he didn't just say the m word did he yeah yeah and let's let's deconstruct that wall of fear that is preventing you from trying something new. And the truth is all of those excuses are now of no merit in a time and a day when almost everybody has a smartphone in their pocket. So whether it's photography or writing or filmmaking, like you have a 4k camera. Like I made a short film that did the, the festival circuit back in 2005, we shot on 35 film and the process of post-production to get it into like 1080p was the most ridiculous protract. I had to go to this fancy post house

and it was like teams of people working on all this kind of thing. Now you have 4K in your pocket and an editing app that you can use to make a movie. And Steven Soderbergh is making features you know high quality features with movie stars with his iphone yeah those excuses are gone bingo so now we're confronted with ourselves it's just you and you're surrounded by these tools yeah you know and and to me that's another thing if you go back to early in a conversation that I love is it's almost, you have to avoid it.

If you really don't want it, you have to try and get away from it. You really have to run away quickly from this. Right. And I like to tell a story of my mom who when I did that app in 2009, I think she was 65 at the time. And you mentioned earlier,

she was an administrator of biotech. I was raised sort of middle, lower middle class. And yet still hadn't, I was never wanted for much. And yet she's always very precise and also very frugal. The heat never got above like 58. You were cold, put on a sweater. And she took pride in that was very practical and because of that had not thought of herself as creative and really didn't care and when i did that iphone app and i got an iphone put that three dollar app in her hand

in no extra time she didn't have to go buy a set of paints. She didn't have to go to the art supply store. Didn't have to take a woodworking class or she didn't have to like get a new set of friends. She just started using the phone when she would take her daily walk and started taking pictures at an effect and share it with her friends. She would occasionally post to a social network and i watched her both recognize her own creativity and this is not over months either this is like and it's not days it's somewhere like weeks recognize her own creativity it almost was like confronted with it because it was so obvious and her friends like oh my god joy you're so creative and i watched it change how she approached cooking i watched it change how she dressed i watched it change the kinds of vacations

she wanted to take she wanted to go explore just from learning that she was creative by taking pictures every day with her phone no extra time this was on a walk that she did every day and it was transformative. And so I think this, like, again, you have, these tools are now are all around us, right? The ability to publish and to, to avoid the gatekeepers and all of the things that we used to have to think really clearly of like, now you really have to try and avoid it. So to the person who's listening to this and you are avoiding it, what are you scared of? Ask yourself the question. And the ability to step into that fear is a pretty low barrier.

And I think there might be, if you're anything like my mom or a lot of other people who've picked this up, like the barrier is so low, you can trip over it. Like give it a shot. And I think you'll be surprised. And I think you'll be,. And I think you'll be, you'll find yourself empowered too, I think.

And on the subject of, you know, creativity being the new literacy, I think that's a sensibility that is second nature to Generation Z that's coming up, who are born and raised with these tools. They've never known a world without them. It's very different. And they're pursuing lives that are premised on creativity

in a way that was not accessible to you and I. I'm a little bit older than you, but it just wasn't even part of the conversation when we were young people. And I think it's really gonna be cool to see what that produces 10 years, 20 years down the line. So true. People that their literacy is creativity.

Like it's just so hardwired into them that the idea of not being creative or not being a creative person is something that wouldn't even occur to them. Right. And words matter. Like that's one of the things that I talk about in, in, in the book that I think escapes people sometimes. Like when you say, oh, I'm not very creative, like a little damage there. And, you know, go back to the Brene quote that you mentioned. And, and what I'm encouraged by is when you've grown up with these tools and, or if you haven't grown up with them, but you're willing to step into them and encourage, incur a little bit of fear, you'll find that the barrier is so small. You just step over that thing

and then you can start creating that. I'm encouraged by that. And honestly, that's one of the reasons that I had to do the book. It was just like, oh my God, it's happening. It's happening. The thing I've been thinking about for virtually my entire adult life and it happened to me and I'm like, oh gosh. And so, you know, that's what ultimately I, I, I called it my eighth grade book report. I, my agent is like, yeah, you gotta do the book. You get excited. I'm like, yeah. And then one day I was like, I took a weekend. I wrote what I lovingly refer to my eighth grade book report. And it was literally like 10 pages, sent it to my agent, Steve. And he was like, this is it.

And then we were off to the races. So in other words, saying, this is my eighth grade book report was a way of lowering the stakes for you. So it didn't seem so intimidating. Yeah, and I just, again, I just did the work because I was afraid, you know, there's a lot of, you start to see culture moving

in the direction that you're talking about. As I had a couple, that's my gift, right? Just to be able to see around the corner and some, some technologies or culture. And I was like, oh my God, it's like happening again. And like, let's change the vehicle. If it was an app or if it was a platform, I was like, let's, that's why a book had to, I had to write the book. But what a cool time. That's part of what needs to be the takeaway from this talk is whether you are all in on this or you're just deciding if you're going to put your toe in the water, amazing time. And it just so happens that this corresponds with it is the riskiest time in the world to play it safe. Because whatever you were sold as safe, now that's beige, it's vanilla.

It is, it's not like you'll blend in in a good way. It's you're leaving so much on the table in terms of identity, earning power, connection with other people, vulnerability, authenticity. Like if you're not sort of participating, it's the equivalent of not participating. Yeah, especially as we progress towards this AI society that's going to commandeer a lot of those jobs. Sure.

And then just listen to Jack Ma, who's the founder of alibaba which arguably the most data-centric one of the most data-centric companies in the world that retails basically like super amazon retail in china whatever mega mega company his kids if you he may give a speech at the world economic forum oh my kids no no they're not worried about coding no no that's computers are coding and computers are teaching other computers to code my kids creativity painting connection sports human movement everything that machines are not and if that's not a clue from the guy who basically road mapped the future of ai and you know all that kind of stuff like wake up call. And again, you can look at that as fear or let's flip the script and say,

what a cool time to experiment. What a cool time to try a thing that I haven't done before. And go back to, as I mentioned a second ago, the line that you bought as a young person where we were fed or sold or whatever the mechanism or transaction, it truly is risky, not in the sense of only in economic prosperity, but as in leaving who you are back on the desk.

That would be a very heavy price to pay to, to not be able to express yourself in the way that you were capable of and to, to leave with that on the shelf over there. And it robs you of that opportunity to be more fulfilled and to live a more purpose-driven life. I mean, if there is a theme to this show that I do, it's, it's how can we live more authentically? How can we create a life for ourselves that is more in tune with our natural blueprint? And that's a journey of discovery that will last you your entire life. But the more that you can kind of connect with that and explore that, not at the behest of leaving your job necessarily, but just to bring more of that

experience into your life, I think will gird it with meaning and will lead you on an incredible, you know, journey of discovery of yourself. And I think will brighten the palette of the world. Yeah. So well said. I'm going to use that when you come on tour with me. Yeah, of course. Carry you around on my lap. Anytime, dude. No, but that's the subhead, you know, the book is like establish a daily practice, infuse your world with meaning, because that's what this does. The book is like establish a daily practice, infuse your world with meaning,

because that's what this does. And it just so happens that this helps you find success in life. As talented as you are behind the lens, I really do think your superpower is being able to see around the bend. And when you look back on these pivotal moments in your life and these decisions that you've made, you've always been just a little bit ahead. you know, like at times maybe a little bit too early, but always prefacing

what ultimately comes. And we're seeing this now with, with creative live. I mean, creative lives been around a decade, that long. I mean, it's crazy. And now you can't watch a YouTube video without seeing an ad for masterclass. Like it's a crowded space now and people are moving in. There's a lot of high quality stuff going on, but you were a first mover here. I don't know if you were the first, but you were the first to really truly establish a, you know, a very popular platform. So how do you continue for, this is a two-part question. First, how do you continue to iterate on creative live to make sure that you're in lockstep with what's happening culturally and secondarily as this visionary what is the next

thing around the bend that you're seeing right now step one is i don't think that I let the pop culture be my guide so much as my intuition. And surely pop culture is one of the inputs. Yeah, but it's transitory and ephemeral. Yeah, and so it's a little bit more of a feeling. And what I find is that if you're chasing market opportunities, you're always behind. And I've been willing, like, again, just go back to like taking pictures with your phone. I was taking of the palm trio that had 0.3 megapixel camera my friends that i was

totally insane and i was like you know what that's that's kind of cool because you know the money thing that i mentioned earlier maybe it doesn't have a role here that's just that's actually a relief and i just kept doing it and lo and behold the market comes market intersects with your ideas that's when cool things happen the same thing with creative And I just kept doing it. And lo and behold, the market comes. Market intersects with your ideas. That's when cool things happen. The same thing with CreativeLive. Like online learning was so like,

it was so ephemeral and wispy and known. Like, of course, you're going to learn more on the internet. That's like, you can see the internet shaping up to that, but it wasn't really about schools and about all this other kind of stuff that it is now. And same thing. But I wasn't saying like, is this a good idea? Should I do this? No, I just kind of like, what would be cool? And so I'm trying to, maybe if it's a superpower, but I got that information just from being a part of the world and letting the things that are inspiring me,

inspire me. And then I tried to make something out of it, which is to me, that's the takeaway. And right now you might be saying, well, wait a minute, I'm not quite in tune with that. But that's starting to listen. All I'm doing is getting much better at listening to all these inputs that are hitting me. And I'm able to literally create something or put something out in the world that is a manifestation of all those feelings. So what I feel like is I'm, and there's a hundred mistakes along the way that don't get, that aren't sort of in the news or aren't going to be a book or whatever. And we don't talk about those, but this is like, I hope that I'm living proof of basically screwing up in so many different ways before losing so much money and time and all those

things that I'm, but I'm just now kind of getting into the, okay, cool. It's working. So I advocate not to be looking to your left and to your right, you know, cause otherwise if you're looking behind you, you're not going to know where you're going and just, you know, you do, you go back to one of the core missions of your show is authenticity. I'm just making things that resonate with me that I would want to see in the world. Just so happens that every once in a while, the market hits one of those things at the right time. So, you know, that's sort of how I think about,

not to dodge the question about how do you keep CreativeLive relevant, but CreativeLive is going to keep doing its thing. And, you know, that's its own ecosystem in life. And it's going to keep evolving and changing and growing as companies that are like people they become. But behind that, sorry to interject, but behind that, I think, look, we've sort of set it up as your opportunity to give back and to contribute and cultivate community around these subject matters that are important to you but but i think that overlooks the broader intention here and and understanding which is that fundamentally education needs a reboot right like we're we're stuck in an archaic setup that isn't necessarily serving young people for the world in which we now live

yeah very true and again there's no evil. No one is trying to keep you down. But part of a mass culture is that you need to create a system that can manage the most people the most efficiently. And we've done a very good job of that. And in the means of production world, it's called the factory. And in the education world, it's called a school. And we put raw material in one end and we move it down the assembly line at the same time when we inject the same things into the same molds at the same moment. And then at the end, what do we create? In the factory, it's a widget.

In the school, it is a person who went through the school system. And sadly, the persons or people that we're making in those systems are woefully unprepared for what the future has because this system, both the system, the means of production in a factory and the means of education in a school are very slow to adopt. They're de-incentivized. And in fact, the government makes a huge sum of money on giving you easy access to student loans. It's student loans. 1.5 trillion is the debt in student loans in our country, which is higher than credit card debt. Just grab onto that for a second. And we'll never go away. And we'll never go away. It's unforgivable from- You file bankruptcy, it doesn't matter.

Right. And again, I'm not throwing rocks at our government or at the school system or the, but it's just an awareness that we have to realize that we need to now supplement all of these things, both our career. If our parents had one job, you and I are going to have five, the next generation is going to have five at the same time is a building covered with Ivy on a Hill that you have to pay 60 grand a year gonna prepare you for that no and my wife is a public school teacher for years i rummaged around in the boiler room of the school to find enough desks to put them in her class we paid for all the materials on the walls of her classroom because we cared but it's just and and i don't, again, the goal is not to throw rocks at the school system because it does a very good job of a very simple foundational deal.

But what I'm trying to emphasize here is that's not enough. I do, I am very excited to share. This is the second time I've put this out in the world. And I'm going to do it here. That I'm trying to gather for people who want to contribute. I'm trying to gather, there are 3,200 teachers in the Seattle school district and I want to get 3,200 books. There's 113 schools. I found someone who will drop ship boxes to all of these schools. So if I can find a way to get enough 3,200 books,

I'm gonna give a book to every school teacher in the Seattle Public Schools. Oh, that's cool. And as a mechanism for both just connecting with them and helping them understand the sort of where I think the future is and the role of creativity in it. If somebody's listening to this

and they wanna help you with that, what's the best way for them to do that? First of all, thank you. Go to creativecalling.com and there's some bonus with purchase if you bought the book one bonus is you can get into a class at creative live for free it's a special class another one is if you want to like buy 10 books then um i don't remember what you get you get something else and then some goodie bag yeah and then there's another one that says make me an offer and that

is like if you want me to come speak or whatever and what i i again i just mentioned this and i've already had two people contribute here you can just send me an email and say i want to contribute this much and we have a mechanism i'll handle these in a one-off manner right um and i was just on a show and someone came through with boom, a hundred books, but you know, it's like, to me, this is what the cool part of the internet and the time we're living in right now is that we can put a dream out there in the world. And you just wanted to talk about the school system and we can acknowledge simultaneously, like acknowledge the shortcomings and do something about it, which is super exciting for me. So that's a little aside,

but I would love it if you want to join and help in that mission. I think it's, and the aspiration is to do it in Seattle. And then if it works, like- Right. Make it a program. Yeah, make it a program. Totally. But to go back to the analogy and the school system that you were, I think, appropriately calling out. No evil genius, but we have to take our education to our own hands. And that is why things like books, podcasts,

learning platforms are an essential part of any person's learning experience going forward. This is true with your kids. It's true with us. I don't know why learning should stop at age 18 or 21 or whenever you finish high school or college or whatever. It shouldn't. That's a myth. Because that's when you're supposed to go into the factory. Literally. And again, we can both acknowledge that and decide to take different action. And that's

what I'm asking. Yeah. Well, it's really cool what you created. And I'm not gonna let you off the hook on the one thing about what's around the bend. Dang. Yeah. I think, do you mean in terms of in sort of- I'm talking about like trends.

Like you, because you're immersed in internet culture or you pay attention to, you have a way of canvassing kind of what's happening and have developed the acumen for a little bit of foresight of what's to come. So my question is really like, what do you see like just around the bend that you think is gonna be

something we should be thinking about now radical decentralization of lots of different things radical decentralization so let's just take two things yeah so money is happening um let's take two things that we've just been talking about uh Let's talk about education and then we're talking about workforce. So education, we just described the radical decentralization of education. It's not happening in a building covered with ivy on a hill where they have billions of dollars worth of real estate in the middle of Boston. Your education is not happening there. is not happening there. Your education is out in the world with all these radical dynamic inputs, and your learning is going to be a lot more tied to those inputs and where you want to go.

In the workforce, the factory is a myth. The knowledge workers are, and that's not to say that we don't need a factory. Great. And there are people for whom a factory is the perfect thing. And I'm a huge advocate of the trades and not everyone should go to college. And it isn't really about, it doesn't define who we are. The reality though, is that 50 million Americans, I think it's by 2020, are gonna have a side hustle. That means half of the working population of the United States will be making money outside of what they would typically call their job.

And to me, that is like a massive world of opportunity. And now I want to go step one step removed and say, what role does creativity play in those two things? Everything. Critically central, right? Critically central. It means everything. Like you have to create your own educational arc. You have to create a way to learn in the world that you're moving through today. You have to, yeah, I don't need to, you know, to be pedantic, but, and if you look at the trend that I see in

this radical decentralization is opportunity. I think we mentioned Seth Godin earlier. Seth has a quote in the book about, it's just about preparing us for the new opportunities. And that's the way I think about the timing of this book, the guts of the book is fulfillment. All those things are there at the core, but it's also like, if everyone says like, oh, creativity is so whimsical and playful and naive, it's the most practical thing we've got. Yeah, I mean, I think you nailed it completely. We're seeing this explosion of the freelance workforce. The whole notion of career has been upended. Young people go from gig to gig to gig, multiple gigs at a time, as you said. The workplace is now the WeWorks and the co-working spaces.

In remote. Or the Starbucks. Here we are. Yeah, exactly. Everything is decentralized. From Bitcoin to office space, We could get, we could, you know, from Bitcoin to office space, which means the individual, it's incumbent upon the individual to take control and responsibility for what that arc is going to look like. And that's the space in which creativity can make the difference between a, you know, a sort of reactive path versus a very intentional path that would, you know, flourish into the life that you aspire to have. I cannot say, I will add nothing to that. And on top of that, I would put a veneer on top of that, of this increase we're seeing in how we think about ownership. Young people, they're not angling to, it used to be like the house and the car, the front yard and all that. It's like, they don't care about any of that. It's about, you know,

maybe a tiny house or living in a van or, or just being a, like a digital nomad all the way down to, you know, ride sharing, everything is, is rental based or impermanent. Like now we're seeing the growth of renting clothes. Like people aren't even going to buy clothes. Friends of mine started a company called Omni where you don't have to own anything, golf clubs, skis, backpack. The whole idea of how you navigate the world and what you need for self-sufficiency is completely changed. And I don't think that we're in a place yet to fully appreciate how that's going to play out, but psychically, mentally, you know, how does that inform the choices that the next generation is going to make

about how they want to live their lives or that you should make starting right now? Exactly. Like I'm an old man, but like, I, I, you know, I don't, yeah. Back to the word calcified, like, right now, exactly. Like I'm an old man, but like, I, you know, I don't, yeah. Back to the word calcified. Like, you know, I'm always trying to prevent myself from getting set in my ways, you know, so that I can be nimble in this regard. But I think you're totally nailed it.

Well, if you're calcified, then I'm like, I don't know what I am, man. I'm just, I'm like sitting over here, pouting in the corner. No, no, no. Dude. Thank you so much. All right, we're gonna wrap this up.

The book, as I said at the very outset, is brilliant, super proud of you. And I'm super excited for people to not only experience it, but put the wisdom to work in their own lives. And let's see a lot of lives changed. Thank you so much. It means the world to be able to be on the show love what you build love the community um and uh just just a treat so thanks for having me but yeah likewise as i said on on your show um your uh your legacy and

your example was inspirational in me wrapping my head around trying to do something in this space. So thank you for that. On a personal level, I've always had such tremendous respect for not just the quality of the work that you put out in the world, but like the way that you share it in that transparent and authentic manner. And it's a beautiful thing. And I wish you only beauty success and love my friend amazing thanks bud appreciate it um so if people want to pick up the book obviously amazon your favorite independent bookseller but creativecalling.com is the website where you can learn more about all the

perks and bells and whistles right yep yep and that or yeah that's a great place to go creative creativelive.com creative calling is where that special classes. If you've already bought the book, you can enter your receipt there and get access to some cool stuff. But yeah. And I'm just at chase Jarvis. If you start typing chase into Google, it'll pull his name up and you'll be able to find all his stuff, but you're basically chase Jarvis everywhere. The chase Jarvis, uh, live show chase Jarvis raw, your YouTube channel, all your good stuff, right? Thanks for all the shots out. I appreciate it. And thanks for everything.

Having me on the show means a ton to me. I appreciate it. Of course, man. It means a lot that you came out here. So appreciate it, brother. Sweet. Peace. All right, we did it.

How'd that mind meld go for you guys? I really dig that guy. I can't wait for more subsequent conversations with him. If you want to learn more about Chase and his world, please check out the show notes on the episode page at richroll.com. Let him know how this one landed for you directly by sharing your thoughts with him on Twitter or Instagram at Chase Jarvis. And please do me a favor, pick up his new book, Creative Calling. It really is great. I meant everything I said in the course of the podcast. It's an incredibly powerful and helpful book that I think will really help you reconnect with your creativity, think about it differently, and put it into practice.

If you'd like to support the work we do here on the podcast, subscribe, rate, and comment on the show on Apple Podcasts. That really helps new people discover what we're doing here. You could tell your friends about your favorite episode, share the show on social media, tag me. I like resharing that stuff. Subscribe to my YouTube channel. You can watch my conversation with Chase there or Spotify, Google Podcasts, all those places. And you can support us on Patreon at richroll.com forward slash donate. I want to thank everybody who helped put on the show today. Jason Camiolo for audio engineering, production, show notes, interstitial music, and many more things. Blake Curtis and Margo Lubin for filming the whole experience and uploading it to YouTube for your enjoyment.

Jessica Miranda for her graphic wizardry. Allie Rogers for her beautiful portraits. And DK, David Kahn for advertiser relationships. And as always, Theme Music by Anilema. Appreciate all of you guys. I love you. And for all of you that were not able to attend my recent live event in Los Angeles with environmentalist, activist, author, and entrepreneur Paul Hawken, you, my friends, are in luck because next week I share that experience. And I'm gonna leave you with a little taste of that. But until then, remember,

we are all infinitely creative beings. So act accordingly. Peace, plants, namaste. I feel like this situation we're in, the most gnarly, super wicked problem humanity has ever described and may ever face, is actually a blessing. And if we look at it from the point of view, it's feedback. And from, actually from the whole of the earth, because you can't really separate the atmosphere from plants and forests and water. atmosphere, from plants and forests and water. If you're looking from that way, then it's a gift,

it's feedback, and you take 100% responsibility for your actions, who you are, and then you begin to imagine, innovate. You do things that make sense to you, that help you connect more to this beautiful, extraordinary miracle we call the living world. And that's the gift of climate change. The gift is transformation of self and of the world. And the solutions are transformative. So we can either accept the offering and the gift, or we can go into self-pity. pity Thank you.