🔔 You don’t need to be louder.
Hey Reader,
I was coaching someone on mic performance recently and asked them to project their energy a little more brightly... and they got louder. 🗣️ Which (big sigh) is not the same thing at all. (Ask any sound engineer who’s watched a meter slam into the red.)
It’s also a pretty good metaphor for what I see happening everywhere right now. Post more, talk more, get more provocative and “mouthy,” serve up hotter takes, make more noise. But loudness isn’t presence, antagonism isn’t leadership, and visibility isn’t impact. None of those things is the same as developing a voice so clear it rings like a bell.
🚂 Whose voice is driving the train?
I bookmarked an interview with Ina Garten because her inner critic didn’t magically disappear once she became successful... she learned to recognize whose voice it was. When her brain says, What makes you think you can do that?, she recognizes her mother’s voice instead of her own and gets to decide whether she believes it.
And as much as I love dissecting the inner critic voice, I hear most of my creators in the studio talk about when the criticism comes from outside. Ina’s philosophy is beautifully simple: you’re either on my train, or get out of my way. She still asks her team for feedback constantly, but ultimately, she decides.
The interesting thing about developing your voice is that it's more about your inner authority. It isn’t refusing to listen, believing you’re always right, or getting louder until everybody else shuts up. It’s knowing who gets a vote without giving everybody a veto.
🧱 You build this shit.
People have recently started asking me how I developed my own version of this, and I wish I had a tidy five-step framework. I don’t. Honestly... it’s more of a feeling.
You know when somebody has it. You can feel it in your favorite creators, performers, leaders, books, movies, and shows because something unmistakably theirs is coming through. Call it voice, presence, conviction, charisma, inner authority, the X factor... whatever. You cannot manufacture it with a Claude skill file or custom GPT because it comes from somewhere those tools cannot go for you.
You have to live it.
You get rejected, make the wrong thing, trust the wrong person, misread the market, lose money, change direction, pick yourself up, dust your booty off, and try again.
The X factor gets built in the reps nobody sees.
😬 And yeah... I’m scared, too.
I don’t know what AI is ultimately going to do to our industries, what the midterm elections are going to do to the country, or what the economy is going to do next. Plenty of mornings this year, my sophisticated strategic analysis has essentially been WTAF. 🤷🏻♀️
I've also had some of the clearest moments of my career in times like this. I pursued B Corp certification (Sasquatch Media Grounds is officially in the audit process 🥳), and after months of painstaking conversations trying to find someone (anyone 😭) with enough decision-making power to meet me in the middle, I finally got the opportunity to produce professional campaign media. Now it’s an arm of my business... it is work that gives my restlessness somewhere useful to go, contributes to something I care about, and pays me for being very fucking good at it.
But there were months when none of that existed yet.
What do you do during that part?
🧀 Remember that Beloved lost to Bride of Chucky.
Oprah spent ten years getting Toni Morrison’s novel Beloved made into a movie. She was on the cover of Time, did hundreds of interviews, survived enormous expectations... and then opening weekend arrived and Bride of Chucky beat it.
She sank into a depression until spiritual teacher Gary Zukav asked her a deceptively simple question: Why did you make the movie?
Note that he didn't ask her why more people didn’t buy tickets or what she should have done differently. He asked her why did she make it?
Her answer brought her back to what the story meant to her and what making it had given her. The world got to decide what it did with the offering. Her job was one thing: Her job was to make the offering.
Seriously, y'all... we all need to tattoo that somewhere. I'm only half joking when I invite you to come out for a group tattoo event. 😂
Here's the thing: money is a perfectly good motivator (I happen to enjoy it immensely) and spite is shockingly energy-efficient in short bursts. But neither has enough battery life for the whole trip. The audience might not come, the money might arrive late, the market might change, and the opportunity you spent two years preparing for might disappear. If your entire reason for doing the work is waiting at the finish line, what happens when somebody moves the finish line?
You need something underneath it that belongs to you.
🔦 Find a portable light source.
Maybe it’s perimenopause. Maybe it’s fascism. Maybe it’s Maybelline. I don’t fucking know. I just know that somewhere along the way I developed the ability to be scared, disappointed, pissed off, and unsure of what comes next... and still eventually arrive at:
Fuck that shit. I’m going to do it anyway.
That isn’t fearlessness. It’s a skill.
You build it when nobody is watching, when there’s no applause, no highlight reel, and no shiny proof that everything will work out. You build it by discovering, repeatedly, that you can move through hard things without abandoning yourself.
That's why I don't think authenticity is having another cultural moment only because of AI. AI makes imitation astonishingly cheap, but we can feel when somebody has lived their way into what they’re saying. There's a person inside the work... and that person has been somewhere. (No, the "somewhere" does not have to be a devastating story. Not everything is the result of tragedy porn.)
So I don't have a perfect framework for you this week. I have a rallying cry:
Build the thing because it matters to you. Listen to feedback, and then decide. Let people get on your train... or tell them to get out of the way. Make money, enjoy the spite, change direction when the world changes, and build for the world that's arriving.
Be scared and keep moving.🌟 Please stop confusing being louder with becoming stronger.
No one else can do the hard part for you. But if this hit somewhere particularly soft this week... hi. 👋 I see you. Keep going.
It's weird until it works. If you ever wanted to know what a producer like me can do for you (in addition to pep talks) check out the next part... ⤵️
🗑️ Your best idea is hiding in the trash.
People ask me all the time what a producer actually does, and last week Benny Blanco explained it better than I usually do.
While talking to Jimmy Fallon about his creative process, Benny says roughly 95% of the songs he writes in a year never see the light of day. He has tens of thousands of songs sitting in the little trash can on his Mac. Sometimes he'll spend a week in the studio with someone and they'll write the best song in five minutes on the last day. Sometimes they don't click until they try again five years later.
And somewhere inside all of that trying... they find the survivor.
That's producing.
A producer isn't a magician who takes the first idea that falls out of your head and somehow makes it brilliant. We ask questions, find the thing underneath the thing, challenge what isn't working, throw shit away, try again, and help you recognize the idea worth keeping when it finally shows up.
Good shit takes time to produce.
You're going to make things that end up in the little trash can. GOOD. That isn't evidence your creative process is broken. The trash can is part of the creative process. Nothing interesting gets made by demanding that every idea justify its own existence.
Some people hire me 1:1 and essentially put me in the room with them... the Benny Blanco version. That's fabulous (and expensive).
For everyone else, that's why I built the Dojo. You get access to my brain, my producer's eye, and my deeply weird ability to look at seventeen ideas headed for the trash and go, WAIT. That one.
Sometimes you don't need another idea. You need someone who can spot the survivor.
🗞️ Gossip from the creator trenches...
🎬 Hollywood's creator problem
Hollywood is facing growing questions about which stories get financed, distributed, and promoted... especially when those stories challenge the status quo. Meanwhile, independent creators have tools that used to require an entire studio. Here's what matters for you: as established talent explores new distribution channels, the creator economy gets a whole lot more interesting. You're not “just a YouTuber” anymore. You're building a media property. So quit waiting for permission and claim your corner of the internet.
The migration is coming →
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🤖 Ben Affleck knows his shit
Apparently, Ben Affleck has been quietly nerding out on AI for YEARS. He founded an AI filmmaking company, sold it to Netflix, and is now making the rounds explaining the technology with considerably more competence than your average AI evangelist. I'm optimistic about what these tools can make possible, but I also have questions. When somebody understands both the technology AND the creative process this well, I shut up and listen. His perspective on protecting human creativity is worth your time.
Watch Ben explain himself→
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🎙️ Congrats, you're a producer
You may not be running a Hollywood studio, but your business has a media department. Even that sporadic podcast or occasionally neglected newsletter counts. As audiences encounter increasingly sophisticated creator-led productions, their expectations may change, too. Which means you need to think beyond what you're posting and ask what your media needs to accomplish. Do you need a team of 50? Good God, I hope not. 😂 But you DO need somebody thinking like a producer. You can learn to become one, or...
Maybe it's time to hire →
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Something For Sale
I released a 90-minute Astrology and Tarot forecast covering July through December 2026 for $47. The second half of this year has a lot going on energetically and I had an absolute blast recording this. Several of you grabbed it immediately which tells me we are onto something here. This is my first experiment in bringing readings back in a sustainable way and it will not be available forever.
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Something For Free
You Don't Have a Production Problem. You have an architecture problem. My free white paper breaks down what creator studios actually sell, what most creators actually need, and why those two things are rarely the same. Includes a self-audit to find out if you are ready to launch or ready to build. 👉 Download the white paper for FREE.
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