Foundations of Creation

April 29, 2025

Today, we share lessons we recently learned about teaching skills to others. Ryan leveled up his teaching skills by teaching a tequila class last week, and I just returned from a week-long teaching workshop in Barcelona with my hero, Lucas Rockwood, the best teacher I’ve ever known.

We discuss our lessons learned about preparing lessons, presenting them on camera to be more engaging, and additional skills for performing live coaching. Coaching is the best first step to turn any educational channel into a business, and these tips will help you become comfortable enough to take that leap.

Finally, I discuss how our teaching experiences showed us the unexpected places where teaching skills boost our lives and our creative careers.

Things referenced in today’s episode:

• Lucas Rockwood’s Podcast - https://www.yogabody.com/podcast/
• Science of Stretching - https://www.yogabody.com/stretching/
• Karolis Gadliauskas, Videographer - https://karolisg.com/

March 11, 2025

🇮🇪🇮🇪This special St. Patrick’s Day episode, we have Shane Carberry who literally makes Irish whiskey in the heart of Ireland. Shane is the head of operations at Tullamore Dew Irish Whiskey Distillery, a life coach, and of course, a brilliant content creator.

First we discuss Shane’s work at Tullamore, rising up from his start at the bottling room and the role soft skills played in his success. And of course get his authentic Irish take on me & Ryan’s ludicrous American plans for St. Patrick’s Day.

Next Shane tells us how his path to getting started in Tullamore is intertwined with his path to content creation, and a frosty move to Canada. We learn about his process, why he creates and what he’s achieving with it.

We learned a lot and had a great time, so I hope you take time to reach out to new creators in your space too. I met Shane through my first stab at networking to meet creators in my field. Like how Ryan meeting Cory Cranfill accelerated both our growth & increased our creating fun, this has been a great experience and deeply educational. So if you’ve been too nervous to try it yet, I heartily recommend you get out of your comfort zone and give it a shot!

Sláinte! ☘️🇮🇪

Things referenced in today’s episode:

• Shane Carberry - https://www.youtube.com/@ShaneCarberry
• Tullamore Dew Irish Whiskey - http://www.tullamoredew.com/
• The Spirit of: Captain Morgan - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=y3E7oN_3G6Y&list=PLjTR2ZZRadLeswgavC9_XGcllltWgUqOJ&index=3&pp=iAQB
• https://www.sandrarajic.com/
• Eric Partaker - https://ericpartaker.com/peak-performance-program
• Subtle Art Of Not Giving a Fuck https://amzn.to/4bPie0C
• So Good They Can't Ignore You https://amzn.to/4kR9Stt

Feb 5th, 2025

We start discussing the bridge between truth and lies in your writing. This has been a fundamental disagreement between Ethan & Ryan for years, but Paul Smith’s Sell With a Story reconciled them together. We discuss his chapter on how much you can stretch the truth in your professional stories. Guidelines when it’s acceptable, when it’s not, and how to know how much to stretch. This has freed me to trim down my writing significantly, making it far more engaging to listen to. And helped me understand my good friend Ryan. This was one of my favorite discussions we’ve had so far.

Then next we throw words out the window and enjoy analyzing 4 SuperBowl ads. Heavily visual, light on words, and condensing a TON of ideas in just a few seconds, these were great lessons in short, powerful art. They say if you can write ads, you can write anything.

Things mentioned in this episode

December 18th, 2024

Steve Jobs is often cited as the greatest storyteller the business world has ever seen. But was he? Or was he a mediocre fraud?

This episode we analyze his greatest storytelling feat during his 2007 keynote releasing the very first iPhone. Cory Cranfill joins us again, serving as the perspective of a real life business owner. We breakdown what he did that was so effective. Things that you could use tomorrow. What things he glaringly missed and should have added. And as usual Ryan breaks my brain with another great idea that I had completely missed.

We wrap up with a look back at 2024, sharing our best lessons of the year, biggest surprises, and what goals we’ve set for 2025. Do they spark any new ideas for you? What were your biggest lessons of the year?

Items Referenced In This Episode

11.08.24

Stories Sell by Matthew Dicks explains how to apply all the great storytelling & dramatic techniques commonly taught, to functional writing. Things like education and business. Things like Ethan works on. Things that Ethan has ranted & raved to Ryan about. Not being able to use all this ‘trash clutter of entertainment advice’. This episode we discuss the techniques in this book that unlock how to apply all that entertainment advice to other domains, and have them magnify the power of value based writing. Not simply shoehorn them in as a meaningless amusement.

Then we use this knowledge to analyze the primary product of the Nelson-Greebrier’s Halloween Event: a halloween drink menu with a story written for each cocktail, each tempting the reader to purchase that brew.

This has been one of my favorite episodes, both in fun and in amount of valuable knowledge shared. I hope you enjoy it, and all the fusions of dramatic & functional writing we can now discuss together.

Items Mentioned In This Episode:

October 22, 2024

After a year of waiting, Ethan attended a weeklong Masterclass on speaking stills with Vinh Giang. This episode we discuss the most valuable takeaways in Speaking & Storytelling.

It also was a hard & frightening reminder of how you can forget how much you love something, no matter how strong that love is. You need to periodically take action to be able to feel how much you enjoy it, and not lose track of that.

Finally we breakdown an example video from Vinh that brings together several of the techniques he taught.

Key Takeaways This Episode:

Things Referenced This Episode:

September 26 2024

We’re back, with something new! We took a short break while Ryan got set at his new job. While we were on break, one of the first podcasts that influenced me made nearly 2 decade return:

Diggnation.

Kevin Rose. Alex Albrecht. Great memories, bad beers.

Looking at it again, that format practices all 3 critical forms of speaking skills:

So we gave it a shot. We had a great time doing it, and learned more about content creation techniques. Hope you will too.

Things Referenced In This Episode

August 9, 2024

This episode we discuss the different value of each of the components of content creation and how best to split your efforts, and when to shoot horizontal vs vertical.

Then we get into a new writing exercise with Ryan using examples of Anthony Bourdain’s writing. We look at his first ever published article, and the evolution of his TV show intros. Analyzing revealed:

Together we discuss how these techniques could be applied to the script for Ryan’s podcast intro, for his Season 3 revision.

Good concrete examples of theory put into practice. I learned a lot from this episode and had a lot of fun as well. I hope you do too.

Thanks to Ryan for the great plan.

Let us know what emotion you’re building into your next content.

July 20, 2024

Ethan shares his first experiences meeting other video creators at the Part Time YouTube Academy meetup in London. It was shocking how much more could be learned by people only a year ahead instead of so advanced all their techniques had become invisible. And a surprise that should have been obvious: they were all incredibly fun to talk with! Highly recommend seeking out other creators in person as soon as possible.

Next we share more vlogging lessons learned from Ryan’s first attempts recording at a cocktail conference, and Ethan recording his trip to Finland.

Finally we discuss some vlogs we like and why.

Question for the week:

Items Referenced This Episode:

July 9th, 2024Working further on developing writing skills, this episode we try out Matthew Dicks strategy of creating the first version of his outlines by having conversations with his friends about his ideas. We attempt this live in this episode, also explaining how this technique helps, how to do it yourself. In Ethan’s live run explaining his video idea about ‘Creating Despite Friction’ to Ryan, a number of surprise realizations came out, and a major increase in clarity on the topic. Also in preparation for Ethan’s trip to Finland, he discusses his first vlog: the techniques to make one and the surprising amount of benefits discovered from doing one. It’s turning out to be the learning tool he was searching for.Ryan asks Ethan - “What historical art style would his next work most closely fit in?”Ethan asks Ryan - “What has he learned from making this podcast together?”We’d love to hear who your favorite vlogger? And what do you like about their channel?

Matthew Dicks

Author of StoryWorthy - https://amzn.to/3Y8dkXQ https://www.youtube.com/@matthewjohndicks