Fresh Fusion

My year in review episode. What a year! What a review! Ooo boy. Tune in to hear how my “3 Words for 2020” went and what I’m looking forward to in 2021. Surely everything’s going to get better, right? RIGHT??!!

I just came back from a retreat. Wow! The saying is true: change of pace + change of place = change of perspective. As creators, we’re always working in one of two modes: the nose to the grindstone, going through the motions of daily output mode; and the 20,000 feet, blue sky thinking mode. It’s difficult, if not impossible, to get into that second mode in the same physical environment as where you’re typically heads down making incremental progress. Let’s dive into the vital importance of getting away in order to reinvent everything.

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Do you ever find yourself watching a video on YouTube from your favorite creator, only to find that—as the video plays—it slowly dawns on you that the whole story arc of the video was simply a pretense for a sponsored product promotion? Sucks right? Because as a content creator, if you lose the trust of your audience, what do you have? Nothing. Let’s talk about that. Also: I only use Rollings Reliable Baking Powder. 😜

You can enjoy the process, and optionally you can enjoy the outcome of that enjoyable process, but you can’t enjoy the outcome if you hate the process. The ends never justify the means. Also on today’s episode: my spoiler-free review of Seduced, the shocking sex cult documentary now playing on Starz.

Share your Fresh Pick of the day with the hashtag #freshpick on Twitter, and your link just might appear in a future episode of the show!

It’s the first official new episode of Fresh Fusion, and it’s a doozy! There’s an oft-expressed notion rooted in misguided pragmatism that says your users/customers/audience don’t care about the tools you use behind the scenes. They only care about the final product. I fundamentally reject such a notion, and I’m here to tell you why. Users DO care about the tools you use, because you MAKE them care. That’s your job as a creator. That’s your job as a marketer. Let’s dive in!

As the Year from Hell heads towards its inevitable conclusion, Jared is back from a retreat born from desperation, fully recharged, and ready to (gasp!) reboot the podcast in a new form. And so a hearty hello and welcome to Fresh Fusion, the new weekly show by Jared focused squarely on the business and art of content creation. Whether you write, record, code, produce, teach, or perform, this is your show. This is your time. This is…well, you get the idea!

Greetings, fellow citizens of the internet refuge from the global pandemic! How are you surviving Crisis? I am, to echo the words of Morpheus, STILL HERE! 💪

In this episode I bring you up to speed on what I’ve been up to…some fun things, some rewarding things, and one terrible, horrible, no good, very bad thing I’ve been battling with for a couple of months now (predating the coronavirus lockdown!). If you’ve been wondering how I’ve been fairing as a Dad during this whole shelter-at-home situation…well, the answer may surprise you. And at the very least, tune in for my barely-tolerable impression of Agent Smith from The Matrix! 😎

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What a strange and frightening time to be alive! But I’m here and I’m back to try to lighten the mood a bit with talk of the brand-new cursor and trackpad support for iPad in iPadOS 13.4, as well as speculation on how the sudden transition to remote work might change the business landscape for good as we look ahead. I also convey my impressions using Photoshop for iPad now that the new cursor-based input brings the user experience closer to the Mac and even surpasses it in many ways.

Kicking off our Creator Series, Nathan joins Jared to talk about his journey from software developer to YouTube content creator, the challenges and rewards of presenting your authentic self, ups and downs in entrepreneurship, what’s the deal with privacy and the tech industry, centralized vs. decentralized social media, diversity in startup culture, and introducing children to an engineer’s mindset. There’s also something about tampons in there…it makes sense in context, I swear!

I haven’t talked much about the general state of social media on the show in a while, so it’s high time we revisit this topic! Here are my latest thoughts on all the top contenders large and small—what they’re getting right, or wrong, and what is coming down the pike. You might be surprised where my head is at these days…