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...

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 h...

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. T...

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. Thin...

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 th...

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...

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: Reading from script Presenting from bullet po...

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: Powerful use of...

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 creato...

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 Rya...

June 26, 2024 This week we discuss the unexpected value of learning to vlog and do a deep dive breakdown of an example travel vlog of the Ardbeg Scotch distillery. We get into the different subgeneres of vlogging, the lesser known ones that have turned out to be useful, despite us being uninterested in the standard popular ones. Also how every type a video is little bit a mix of nearly all types a...

June 11, 2024 Writing is the most important skill in all your content creation. This episode we dive deep in learning to improve our writing skills by breaking down the techniques & skills Ryan used in writing his episode of Spirit Of on James Buchanan. This has been one of my favorite episodes to record and I feel I learned a lot that will make easier to write in the future. Would love to hea...

June 3rd, 2024 In a rare episode Ryan makes an in person appearance in Nashville. Following up on things I learned about Ryan from our interview with Cory Cranfill, I ask Ryan about his previous education in content creation. First Ryan tells us about the Modern Rogue weekend content creator bootcamp he attended. What it was like studying under Brian Brushwood, what he learned there, and connectin...

May 14, 2024 This episode we interview special guest Lea Brainerd, a clinician at Mindbloom providing ketamine therapy. Ethan credits his Mindbloom for improving several of his creative skills & taking action on his content creation dreams. Lea first guides us through how ketamine therapy works. She explains the powerful mental preparations that can be done before a session to multiply the eff...

April 30, 2024 Ethan & Ryan share the things they learned from hosting Cory, their first ever guest. They learned about different styles of questions and when to use them, what different level of listening vs controlling the flow is ideal for different types of content, and the advice Cory shared after the episode. Next Ethan explains how many ways improving his listening skills is paying off...

April 19, 2024 In this episode we interview our first ever guest: Cory Cranfill. A friend of Ryan, Cory is a professional content creator, who pivoted from a 9-5 management job at Microsoft to creating content for Brian Brushwood’s Modern Rogue, then kept going to form his own content marketing & consulting business: Right Tool Media. Cory walks us through his journey from an untraditional bac...

April 3, 2024 Ethan tells us about starting in voice acting. How it’s rapid learning for important skills, and an excellent way to make lots of ‘small pots’. Ryan discusses the short trailers he’s making for his newly released episodes of season 2 of ‘Spirit Of’, with good insights on rapid creation with your phone, minimal resources and your ideas.  Next we discuss the balancing act between enjoy...

March 29, 2024 We celebrate Ryan releasing the long awaited 2nd season of his whiskey audio drama ‘Spirit Of’, telling the legendary stories behind famous whiskeys. We discuss the fear of releasing your work to the public turning into anticipation and excitement, and how everything got started for Ryan over a year ago. Then a spoiler free discussion of the behind the scenes process and learning fr...

March 20, 2024 Ethan & Ryan celebrate St. Patrick’s Day and discuss the videos they created for it. They both dipped their toes into Short Form content and have a good discussion about important lessons needed to make them well, and how that actually taught them more about making Long Form content. Ryan walked us through a discussion on maintaining motivation through hardship. If you can do it...

March 5, 2024 Ethan celebrates making his first full video using the techniques learned from Part Time YouTube Academy, and shares with Ryan the surprise lessons he learned from the first completed process.  Then Ethan & Ryan discuss the gems they were simply taught too soon before they could use them, that became distractions and hurdles. For example, presenting from word for word scripts ins...

February 20, 2024 Ethan & Ryan expand the topic of sincerity in content creation in their first ever movie discussion: Fight Club.  First Ethan discusses the extra filmography elements he was able to notice by watching it after a year of learning content creation. Including a deep discussion on how color theory was used in the film, and a brilliant use of sound design. (Ryan’s Specialty) Then...

February 20, 2024 In our first episode with a planned theme of focus, Ethan tells us about a new script writing technique he is wildly excited about, which fixes so many of his struggles with writing.  Next he discusses yet another course he has started, for only $1, and how it was genius and making you emotionally ready to make enough videos, mistakes and all, to master the art and find what your...

February 9, 2024 After 12 months of recording in dubious locations and learning, we hit the huge milestone of publishing the podcast to the public! Ethan discusses the final gap work needed to make it possible, and all the learning that required as well, from brainstorming a name, creating an animated logo with music for the intro, adding quality captions, writing episode titles and show notes the...

January 25, 2024 Ryan and Ethan take a look back at 2023, and look forward to 2024. We remember how little we new a year ago, hardly anything at all. Appreciate how much we have learned in our first year studying content creation. Reviewing our creations from time to time has taught us so incredibly much, in this episode we encourage everyone to do the same, and review their work from the past yea...

August 12, 2023 Ethan shares a bunch he learned about camera angles from his practice project filming a mock aerial property advertisement for a condo building. A critical revelation: close up shots trigger the non visual parts of the viewers mind and unlock all 5 senses!  Together Ethan & Ryan discuss the benefits of planning shots in advance, how to use example content for a leap ahead, and...