Fresh Fusion

Hello my friend! Are you enjoying this podcast? You can now support the show and share your appreciation with Buy Me a Coffee! In this episode of Fresh Fusion, I share some of my raw and unfiltered feelings about the meltdown of Twitter, how there’s never been a time like right now to focus squarely on “the business, the art, the ethics of content creation on the open web” (which is the tagline of...

Alternate title: How to Be Productive and Successful as a Content Creator . (Yeah, I know…it’s cringey…but I have a bunch of pent-up thoughts and some helpful tools/workflows to share with you all and figured now is as good a time as any to dive into all that. Also feeling all the feelz after a tweet actually went viral. Imagine that!) Links & Show Notes Leave a review on Apple Podcasts Subscr...

Could it be? Maybe? Yes! Fresh Fusion is BACK, and in this episode I catch you up on the last couple of months as I recovered from Covid and moved across town to a new home! And not just Fresh Fusion, but the vlog ( Essential Life with Jared ) is also in the process of making a comeback. Listen for the inside scoop. Links & Show Notes Leave a review on Apple Podcasts Subscribe to Creator Class...

In this possibly final episode of the show, I candidly share my struggles with creative identity and finding success in the “wrong” genre. I contemplate whether I should cancel Fresh Fusion and put greater effort behind other projects. And I wonder what makes sense as a creator in a year when I expect to be on the road more often than not. Should I stay or should I go? Let me know! Thanks for list...

“After all these years, to go back to where it all started…back to The Matrix!” And that, my friends, is exactly what we’re doing today. A fireside chat about my off-the-charts excitement level at entering back into the world of The Matrix—my favorite movie of all time—and how much the real world has changed over the past 20+ years. Will The Matrix Resurrections live up to the hype? Links & Sh...

My kids are obsessed with “Squid Game” — even though they’ve (obviously!) never seen the show. “You” has taken over Netflix Top 10. Twitter vs. Meta: I’m amazed at the shockingly different trajectory these two companies are taking. The social media landscape is fracturing and it’s no longer Facebook/Twitter as a monolithic duo. Let’s do a deep dive into just how much Twitter has grown and changed...

Apple’s latest and greatest M1-powered MacBooks (MaxBooks?) are here, and Jared wonders if there’s anything left for Mac nerds to be upset about when it seems like Apple has fulfilled all their wishes. (For a hefty price of course!) Plus a special rundown of all of Jared’s favorite podcasts he frequently listens to and why they’re worthy of your attention. Hmm, sounds like…a Fresh Fusion Reaction!...

Yes my friends, it’s time to pull back the curtain and share about some events which have transpired in my personal life—things which have been among the most challenging moments of my life. But first, an announcement: I have a newly redesigned website! Woo hoo! =) Links & Show Notes Brand-new Website Design! Goals for the new site design (episode 70) Essay: Hello Singleness, My Old Friend Lea...

In today’s episode, I step through some follow-up and a few items of note I’ve been tracking (such as the gorgeous Nikon Z fc retro-style camera!) before kicking off a rant about the ways algorithms privilege the already privileged instead of favoring content off the beaten path. Apparently you’re likely to do quite well on YouTube if you’re young, white, cis, “attractive”, and so forth…but what a...

Jared returns with a brilliant solution to the woes of maintaining a deep podcast content pipeline: read tweets! 😅 So contained herein is the riveting, rousing, and really rad reading of Jared’s Top 7 Tweets of July. Or something like that. From Bosch to LG 4K, remote work to news feed readers, there’s a little something for everyone. Enjoy! Links & Show Notes Leave a review on Apple Podcasts...

I’ve embarked on a huge restructuring and visual overhaul of my website , and as I thought about it more and more, I started asking the Big Questions such as: What even is a “personal website” in 2021? How do we evolve from the mental model of the circa-2005 “blog”? How can you integrate with other mediums such as social media, newsletters, and the like? Does the world really need me, a “white dud...

The last two weeks have been devastating for me—on multiple fronts, both as a huge fan of the #VanLife community as well as a figure in the Ruby programming community. This podcast episode is my catharsis, as I try to work through the heartache and find something meaningful to hold on to at the end of the day. As content creators, it’s only natural that a huge part of our identity is wrapped up in...

Creator Class is my new newsletter all about the challenges and rewards of being an underpaid content creator building an audience one connection at a time. In today’s episode of Fresh Fusion, I talk about why I decided to rebrand and refocus my newsletter and why it’s so important to highlight conversations around motivation and ethics in content creation. (Also why I’m ditching YouTube and going...

I opened the Patreon mobile app on my iPhone. I looked at the feed. Suddenly, in the twinkling of an eye, POOF! A bunch of the creators I follow vanished. Gone. Out of this world. Did they suddenly shut down all their accounts? Was there a rapture and I wasn’t notified? No, it was none of those things. Patreon just had a temporary snafu billing my debit card, and because of that, I was unceremonio...

This is me stumbling my way through an episode all about systemic racism in zoning laws and white supremacist policies harming disenfranchised minorities, and how I was raised to believe affluent suburban neighborhoods are the American Dream. While the global pandemic has been horrifying and so very hard to stomach, perhaps we can also see it as a much-needed opportunity to accept just how much wo...

Subtitle: Rumors of Portland’s Death Are Greatly Exaggerated This is a deeply personal episode. I spent most of my life within a 60 miles radius of where I was born. That all changed when I relocated to the Portland, Oregon metro area. I came here on a fact-finding mission in 2017 and fell head-over-heels in love with the place. It’s no accident in the slightest that the most creative period in my...

Tumblr is a social media platform heralding from a different time…the era of “Web 2.0”, when oodles of visual customization features were a given and open functionality like RSS feeds were compulsory. Yahoo! and Verizon nearly drove Tumblr to an early grave, but with the acquisition by Automattic, there is hope yet. Can Tumblr survive—nay—thrive in 2021? Jared White investigates. Prior discussions...

The vital necessity of competence in leadership and governance, life imitating art imitating life, and a megadose of fascinating news regarding Twitter’s forays into decentralization and open moderation tools…all on the latest installment of Fresh Fusion. Links & Show Notes Buy American Act: Biden will sign order aimed at strengthening American manufacturing - CNNPolitics Can You Tell if These...

In the wake of last week’s horrific events at the United States Capitol where domestic terrorists stormed into the building and nearly toppled a duly-elected Congress, one of the top questions on everyone’s minds is: what is the role of Big Tech in the face of such extremism and anti-democratic conspiracy theories? What should Twitter, or Facebook, or Amazon, or Google, etc., be doing about all th...

This is it! Tune in for all the juicy details of why I walked away from Mastodon and the “Fediverse” after a year of fanboyism, and what needs to change in open social networking protocols before I let go of Twitter and Discord. Also some Fresh Picks of the day! Links & Show Notes Google avoids updating iOS apps as Apple adds privacy labels- 9to5Mac 20 Macs for 2020 – Six Colors 20 Macs for 20...

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??!! Watch as Video YouTube Vimeo

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 yo...

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 Reli...

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...

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 car...