David Pakman: Long-Term YouTube Careers, Loving Work, Rest & Breaks, Fatherhood & Politics

[00:59] Paul: Welcome to The Pathless Path. I'm Paul Millerd, and in this podcast, we examine the invisible scripts that run our lives and dare to imagine new stories for work and life. Today, I am super excited to be talking with David Pakman. He is in the political space, and we're going to talk about some of the challenges of working in that space. But also, we're going to explore his relationship with work. He has a big YouTube channel.

And has been hosting his own show for a very long time, I think since college, right? Or even before college.

[01:34] David Pakman: Yeah. Started during undergrad and then continued through grad school.

[01:39] Paul: Amazing. Yeah. And he sort of found his thing early, which I think is really fascinating. I think you should feel lucky that he found his thing and he still enjoys what he's doing and sent me a message last year wanting to explore like How do you deal with handling that, like still sticking to that when shifting to sort of new projects and reinventing yourself throughout your career? So really excited to explore these things. David, thank you for joining me today.

[02:07] David Pakman: Yeah, I'm so glad to be here.

[02:10] Paul: So the question I always start with first is what are the stories and scripts you grew up with around work that you grew up with?

[02:20] David Pakman: Well, my family moved to the U.S. from Argentina when I was 5 because the economy was collapsing. So quite literally, I mean, one of the earlier stories was, hey, my dad's a doctor, he's educated, my mom's educated at the time, taught in high school, ultimately went on to teach college after getting her PhD. They did everything right on paper to the extent that that's a framework that is often used. And we quite literally have to leave our country because the economy is so bad that even doctors and teachers aren't— are barely able to get by. So that would— that's one of the earliest stories of, of relationship to work and money that I can kind of remember.

And it was implicit in why I ended up in the United States speaking, you know, 2 words of English at age 5 and having to kind of start, start from scratch.

[03:17] Paul: So was the lesson you took that things are fragile? Like, I could see going two ways with that, right? You could either be sort of cynical about it's not worth pursuing anything. Everything might get taken from you. How did— how did your parents internalize that lesson and what did you absorb?

[03:36] David Pakman: There's a couple of things here. There's like the immigrant part and there's the Jewish part. So in general, even nonimmigrant Jews, often knowing the history of Jews being kicked out from so many places, you have this implicit sense of fragility. And even when things are good, you've got to be careful. And at any time you could get kicked out from the next place. So that's like baseline number one.

And then on top of that, I think it's very common being an immigrant myself and talking to others who have been in similar situations, where there is also this idea that even when the getting's good, that can stop, that can change quickly. You have to be prepared. High savings rate, if possible, is a good thing because you never know when whatever is going to kind of drop down beyond your control.

[04:25] Paul: Yeah. So what, what were you like sort of growing up? What were you interested in?

[04:32] David Pakman: I think I— some of my earliest interests, I guess, were playing and watching sports and sort of outdoor stuff like biking and rollerblading and this sort of thing. And I think part of it had to do with the community that was built around it. A lot of times you go to a basketball camp and you very quickly develop a kind of part of a community that could be tougher when you don't have the same shared history as everybody else who grew up where you grew up. So those are the things I really remember. And then, you know, when, when computers entered the picture, when I was like 10 or something, technology and computers got very interesting. And, you know, getting on AOL with the dial-up modem and starting to figure out what is this internet thing.

I mean, that— I think that led directly to me ultimately working in the online space I work in now.

[05:25] Paul: Oh man, it's so interesting. So many people I interview that are doing sort of things we're doing in today's world were playing around on the internet. But the rare thing is most people didn't start as early as you did. Like, for me, it was just like, oh, computer stuff. I didn't really pay attention to. I was obsessing or going home and playing on the internet every night and like building websites.

And it's like, I still got to get a job. So what, like, why did you sort of take that more seriously earlier?

[05:59] David Pakman: Well, I don't know that it was serious in any kind of way that maybe there's like a job or an occupation here until I was probably in high school, at what point I at which point I started building some content websites before I was producing content in audiovisual form. I just started really messing around with super basic websites, doing some really early ad sales, like when I was 16, 17, and some of these websites I built started getting a little bit of traffic. I started sort of just really feeling around in the dark as to like, could I sell some kind of ad here? This was in the banner ad era of the internet.

And it all made very little money, but it was kind of a bug somewhere in my brain as I finished high school and went into college, etc., and started thinking about what the next step is that made me think maybe I don't have to take the traditional path of going with my resume in hand and trying to ask somebody for a job. I did that stuff, and my audience on my podcast knows I worked at Circuit City, the now defunct Best Buy-like retailer, working on commission and kind of developing communication skills and interpersonal skills. And that was super interesting. I had some other, quote, real jobs, but really all of it informed me to the idea that I don't really love this path. And I sought out intuitively the autonomy and control of working for myself. That was the really big thing I figured out early.

[07:28] Paul: Did you have role models that sort of brought that alive for you?

[07:32] David Pakman: Not in any specific sense that I can remember. I mean, You know, once you start taking business and economics classes, you certainly hear about the big entrepreneurs, but not in any way that felt super specific or actionable, which I think is why it took a while for me to actually say this was through college and grad school, getting my MBA to actually say maybe I don't have to do the traditional path. In other words, it wasn't totally obvious to me that there were alternatives.

[08:01] Paul: Yeah. You went to a state school. I went down the road at UConn and you're up at UMass. And I mean, late 2000s, there just wasn't much of a sense that you— there were all these alternative paths that are so popular now. What were your career ambitions at that time?

[08:21] David Pakman: I think as I was wrapping my undergraduate degree, part of what I was up against and at that, at that point, I had started what eventually became the content and show I do now, The David Pakman Show, in a kind of earlier stage as I was doing it and it was making $0, not very little, but it was making $0 initially. And I was a junior and then eventually a senior at UMass. I didn't really have a vision for exactly what I wanted to do, and I ended up getting my MBA right away, which had its pros and cons. Going directly from undergrad into MBA has its pros and cons, a lot of cons which we can talk about. But part of it was I don't really know what else to do right now. I want to buy myself a little bit of time to see if maybe this show thing could become something.

And a way to do it is to just keep going to school and kind of buy myself the time to figure out, could this become something? And what other paths kind of come to mind? The MBA was interesting because I learned a lot of really useful skills that I now use in running my business. And I also saw in seeing the on-campus recruiting and all of the stuff that was happening at Bentley University, I don't really want to do any of this stuff. I did an internship in wealth management and financial advising, realized it was basically sales, and I don't— I just don't want to be doing this. I briefly went through the selling life insurance potential path, realized very quickly I don't want to do that.

And basically I figured out I didn't really want to do the things most of my MBA classmates were doing.

[09:51] Paul: Yeah, I did an MBA 3 years after work. I worked for 3 years and went and got an MBA. And I like to tell people, especially if you're really curious, an MBA will be a great place to start not knowing what you want to do and then knowing even less of what you want to do 2 years later.

[10:08] David Pakman: 100%. And that's why, you know, by the end of the MBA, the show was making enough that I could justify focusing on it for a year without school happening concurrently, because I had been doing the show sort of as a hobby. You could say an unpaid hobby, totally unpaid hobby for the last 2 years at UMass and the entire time I was doing the MBA. So there was enough meat on the bone to say, let me take 1 year after being really done with the MBA and just see what happens and see if this can keep me out of banking, essentially.

[10:50] Paul: I love that. I went back and watched your first video, and I think the most interesting thing of this— I've watched other people's first videos, and usually the first videos are bad, but yours, like, the video quality is not perfect, but it's pretty impressive. Like, you clearly had tons of reps at that point. You had like very advanced audio equipment. You're like, you're like mixing in Deval Patrick's voice on your own.

[11:17] David Pakman: So there's two things about that. The first videos are 3.5 years into the show because the first 3.5 years it was audio only. So it wasn't the first time I was talking on a microphone. I think that that's a kind of a relevant thing. And also I go back and forth, forth between thinking that it wasn't bad and it was terrible. So it's interesting to get a different perspective.

[11:40] Paul: Well, the thing I think when I see it is Oh, it's obvious this person would be able to build a career around this skill. And at the same time, I know at that time that was probably a ridiculous notion.

[11:55] David Pakman: Absolutely. And, and especially in thinking of the curve, both of the audience and the revenue, to think that it became what it is now from the videos in 2009 that you're talking about, it is, it is crazy in a sense.

[12:10] Paul: Yeah. When you see young people want to be YouTubers and stuff, what do you think of that now?

[12:15] David Pakman: Well, there's two thoughts I have. One is I think I benefited greatly from timing and the fact that I started doing politics on YouTube when there weren't that many people doing it. Or to put it a different way, there were a bunch of people dabbling in it, but nobody really was in even the six-figure subscribers, never mind seven figures. So I think the timing was really useful to me. I think if I were to start over right now, there would be significantly more competition. So that's one thing.

But when people, young wannabe YouTubers or early nascent YouTubers come to me all the time and want advice, and I basically always give them the same advice and they almost never follow it, which is you need to commit to the content creation and you need to stick with it for a while. There are overnight successes on YouTube, but It's actually less common. More common is you really build it over time. Even somebody like MrBeast, who is wildly successful, he has talked about how at this point, I don't know how old he is. He must be close to 30. He's been on YouTube essentially half of his life or 15 years or something like that.

And on a percentage basis, this stuff is cumulative. So the advice I always give people who want to start now is the questions you're asking me about who should build your website, do you need an agent, None of this stuff matters right now. You've got to commit to the content and you have to really stick with it probably for years before it'll start accelerating, which is what I experienced.

[13:43] Paul: Yeah, I almost think it's more challenging to do these things now, even though it's easier to do them tools-wise. Even when I started writing online in 2017, there was no idea of like a creator. And so I just wrote because I like to write and I had the mindset you can't really make money writing, so I got to fund this. I actually like it. And along the way, I just got so many reps in and it wasn't even until the 6th year of writing that I started to make real money from writing, which is crazy. But what you self-select for in actually practicing the creation is liking the creation, which it seems like you've always had.

How have you protected that over the years?

[14:26] David Pakman: There are a couple of different aspects to the protection of it. I think at the beginning, part of it was I worked with my little brother and one of my best friends. They were my original employees. And so it didn't really feel like work at the beginning. And I think that allows you to get some of the reps in that you're talking about in what feels like a low-stakes, really enjoyable kind of situation. The other thing is that as the show has grown, What I'm doing really kind of changes.

I mean, like the getting in front of the camera and talking about what's going on in the news doesn't change. But the production flow, the ancillary things that are going on around it, the team has changed. The offloading of all of the technical stuff to, to my team has happened over time. And that really allows me to focus in on the part that I think is the least teachable, right? Which is the what's the crux of a story? How can I present this in an interesting way and create content that can be put on multiple platforms and generate views?

The editing, it's very involved at this point, but there is a playbook for it, if that makes sense. And I think clearing out a lot of the stuff that's related to the hosting but not the hosting has really helped to keep focused on the part that's most enjoyable for me.

[15:42] Paul: Yeah. And what has been some of the challenges with that? I mean, I think when you're doing these things at first and you're not making money, you're sort of driven to sort of make it work or just keep going because you like it so much. And then you do. Now you are making money. I assume you're at the point where you're able to sort of sustain and meet your needs.

How do you stay motivated now?

[16:04] David Pakman: Not that it was super interesting at the beginning. The financial aspect of it was not a motivator at all because it wasn't even really a concept that this could make money. So at the beginning, the finances didn't come into it at all. In the middle, when I said, I'm really going to try to do this and do this in a serious way, I am now using this to avoid getting a, quote, real job. Now the money starts to take on a little bit of a different perspective when we now have studio rent and I have salaries to pay for people that aren't one of my childhood friends and my little brother. Then the money has a very particular type of importance.

And then now that the show has been as successful as it is and the money is no longer a motivating factor, it's now again off the table as the thing that is how I make decisions about what to cover or how to organize my week or my day. So it's, it's really changed over time. And so now I think the motivations are— it's really two things. I just enjoy it, right? Sunday night when I know a lot of my friends are saying, we start at 9:05 and my boss is watching. If I'm not there at 9:10 and then at 10 and 11 and 12, I have meetings I don't want to be in.

I'm sort of like, so much stuff happened since my last show. I'm really looking forward to getting back in front of the camera tomorrow. Hugely privileged and unique situation for so many people. That's really good. The other side of it also is what's the trajectory of this entire thing? I have a kid now.

The financial aspect is no longer the motivator. What is the life cycle of what I'm doing? There are certainly people doing what I do who are much older than me. But what is the exit, especially when I am kind of the business in a sense?

[17:48] Paul: Yeah. And so I've seen people like Matt D'Avella and Ali Abdaal, who I've interviewed here before. They're, they're sort of taking this. They've both scaled down their teams a bit and they're just saying, I'm just, we're just going to create what we want to make. And in politics, that is hard, right? If you're covering the current events, you can't really cover what people were covering 3 weeks ago today.

Right. How do you think about things like that and making tradeoffs in terms of what might drive you creatively versus what is keeping the engine running?

[18:26] David Pakman: Yeah, it's just finding a balance. I think, you know, every day I'm talking about 6 to 10 things on my show. And at this point, it's like an automatic, intuitive process. But if I were to break it down into its component parts, it's sort of saying of these 6 to 10 things I'm going to talk about, what's the balance between content that is likely to do well and keep, keep everything kind of moving and stuff that I am interested in talking about and really just kind of finding a balance. And there's no doubt that I'm only talking about things that I want to talk about, but the reasons I may want to talk about them can be multiple. And you're constantly kind of threading the needle with content creation in that way.

I don't know if it's 100% an answer to your question, But that's kind of how I think about the process.

[19:14] Paul: Yeah. When you see other YouTubers like that saying, I quit and take a break, do you have this urge to do that as well?

[19:22] David Pakman: You know, that's a really interesting thing. I daydream about what would my life be like if I did X, Y, Z? What if I took a 3-month sabbatical? What would happen if I just said next Monday, this is the last show? The archives will stay up and I'm kind of going to go do something else. The question always becomes, well, what is that other thing that I'm going to do?

Is it anything? Is it just taking time off to figure it out for a little while? I daydream about stuff like that, but I don't know that it's out of a conscious or logical belief that I would do well with those things. It's just sort of like, I don't know what the path is for someone in my situation because The career I've built was essentially created over the last 15 years as I and other people started to try this thing out. And I know that for some people it's, well, you diversify the voices that are on camera so that then you're only a part of it. Like there's this financial guy, Dave Ramsey, whose financial advice I mostly don't subscribe to and his politics I completely don't subscribe to.

But I saw an interesting interview with him where he said, Dave Ramsey stuff used to be 100% of our revenue. Now it's like 25% of our revenue. So, you know, that's one possible path forward or something like that. These are all things I think about.

[20:42] Paul: I mean, why couldn't you just stop posting videos for 3 months and say, I'm taking a 3-month break? I mean, that was a pretty normal thing to do in television. They'd have guest hosts and things like that. Is just the nature of sort of what you're doing.

[20:57] David Pakman: I think it's a combination of anticipating that I would be super stressed during those 3 months about what's going to happen, how much of the audience might not come back, how many of my paid subscribers on my website might cancel in a rage. I think there's that fear because it's an unknown. It's not something I've done before. And also, you know, when I've explored some of this stuff with like executive coaches and even, even in like therapy type settings. I don't know that it's necessarily actually interesting to me. Like, I think I might end up extremely bored after 2 weeks of it and kind of unsure what to do.

[21:42] Paul: What do you think would happen?

[21:44] David Pakman: I think probably the first 10 days would be really difficult and scary. Yeah, I would then fall into some kind of a routine with whatever else I'm doing for this period of time. And then after getting accustomed to that, that's the question mark. After that, I don't know what would happen.

[22:03] Paul: Yeah, it's interesting. I think I talked to a lot of people who take breaks and stuff, and there is this sort of— the initial period is painful. I talked to one person, Jacqueline, who took a structured 3-month sabbatical, and she said it took her 4 to 6 weeks to even get to like a base level of being able to think about what she wanted. And then, like, the crazy thing about these sabbaticals is they almost have like 99 to 100 approval rate rating. I talked to one person once and she said it sucked. I stayed at home in West Virginia the whole time.

My husband still worked and I didn't really do anything. She was like, it was terrible. I'm like, all right, good. Now I have counter evidence that it's not a perfect foolproof strategy, but people often discover creative hobbies that they didn't do as a kid. And one of the things I often suggest to people instead of taking a sabbatical is actually just to take an afternoon and do something you did as a kid. But I think the interesting thing is here, like, you're sort of like already living your dream, which is, which is almost like this whole new generation of workers?

Like, what happens when you already find your dream at like 20 years old? Right.

[23:23] David Pakman: That's a factor. And I know it's so cliché and privileged to say sometimes having tons of options is actually difficult, whereas sometimes if your situation is more limited, either by a boss, a work schedule, or financial constraints, the fact that you have fewer choices in a way, it's simpler. And I'm not saying I envy that. I recognize I'm in a far more privileged situation. But I think that some of the practical things you're bringing up are real questions. Like, for example, now that I have a baby, even if I'm on a sabbatical, my daughter still wakes up at 6:50 every morning.

And is my partner working or is she taking time off? Because if she's working and so What exactly are the lines of whatever break there would be that I put together? I think that's a real practical question. And how much, how much valuable information would I get from it if some of that other stuff continues the way it is every day?

[24:26] Paul: Yeah. So, I mean, you must be reaching out to me for some reason. What do you, do you remember why you reached out in the first place?

[24:36] David Pakman: Well, I read your book. And found a lot of what you wrote about kind of the— I don't know if I would call them motivations, but, you know, it's been a while since I read the book now. But I think I remember feeling that a lot of the things that went through your mind that led to the writing of the book and that are represented in the book were similar to things I was thinking about. And to be clear, like, to people in my audience who will certainly listen to this interview, I'm not about to end The David Pakman Show or anything like that. So, like, don't cancel your memberships or anything like that. But it's more a, I've been doing this for a while.

I know what the day to day of this structure is. What other structures might be interesting to me? Or what are ideas I haven't even really considered about things that would be worth trying from a lifestyle perspective? I mean, I think that was really the motivation. Or what would it look like to really restructure the day to day in some other way?

[25:30] Paul: Yeah. Do you work 5 days a week now?

[25:32] David Pakman: You know, I film my 5 shows in 4 days. So really, like, my days in the studio are Monday to Thursday, and it's usually only 2.5 hours a day that I'm in the studio. So outside of that, it's all kind of flex time. I can do my research first thing in the morning or the night before. I could do it on weekends or not do anything on the weekends. If there's news happening and I want to livestream on weekends, I can do it.

Like, you know, there's a Saturday election coming up based on when we're taping this. I'm going to livestream the results because I'm interested in that, or I can do nothing on weekends. So the core of the week are these 2.5 hours a day, 4 days a week. That's 10 hours. Everything else is sort of flex time.

[26:17] Paul: Yeah. Is some of the curiosity around just like you're sort of on a rhythm, right? You're, you're paced around these fixed blocks. Is some of the curiosity around like, what is the different Like, like the way I think about it is like I've experienced so many different seasons. Like the pace of work I've been doing in the past 2 months is very different than it was 4 months ago because I was literally in a different country and wasn't working every day. Now I'm like doing a little more structured and it changes a lot.

I also get a lot less done than you. So yeah, I mean, there's all these tradeoffs.

[26:57] David Pakman: There's— my job doesn't have as much seasonality. I'd say the seasonality is the election years are bigger years.

[27:04] Paul: Yeah.

[27:04] David Pakman: So like those are the years in which we have the most growth for sure. The interesting kind of dabbling in seasonal seasonality I recently had is I signed a contract to do a nonfiction book and I had 9 months to write the book and I wrote it in 4 because I said, you know, I think I can just get up and do 45 minutes 4 times a week, and if I really commit to it and do 1,000 words, I think I can get this thing done in 4 months. And so I did that. And it was interesting because when I finished— we're in the editing phase now. So I'm going to go back to that because now we're going to have 7 weeks to finish the edits and it's going to be another sprint. But what was interesting was it wasn't as difficult to add the writing time as I thought it would be.

And then when it ended, I didn't feel like I had that much less work. It was like there was this dynamic adjustment both to adding it and to it going away, where it kind of all felt the same when I was writing and when I wasn't. It's a weird thing.

[28:02] Paul: Is there some factor of creative energy in how it feeds into what you do?

[28:07] David Pakman: Probably so. I mean, I think, for example, if I think back now, having a baby to the end of 2020 and the beginning of 2021 when things were crazy. This is when, you know, Trump lost by any definition that I associate with losing and then said that he won. And there were months of— I mean, it was 4 or 5 livestreams a week in addition to all the normal stuff I was doing, thinking about how would I even do that right now with a baby? It sort of seems impossible because it sounds like so much. But it was so interesting what was going on and concerning as well.

Right. It's not just about, oh, I'm a bystander saying, look at how entertaining this is, that you just kind of adjust. And I was doing the work because it was such an unprecedented situation worthy of discussion.

[28:56] Paul: Yeah. How is having a kid change perspective on things, if anything? I think people always ask you— ask me that and it's like, oh, it was the moment. How was the big shift? And like, For me, it's definitely been a bit more gradual.

[29:13] David Pakman: It's been super gradual. I didn't have, you know, sometimes you hear stories from parents about the moment I saw my daughter for the first time, everything instantly changed. You think that's real? Like people, some people say that. And I see friends, but nobody has said it to me in person, but they've said it on Facebook. So, but, you know, that was not my experience.

My experience was, wow, the last 72 hours have been crazy. I have some personal things now I've got to get done. Oh, that felt just like before, even though I know there's this baby now.

[29:47] Paul: Right.

[29:48] David Pakman: And then slowly, very soon, getting, getting back to work. The work felt very similar once, but I've— I feel very— the— there's a lot of transitions from, okay, I'm up at 6:30 to get my 45 minutes of writing. Now it's 7:15 and it's 2 hours of figuring out breakfast. And what does a 20-month-old want to eat? Now I'm going up to my studio. So there's a lot of these kind of like trans— mental transitions.

[30:17] Paul: That's cool. So you've been able to build things around spending time with your girl, boy in the morning.

[30:25] David Pakman: Yeah.

[30:26] Paul: Daughter. Yeah. Daughter in the morning.

[30:29] David Pakman: Yeah. And really throughout the day. I mean, I have a lot of natural breaks in my day. And so an example of a change, a practical change, would be I would usually get all of my prep done for my next show around 2 p.m., but now I'm hanging out with my daughter during some of the afternoon and pushing a lot of that stuff to 8 p.m. when she's asleep. So a lot of these things are just kind of dynamic adjustments.

[30:54] Paul: That's cool. Well, it sounds like things are pretty good.

[30:58] David Pakman: In a lot of ways they are. Yeah. And so that's another one of these things where a lot of times when I will talk to other people who are struggling in a sense, there's a very specific thing to be fixed. Either they're having a coworker problem or a motivation problem or a scheduling problem or a financial problem. I don't really have those things. It's just I've kind of been doing this for a while and maybe the birth of my daughter brings up questions of, well, how long will this be the paradigm?

[31:30] Paul: Yeah. Interesting. Yeah. And so you've said it a couple of times and it sounds like you have these scripts of like, I need to keep doing these things to keep earning the money. And you said before, if I stop doing, who knows how many people get mad at me or unsubscribe and all these things. By the way, like, I feel like if you're listening to this and you're a fan of David, it'd probably be interesting to just like let him know how you would feel if he took like a day off.

Like, right.

[32:04] David Pakman: Well, days off I do pretty regularly. And the reaction is actually mixed in the sense of, oh, interesting. Some people go, why are you off today? And we explain it's Labor Day. It's a federal holiday. That's why we're off today.

You know, you get home and then other people, you know, for example, when I— over the summer, we went to Spain for 2 weeks. Some people are furious and some people say, hey, you know, you deserve this just like anybody else. In fact, You advocate for people taking more time off and that they should have more vacation time. So of course, we would expect you to do the same thing, which is a very rational response in my mind.

[32:43] Paul: Yeah, I early on, I had this thing I wrote in my newsletter, which was I write this newsletter most weeks and I take weeks off. Now, I've never gotten any negative comments. But I think a show is probably different because people are sort of like used to expecting things at certain times. It's sort of like how we used to treat TV. But yeah, that, that's interesting. I don't know how I would deal with that.

[33:12] David Pakman: But yeah, I mean, one of the interesting things that maybe you were getting to is the sort of like, imagine half of my members cancel if I say I'm going to take 3 months off. And during the 3 months, YouTube, Facebook, and all revenue is down 80%. And then I come back and slowly rebuild the membership and the YouTube revenue and all of it mostly comes back, but not all the way. At this point, it really makes no difference in terms of the financial stability. I save most of the money I earn already, and so I could take a huge pay cut and change nothing about my lifestyle.

[33:50] Paul: Well, you'd also be getting rid of the subscribers that don't want you to take a vacation.

[33:55] David Pakman: That's true. That's true.

[33:59] Paul: Do you really think it would go 80%, though? Like, where does that story come from?

[34:03] David Pakman: Well, I think that story comes from some of the analytics about how— I don't have the numbers in front of me, but like on YouTube, I think it's something like 85% of the revenue comes from videos that are under a month old.

[34:17] Paul: Yeah. So that's probably—

[34:18] David Pakman: so if there's no new stuff for 3 months now, here's the thing. I could just hire guest hosts for the 3 months.

[34:25] Paul: Yeah.

[34:25] David Pakman: And that wouldn't be a perfect solution because a lot of my audience doesn't like my guest hosts, but it dampens all of these effects that we're talking about.

[34:35] Paul: Yeah. Are there any models you've seen that are inspiring, maybe even from like sports or other areas that do this well?

[34:43] David Pakman: With channels, I think the models are way bigger than my team is. I mean, we— it's me plus 3 full-timers and then some contractors or, you know, service providers on a part-time basis. Groups like, you know, The Young Turks, which at last check had between 70 and 90 employees, they are built out in a way where there's multiple shows, there's guests, there's backup hosts for every show, backup producers. But I don't want that overhead and I'm not interested in building something that big.

[35:15] Paul: Yeah, I'm curious how you started so long ago. I saw Jon Stewart came back to host The Daily Show. I think 9 years off he took. And it seems in that time, like the whole world of politics has shifted and you've probably seen this shift, like people, like people are just angrier. It's more of their identity and It sort of feels like politics more has like teams now. It sort of feels like sports when I was younger, like Yankees versus Red Sox.

It's like you're sort of rooting for your team. You seem to handle it pretty well, but like, I mean, what's the effect of that?

[35:59] David Pakman: Well, I've said before, one of the things that makes my job different from an accountant is the accountant doesn't come in on Monday and have 3,000 angry comments about what they said about taxes, half of which are anti-Semitic here, 100 which have violent threats. You know what I mean? Like, so there's definitely a difference. Now, there's two sides to this. One is I've gotten so accustomed to it that I don't feel like I'm thinking about it very much day to day. The counterpoint would be, well, I may have just internalized so much of this stuff because it's so common that it is affecting me, but just not in a way that I'm consciously aware of.

I think that's an interesting question, but there's definitely a toxicity to the political space that I think the one thing I can say I've done over time— early when you do this, you're looking at every YouTube comment, you're responding to a lot of YouTube comments to get people to come back and watch the video again while they write something back. That is impossible to maintain at scale. I mean, we get 300,000 YouTube comments a month, so I've stopped looking at them altogether. I mean, I just don't look at them my team. It would take a year to do. Exactly.

It would take a year. So I do think that separating myself from some of that stuff and trying to reduce the noise and increase the signal by looking at thoughtful emails that people take time to actually write to me, I think that's part of maintaining some of that balance.

[37:25] Paul: Yeah. And how do you balance the public recognition part? I know Tim Ferriss has been talking about this, and one of his things he was talking about in a podcast recently recently was, I don't know if I want to do YouTube because that would mean more people would recognize me. And he's already dealt with some scary situations with followers. But how do you think about that?

[37:47] David Pakman: I heard that. I think that was when he— in his interview with Cal Newport, right?

[37:51] Paul: Yeah.

[37:51] David Pakman: Or maybe it was the one before. Yeah. I mean, I'm getting recognized a lot. And what was interesting was there was this huge period during the pandemic where everybody was just home and my show exploded during that time. And so before the pandemic, I would go out and get recognized like once every 10 or 14 days. Then I was just home for this long period of time.

The show grew in a way that I didn't notice because I was just home. And now, I mean, if I go to a coffee shop, I'm usually recognized once or twice just sitting there trying to read or do my work. And it's all delightful. 95% of the interactions are great, except I know half of the people who watch my content vehemently disagree. And so you do worry a little bit about, is this person coming up to me for what reason? Why are this— why is this person coming up to me?

[38:48] Paul: What is that?

[38:49] David Pakman: Who—

[38:49] Paul: I don't understand this. I only consume stuff I like. What— why do people consume stuff they dislike?

[38:58] David Pakman: I don't know. I mean, listen, I consume content of the people I disagree with. So I'll give you an example. Thomas Sowell is a right-wing economist. And yeah, I don't agree with everything he says, but I want to understand what are the arguments. But I would never be compelled to write to him.

[39:17] Paul: Right.

[39:18] David Pakman: And to say, I think you're a terrible person because you're advocating cutting taxes on the rich or It's just, oh, that's a perspective. Okay. So, so I do. One of the things I've adopted is when I think about someone who says, I just saw what David Pakman said, I think it's terrible. I'm going to write horrible insults to him on the internet despite never having met him. I realize that person must have some really tough stuff going on in their life.

I have like radical empathy where you must be really struggling to lash out in these ways that border on violent to people you've never even met in person. That doesn't mean they might not try to show up and harm me. But my perspective is that's really indicative of a struggle that a lot of people are having, because it would never occur to me to behave in that way. I think a lot of people are struggling, and that's why they're writing to people that they've never met on the internet and saying such horrible, disgusting things.

[40:17] Paul: Yeah, it's really interesting how social media has almost made it, uh, all this like human suffering visible. Like people are just doing it out in the open and we're— yeah, I think we're in this period like with social media and we don't even really understand what's going on socially yet. Like so much has changed. I was just reflecting on the fact that in college I met up with people via AIM and like QWERTY texts that our parents would get mad at us for sending because they were expensive. But now everything is so smooth and there's so much information, I don't even know how to really think about it.

[41:02] David Pakman: I agree. And there, you know, I was thinking back with some colleagues who host other shows where 10 years ago we would sometimes do a meetup If we were all going to be at the same conference, we would just announce on our shows, hey, at 5, we're all going to be at— in the bar area of this restaurant. Just show up sort of thing. None of us would dare do that right now. And if we did, we would absolutely say we need some kind of security presence. We probably, depending on what state it's in and how common firearms are and what the laws are, we probably want metal detectors.

I mean, the entire landscape has completely changed.

[41:42] Paul: That's got to have some effect.

[41:46] David Pakman: Sure. I mean, I don't look to do those sorts of events anymore. Yeah, that's one. That's one change.

[41:52] Paul: Yeah. Just knowing that, like, yeah, man. Yeah, it's— I'm grateful that my curiosity has led me to weirder topics than politics.

[42:06] David Pakman: Well, I wonder with someone like Tim Ferriss, because he's talked about how he's had some scary stuff. Who would he— would he be worried about? Who would show up if he were to say, hey, I'm going to be at such and such place in, you know, Seoul, Korea, or wherever it is that he is, just kind of show up? I wonder whether his concerns would be different than mine.

[42:28] Paul: Yeah, I think— I mean, it doesn't seem like he really does events anymore, but yeah. Yeah, it's like something that's hard to figure out because I mean, if you map out the trajectory, you have, what, 2 million followers on YouTube now? If you keep going for another 10 years, like, you may have like 100 million followers. Is that kind of—

[42:48] David Pakman: I don't think my trajectory— I don't, I don't think that's the— so here's what— that's really—

[42:52] Paul: you'll definitely take a sabbatical before 10 years. Yeah.

[42:56] David Pakman: I'm limited by the fact that news and politics is just never going to be as big as a lot of these other verticals. So I think my ceiling I mean, listen, 10 years ago, I would talk to other people who do what I do, Sam Seder and all these other people who we've been all growing our YouTube channels. We all were saying, what is that? What's the ceiling? We could probably get to a million if we stick with it. And then like most of us got to the million and then it started to be like, okay, can we get to 2?

And for now, 3 of us on the left have gotten to 2 million. It's Brian Tyler Cohen and The Young Turks and me. So now we're all again kind of like, What is the ceiling of this thing? The Young Turks, again, is way bigger. I think they're at 5 million, but they have 70 to 90 employees. So it's sort of like a different scale.

So I don't know what the ceiling is. I'm pretty sure it's not 100 million.

[43:41] Paul: Yeah. Talk to me about those people and the impact they've had. Your friends. It sounds like you, you have a group of you that have been doing this for a long time. How has that been beneficial for your journey?

[43:54] David Pakman: [Speaker:1] Well, it's been interesting because a lot of us face the same stuff, although not necessarily at the exact same time. So like, okay, now I am having some security concerns. Okay, so now, like, now let's have that conversation. Or I am now at the point where I can't do the editing myself. It's just like there's too many platforms I'm posting my content on. How do I transition into having employees?

Or how can you have people you trust to give the keys to your social media? So I think that's super useful. Also, everybody kind of is doing their own thing. So I don't know that I have that much audience overlap with any one other creator. I think right now with Brian Tyler Cohen, he and I may have more overlap audience-wise than I do with, with anybody else. But we also kind of all have our distinct niches.

And that's also kind of interesting because the audiences really can be quite different.

[44:49] Paul: Who do you look to for inspiration now? Do you have path role models?

[44:55] David Pakman: You know, I really— I need some. I think I need to find some. No, I really— I really don't. I think that the answer would be, are there people that I think are— so I read a ton of different stuff. And so if you said to me, who do I think is writing interesting stuff about X topic, I probably have some answers. But really, in terms of a role model for what the next 5 to 10 years of my career look like, not really.

I mean, I think, you know, Cenk from The Young Turks is in an interesting position because he's older than me and he's built his thing up in a very particular way. So you could say that might be it. But I know I don't want to do that. He's working an insane amount and I have to, you know, 16, 18-hour days. That's not appealing to me. So it's sort of like an anti-role model and like, I know what that path looks like.

Not appealing to me.

[45:46] Paul: Yeah, I sort of resonate with what you're saying. I'm 7 years into my path and I'm looking ahead and there's not a lot of people I want to follow. Like, if you control for having a happy marriage, not working a lot, and having a kid, it eliminates like 90% of the people.

[46:05] David Pakman: Right.

[46:05] Paul: And so it's, yeah. And I wonder if I almost feel like I might have a similar feeling to you in the sense that It's not that I don't like my path. It's that I need to be challenged to bring up those like unknown unknowns. It's like, what am I not thinking about? And especially given my past path, like it was pretty clear I hated that at the end, but how do I know I am like, how do I know if I'm like 15% discontent with what I'm doing now? Right.

Because I don't really have models or people to to map that against. And it's, it's an interesting thing to think about.

[46:50] David Pakman: Yeah, I think you're getting at that. That's resonating a lot, this idea that what, what am I comparing? So, okay, what I'm doing is quite satisfying. And in terms of lifestyle, it's great and okay. But so what do I compare it to in order to try to figure out, are there areas of opportunity? Or is it about I just need to appreciate more the situation I've created because there actually isn't anything to change, improve, or modify?

What are the guideposts? And I'm not totally sure what they are. I think it is useful when I hear from people who are in kind of more traditional roles and hearing about their day to day, and I go, wow, that sounds horrible. I would have been fired 10 years ago. I never would have survived in that situation. And I think that that can be an interesting kind of wake-up call.

[47:39] Paul: Yeah, it's interesting though. I think just the, it's sort of like the underlying economics of the creator economy do mean that you can earn more without working more. And so I've talked to a few creators that sort of hit this exponential curve earnings-wise, and they're not doing anything different. I sort of face something like this. Like, I sort of just like show up and write and do, do the work I love each day. And last year, uh, I made more money than I ever made, basically because people started talking about my book and sharing it.

Like, I didn't do anything. Like, I wasn't working to earn that money in a very weird way. And I grew up with the scripts of you put in a day's work and you get paid for that.

[48:32] David Pakman: Right.

[48:32] Paul: And how do you mentally deal with like, well, I put in years of work a few years ago and now I'm paying the dividends for that. It's—

[48:42] David Pakman: that's a super interesting thing. And I've been asked for, you know, like newspaper interviews or on other podcasts, how does it feel different to do the show now than it used to? And I always explain, you know, when the audience— I've been doing 22 hours a month of content for a really long time. And when I'm sitting in a room with a microphone, it kind of always feels the same. It's just that later more people are watching it. And there's the very strange thing where the feeling— obviously, I know the audience is bigger now than it used to be, but the day to day, it's sort of like, you know, if your hair grows so slowly every day, there's not one day where you go, wow, my hair really grew today.

It's just eventually you're like, oh, wow, I need a haircut. It's been a while. There's a kind of similar dynamic. And I do— that makes a lot of sense to me. I understand that.

[49:33] Paul: Yeah. And I think the key is just like, I mean, this is why I love having conversations like this on this podcast. This is really what I want to do is get to the deeper inner game. I'm totally bored with like, how do you get more click-through rate on YouTube or post better thumbnails? Like, that stuff's Fine. But it's like, how do you actually think about navigating paths like this?

And I think more and more people are going to be following these paths. Like the corporate employee 10 years from now will be creating content.

[50:07] David Pakman: That's interesting.

[50:08] Paul: Yeah.

[50:08] David Pakman: I mean, and maybe for the, the audience for the content may be, yeah, their customers or clients or yeah. Or internal content or who knows. Yeah, that's interesting.

[50:19] Paul: But yeah, and you're writing the book, you're putting that out. Do you have other creative projects that you've always said, oh, one day I want to try this or experiment with that?

[50:30] David Pakman: You know, a bunch of them I've tried. So one was I want to do a show in Spanish, and I did that during the 2020 election for the Estrella Network, and it was like a 13-week thing. And it was interesting, but I realized in doing it Number 1, I've been away from Spanish political discussion because I moved to the US when I was 5. I— it is more of a challenge linguistically to do it than I thought it would be, even though I talk to my parents and my daughter and family and so many people exclusively in Spanish, all of a sudden saying, now I'm on TV in Spanish. It was different. To go back to it would be an interesting challenge to see if I could get as comfortable talking news and politics in Spanish as I am in English.

But I ultimately decided it's kind of really a distraction from my bread and butter, which is I'm really known in an English-speaking context, and that's where I really want to focus. Actually, I think I'm spreading myself too thin by trying to do English and Spanish. So I tried it. I— the book is something I've been wanting to do for a while. I still have to finish it and then do all the publicity and see how it sells and then maybe look at whether I want to do a second book. So that's interesting to me because it's a new space.

What's been really not difficult, but a challenge to get accustomed to with the book space is it moves so slowly.

[51:54] Paul: It was so slow.

[51:56] David Pakman: And the conversations— and I've self-published two and soon a third children's book. And what I love about that is it's my timeline. It's my timeline. And the conversations with the publisher about, you know, we might be able to get this printed for March 2025. But it might be August 2025. This was like a year ago, you know, where I'm thinking, kill me.

A project for me is 3 months, you know?

[52:21] Paul: Yeah.

[52:21] David Pakman: So that's been interesting. It's been an interesting learning experience. But, but so, you know, I think that's a project. But beyond that, I'm not— I'm just doing my show essentially.

[52:30] Paul: Do you think we'll have a YouTube president by 25 years from now?

[52:35] David Pakman: Probably. Yeah. I mean, I don't know what YouTuber, but, but certainly someone who becomes known through online video platforms.

[52:46] Paul: Yeah, it just seems like YouTube is just so influential. Like, you talk to anyone under 30 and like, how do you learn YouTube? Talk to anyone like who's learning anything. It's, it's YouTube. It's pretty wild.

[52:59] David Pakman: It really is. And I think also the demographics that I'm finding are very interesting. Like, my audience on YouTube is way younger than my audience on TikTok. Which I would not have assumed because the YouTube's been around a long time. TikTok is associated with younger people, but my audience on TikTok is overwhelmingly 55+. That's super interesting.

What does that mean about the future of these platforms and the content I'm creating?

[53:26] Paul: Yeah, I think that's an interesting thing. If you do hang out with people that are 55+, increasingly a lot of them are spending a lot of time on their phones.

[53:36] David Pakman: Yeah.

[53:37] Paul: Which is sort of sad. Yeah. I mean, what, what's like the average age of the YouTube audience?

[53:43] David Pakman: YouTube? I think our core is like 25 to 55.

[53:47] Paul: Okay. Yeah.

[53:48] David Pakman: Yeah.

[53:48] Paul: So it's like right in the middle.

[53:51] David Pakman: Yeah.

[53:52] Paul: Got it. Fantastic. What— yeah. What are some inspiring people you're following lately? Inspiring people, content writers, things things that you're looking for, for inspiration, looking to for inspiration?

[54:08] David Pakman: It's really all outside of the political space. One of the things that I, I get so much in the way of politics from doing my show that I don't even talk. You know, my mom wants to talk about that thing that happened in politics, and I'm like, Mom, I do this every day. Let's please talk about something else. So one of the things is with my reading, I don't read any political memoirs or any of this stuff. For me, it's not so much about inspiration, but it's about thinking about the world in ways that aren't through a news and politics lens.

So this is everything from, you know, right now I'm reading Proust's In Search for Lost Time with companion material and just totally taking myself out of the space that I inhabit workwise. And I'm reading Selwyn Rabb's History of the Italian mob in New York. You know, the 700-page book. It's super interesting. It's, you know, reading books about failed Everest climbs and really just digging into other spaces. And to me, the inspiration is less about the people, but more about paradigms that are completely different from what I'm stuck in day to day, the partisan bickering and that sort of thing.

That's where I'm kind of drawing inspiration from things that are outside the political prey.

[55:30] Paul: That makes a lot of sense. I think— I forget who said it. I think Kevin Kelly said, to be interesting, you have to remain interested. I could be quoting him, but yeah, I mean, a lot of the stuff— I'd stop reading anything if it's not interesting. And I'm always trying to look outside of my space. I read a lot about work for a couple of years, but now I'm reading like random fiction.

[55:52] David Pakman: Yeah. You know what a really interesting thing is? There was a period in my life which maybe happens to everybody who is kind of entrepreneurial in some sense, where you go through the full slate of the, you know, the Peter Drucker and Seven Habits. And, you know, there's 50 books, right? Read them in my 20s, all the personal finance books that are out there. I recently have picked up a couple of books in that space, and I won't say which ones because they're not bad books.

It's just I realized I'm beyond the genre right now where I am in my life. I'm like looking for something different.

[56:29] Paul: Yeah, you sort of graduate past them, right? It's— it's so eye-opening. I remember reading Freakonomics when I was 20 and I was like, oh my gosh, I can't believe I'm seeing the world now. And if I read that book now, I would just be like, okay, that's fine.

[56:46] David Pakman: Yeah. Yeah. What's interesting is lately I've been reading a lot more of the sort of like becoming a real adult books. So like David Brooks's A Second— The Second Mountain.

[56:57] Paul: Oh, yeah.

[56:58] David Pakman: And that book that's 20 years old, The Adult Years and that sort of thing. And so, like, I feel like that has replaced a lot of the stuff I read in my 20s and early 30s.

[57:08] Paul: Have you read David Whyte yet?

[57:10] David Pakman: No.

[57:12] Paul: I need to David Whyte pill you. But he's this guy that quit to become a poet in his 30s, and he just like these beautiful prose, like poetic books about like coming of age and pursuing what you love. And I'm gonna check that out. Yeah, The Three Marriages is one of my favorites, sort of.

[57:34] David Pakman: Okay, I'm gonna make a note of that.

[57:36] Paul: Relationship, self. And, uh, if you do read it, let me know. But I'm okay. My mission is to like David Whyte pill many people.

[57:44] David Pakman: I'm gonna check that out. And it's White with a Y, I see, which is— that's, that's slick.

[57:48] Paul: Yeah, very poetic. Yeah, it really is beautiful. Anywhere you want to send people?

[57:56] David Pakman: Just my website, I would say davidpakman.com. That's the central clearinghouse for everything I do.

[58:01] Paul: Cool. And it's not just politics. I saw some book recommendations and stuff on there as well.

[58:06] David Pakman: There's book recommendations. There's nonpolitical interviews that I do. Yeah, but it's mostly politics, I'll be honest.

[58:14] Paul: Fair enough. All right, well, this is a pleasure. I really appreciate you sharing a bit more about your perspective. And yeah, if you've listened this long, like, love to hear thoughts on this in the comments below as well. And thanks so much for your vulnerability today, David.

[58:30] David Pakman: Thanks so much for talking to me.