How to Get Millions of Views on TikTok WITHOUT Paid Ads w/ Chris Claflin

[00:00:00.090] - Chris Claflin

And when it comes to content, we get a lot of these false signals from big creators as well. Bella Poarch on TikTok is an amazing example of this. How did this girl get big? And we don't realize as small creators that a lot of these creators, their accounts are being heated by TikTok. We're going to really push them to everybody because they're a good representation of what we want the brand for this app to look like. And so when we see Bella Poarch doing some weird face expressions to a trending sound, we assume as creators and businesses that we need to be using the trending sounds they're using. We need to be doing the trends that they're doing. We need to be using the hashtags and video descriptions that they're doing, not realizing that there are other factors that have gone into their success and how viewed their videos are. And some of these factors are as simple as TikTok's team deciding, let's turn this person into a star. And so we get this information that's muddied that we think is what we should be doing, when in reality, it's not at all. A lot of people waste a lot of time sort of barking up the wrong tree, assuming that these are the videos that are working, because we see the three creators on the platform that blew up doing that, and we don't see the tens of thousands of people following the exact same formula that are stuck at two or 300 views per video.

[00:01:17.960] - Jesus Ramirez

Today's creator is Chris Claflin, the master of organic social media growth. With over half a million followers on TikTok, chris has become an expert in helping people grow their social media presence without paid ads. In today's episode, Chris shares his insights on what it takes to create viral content, the best metrics to analyze and ignore, and how he helped the creator raise seven and a half million dollars in investments for a startup on a brand new TikTok account.

[00:01:43.410] - Jesus Ramirez

Hey, Chris, how are you today?

[00:01:44.640] - Chris Claflin

I'm doing good. How are you doing today?

[00:01:46.470] - Jesus Ramirez

Fabulous. Thank you so much for joining me. The reason that I wanted you on the show was because you talk a lot about organic growth on TikTok, which I think is very important, but you do it in a way that I don't see a lot of people doing it in. And I don't know if that's through the experience you have on your own TikTok and your own personal accounts or with the client work that you do, but can you explain to me what the difference is between organic growth and other types of growth, whether it be pay or anything else? Yeah.

[00:02:14.350] - Chris Claflin

I'm a huge fan of organic for a lot of reasons, but the primary difference is whether or not you're paying for reach. So all these platforms will be like, hey, this post is performing really well. Instagram is notorious for this. Do you want to boost it so you're like putting money out there so that more people can see it. And that's a real problem in my opinion, whether you're a business or an independent creator, because it sort of muddies the data on what people want to consume from you. So if you have a post that's a little bit better than your other ones and it's performing at a higher rate, and they're like, do you want to boost this post? I'm not a big fan of that because that post is a signal that that's the direction you should start to follow. But if it's, like, capped out at X number of views, it means that's in the right direction, but it's not quite there. And the minute you start paying for reach, a, it gets you sort of like on this drip that the platform wants you to be on where you're paying for reach, and B, if you're boosting posts, you're not getting real feedback from a true audience on what they're engaging with and what they want to see.

[00:03:22.100] - Chris Claflin

And so, I mean, there is a place for paid reach, for brands and businesses and maybe even creators, but it's got to be approached in the right way, sort of viewed holistically with everything else that's going on and what's working and what's not organically. And the last thing I'll say about that is, like, social media is the most powerful marketing tool on planet Earth, and if you do it right, you don't have to pay for ads. Like, I used to spend literally tens of thousands of dollars in ads on my own business, which back then, we were building websites, mobile apps, web based applications, and I dumped tens of thousands of dollars into ads on Facebook, on Instagram, to get leads coming through. And people were seeing them and they were clicking, but nothing was converting. And when I had my first video related to websites, didn't even go viral. It's just like I could only say that it was Blendif mode. We got, like, three to five new leads from that. Two of those leads converted into actual customers. And that's when I was like that was like, 2021, maybe. And I was like, I'm never paying for ads again.

[00:04:23.570] - Chris Claflin

And I haven't since. And most of my clients don't either. It's all organic. It's really awesome.

[00:04:28.710] - Jesus Ramirez

I do want to talk a little bit about your clients, but before we get to that, I want to take us back. How did you even get into all this? Where was Chris in 2010, and how did you get to here? Being someone who helps people grow on social media, what was that transition like?

[00:04:43.040] - Chris Claflin

Yeah, I grew up in Colorado Springs, Colorado, and I always wanted to be a movie director in Hollywood.

[00:04:49.990] - Jesus Ramirez

Wow.

[00:04:51.770] - Chris Claflin

I grew up making movies, and the adults in my life were like, don't you go to LA. They're going to take your soul. And so I was like, okay, I'll be a dentist. And I went to school to be a dentist. And then I started building websites and dabbling in the stock market, which are two very unrelated things. But one thing led to another, and I realized, like, I'm going to be making more money doing my own thing than I ever could if I was a dentist and going through school. So I dropped out, started a couple of businesses that failed miserably, and then finally development took off. So I built a small dev shop. We focused on software and websites, but the whole time, I was trying to make YouTube work. And so I was always dabbling in YouTube, and I struggled to get my stuff to take off. We had one channel that started to do very well, but it was in the children's space. And so that got shut down in like 20, 16, 17 they changed the way that you can monetize that type of content. Yes, but on the side, since I had all this video gear, I started producing content for YouTubers in my area.

[00:05:52.940] - Chris Claflin

And the videos that I scripted and edited and produced for them did very, very well. And so I was just, like, always dabbling. And then when TikTok hit the scene in 2020, my 7th video that I posted blew up. It got 2 million views, and it was actually a Photoshop video. I see the Photoshop logo in the background for you. So that was the first one that blew up by accident. And I've just been kind of feeling my way through this growth process ever since.

[00:06:20.170] - Jesus Ramirez

That's crazy. I haven't seen that particular video. I'm going to have to go look it up. And by the way, if you haven't already, make sure you check out Chris's TikTok is fantastic, but I need to scroll all the way back to it sounds like the beginning. So I could see a photoshop video.

[00:06:32.820] - Chris Claflin

It's pinned right now, actually, right there at the top. It's pinned because I really enjoyed creating it. I have stuff go viral that I'm like, well, that was cool, but I wasn't like I did it because I like creating content that I sure well.

[00:06:48.050] - Jesus Ramirez

It sounds like it. You mentioned that you wanted to be a movie director, and I'm sure that passion helped you understand better what audiences want to see, at the very least. You mentioned it earlier. Analyze the data, the unbiased data to create content, which I think it's fantastic. By the way, I was doing a little bit of research on you, Chris, and I heard a great story about you, and I wanted you to talk a little bit about that in the research that I was doing, and please correct me if I'm wrong. You did something very interesting to attempt to raise money for your wife's wedding ring, something with blackjack. Can you talk a little bit about that? Because I think it's a hilarious story.

[00:07:26.750] - Chris Claflin

Yeah. So when I was in college. I was so poor you wouldn't believe it. Like, I built bikes at Toys R Us. That was my job. And so I saw a documentary on BBC one day while I was at work because the job that I had allowed you to watch TV. And so I saw this documentary about these card counters that went to the casino in Monte Carlo, and they counted cards playing blackjack, and they made, like, tens of millions of dollars. And it's what the movie 21 was based off of with Kevin Spacey. So I was like, I think I could figure that out. So I taught myself how to count cards. Gambling is illegal in Utah, where I was going to school. It's where I still am. And so I taught myself how to count cards over a couple of weeks because I knew I wanted to ask my wife to marry me. She wasn't my wife at the time, obviously, but I learned how to count cards. I drove out to Wendover, this little gambling town on the border of Nevada and Utah, and I did that every week for, like, six or seven weeks, and I turned, like, two or $300 into $1,300.

[00:08:28.230] - Chris Claflin

And the goal was to buy her wedding ring with that money. But what I actually did was I took that money and then put it into the stock market to keep gambling. So I ran that up pretty well, thinking that I knew what I was doing, but I really didn't. And that ended in disaster. And actually, that's a whole other story, but some painful lessons in there, but yeah.

[00:08:50.510] - Jesus Ramirez

No, it's funny. The reason that I wanted to bring up two reasons number one, it's a funny story, and when I heard it, I was like, oh, my God, this is a great story. And number two is it shows that you like to put things together to create something else. It seems to me that your mind is always thinking about, how can I make this work? You were trying to buy a wedding ring. How can I make this work? Here's this idea. I'll try it stock market, all this different stuff. And it seems like that's what you're doing now with TikTok. And one of the things that I liked about your content when I first started receiving it from my For You page is the way that you talk about creating content. You have one video in specific, and I cannot remember exactly what you said verbatim, but you were talking about how a lot of creators are trying to mimic bigger creators and they want to do the fast cuts and the words and the talking loud and the flapping hands and all this stuff. But the way that you contextualize that is that that is the easy stuff for us to see when we look at the video.

[00:09:57.700] - Jesus Ramirez

But we're not thinking about storytelling and everything else. It really resonated with me because that's how I feel when I'm trying to create my Photoshop stuff. Can you talk a little bit more about not only that video, but specifically what you meant in that video?

[00:10:12.230] - Chris Claflin

Sure. Yeah. This actually happens a lot in life in general. And actually, the story I just told about counting cards, playing blackjack, and investing it into the stock market is a perfect example of this. Very often, we get false signals out of life, out of the market, out of the pieces of media that we put out, and we assume that the feedback that we're getting is indicating that what we're doing is working. So when I took the money from blackjack, I mean, if you ask me now, was I counting cards? Yes. Is that why I won all that money in the casinos? No. I just got lucky. I maybe had a slight edge, but I didn't know enough about it to really have an edge. Now, if you were to tell me, Go count cards, ultimately, it comes down to having a team. You've got to spread that team across multiple tables in order for it to work. You got to be incredibly quick on your feet, brilliant, good at math, and most people are not like that. I'm not that way either. But when I put it into the stock market, I started making money right away, and it was luck.

[00:11:13.100] - Chris Claflin

But I internalized that as like, oh, the things that I'm doing are right. And when the market changed, the things that I thought were right were actually opposite of what I should have been doing. And when it comes to content, we get a lot of these false signals from big creators as well, because we see the videos that have done the best on these platforms and we try to reverse engineer. Okay, so this is what Charlie D'Amelio is doing, or this is what Two Turnt Tony is doing, or whoever the creator is that you're following. And you try to reverse engineer that and create your content based off of what they're putting out. Bella Poarch on TikTok is an amazing example of this. Where the stuff that she had that blew up early on it's a little bit like if you look at it today, it's like, how did this girl get big? And we don't realize as small creators that a lot of these creators, their accounts are being heated by TikTok. So TikTok has just decided, okay, D'Amelios, we're going to let them run. We're going to really push them to everybody because they're a good representation of what we want the brand for this app to look like.

[00:12:12.880] - Chris Claflin

And so when we see these videos that are get ready with me in the morning, or Bella Porsche doing some weird facial expressions to a trending sound, we assume, as creators and businesses that we need to be using the trending sounds they're using, we need to be doing the trends that they're doing. We need to be using the hashtags and video descriptions that they're doing, not realizing that there are other factors that have gone into their success and how viewed their videos are. And some of them, some of these factors are as simple as TikTok's team deciding, let's turn this person into a star. And so we get this information that's muddied that we think is what we should be doing, when in reality it's not at all. And a lot of people waste a lot of time sort of barking up the wrong tree, assuming that these are the videos that are working because we see the three creators on the platform that blew up doing that, and we don't see the tens of thousands of people following the exact same formula that are stuck at two or 300 views per video.

[00:13:15.500] - Jesus Ramirez

If I were to put up a new video today and I'm a completely new creator, what are the first metrics I need to see and analyze so that I can create my next batch of videos?

[00:13:25.170] - Chris Claflin

At the beginning, probably nothing.

[00:13:27.190] - Jesus Ramirez

Nothing.

[00:13:27.750] - Chris Claflin

Beginning is just about getting content out there. Now, there's some caveats to this because you don't want to just be throwing out trash, but at the beginning, you have no idea what's going to work. Like, if I was like, hey, sue, you want to start a new account? I'll work on this with you. The first thing I'd ask you is what's the purpose of the account and what do you want to create content around? And once that's decided, we're just going to sit down and make some assumptions about what we think might work, and we're going to batch those assumptions into three or five, what I call content verticals. It's like either subject matter or a certain approach to your subject. That way when we fill up each one of those content verticals with concepts for the media that we're producing, each one of those verticals is an assumption that we've made that people are going to want to learn more Photoshop features, where people want to learn how to do composite images on Photoshop. So we just create videos about how to do Photoshop composite paintings, or just features on tools within Photoshop, or just videos that are FAQs that come up on Google.

[00:14:33.140] - Chris Claflin

And those are the assumptions that we think is going to work. We just create content around those as good a content as we're able to. And then based on a six week trial run, creating content within these verticals, we can look and see which verticals have performed the best. But at the very beginning, you don't want to be paying attention to the metrics because at the very beginning, you could do stuff like everything completely right. And just because it's a brand new account, you might not go viral at all, you might not have anybody see it. And a lot of getting past that is just putting out the media because TikTok actually has we're pretty sure from this kind of goes back to and sorry to ramble, but this is really valuable.

[00:15:14.620] - Jesus Ramirez

No, please, no. It's all good information.

[00:15:16.680] - Chris Claflin

I built apps with a team for about seven years. I had a team of developers and we'd build social media apps, dating apps, like things that are not similar to TikTok, but pretty similar to everything that existed prior to TikTok coming along. And one of the key concepts amongst social platforms is this idea of cortisol and dopamine hits within the app. It's what makes them addictive. If you've seen the show, the documentary, the Social Dilemma on Netflix, this is the entire premise that these are basically hijacking the human brain to keep users on them longer. And one of the things that I've noticed with TikTok is they seem to have a dopamine and cortisol trigger for new accounts somewhere between post zero and post 45. So if you're first starting out and you're uploading content somewhere in that range, they will pick one of your better performing videos and just push the hell out of it so that you're like, oh my gosh, it's happening.

[00:16:12.540] - Jesus Ramirez

It's happening.

[00:16:13.380] - Chris Claflin

You have a video that does 10,000 views or 100,000 views or a million views or 2 million views, whatever the number is, and they just do it with that one so that as a creator, you're like, I know I can do that again. And now you're hooked on the content creation process, which makes more media for their platform to push to users. And so this is like a real thing. And if you're first starting out, you need to keep that in mind. So all of the content needs to be as good and on brand and on topic as it can be because you never know when that video is going to hit that they pump. But at the same time you have to recognize, like, I need to be process focused here rather than results focused because the results are going to be abysmal until that event trigger occurs and they're going to be abysmal afterwards. And that's just kind of how it is. But that event trigger can help. Like if your content is super, super good from the beginning, it can help you sort of land on the map and in people's for you pages.

[00:17:12.710] - Chris Claflin

But at the beginning, just focus on getting good content out and look at the results after like a six week period is what I tell people.

[00:17:21.790] - Jesus Ramirez

Okay, it's funny that you mentioned that story about how TikTok will just decide to put one of your videos out there and make it a blow up because that's exactly what happened to me. I posted maybe five videos in the fifth or fourth or something. Got to man, I remember it was like a million views in a day or something. And I was like, oh my God, this is insane. And that video's got God knows how many millions of views now, but it happened so early that I was like, I'm going to keep making more TikTok. Yeah, you're absolutely right. That worked on me until this day. I make to a week now, one on Fridays, one on Mondays and Fridays is when I post. That was a little late this week, so I made it yesterday. Tuesday, we're recording this on a Wednesday. But yeah, it definitely happens to me. And as you said, as soon as it came out and I started seeing those numbers, I started making more and more and more. So for sure, they did get me. I don't get millions of views on any video or not any video.

[00:18:14.640] - Jesus Ramirez

Some videos do get a million or more, but definitely not as easy as I thought it was going to be. And one of the things that I wanted to circle back to that you mentioned, Chris, that I think is very important. And again, this is why I like your content. You talk about some things that I haven't seen anyone talk about in terms of creating content. You have a very great, great video that I recommend people watch about creating hooks. And one of the things you talk about in that video is the amygdala, the oldest part of the human brain, and the few key objectives that the amygdala is always looking out for and how you as a creator can take advantage to create hooks. Can you explain what the amygdala is, what these key objectives are, and how creators can take advantage of these objectives to create hooks and also why hooks are important? That's a long question.

[00:18:57.530] - Chris Claflin

That's fine. I am barely smart enough to be able to talk on this topic. It's more for the neuroscientists to cover. But the amygdala is the oldest part of the human brain and it's responsible for the flight or fight decisions that we make and it also makes most of our decisions for us. So the thing about these algorithms that TikTok and Instagram and YouTube are running, we're in the age of AI now. We can't really trick these algorithms, but we can speak to the human brain how it likes to be spoken to, and the amygdala, the purpose that it serves and the reason that it makes 90% of our decisions for us. One of the things that's important to think about when you're thinking about the amygdala is it makes these decisions lightning fast for us. And it needs to, because the amygdala's primary purpose is to spot and identify danger. Because if you can identify danger or something that's going to cause pain, you can avoid it. And there's a higher likelihood that you can pass your genes on to the next generation. Because if you are undeterred by danger in the wild, where there's animals and creatures that can eat you and brightly colored plants that can kill you, you're not going to stick around for very long.

[00:20:23.780] - Chris Claflin

So the amygdala, that's what it is. Evolutionarily. Is this like a little option of the brain that helps us make snap decisions that will keep us alive. And that's part of why in the news, if it bleeds, it leads. It's why sex sells. It's why we pay attention to sensational claims. And so even if you're not trying to necessarily manipulate users into watching your stuff, understanding, which I don't necessarily condone, but understanding that the amygdala is what triggers within a person's decision process, whether or not to swipe up or keep watching. It's good to know. In terms of how to craft the initial second or two of your video, which a lot of creators refer to as a hook. A lot of people think that a hook is supposed to be seven facts about this or tell people what the video is about. And that's partially true, but a good hook speaks to the amygdala and triggers within a person's mind. No, I have to watch this. This is important to me, and there's right ways and wrong ways to do that just based on how human beings prioritize decisions. And it's really all based in the amygdala because we have a different part of our brain called the neocortex, which is the part of our brain that we use to craft arguments and come up with math and art.

[00:21:45.720] - Chris Claflin

And it's our thinking portion, our logical portion, but we don't make decisions based on that. And that's why when you sit down at Thanksgiving dinner with your weird uncle and you're like, this is the year that I'm going to explain to him why politics isn't how he sees it, I've crafted the perfect argument. That's your neocortex that came up with that. And when your uncle goes off on his crazy rant again, it's because the amygdala is the part of the brain that's listening. And when you're crafting content, whether it's for marketing or organic media, you got to frame your message with that in mind.

[00:22:20.910] - Jesus Ramirez

Do you have any case studies or success stories that you've had with your clients or people that you helped where you crafted a hook using these principles and how they contributed to the success of the videos or series of videos?

[00:22:35.230] - Chris Claflin

Yeah, I mean, I do this in all of my media. I've had clients go from a couple thousand views per video to having videos do tens of thousands of views. And it's not always necessarily a hook of what's being said. So the Amygdala prioritizes a lot of different things, but a hook can be what we see as well on the screen, so it doesn't necessarily have to be something that's said, but anybody can implement this and you'll see a marked change in how much engagement you have on your posts as long as you lead in the first 2nd. So I don't have any specific numbers on clients that we could tie their growth specifically to this one thing because just like a cheeseburger has layers and different ingredients, speaking to the amygdala is one ingredient. But I can say that. My best example is a guy who sells rare books and on TikTok. His name is Reed Moon. @MoonsRareBooks on TikTok. And when I started working with him in April of last year I think he had 6000 followers and he's crossed 1.6 million in under a year. And that's one of the things that we work on on his videos or did because I told him in November I was like, Reed, you don't need me anymore.

[00:24:02.570] - Chris Claflin

Your stuff goes viral on its own. He was like, yeah, you're right. And so he does his own stuff now.

[00:24:06.980] - Jesus Ramirez

You're like, I'll keep collecting the paycheck but I'm not doing anything anymore.

[00:24:10.230] - Chris Claflin

Yeah, I do have a guilty conscience when it comes to that. I like to know that I'm helping people and sure, when they get big enough that they don't need me, I'm totally cool with being like hey, right, you don't need me anymore.

[00:24:22.730] - Jesus Ramirez

And if somebody wants to work with you, how do you decide on who to take on? Is there an interview process? If someone is listening to you and is enjoying the things that you're saying and they want to work with you, how does that work out?

[00:24:33.860] - Chris Claflin

I'm figuring that out as I'm going because the amount of interest, especially lately has been really overwhelming. It's been hard to even go through all of the submissions that we get. But yeah, I don't work with everyone because there are some creators that clearly have a lot behind the scenes that's not in place to be able to help them. Because with social media, one of the problems is it's a lot of work to create good content that trends organically or goes viral organically. And with social media, for most people that want to do it they think that they're going to make money in some capacity off of getting all these views. But that's not true. Now, at least in 2023, you have to solve for two problems. One is traffic which you solve for by getting a following and videos that do very well. But the second is conversions. You have to have a business attached to your media in most cases or it's just going to be views without any kind of financial compensation for the time that you're putting into these videos. And so I have a course that people can take. It's pretty affordable.

[00:25:44.820] - Chris Claflin

It's $125. The entire process that I go through. There's no one on one interaction with me. But that's like the good place to start for people that just are barely starting out.

[00:25:56.180] - Jesus Ramirez

And where can people find that?

[00:25:57.480] - Chris Claflin

It's at christopherclaflin.com. I have just like a little landing page.

[00:26:02.150] - Jesus Ramirez

There'll be a link to it in the show notes for sure.

[00:26:04.200] - Chris Claflin

I appreciate that. But yeah, to answer your question though, I try to make sure that every person that I work with, whether it's a business, usually they're businesses and marketing departments that are just stuck. And that's kind of who my primary client is, because I know they already have the business side in place. It's really hard to work with individual creators who are just starting out, who have never started a business and who have never created successful content. Because then you're building, like, two really difficult processes out with these people, and that gets expensive. And for most people, it's not the right move. So the businesses that reach out, we make sure they have all their ducks in a row. So that way, if we can help them get the traffic, and if I can help them create better content, it's going to move the needle on their bottom line. And in many cases, it replaces their paid ads completely. Which is awesome, right?

[00:26:59.770] - Jesus Ramirez

And if I'm not mistaken, you recently posted a video, maybe even this week, with a gentleman out of Columbia who made, if I'm not mistaken, $7 million through a lot of views on TikTok.

[00:27:10.420] - Chris Claflin

Seven and a half million, yeah.

[00:27:12.970] - Jesus Ramirez

Only seven and a half million.

[00:27:15.320] - Chris Claflin

Yeah. His name is Brian York, and he's the CEO of a company called Cubbo. So it's like Amazon. They're a fulfillment service for e-commerce providers. They're based in Latin America and he's actually American. I think he might have dual citizenship, but he is back and forth between the US and South America. But he didn't get paid seven and a half million dollars. I want to make the distinction. He used TikTok to raise seven and a half million dollars in investments for his startup. And I talked to him about it a week or two ago, and he was saying that that's never happened for him before. Usually it's like this really tough grind to find investors and convince them to give you money. He was posting videos that were trending in his space. And the investors found him and they slid into his DMs, and they were like, hey, we like, what you're doing? We want to invest. And so he had pre-qualified investors reaching out to him, which is crazy. And I wasn't expecting that. That was a happy accident, and it worked out really well for him.

[00:28:20.910] - Jesus Ramirez

What type of content was he creating prior to you helping him? And then after, what was that shift in content?

[00:28:27.320] - Chris Claflin

When he reached out to me, he wasn't on TikTok, so it was from scratch. Like, I want to do this. And what do you think we should do? And so I told him what I thought, and unfortunately, he didn't have the time to be able to follow the plan that I had laid out. And so I was like, Dude, that makes sense. I mean, you're the CEO of a company. People's jobs depend on you. Don't prioritize TikTok. But Do You Have Time To Just post every day and document your fundraising process, because he was gearing up for this three month stint where he would be reaching out to venture capitalists and raising capital and pitching to investors. And I was like, Just document as much as you can and upload every day. You don't have to edit it. Just shoot it on your iPhone. But if you can show the worst parts and the best parts and be totally transparent about what this process looks like because there will be people out there that find value in it. And nothing went viral. It all just trended into the tens of thousands or hundreds of thousands of views, like low hundreds of thousands.

[00:29:35.600] - Chris Claflin

But that was enough for him to get $7.5 million of inbound interest, and his goal was to raise $10 million. That was like 75% of what he was aiming for from the very beginning, which is awesome.

[00:29:48.520] - Jesus Ramirez

That's incredible. I can't even imagine. And it also speaks to the TikTok algorithm finding the right audience for him. They just didn't shoot it out to 7000 random people or whatever the number was. They shot it at people who clearly were going to be interested. So that's incredible.

[00:30:05.000] - Chris Claflin

That's the beauty of TikTok. Their algorithm is so good at pairing media with the right person. So if your stuff isn't working organically, it doesn't mean you're shadow banned. It just means that the algorithm cannot find the people, and the people are out there. So it's on you to shift your approach and tinker until you figure out what people in your space are actually into, because the algorithm will find them for you. Because this platform wants people on their platform longer, and it's based on how efficiently they compare media with the right eyeballs.

[00:30:37.680] - Jesus Ramirez

I completely agree. And if you compare it to, say, Instagram, for example, I think, at least in my opinion, TikTok is much better at finding people that are going to be into your content. And also, I think you posted about this, Chris. You talked about another creator posting their call with someone on Instagram, and they had this list of things you needed to follow in order for your content to be successful. And essentially, you had to be an employee for them. My God, post two or three times a day. And for people like me, I couldn't do what they require since I do a lot of screen capture work and then a lot of post production and premiere and things like that. And they want you to edit an app and a whole bunch of stuff. And I was like, I cannot believe that Instagram is doing this. They're shooting themselves in the foot, in my opinion.

[00:31:22.100] - Chris Claflin

I mean, they keep doing that. They keep moving the platform farther and farther away from what people loved it for in this vain attempt to try to compete with TikTok and it's weird. I really think it's a function of the US based capitalistic system, which, full disclosure, I'm a big fan of it. I love the fact that anybody can create a product or service and make a ton of money. I want to make more money. I don't think there's anything wrong with making a bunch of money. But it doesn't make sense if you think about it logically, that corporations in the United States are always shooting to beat last quarter's profits, especially when they're as large as Instagram and Facebook. Like, you have market saturation everybody's on your platform. So at some point you got to accept that you can just plateau and be good at what you're good at. But they see a TikTok come along, that's something completely different and it's like, oh, we can't have that. We got to do the same thing and they end up cannibalizing. What made them special in the first place? And my opinion is that when it comes to Instagram and Facebook, we're seeing like a slow motion collapse of just a massive giant that cannot keep up with the times because they came into existence at a different point in history and they did what they did very, very well.

[00:32:39.440] - Chris Claflin

And you either continue to do what you're doing well or you try to do everything poorly. And Instagram and Facebook have decided they're going to try to do all of it really badly. So I'm not a fan right now, to be honest.

[00:32:56.660] - Jesus Ramirez

Neither am I. I do post on all the networks. I do post a short content on TikTok first. I then post the same video as a reel and as a YouTube short.

[00:33:05.800] - Chris Claflin

Are you crushing it on YouTube? I bet you're crushing it on YouTube.

[00:33:10.250] - Jesus Ramirez

I have a large following on YouTube. But funny that you asked that specific question with the short content because the short content does much, much better on TikTok. Like much better. It's night and day difference. And the funny thing is I compare the analytics on the videos and they're about the same. They're not always 100% the same, but they're not so vastly different that I just don't know why the YouTube videos don't do as well as the TikToks. Having said that, I just had a video that I posted about maybe three or four weeks ago on YouTube that for whatever reason, the algorithm gods decided they were going to give it some views. So it has about four or 5 million views now.

[00:33:51.440] - Chris Claflin

What was the title of the video?

[00:33:53.370] - Jesus Ramirez

The title of the video was I believe it was Creating Realistic Shadows in Photoshop.

[00:33:59.010] - Chris Claflin

Interesting. You want to know something very interesting about this?

[00:34:02.290] - Jesus Ramirez

Yeah, please.

[00:34:03.550] - Chris Claflin

All these platforms, this would have been lost on me if I wasn't a developer in my previous life. And actually that's a misnomer because I am not a great developer. But I recognize what good development is.

[00:34:16.120] - Jesus Ramirez

Yeah.

[00:34:16.370] - Chris Claflin

I was able to hire the people that were and recognize the people that weren't because it takes one to know one. And I'm a terrible programmer, but all these platforms are different. TikTok is not social media. Instagram and Facebook are social media platforms because traditionally our feeds in these platforms were filled with content that we saw from people we chose to follow. YouTube is not social media. It's a search engine. So people are actively searching for things on that platform. So what works on TikTok? Why would it work on a search engine? Because TikTok does something completely different. It's an outreach platform. So they are taking media and pairing it with the widest number of eyeballs of people that are going to engage with that. So, like, if you think about what TikTok did, they essentially took the mechanism of user driven virality from Instagram and Facebook, where back in the day, it was like something went viral. And you saw it because your cousin or your aunt or your mom shared the video with you because they thought you would think it was funny. And that's how these videos get 10 million views, 20 million views, 30 million views on social.

[00:35:25.880] - Chris Claflin

And TikTok came along and they were like, we can cut out the middleman and use analytics and user driven data to understand what should be viral, and we can decide who to show it to. So they took out that middleman sharing effect of virality, and they utilized an algorithm to make that happen. And they have the share feature, which sort of reinforces the data that they use to make this happen. But on your For You page, on TikTok, most of what you see is from creators you don't follow because it's not social media, it's outreach media. And you can't treat these platforms the same because they're different.

[00:36:02.710] - Jesus Ramirez

No, for sure. And you bring up a good point, the SEO. So when I first started my YouTube channel back in 2011, July 2011, I was very focused on SEO. I knew that if my videos were going to get views, they needed to have a good SEO title. And that was very beneficial for me for a really long time. It still is. But recently, the way that YouTube algorithm works is now focusing also more on that virality stuff, but not necessarily as good as TikTok. I will say that TikTok's algorithm is just so much better at finding the right viewer for your content. One thing I wanted to ask you because I know we're running out of time and there's so many things I wanted to get to before we end the podcast, but are there any misconceptions that you see with the TikTok algorithm, with the general public, and how creators can leverage how the algorithm actually works to get better organic reach?

[00:36:54.560] - Chris Claflin

Yeah, well, all these platforms, TikTok included, they make statements about what they want you posting, they'll tell you what they want. And in terms of how the algorithm works, I think there's two misconceptions that I see one is like, people will be like, oh, my views dropped off a cliff like I think I'm shadow banned or what's going on? And sometimes that's just a byproduct of developing software where it's like you develop a new version and you push it out to your users. And every developer that ever does that is crossing their fingers and praying that it works and that it doesn't break the whole thing. That's how it works. And so oftentimes a new update will just randomly, there's not even like any rhyme or reason to it. Some creators wind up catching a positive wave and other creators that were doing really well get buried by it. And that usually the dust settles as the development team works through some kinks or bugs or unintended consequences of a new feature or a new release. And then the other thing is that when it comes to hashtags and time of data posts and video description and trending sounds and whether or not you did a Trend or used a Cap Cut template that seems to be working.

[00:38:03.710] - Chris Claflin

All of those things that social media marketing agencies and gurus and stuff tend to focus on is not nearly as important as people think. There's some validity to it. But for the most part, it really comes down to whether or not your content is good. And people love to split hairs over whether or not they have the right hashtags or the right trending sound. And that kind of goes back to what we were talking about at the beginning. We get a lot of false signals on what we should be doing. And by definition, SEO in general, I think the entire SEO space is my opinion, is dying. Because when there's a status quo that everybody can check all the boxes and yes, we have this. Yes, we have our meta descriptions on our pages, yes, we have our website indexed with Google Search. Yes, we have all these hashtags and our social posts that's public knowledge on what you're supposed to do. So it means that there's no edge to it. Just like in trading the stock market or counting cards, you have to have an edge in order to be able to generate views on these platforms.

[00:39:04.810] - Chris Claflin

And the only space that edge can come from is the piece of creative that only you can produce in such a way, or the host of your show is like ridiculously attractive and they're super funny. That's a very defensible edge. But it has nothing to do with hashtags, time of day to post trending sounds, all that other stuff. But people love to focus on that because it's tangible and it's measurable and it makes sense. How do you make attractiveness versus comedic value? How do you boil that down to a formula? And you can't really, so people don't latch onto that, but really, that's the muscle that you need to be building if you want to be able to reach large groups of people.

[00:39:45.790] - Jesus Ramirez

So you mentioned hashtags, and that's something that I wanted to ask you, so I'm glad you talked about that. But what about other engagement metrics such as likes, comments, shares? Are any of those metrics significant in terms of content visibility?

[00:39:59.220] - Chris Claflin

Definitely. Shares seems to be one of the at least on TikTok seems to be one of the sort of gold standard metrics to look at in terms of whether or not a video is doing well. The percentage of shares to views doesn't need to be super high, so it's usually like 1% to 2% shares to views is actually pretty good in terms of views to likes usually like around 10% like to view ratio indicates that a video is pretty healthy. You want to have people saving your videos and comments is really good too. But that still begs the question, like, okay, I know what metrics to look at, but how do I actually get these things? When it really comes down to it, you have to be brutally honest with yourself whether or not a piece of media is shareable. Is somebody going to share this with their mom? Is somebody going to comment on why they think this opinion is right or why they think this opinion is wrong? Because it's really easy to try to fall into this trap of thinking that you're making media for everybody, but you're not. And I tell people all the time, if what you have to say is not offensive to somebody, it's not interesting to anyone.

[00:41:16.330] - Chris Claflin

Hand tool many people are trying to sort of toe the line between left and right or artists versus intellectuals or whatever. These are not the same. People don't try to talk to everyone and make it work for everyone that hears it. That's impossible. And it's like counterproductive because you're not going to get shares or comments or likes or saves on a video that's just regurgitating traditional viewpoints that everybody's sort of accepted as fact. You have to think about every piece of media through that lens. Like, will people think this is interesting? Are they going to share it with each other? Are they going to tag their friends in the comments so that they can see it? Because those are the metrics that those metrics matter for sure. Saves and shares on TikTok seem to be the most important ones, and you got to craft your content with that in mind.

[00:42:10.960] - Jesus Ramirez

Yeah, and I'll share with you what I have in mind, and I'm nowhere near an expert in this topic like you are, but I've looked at all my videos. Most of my videos are about a minute long. They're never shorter than 30 seconds, never longer than a minute. So in that range and I've noticed that all my videos that have 100,000 views or more, it doesn't matter how much higher, by 5 seconds, I retain 50% or more of the viewers watching and literally that's the only thing I look at in terms of analytics. Because with my simple mind that can't do math or count cards or anything like that, I can't figure out what the other numbers mean in relationship to each other to create a successful video. But that's the one simple metric that I've noticed on my videos. So I focus a lot on the quote unquote hook to try to keep people interested because my videos are all Photoshop content. So if somebody is wanting to learn that specific technique, how can I get them interested? And to your point, I understand that not everybody in the world wants to learn that specific technique.

[00:43:19.190] - Jesus Ramirez

Even if they are Photoshop users, they might already know it or might not be interested in that thing. Well aware of that. But if potentially a user could be interested in that technique, how can I get them interested in it? And that's what I work really hard on.

[00:43:32.410] - Chris Claflin

That's really smart to do. I mean, you said it yourself, like by 5 seconds, they've decided but that's the Amygdala making the decision for them. Yeah, you're absolutely right.

[00:43:47.670] - Jesus Ramirez

Great. Okay, well, thank you so much, Chris. Yeah. This whole social media thing, I've been doing it for God knows what year are we? 20- my God, I've been doing this at 2011 a long time, YouTube, and then at one point Facebook, Instagram, now TikTok. And what seems true at the end of the day is creating good content. And that has changed over the years. If I look at some of the videos I made in 2011, 2012, my God, I want to staff my eye with a pencil, they're so bad. But then some of those videos got millions of views at the time and the videos are so much better in my opinion now than they were back then. But they're not that much better in terms of views. And I know part of the reason is everybody's content is getting better. There's more of it as well. What I tell people when they ask me how do I get big on YouTube, retention rate is my big one on YouTube as well. And click through rate. And one of the things that I tell people is like, don't be emotional about it. The data is there.

[00:44:44.910] - Jesus Ramirez

And if I lose most of my audience in the first 10 seconds of a YouTube videos because I didn't fulfill their promise or I made them bored or whatever, and with YouTube, at least with my old videos, oh my God. Chris my introductions were two minutes long. Hey, everybody. This is Jesus Ramirez. Welcome back to the Photoshop training channel. You can find me on Instagram @JRfromPTC. Last week I went to Jamaica. I have some, you know, and and it was all and dude, I'm here to learn Photoshop. I'm here to learn how to remove a background. I don't care about your it's a realization for me that the content that I put out is educational, and people come to me for the most part because they want to learn how to do something. And yes, have I developed a relationship with my viewers? For sure, with a percentage. Would those people be interested about my trip to Jamaica? Maybe, but that's not the majority. So I had to really tune my content so that it was more accessible to more people.

[00:45:40.700] - Chris Claflin

That's amazing. That's the journey everybody goes through.

[00:45:43.290] - Jesus Ramirez

100%, and there's no easy you mentioned it, just put a bunch of content, analyze the data later. I mean, that's really it rinse and repeat. I think that the issue is when people get emotional and they just want to make the same thing work over and over and over again, and it doesn't work. You should look at the data and then fine tune from there. There's one thing that I wanted to get your thoughts on, and I know you have very strong opinions on it and currently here in the United States, we have a lot of talk with TikTok and data privacy. So can you please provide some background on the concerns that are raised by the US government about TikTok and what's been going on in the last couple of weeks in your perception of the whole situation?

[00:46:24.880] - Chris Claflin

Yeah. Well, the United States government wants to ban TikTok in the United States or force the Chinese owners that hold controlling shares within the company to sell those shares, relinquishing control of a lot of how the app works and so Congress met and supposedly grilled CEO's, TikTok CEO on the safety and data privacy features of the app. The government really wants to ban it. The people that are on it don't want it to be banned. There's 150,000,000 Americans on the app right now, which is insane to consider, and it's super sketchy in my option. I think it's, like, a really sad day for the United States, a sad period of time, because for a lot of reasons, we could get into it. But in a nutshell, yeah, the US government wants to ban TikTok because it's got ties to the Chinese, and Americans aren't for it for the most part. Like, I haven't seen very many people be for it. And in my opinion, we're kind of getting a bait and switch because the bill that has been proposed to ban TikTok doesn't just address TikTok. TikTok's sort of like the poster child of what they would do with this bill.

[00:47:50.540] - Chris Claflin

But if you look into the bill, the Restrict Act, it's really about freedom on Internet in general. Like, they're really trying to clamp down on what people are saying to each other, how people are communicating with each other, how platforms allow people to communicate with each other. And it's like it's one of the biggest breaches, in my opinion, of people's individual freedom since the Patriot Act, which back then was all about, like, okay, terrorists are trying to blow up Americans. We need to be able to track what everyone's saying through cell phones and text messages and emails to make sure that Americans are safe. And so people are like, okay and Edward Snowden famously blew the whistle on the fact that the government used the rights that they gained through the patriot act to spy on Americans, and in some cases, radicalize American citizens and get them to do some really shady shit. So I'm very leery and opposed to this whole thing. And last thing I'll say, and we could dive deeper into it if you want, but I'm not saying that the Chinese are the good guys here. They're a legitimate concern, and they have a vested interest in the United States not remaining the world's superpower.

[00:49:12.260] - Chris Claflin

We could argue whether or not we still are, but I don't think that changes the fact that what's being proposed in this bill is not good for anybody. And so I strongly oppose it.

[00:49:24.020] - Jesus Ramirez

Yeah, and just to be very clear, I'm not very educated on the subject, but on my perspective, it seems like a very unfair way of treating TikTok compared to the other social media platforms, at least from my understanding, they are no better. And you can make the argument, well, they're not owned by Chinese companies, and fair. But from my understanding and my perspective, they have access to all that same data. And as you mentioned with the patriot act, they have access to all our information.

[00:49:54.590] - Chris Claflin

Yeah, the information of the people is already in the hands of the Chinese because Mark Zuckerberg and Facebook and Instagram and Google have actually like it's on record. It's not even that it's on record. They actively sell our data to the highest bidder, whether it's the Chinese or the Russians. And this has been a conversation in the mainstream media for a long time, that Russians are infiltrating Facebook to try to sway elections and all these other things. So you're right, TikTok having our data isn't the issue. I think that the issue, and here's the weird thing. Government and big tech, they want to restrict what TikTok is. And really it comes down to the fact it has nothing to do with the data from my understanding and all the facts that I have. Which, again, I'm also not a super high level expert on this, but it seems like the reason they're so hell bent on passing this bill so they can ban TikTok, is because in the United States, when it comes to YouTube, Twitter, Facebook, Instagram, even Pinterest, they're all based in the United States. And so they're all kind of in bed with the US government. They use their money to lobby congress to pass bills that favor them, that allow them to distribute information how they want to. And there's already kind of this quiet agreement between government and social media companies that it's like, oh yeah, that thing that just happened. Yeah, let's make sure that that doesn't trend. They can suppress voices. And Twitter, the Twitter files actually revealed that the government, the White House, actually colluded with Twitter and pressured Twitter to ban journalists from covering the facts during the pandemic. And the facts were always changing. This isn't about being like, on the left or on the right. They were just journalists looking for what the truth was. And the White House didn't like that. So they had Twitter ban these journalists. And when it comes to TikTok, it's owned by a foreign entity. What's the White House going to do to pressure the Chinese to ban some creator or a journalist who's reporting the news? The Chinese don't care. It actually probably works in favor of the Chinese for Americans to be critical of their government on this app. And in my opinion, that's a good thing because it's a part of what makes America the country that it is.

[00:52:11.050] - Chris Claflin

Like, Americans by definition, have always been mistrusting of centralized power, and we actually revolted against King George to start this country. And so that's sort of an American trait is to be suspicious of government and be sort of nitpicky about what they're doing. Like it's a good thing. And ironically, the Chinese have given us that through TikTok, and it's the US government that's begging the Chinese to censor American citizens, which is crazy.

[00:52:44.470] - Jesus Ramirez

The funny thing to me, at least, out of the whole situation, is it really showcases how uninformed our elected officials are about technology, about how things work. I mean, I was watching some of these questions they were asking in Congress, and I'm obviously joking here, but the questions were basically, does TikTok connect to my WiFi? If so, what color is it? Yes or no? Insane.

[00:53:09.570] - Chris Claflin

You literally quoted him word for word. That's what he asked, right? That is what he asked.

[00:53:15.040] - Jesus Ramirez

I added the whole, like, what color is a WiFi, yes or no? But literally, I think the gentleman said, does TikTok connect to my home network? And the TikTok CEO was dumbfounded by the question. He actually thought he misunderstood the question. And there was another woman who said something like, does TikTok track your GSP information? She meant GPS. So clearly a lot of the people are not informed about the topic. And it's fine if these people are not tech experts. I understand that. Yeah.

[00:53:45.530] - Chris Claflin

But these are the people that are making decisions for a nation that's living in the technology era. Like, we're in the 21st century. Everything we do is tied to tech. You're on the money. That raises the question, who are we letting make our decisions for us when everything we do is tied to our ability to connect freely via the Internet?

[00:54:09.890] - Jesus Ramirez

And you talked about being a world superpower. If we are still going to continue to be a world superpower, it's going to be through technology, not going backwards.

[00:54:18.490] - Chris Claflin

Exactly.

[00:54:19.040] - Jesus Ramirez

Oh, man. I did want to ask your thoughts and opinions on this, but if I am a TikTok user who is worried about protecting my data and privacy while using the platform, is there anything that you recommend for those people to do, or are there any safeguards for that that you know of?

[00:54:37.820] - Chris Claflin

That's a good question. Unfortunately, the answer is probably no, because when you download an app, you're accessing a product, and when it's free, like TikTok, the part of that product that's being sold is you, your information. So the only way, and this is not just about TikTok, it's Facebook, it's YouTube, it's Instagram, any of these social media apps, the minute you download them on your phone, you're essentially agreeing to their terms and conditions, whatever those are. And there's nothing you can really do about that. Besides, if you're an Apple user, iOS will ask you, do you want to allow this app to track your data and usage across other apps? Meaning, do you want to let TikTok or Facebook or Instagram look at what you're doing on Pinterest or on your browser? And Apple has worked into their hardware systems to prevent that from happening. And that's really the only thing you can do, is make sure that your settings are set up so that way they're only tracking what you're doing within the app but this is not exclusive to TikTok. Every single app tracks your data, looks at what you're doing based on your privacy settings within your phone, but you're agreeing to their terms of service when you download the product in terms of what they track while you're on their platform.

[00:56:00.280] - Jesus Ramirez

Do you have any recommendations for people if TikTok were to get banned in the US and how creators or brands could pivot their content strategies to other platforms, or how to maintain their online presence to reach our target audience?

[00:56:13.290] - Chris Claflin

I think if TikTok gets banned, we've got bigger problems than that, because if you look at the Restrict Act, it restricts everything from what you sell on platforms like Etsy. The government can decide, we don't want anybody selling Black Lives Matter merchandise and so they'll shut you down and if you try to get around it with a VPN, they can imprison you and fine you up to a million dollars. My understanding is that's a piece within the bill. If TikTok gets banned, probably the next place to go is YouTube. It seems that Instagram and Facebook are really struggling to figure out what they even are as a platform. Twitter is the same way since Elon Musk purchased it. However you feel about that, it's the Wild West, which can be good. Sometimes it's not. But YouTube has been very consistent in being true to what their product is and how they serve their market. And so YouTube is probably the next place to go to just, like, figure out, how do I storytell? How do I make good content for people that's valuable. And it's really the same game plan, but you're just not going to get the reach that you do on TikTok, because these platforms, they're search engines, they're social platforms.

[00:57:27.160] - Chris Claflin

They're not outreach, which is what TikTok is. Right.

[00:57:30.510] - Jesus Ramirez

And I don't know how you feel about this, Chris, but this specific issue to me, again, from the little that I see and read, it doesn't seem like a left or right issue. I see people on both sides of the aisle for this, and I've seen some people on both sides of the aisle against it as well. Most people or most politicians seem to be for the ban of TikTok, with some exceptions, again, on both sides of the aisle. And that's what's interesting to me. In this country, we can't seem to agree on anything, but this seems like it's something that all politicians agree on, which is actually quite scary. Yes. I like to end the show by asking you a series of lightning round questions. These questions could have a one word answer. They can be longer, lead to a story, or you can say skip. So I call it lightning round. It might be 15-20 minutes worth of conversation.

[00:58:19.830] - Chris Claflin

Okay.

[00:58:20.370] - Jesus Ramirez

The first question I want to ask you is to tell us a shocking fact about yourself.

[00:58:24.760] - Chris Claflin

I don't find this that shocking, but other people seem to. I run every day, almost at least five days a week between five and 10 miles right now. And in the summer, I bumped that up to between 50 and 70 miles a week. And I've been doing that since I was, like, 15 years old.

[00:58:41.720] - Jesus Ramirez

Wow. And how old are you now, if you don't mind me asking?

[00:58:43.940] - Chris Claflin

I am 33.

[00:58:45.540] - Jesus Ramirez

Oh, man, you're a baby. Yeah. I don't know if I can run 5 miles on you. I was a college soccer player, and I used to run a lot, but at my advanced age of almost 41, it's difficult to run. Yeah.

[00:58:59.130] - Chris Claflin

When I was running in high school and college, we'd always try to poach the soccer players that didn't make the team because they knew they'd be amazing runners.

[00:59:08.520] - Jesus Ramirez

Yeah. A lot of my teammates, at least in my high school, track and field and cross country was a different season than soccer, so we have players that did both. The next question is, what's the most interesting thing you've learned in the last six months, whether it's business or personal?

[00:59:25.670] - Chris Claflin

Well, my kids are super into the Mariana Trench right now, and it is the deepest point on Earth and deeper than Mount Everest is tall.

[00:59:37.330] - Jesus Ramirez

Wow.

[00:59:37.820] - Chris Claflin

Pressure down there is so great that a human's bones would be dissolved by the pressure. Oh, my God. There's still life down there.

[00:59:48.650] - Jesus Ramirez

That's insane. That's a very good thing to know. Yeah. How old are your kids? How many kids do you have?

[00:59:54.580] - Chris Claflin

I have a seven year old, a five year old, and a three month old.

[00:59:58.380] - Jesus Ramirez

Oh my God. How do you have so much time to run, man? Jesus.

[01:00:01.730] - Chris Claflin

My wife is amazing. She was born to raise kids and she's a great mom.

[01:00:08.530] - Jesus Ramirez

Wow. Yeah. I'm actually engaged at the moment. I'm getting married in September.

[01:00:13.080] - Chris Claflin

Congratulations.

[01:00:14.620] - Jesus Ramirez

Thank you very much. The kids conversation is happening here with me, so maybe I'll have one in a year or so. We'll see. I didn't have to learn counting cards to buy her an engagement ring, though.

[01:00:27.830] - Chris Claflin

You're doing better than I was.

[01:00:30.490] - Jesus Ramirez

I'm a little older than you were at the time. I think you were in your twenties at the time. Why is helping people grow their reach on TikTok so important to you?

[01:00:40.990] - Chris Claflin

That's a good question. I have always liked helping explain creative concepts that seem like there's no form or structure to them. We touched on this a little bit earlier that when it comes to building a house, if you want to frame out a home, there's specific measurements and angles that you look at and specific tools, materials and everything. All you have to do is follow the instructions. And when it comes to creative pursuits, it's a little bit more ambiguous, but I feel like there's still a way to break that down and help people understand. I come from a very artistic family, and actually I am a descendant of Sir Isaac Newton's grandfather.

[01:01:29.880] - Jesus Ramirez

Wow.

[01:01:30.500] - Chris Claflin

He did not have children, but Sir Isaac Newton's grandfather is my great grandfather eight times removed. So I don't know what that means, but I think that there is a science to art. It's just more ambiguous and difficult to explain. And I, for whatever reason, am okay at that. And I really enjoy sharing that with people and I like the idea of empowering people to create content that can change their lives. On my TikTok, I don't hold back any information. Like, I have this cheap little $125 course that has everything in it. I don't believe in gating information. I did make the course, and I am a capitalist at heart, so I want to get paid for the effort that I put into it. So it does cost money. I do profit from that, but there's like no weird upsells in that or anything where it's like hand tool. Get the secret, secret to this. The $2,000 Mentorship program, I do charge to work one on one with people. And it's expensive because I only have so many hours in the day, but it's all there and it's easy to digest and easy to understand.

[01:02:40.470] - Chris Claflin

And I like seeing the light bulb go off in people's minds because we're all creative beings. I don't know why human beings are this way, but there's no other species that just gets pleasure out of making something beautiful or funny or the ability for people to manipulate emotions in a good way. Like how many times you've been scrolling through TikTok and you see something that just hits you in the heart and speaks to your soul and brings tears to your eyes because it represents what it is to be human. And I think a lot of people have those ideas inside of them and they just don't quite know how to turn it into something that speaks to people. And I like that process of helping people understand what goes into that.

[01:03:29.040] - Jesus Ramirez

This wasn't a planned question, but you're talking about helping people, which is very important to me. But any story come to mind of somebody that you helped that made a huge difference for them, but to you it wasn't such a big deal. Maybe it's like, yeah, I'm helping them grow their TikTok, but it made a huge impact in their lives. Or maybe it was something personal where, I don't know, you did something for someone, but it made a huge impact for them.

[01:03:52.880] - Chris Claflin

So this is going to sound superficial and self-promoting but it's really the only thing that comes to mind. There's the guy, the book guy on TikTok. His name is Reed Moon. He had 6000 followers when I started working with him and I knew that he could be at a million followers. When I reached out to him, I knew it. I was like, if this guy lets me work with him, he'll be the most amazing case study on planet Earth. I knew he had it in him already, but he tells people all the time, like, oh, yeah, this guy helped me. And really, it was him that did it. It was him. Like, I was just guiding a little bit, but he was on Good Morning America the other day and they were asking him about his TikTok and he explained that TikTok helped him recoup massive losses after the pandemic and it brought him amazing business. Like Logan Paul and Mr. Beast have slid into his DMs asking about books like, can you get me this? And celebrities are seeing his stuff so it's expanded his clientele base tremendously. We have a widow that lives around the corner from us and we bake her cookies all the time and go talk to her and visit.

[01:04:58.440] - Chris Claflin

And honestly, that one probably means more to her than the following on TikTok does to Reed. So I don't know every level.

[01:05:07.240] - Jesus Ramirez

And it's funny how you talk about that. You saw it in him and in your mind, I presume. You thought, if I just give him these tools or these guidelines, I know he'll blow up. I had a similar experience with a family member, my nephew. He was 21 at the time and this is about three years ago, four years ago. And he calls me up and he's crying because his girlfriend broke up with him. And I'm like, oh, for God's sake. You're 21. Who cares? And I said, let's meet for lunch. So we live about maybe an hour and a half away from each other. We met in the middle. We each drove about 45 minutes. We had lunch, and all he wanted to do was talk about his girlfriend. I was like, you know what? Let's forget about this girl. This is forgot about it. What else is going on in your life? And at the time he was working, he was very young. He was working at a real estate agency, and he wanted to open up his own real estate office and agency, whatever, and have employees and all this stuff. And I was like, Great, let's make that happen.

[01:06:06.880] - Jesus Ramirez

What do you need to get there? And he gave me a laundry list of things. I said, all right, what's the first step? I need to get some sort of certification. I said great. What do we need to do to make that happen? Well, I need to go to school, and I need to do and, okay, great. What do we need to get you enrolled in this course? And he said, I need some money. And I was like, what's stopping you? He's like, I don't have the money. How much money do you need? And it was not even that much. It was like, $700. And I understand that at that age, I didn't have $700. And by the way, so I come from, like, a very poor family. Nobody ever had any money so $700 to me at his age was a million dollars, so I can understand that feeling. And I said, all right, if I give you the $700, can you take this course in this class? And he's like, sure, I'll do it. And I told him, but I'm not going to give them to you. I want you to write me a contract of how you're going to pay me back.

[01:06:58.070] - Jesus Ramirez

I don't care if it's a dollar a week. I need a contract. So he sends me this very professional email with a contract or whatever, but I saw it in him that he had that fire that I have the tiger, that I'm going to make it happen. And I kind of was pushing him in the right direction. That happened in 2020. So three years ago now, he owns a real estate agency. He's got, like, ten employees, and he's doing very well. But it all happened because I knew that he was an implementer. He was not those people that, oh, yeah, I'm going to do it, I'm going to do it, but never does anything. I knew that he was hungry, and I knew that he was an implementer, and all I did was just give him little nudges. And I was reminded of the story when you said that. Now he talks about me like, oh, my uncle did this, my uncle did that, and my uncle this. And I'm like, no, yeah, sure, I might have signed a check for you and gave you some advice here and there, but the end of the day, it was all you.

[01:07:49.910] - Jesus Ramirez

I just kind of help you, guide you in the right direction, so I can completely relate to that.

[01:07:56.390] - Chris Claflin

That's awesome.

[01:07:57.610] - Jesus Ramirez

Yeah. No, thank you. Thank you. So shout outs to my nephew Frank, real estate agent out in Turlock, California, if you need to buy a home.

[01:08:05.660] - Chris Claflin

Way to go, Frank.

[01:08:06.720] - Jesus Ramirez

One of his agents can help you out. But yeah, man. Anyway, quick side, random story just because I was reminded of what you said. My next question is, if you were to give a tech talk on a subject unrelated to your work, TikTok, or social media, what would it be on and why?

[01:08:21.700] - Chris Claflin

It would probably be on the American state of heart disease, I guess, and diet's role in that. My dad passed away from a heart attack when I was 14, and we're just a very unhealthy people, and a lot of what contributes to that is there's a theme here. Right. I'm not necessarily anti government, but I don't have a lot of faith in them because they allow corporations to put things into our food that are known cancer causing agents and sort of the entire food industry is about creating products that are addictive that don't nourish, but create more hunger because you want more of it, because you're not getting nutrients, and it's all based on sugar and everything. I'm really passionate about that, and, yeah, that's probably what I would try to craft a Ted Talk around. I would have to do a lot of research because I just know surface level, what happened to my father and what I believe about it. But that would be probably the topic. And my dad was only 43 at the time, and so, yeah, if I had the lifespan that he had, it means I only have ten years left.

[01:09:36.330] - Chris Claflin

Maybe I have less than that. I don't know. None of us know. But if I can do anything about it, I want to be here till I'm 100 for my kids.

[01:09:42.410] - Jesus Ramirez

Right. That makes total sense. Thank you. I appreciate it. What is a valuable professional lesson you've learned that translated over into your personal life?

[01:09:53.760] - Chris Claflin

I have learned over time that I don't know nearly as much as I think I do about things. Like, everything we've talked about today is how I understand it right now. But, I mean, somebody might come along and prove me completely wrong, and I'm going to have to come to terms with that, and I try to implement that with my wife and kids. Maybe they know better than me.

[01:10:17.990] - Jesus Ramirez

I have a few more here for you, man. What is something that people often get wrong about you? Any misconceptions?

[01:10:26.730] - Chris Claflin

I have political views. No, I'm not going to share what they are right now.

[01:10:28.570] - Jesus Ramirez

Got it.

[01:10:28.890] - Chris Claflin

But I have people on the left who project their ideology onto me, and they see me as one of them, and people on the right see me as one of them also, and that's actually back to one of your other questions.

[01:10:41.490] - Chris Claflin

It's one of the most interesting things that I've learned this year is, like, the left and right in this country are not that different because both political parties see me as one of their people. And I'm just saying stuff that just, like, bugs me or makes sense or I think I need to bring to people's attention when I'm not talking about the social media stuff. So that's probably people's biggest misconception that I never really reveal to them because I just let them assume that I am what they've projected onto me. I find it very easy to sort of mingle with people on both political sides, not both political extremes, because I think that the political extreme left and extreme right are the same people in this country with different costumes. But yeah, that's probably one of the biggest misconceptions that people have about me is they assume my politics and I sort of take it as a compliment because it means that sometimes at least I'm just making common sense and hopefully helping people see, like, we're not that different from each other.

[01:11:44.610] - Jesus Ramirez

Right. I mean, it sounds to me that people agree on the problem.

[01:11:49.270] - Chris Claflin

Yeah and what the solution? We see the same problem, we just have different approaches to it and that is framed by different aspects of how we've been brought up or how we just view the world. But we're all looking for the same solution, same problems to be solved and the same ends that we'd like to achieve, which is happier families, a safer place to live, more money in our pocket, the ability to pursue our dreams. We all want the same stuff.

[01:12:15.210] - Jesus Ramirez

Yeah. For the stuff that I do, I rarely get any politics thrown my way. What are people going to say? Leftist photoshop artist? Or are you right wing photoshop? Nobody's ever going to say that. But political, that happened. I mentioned that I've been on YouTube for so many years now and after some time you start recognizing comments over and over by the same user and you're like, oh, okay, this has been a supportive user for years. And that user found somehow my personal Facebook account and they requested me on Facebook. And I tend to not accept requests from people that I don't personally know. I have like over a thousand unanswered friend requests, believe it or not, but this particular name popped up because I recognized it. I was like, oh yeah, this guy's been commenting on my YouTube videos for forever, so I consider adding him. But I did click on his profile and he had an open public profile. And this guy, just days prior to sending my friend request, had a lot of anti Latino posts and how Mexicans were ruined. And I'm of Mexican descent. I was born in Mexico. I've told my story in the podcast before.

[01:13:33.170] - Jesus Ramirez

I'm sorry.

[01:13:33.490] - Chris Claflin

Me too. My mom is from Chihuahua.

[01:13:35.580] - Jesus Ramirez

Oh, wow. I didn't know that. Yeah. So there you go. Your mom's from Chihuahua. I was born in Mexicali, Baha, California. My dad is American, and he grew up in the US. My grandparents, without going into too much of the story, because I told it before, my dad and I went to the same high school, but I was born in Mexico. He was born here. As an adult, he moved to Mexico and then came back with his family, my mom, my brother and I. So I went to the same high school as my dad and my uncles and my granddaughter in Alameda, California, where my dad grew up. So they're all American on that side. But the point is that this gentleman had all these anti-Mexican, anti-Latino posts, and I'm like, this guy has been following me for years and comments on my stuff all the time and is requesting me on Facebook.

[01:14:21.480] - Chris Claflin

And they were positive comments that he had?

[01:14:24.130] - Jesus Ramirez

I'm sorry.

[01:14:24.690] - Chris Claflin

They were positive comments. Like, he's like a fan.

[01:14:26.620] - Jesus Ramirez

Yes. He's what I would call a fan or a supporter. I don't really like the word fan. He was a supporter. He likes my work. He likes the videos, and he would literally comment on every video. And it's not like your name. For example, I didn't know that you were half-Mexican. Just by looking at your name. By looking at my name, there is no doubt that I'm Latino at the very least, maybe not Mexican, but Latino. So I just found it surprising that he was very political and very anti-Latino, so much so that he would post a lot of negative content on his feed. But yet he was a big fan of me and requested me on Facebook, so I didn't accept his request. And he still comments to this day.

[01:15:14.210] - Chris Claflin

We're weird, right? People are weird.

[01:15:16.510] - Jesus Ramirez

It's so random. Anyway, the last question I have for you, Chris, is what would you like to be remembered for? What Mark, do you want to leave in the world?

[01:15:24.810] - Chris Claflin

I am trying to figure that out every day. I don't know yet for sure. What I know is- Yeah, for sure. The only thing that's important to me is that my kids remember me as, like, setting the precedent that whatever you think you want to try, it's easy to try, and it's okay to fail, and that's part of growth. I don't really care what the world remembers me for, but I want my kids to look at what I've done with my life so that they can not be afraid of taking risks, not be afraid of trying things out, not be afraid of speaking their mind. And also be comfortable with the fact that sometimes you open your mouth and it gets shut by somebody who knows a lot more than you. And that doesn't mean that you have to stop. You just internalize that and be a little bit more humble and check your facts in the future. That's really what I'm trying to do is get my kids into this mindset of believing that building something that's meaningful and loving your work is something that's possible. Because in the US, that's something that they beat out of you in school over decades. That no life is about figuring out what the status quo is that this person who's in charge up at the front needs. And how do I get that to them on time and be in my seat and do what I'm told? That's a really bad formula for creating a society of people who are going to innovate and make the world a better place. So I'm really trying to instill in my kids that, like, no life is meant to be explored. It's meant to be fun. You can do amazing things. You can try anything you want to, and it might end really badly, and it doesn't mean that you don't try the next thing that you think is going to be a great idea. So I really want to be remembered by my kids and my wife as being like, you know.

[01:17:17.090] - Jesus Ramirez

Wow, man, that's such a fabulous answer. Thank you so much for sharing that.

[01:17:21.070] - Chris Claflin

Yeah, this has been really fun. A lot of fun.

[01:17:24.000] - Jesus Ramirez

Yeah. I'm glad you enjoyed Chris. Thank you so much. I was very excited to meet you when you came up on my feed, and when I started the podcast, I was like, I got to have Chris on. I really think we're going to get a lot of good information and hit it off. So thank you so much, man. I really appreciate it.

[01:17:39.120] - Chris Claflin

Yeah, thank you. This was awesome. This is a lot of fun. I really appreciate you, man.