✨ The Production Oracle ✨
Weekly thought leadership for creators who are done playing the wrong game. 📬 Strategy, media, and the creator economy without the pipe dreams. Brought to you from Sasquatch Media Grounds, a production studio in Vancouver, WA.
Every great kitchen has a floor scrubbing moment.
🍅 Do You Know What a Box of Tomatoes Costs? Hey Reader, There is a video making the rounds right now that I cannot stop thinking about, and it is not about AI or algorithms or the creator economy. It is about tomatoes. A restaurant owner walks into his kitchen and asks every single employee the same question: how much does a box of tomatoes cost? The answers come in all over the place, and every single one of them is significantly lower than reality. He pulls out the invoices. The cost of...
Where Portland's creative community goes to get inspired 💡
Hey Reader, This is the weekly announcement for The Awkward Handshake, a podcast & community all about networking that I co-host. If you want to opt-out of these podcast & networking community updates, CLICK HERE. Someone has to set up the chairs, order the coffee, book the speakers... And in Portland, that someone is Kaitlin Carpenter and her team of volunteers who have been running one of the largest Creative Mornings chapters in the world since 2019. Not New York. Not LA. Portland. This...
The boys in the hoodie said move fast.
⚡ Speed Comes With a Tab Hey Reader, This week I watched something predictable happen in real time, and I want to talk about it because it touches something I feel very strongly about as someone who has been in and around media and technology long enough to have seen this particular pattern repeat itself in at least three different eras. China blocked Meta's $2 billion acquisition of Manus, an agentic AI platform that a lot of entrepreneurs (including some people I know personally) have been...
Your networking problem might actually be a therapy problem.
Hey Reader, This is the weekly announcement for The Awkward Handshake, a podcast & community all about networking that I co-host. If you want to opt-out of these podcast & networking community updates, CLICK HERE. May is Mental Health Month, and we could think of no one better to kick it off than our friend Micah Freeman. Micah is a licensed therapist, educator, coach, and the kind of person who will say something in casual conversation that rewires your entire brain. This week on The Awkward...
🦕 The extinction event already happened
🎬 The Gatekeepers Are Leaving the Building Hey Reader, Let me tell you what the inside of a dying gatekeeping system actually looks like, because I have been there. I was the digital archivist at Disney Animation back when having institutional credentials meant everything, when the path to legitimacy ran directly through the people who controlled the infrastructure and decided whose work got seen. I understood that system intimately and I watched it start to crack from the inside out. I have...
We flew across the country for a networking lesson. Worth it!
Hey Reader, This is the weekly announcement for The Awkward Handshake, a podcast & community all about networking that I co-host. If you want to opt-out of these podcast & networking community updates, CLICK HERE. 25,000 people. One convention floor. Two very different women with two very different agendas. When Megan and I flew to New York for BookCon, a massive book convention that hadn't happened in six years, we went in with completely different goals. Megan was in full market research...
Be still my heart, Justin 🫶
🎤 The Karaoke King and the Creator Economy Hey Reader, I have a confession that is going to date me in the most specific way possible: I used to catalogue Justin Bieber's hair styles for a living. This was back when I was the digital asset manager at Guthy-Renker, the infomercial company, and Bieber was a teenager hawking Proactiv skincare. He went through a growth spurt mid-campaign, which meant multiple reshoots, which meant I was processing an ungodly volume of new photo and video files of...
Safe spaces don't happen by accident 🏳️🌈
Hey Reader, This is the weekly announcement for The Awkward Handshake, a podcast & community all about networking that I co-host. If you want to opt-out of these podcast & networking community updates, CLICK HERE. Quick gut check: When was the last time you walked into a room and felt like you actually belonged there? Not tolerated. Not professionally useful. Actually, genuinely, belonged. That's the question at the heart of this week's episode and it's one that Polly Bilchuk and Oliver...
Houston, We Have a Problem
🌕 Moon Joy and the Untethered Creator Hey Reader, This week felt different, not because the world suddenly got easier (it didn’t), but because for a brief moment, a lot of people were looking up at the same thing at the same time. The Artemis II mission lit something up that I think we’ve been starving for… not information, updates, or hot takes... but awe. There’s a term in sociology called collective effervescence, which describes that shared, electric feeling that happens when a group of...
Your network didn’t disappear… you just stopped using it 🙈
Hey Reader, This is the weekly announcement for The Awkward Handshake, a podcast & community all about networking that I co-host. If you want to opt-out of these podcast & networking community updates, CLICK HERE. Let’s be honest for a second… When was the last time you actually used your network? Not scrolled LinkedIn.Not thought about reaching out.Not said, “I should probably go to more events…” But actually showed up, followed up, and stayed in touch? Yeah. Exactly. This week on The...
Weekly thought leadership for creators who are done playing the wrong game. 📬 Strategy, media, and the creator economy without the pipe dreams. Brought to you from Sasquatch Media Grounds, a production studio in Vancouver, WA.