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Andy J. Pizza
On the creative journey, it's easy to get lost. But don't worry, you'll lift off. Sometimes you just need a creative pep talk. Hey, you're listening to Creative Pep Talk, a weekly podcast companion for your creative journey. I'm your host, Andy J. Pizza. I'm a New York Times bestselling author and illustrator, and this show is all about everything I'm learning about building and maintaining a thriving creative practice, and it's really hard to do, so I'm just sharing all the things I'm learning throughout my own creative journey. I'm a believer in the idea of dressing for the job you want, not the job you have. And I have applied this to my creative practice too, which means if you want professional results, you need to present online like a pro. And that means going beyond social media and having a professional website that reflects your style and looks legit. I rebuilt my site this year with Squarespace's Fluid Engine and was so happy with how easily I could build my vision without coding that when they approached me to support the show, I jumped at the chance because I love and use this product. So go check it out. Squarespace.com Pep talk to test it out for yourself. And when you're ready to launch your site, use promo code. PEP talk all one word, all caps for 10% off your first purchase. Thanks goes out to Squarespace for supporting the show and supporting creators all over the world. Miro is a collaborative virtual workspace that syncs in real time for you and your team so that you can innovate an idea into an outcome seamlessly. We talk a lot on this show about the idea of how creative research shows that playing with the problem is essential to innovation. Now when I think of play, I don't think of documents in email. So if your team is often working remote, you need something more dynamic and collaborative. I think that Miro's mind maps and flow charts, where team members can edit and play in real time, has a lot more capacity for innovation in playing with the problem than traditional ways of collaborating over the Internet. Whether you work in innovation, product design, engineering, ux, agile, or it, bring your teams to Miro's revolutionary Innovation Workspace and be faster. From idea to outcome. Go to miro.com to find out how. That's mirror.com today I want to talk about why do we support the artists that we support? Why do we purchase the merch that we choose to purchase? When I think about why someone might buy something from me, whether it's a poster or a book, or bring me to a place to do a talk or whatever it is, Maybe client illustration. Why do they choose me instead of somebody else? I think the most obvious, logical answer that comes to mind initially is it's better than the other people, than the competitors that they're considering. Like, it's just about having work that's so good that it beats out the competition. But if I will put myself in the shoes of the audience or the listener or the purchaser of the merch. Sir. The merch. If I put myself in their shoes, I realize that it's not that simple. Because if I think about this through the lens of bands and the bands that I buy merch from or where the T shirts of or go to their show, there's a really interesting difference between what I'm a casual consumer of, like, just listen to them on Spotify versus the artist that I actually choose to spend money on, buy the vinyl, go to the show, et cetera. And it's not as simple as how deep they move me. Now, that is a factor. Like, it has to be something that I really love in order to want to spend money on it, right? But it's not that simple because actually, when I started thinking about this, I realized there's a lot of bands and there's a lot of artists that have moved me at a really, really deep, profound level that I wouldn't necessarily go buy the T shirt of. Now, on principle, before you come after me with this, on principle, if I love the band, if the band has been really important to me, I try to find ways to support them, whether it's buying the vinyl or going to a show or what have you. But musicians tend to make their money from the merch. And so I wanted to zero in on the T shirts, like, what bands am I willing to wear the T shirt of? And it was kind of weird because the more I thought about it, the more I was comparing these two music stars and looking at their merch and thinking, why do I wear that T shirt? But I don't wear that one. It's more or less the same, you know, star power, star level. It's. The merch looks about the same. You know, it's similar, classic evergreen design. It's not really about just liking the shirt more. It's something beyond that. Now, we just went through the election cycle, which I don't want to get into here, but something kind of novel that happened that you might not be aware of. I wasn't aware of it. Is that Maine, the state of Maine was voting to potentially change their flag. Now, I believe they didn't end up changing it, but I saw a little segment on the news about this, and it really intrigued me because they were talking about the process of picking which design they were going to claim to be the winner and put to the test of potentially changing the design to. And they showed the designs. And these designs all looked almost the same. Like, yes, there were some that were really rudimentary and probably not really in the running. There were others that were super detailed and impressive. But the ones that they were considering as, like, the finalists looked pretty much the same. They have this fir tree in the middle, and they have a star off to the side. And really, it's just minor details that they changed with each design. And I just thought, like, how in the world do these people decide which flag is the winner when they all feel so similar? And I'm watching this person on TV talk about it, and she says, the winner we picked we really loved because their fir tree in the middle had 16 branches, and that stood for. That represented and symbolized the 16 counties in Maine. And they like that. They knew what it stood for. And I thought, that is something. There's something interesting about that to us creative people trying to build a practice, because there it was, these two flags with more or less the same design, the same star, the same evergreen design, and yet one was one that they were willing to stand under. And what was the difference? It was that they understood what it meant. They understood what it was about what it represented, and that was key to them feeling good about flying that flag. And the same is true if you are a creator. People are going to have a really hard time flying your flag if they don't know what it stands for. What does it mean to be a fan of what you do? And I realized that I apply this same thing to the merch that I will proudly represent and proudly fly the flag of on my body. If I know this band stands for this, this is what they're about. There are things that I feel good about representing throughout my town. That's the stuff that I'll wear. And then there are other bands and comedians and, you know, movies and whatever that I might have really enjoyed on some level. But I'm not going to use them as shorthand for my identity either, because I'm not really sure what it says about who I am as a person, but. Or I don't really. I'm not fully aligned. There might be things I liked about it, but I ultimately don't really agree with what it's about. Now, I'm not saying that every band has to be overly political or have a really strong message, but I think that the bands that do tend to create these really engaged followings, these, these, these wild super fans of what they do, those fans have a sense of what are these people? What is this music about? In the previous episode, we talked about how my 16 year old daughter is a huge fan of the band Boy Genius and why she has this connection to the band that she has. But she's also a really big fan of the band twenty one Pilots. And I was kind of testing this theory out and I thought, I don't really know if she'll have an answer, but I was like, hey, with 21 pilots, why do you or not why do you like them? But what do you think they stand for? Like, what are they about? And I honestly, this was just an inkling of a theory. I didn't really. Even though I felt convicted about it and I knew it was true in my own life. I didn't know if she would be able to easily and quickly verbalize this even if she felt it, but she instantly was like, boom, boom, boom. One, they stand for taking mental health seriously. Two, they stand for platonic love, like friends Forever, that kind of energy between the drummer and the singer. And three, they stand for being outsiders and that being okay. And she just like, boom, boom, boom, boom. And having just gone to a twenty one Pilots concert with my son, she went a couple days earlier with some friends before you, you know, were like, why didn't you take her? She didn't want to go with us. Um, I went with my son, who's also just a mega fan. It's the only band he listens to. I was just blown away by the movement that is the fandom of this band. And this illustrates something that I think is so often missed by creative people. Maybe the most important part of the process, which is the deep level of trust and connection that you have with your audience. Because for, for me, for the longest time, I thought there was kind of two. I probably didn't even conceptualize this, but I thought there were two parts to the process of someone engaging with my work, right? They discover my work and like it and then purchase something or support it. But of course, that is not the full journey. So we have been doing a series. This is episode three in this series. It's called the Journey of the True Fan. We talked about how there's really two journeys that you Go on. As a creator, you go through the creative journey, which we covered in a previous series just before this, all about how you discover the inner stuff, the stuff out there that you want to make work about. You develop it into something and then you finalize it with this final statement of work, or a gallery or a film or an album, whatever it is, and you put it all together, and that's your creative journey. But that is the end of the creative journey. But that's the start of a second journey, which is the journey of the true fan, which is not your journey. You're just the guide on that journey. And that journey also has three steps that mirrors the creative journey. And so the three steps, we talked about this in the first episode of the series, they are discovery, them finding out that you exist. And the middle one, which is the one we're talking about today, which is trust. They develop a relationship, they go deeper, they learn to trust what you're all about. And then three, they purchase something, they support it. They want to own a piece of this. They want to use what you do as shorthand for their identity because it helps them explain who they are in ways that they haven't been able to in their own words, with their own creativity. And so if you ask me, like, who are you? I might be like, I don't know, but I'm a Modest Mouse fan, or I'm a Y fan, or I'm a fan of the movie Eternal Sunshine. Like, that is one of the ways that I think about who I am and understand who I am. And when something means to me something that deep, on that deep of a level, that's when I'm willing to park cash for it. But today I want to focus on that middle bit, because that's a bit that I feel like we so often miss or ignore. And it probably is the most essential part of the journey. And so most of us think about discovery and sales, but we miss out on what it means, how you actually create the kind of connection that makes someone want to go from a casual consumer into a true fan, into somebody that will spend money on what you do. This is the converting principle. And a lot of great work has been done talking about this. Ryan Holiday talks about this and his work around Perennial Cellar and his fandom of Iron Maiden. Iron Maiden. He talks about how they don't even have any, like a string of mega hits, but they have this ravenous die hard fandom. And the same is true for Grateful Dead. Like the Grateful Dead, the band has outlasted the members of the band and 21 pilots, I feel like, are probably going to be that kind of band. And where do you get that level of fandom? How do you get, how do you help them cross that chasm between consumer and true fan? You do it by helping them understand what the evergreen design means. What does your work mean now? It doesn't mean that you have to spill your guts, lower all of your boundaries and say everything, every opinion and every thought you have on every single topic and issue. I actually think that that's a terrible idea. I don't think. Not only because I don't think it's good for your creative practice. I don't think it's good for your creative soul. I don't think it's good for you to put yourself out there to that degree. I'm a really big believer in boundaries even within your art. And there are certain things in my art, you know, I've told stories in my own creative practice on stage and in the podcast of my relationship to my mom and my adhd. So those are family things and medical things. But there are a whole host of other things even within those two topics that I will never touch. I don't say my kids names for an example. That's just one that I just think, just why? Why do you need to know that? No, but there are other, like, I don't think you need to be explicit. I don't think that you need to lose all the mystery. But I do think you have. If you want people to make that conversion, if you want them to bridge that chasm, you have to give them a sense of what is this about, what are the core values that this art means? If you give them that, if they can understand what you're about, they will be proud to stand under a flag that they fly to their friends and family. But now let's talk about some ways to actually do that. So in every episode we try to leave you not empty handed, but with an idea on how to bring this into your creative practice right now, right today. Because I like getting inspired as much as anybody who doesn't want to feel motivated, inspired. I love it. It's a great feeling. But it turns sour quickly if you can't do anything with it. Especially if you do that consistently and you're like, man, I felt inspired for two months and I didn't actually do anything. Now I start feeling anti inspiration, anti motivation. Right? So we don't want that. We want to leave you with something that you can do that can make a difference to your creative practice. And so we try to leave you with a creative call to adventure every single week that we do this show. And your creative call to adventure with this week's episode is make a D values list. Okay, this is kind of like a values list, but it's the opposite. And I'll explain why that is. If you stop and try to think of what are my values, what are the things, what are the qualities, the characteristics that mean the most to me, it can be kind of daunting, kind of difficult to get to those parts of your brain. And the reason I think that this is is because we have a negativity bias as humans. I've heard smart people talk about this plenty of times, way beyond my pay grade. But I think the deal here is that we evolved. We have the machinery to focus on the negative, to spot the negative really, really quickly, because it helped us survive. It helped us to know what we needed to change about ourselves so we didn't get thrown out of the community or what, what bad thing is on the horizon or in the bushes or, you know, whatever. We have a tendency to focus on the negative, right? And so we can hack this. Now the problem with that negativity bias is that's how we get all these groups of people collectively gathering around, concretizing what they're against. And that becomes self identification through what you're, what you hate. And it's a terrible, miserable way to live and it does terrible things to the society. However, doing the opposite is really difficult. Gathering around what you're for is really, really difficult. And so we can not push against our negativity nature, but hack it, use it, start there and then flip it. The first time I ever heard about this was through Austin Kleon. In one of his books, he talks about, I think it's Keep Going. He talks about this punk band that, you know, they were doing the thing that bands usually do, which is sit around and talk about their influences as they start to make music. But they couldn't agree on what they liked, and so instead they agreed on what they didn't like and they chose to be the opposite of that thing. And so that process is what I want you to do. It's so easy, it's so powerful. And the reason I want you to do it is because, like I said, I don't think that you need to put every opinion about every random occurrence that happens, every hot take that you have into your creative work. I don't think you need to do that. I actually think that's a terrible idea. And I think that's why getting familiar with your core values that are more timeless have a higher likelihood of being something you're going to stick with and something you're going to be proud of, baking into not just the way you market your work, but the actual work itself. These are things that can bleed into the songs, the illustrations, the stories, whatever it is you make. They can be grounded in some of your core beliefs about what you think it means to be a good human or live the good life, as the. As philosophers would would say. And so how you get familiar with them is really important so that you can command them. You can do it on purpose. You can tell people what flying your flag means, and you can do it in a subtle way just by kind of injecting it into the. Your creative work. You can do it a little bit more overtly than that. In your interviews and press releases around the work, how you write your Instagram capt. There's a whole. There's a whole spectrum of how people do this. Well, but I would challenge you to think of the artist that you're willing to wear their apparel and sport their merch and be a loud fan of. My guess is you could list, what are they about, and I challenge you to do that. But the creative call to adventure today is the devalues list. And so instead of trying to think of, like, what are my values? Think of, what do you wish society would devalue? What are the things that you cannot stand, that you fricking hate? This instantly helped me find a value that I was having trouble identifying myself through just thinking of what I was for. The first thing that came to mind is I really cannot stand groupthink. I cannot stand this. The archetype of the zombie, where I love this symbol of the zombie. I'm not like a horror guy. I just think this is such a powerful symbol. It's the. This Young Life did a whole episode about zombies. It's a podcast. I recommend that episode. They go deep into this idea that zombies are a symbol of group think. They want to eat your brain, they want to eat your thoughts, they want to stop you from thinking and make you part of this brainless mass that goes around destroying other people's brains and independent thoughts. Now, I actually think it needs to be balanced with community, but I think community needs to be organized around valuing how we're different. Now, that's a whole other value. But as I was thinking about this group think, I hate this thing where our consciousness lowers when we get a part of a group that. That who has a core value, that in order to belong we all have to think the same. That I hate that. And so what I realized was that's a devalue list item. And the opposite of that is individuation. That's a term coined by Carl Jung and he talked about. Individuation is this process in which you go on a journey. The hero's journey is about this. And find out who the heck you are, what makes you different, what are your core values, what are you about what, what are your gifts as a person, what are your opinions. Not because you're part of this or that group, but because you have experienced it, you are convicted about it. That individuation process. Individuation is one of my core values. Two other core values that came to mind as I was working through this process were growth mindset. That's attached to my love of story. It's this idea that it's not as simple as you're talented at something or not, or you're smart or you're not. It's you have this ability to grow and learn and that conflict and challenge can be your friend and they can be the keys to your journey. And then another one that came up, the first one I thought of was this idea of you are good. One of the things that is on my devalue list is this idea that we are inherently broken and flawed. F that I don't agree with that I actually think that we are built or we have evolved, that our hardware is freaking incredible and that we have rapidly evolved our environment to be not so compatible with that hardware. And that's where the break is. And there's so much great information around this idea of you are good. Positive psychology, not positive thinking, not toxic positivity. This is positive psychology. This idea that your base nature is a good thing that needs to be cultivated, not overcome. So you can see how if you know my work, this stuff permeates everything that I do. These are my core values. They bleed out. These are the things that I build my stories on. And I think they're more important than messages. Values are something that transcend time. And so going through the devalues list helped me identify a few of those. And if you have ever bought any of my merch, I'm guessing it's probably because on some level you align with some value that I have and you like how I aesthetically put it together. And my argument in this is. And maybe it's not an argument to say that. It's either this or that. It's either that it's about how cool the merch is, or it's about what it stands for. I actually think there's probably gray area. There's, you know, that's just speaking to another one of my core values, which is kind of a non dual. Take this Niels Bohr quote. The opposite of a profound truth might be another profound truth. I like that space. So. But what I'm trying to put in front of you today to consider is that why people become not just consumers of your work, but true fans of your work are happy to fly. Your flag is less like wallpaper, less like they like the look of it, they like the vibe of it. That's probably part of it. That's part of the equation. But it's probably one you've already considered and got stuck on because you can only make wallpaper that it's so much more hardcore, so much more beautiful than the next wallpaper. You have to infuse it with something deeper than that and that. If you want to find your style, you got to find your substance. And your substance is rooted in those core values. So make your D values list, but don't start there. Don't organ around that. Flip it before something and put that in your work. And people will start organizing it. People will start organizing around it. People will start standing under it when they understand it. We have one more episode left in this series. I hope you're enjoying the true fan journey of the true fan series. This is episode three. I want to just give you a note. We're doing it backwards because we started. The first episode was kind of explaining the concept, giving you the three pieces. The second episode was part three. This is part two. The next episode will be part one. The reason is, as confusing and weird as that might seem, is because it's supposed to be training our brains to think strategically. So I'm a big believer in strategic creativity. Most creativity that we talk about in society is exploratory creativity. It's kind of Ouija board creativity, as John Mayer calls it, where you're like, you start without an end in mind, you don't know where it's going to go. It's improvisational, it's pantsing. That's a super, I think leave room for that. It's really important. But for me, I've had to go on a long journey to get comfortable with having an end in mind. When I started challenging myself to know where the story was going before I started it. And I think the ideal is some mix based on your core values of that, some mix of strategic, some mix of exploratory, finding your sweet spot between those two things, but being comfortable and capable of doing either of those. So we're doing the series backwards because we're starting with the end in mind. We did last episode about sales, making the sale. That's the end of the process. The middle is trust. Building that trust to where they really trust that they are willing to fly your flag. And then the last episode, we're going to talk about what probably most people think most about in their creative practice, which is getting discovered, getting more people to hear about them, getting more eyeballs on their work. That is an important and very difficult part of the process. But I would say that if you will, if you find yourself focusing all your energy on getting discovered and then thinking you're going to figure out building the trust, you know, having the quality and what you're going to sell later, I would highly recommend that you just part, you know, balance out that level of focus. Because getting discovered is only one piece of the pie, and it doesn't really amount for anything if you can't do the other two. There are lots of people that have gone viral on TikTok and Instagram, have millions of followers, but they don't have any way to build trust with that audience, to let them go deeper than short form and then ultimately have any way of supporting what they do. And I think if you would, if you focused all your energy on any of these, I would focus on number two, because if you can create those kind of bonds that 21 pilots have or Grateful Dead has or Chapel Roan has, if you can do that. And by the way, if you're a Chapel Roan fan, if I say Chapel Roan, you could probably list, what are the values? What is she about? I think that's one of the reasons why she's caught on like Wildfire. People know what she's about. There's. I mean, yes, her. Her. Her songs are great, but there are other songs on Spotify that I think are probably as good that aren't going to get that kind of reach. Same star, same evergreen designs on the flags, different outcomes because they're happy to stand under something they understand. And so if you're going to focus on any of these areas, I recommend focusing the most energy on this one. It's the one that most creators might not even know exists. Definitely one that I'm tempted to spend the least amount of time on probably the most important. But at the end, we're going to talk about the next episode. We're going to talk about sales and. Or. No, we're not. That's. I got that totally wrong. We already did sales. See, the strategic mindset is difficult to get to master. We're gonna. We're gonna end with the start, which is discovery. We're gonna talk about that. Hey, in case you don't know, we have a monthly live virtual meetup every last Monday of the month with supporters of the show from Patreon and Substack. We have so much fun on these calls and they are the warmest, most encouraging creatives that I have ever met. And we also talk real creative practice stuff. We have authors, illustrators, lettering artists, picture book makers, fine artists, musicians, and folks that work in video and film as well. And we have people that are just starting out, people super established in their creative careers and everything in between. For the rest of this year, we're going to chat through our new Journey of the True Fan series, exploring questions and ways to apply these ideas to your own creative practice so that you can leave 2024 strong longer than you came in, with more visibility, connection with your audience and sales. Sign up to whichever suits you best@ either patreon.com creativepeptalk or andyjpizza.substack.com and I hope to see you at this month's meetup. Okay. When you have your values, you've did the devalues list, you flipped them, you got a sense of what you're about, you have the most essential piece to build, the most essential thing to make that trust possible with your audience now creators today. Often I have heard them say, like, do you even need a website now? And what I think that is indicative of is how much we focus too much energy on the discovery portion. We focus so much like that's coming from this idea that do you need a website? When most people discover you on social media, that's a huge part of the problem because it's not just about discovery. And the thing that your website does is this piece that I am claiming is the most essential part of this process, which is establish the trust if you want to. Before you want to pay for something, before you want to go all in, you need to have a sense of what is this artist all about. How are you going to know whether or not they're legit? In my experience in public speaking and books and client illustration, the place to make that happen is on your website. And when I went to make my website, andy jpizza.com I heard that Squarespace has this new fluid engine and it allows you to move things around and do all this stuff that you could never do before without knowing tons of code. And I went and did it. I loved it so much that I decided to pitch this series to Squarespace and see if they wanted to sponsor it. Because I think that the website is the primary place to do the most important part of this journey. So they said yes. So they are the sponsor of this series and I want to just quickly talk about how my values and building trust as the goal influenced my website. And so if you go to Annie jpizza.com you can go ahead and like look through it. Right from the get go. Everything I'm thinking about the purpose of this site is to build trust with the people that I'm trying to sell to. And so right from the get go, one of the ways that you can build trust is what are your credentials. Now I have New York Times bestselling author illustrator. You might not have that where you're at in your journey, but whatever you had, whatever you have, at different times, it was clients I'd worked with. It was even before that projects with other creators that I had collaborated with. Anything that you have that is a benchmark of trust should be front and center. And so as you move down kids books, for me, I put kids books at the top because for me, being a published author, having a bunch of books, the most essential part of that in my practice is that it builds trust. Like there are definitely books in my future that are going to be self published. Because I think depending on your goal, you either want to publish or self publish. And it's not just whether you can publish or not. I can publish. I've published a bunch of books with publishers. But there are other reasons why in the future I will probably do some books self published. One of the reasons I chose to publish the traditional route with so many of my picture books is because I knew that that was a great marker of being able to be trustworthy as a creator. So I put that at the top. Second one down is client work. And I put clients and projects that I thought illustrated my trustworthy as a illustrator, my trustworthiness as an illustrator. If you go down podcast now, you've got 400 episodes of ideas around creativity. That says something about one of the things that I'm going to try to sell right at the bottom, which is public speaking. And so public speaking is a big part of my practice. It's something I absolutely love to do. And so this is kind of the sales element of the page, the public speaking. And it just is flashing this idea of loving yourself, which is one of my core values. It's the one I was talking about. It's the opposite of this idea of you're fundamentally flawed. I actually think you're fundamentally worthy of love. And if you go down further, you got some logos and then you got topics again, a bunch of my core values. Growth, mindset, self, love, neurodiversity. All of. All of those speak to who I'm about and what I'm about. And so as I went to go make this site, everything I was thinking is trust building. It was all number two, except that bottom section was more about the sales. Now, if you want to get started on your site, go to squarespace.com peptalk and you can get building for free right now. You can just test it out, try it out, and then when you're ready to launch, you can get 10% off your first purchase or domain with the promo code Pep talk. All one word, and I highly recommend it. I absolutely am super passionate about partnering with Squarespace. I love how my website has turned out and what it makes capable for creative people and how it allows them to build trust with the people that they're trying to connect with. So thank you, Squarespace, for sponsoring the series. Go check it out, squarespace.com pep talk. Also, you can go to my site, AndyJ Pizza, or anniejpizza.com and check out what I did with it and how I built with this trust building in mind. Just one more quick thing. We are doing these months monthly virtual meetups with the Patreon backers and the substack supporters. They're creative pep rallies. We get together and we talk about creative practice. Now, we've been doing this all year. Now, I didn't want to talk a ton about it until we had. I knew that we had consistency in terms of showing up every month. We've done it every month this year. It's been fantastic. But I also didn't want to talk about it until I started to feel like I understood what it was all about. The last meetup, I feel like, was the best that we had to date. It was all about talking about this series, the journey of the true fan. And we applied it to people in the group in real time and we talked about the questions around it and what were the concerns, what were the missing pieces. And it was just incredible because usually this is like a one way conversation and it's not satisfying in that way. Like I want to hear the holes, I want to hear how, how you're struggling to think about how this applies to you, what you're excited about, what you need more information on. And it just became this really great conversation and we applied it to a bunch of unique scenarios. We have people at all different stages of their creative practice, people that are just starting out, people that have published a bunch of books, people that have released albums and everything in between, client illustrators, a bunch of different types of people. But they're people that take their work seriously and they want it to be a practice. They want to take strangers and make them true fans of their work, make them supporters of their work. That's what this group of people is. And it's just the warmest group of people. We have tons of fun and this last conversation where we're really using it to talk about the stuff we're talking about on the show. I've had a lot of listeners over the years express the desire to have a space to talk about these ideas. And I don't know why it took me so long to figure out that that's how this, these meetups should go. But it's, it was a blast. And I can't wait to the next one. We're going to do the next meetup, the last so we usually meet the last Monday of the month. We're going to do the next one on November 25th at 2:00pm Eastern. And so if you sign up to become a Patreon backer or a Substack supporter and you're a paid supporter of this show, you will get a link to register for free and go sign up and be a part of this community. It's been an absolute blast and I'm really looking forward to the next one and talking more about these ideas from this episode and the coming episodes before we get to that. So I hope to see you there. And yeah, check it out. Andy jpizza.substack.com or you can use patreon.com creativepeptalk and sign up there. Hope to see you. Creative Pep Talk is a part of the Podglomerate Network. You can learn more at www.podglomerate.com Massive thanks to my team, my co producer and editor Sophie Miller, who's also my wife to Connor Jones of Pending Beautiful, who is not also my wife but does the audio editing and sound design to Yoni Wolf and the band Y for our theme music and soundtrack that we just freaking love. And to all of you who we just freaking love for listening and being a part of the creative Pep Talk community. Till we speak again, stay pepped up. Hey y'all, one more quick thing. Earlier this year I rebuilt my website using Squarespace's new Fluid engine and I was so pumped about how it turned out that I have been really thrilled to find as many ways to partner with them and tell you about what they can do and bring you discounts as possible. With social media going haywire, I think having a site that feels as unique as your creative work is essential to building trust with your target audience or your clients. I have had several clients point out how cohesive and fresh my site looks lately, and if you want to check that out and what I was able to do without any code, check out andyjpizza.com if you want to test it out, go to squarespace.com pep talk to test it out yourself. And when you're ready to launch, use promo code pep talk for 10% off your first purchase. Thanks Squarespace for supporting the show and for supporting creative people. I did consider Barney a friend, and he's still a friend to this day. The idea of Barney is something, something that I want to live up to. You know I love you, you love me. I call it the Purple Mantra. Barney taught me how to be a man. Generation Barney, a podcast about the media we loved as kids and how it shapes us. Listen wherever you get your podcasts.