Happy Sunday! Baby Clouse has officially reached full term, so we're on baby watch. It's getting very real. Thankfully, the whole team has been behind me, helping me prepare to take time off so that you shouldn't even notice.
What we're working on is exciting, and I feel like we've never been more organized. I can't wait to show you everything we've been working on.
Last week, we welcomed several new members into The Lab, and I unveiled a new matching tool inside the community that I couldn't be more excited about. Some folks on the waitlist told me they still weren't sure what to expect in the community, so we built a new page to show you what it's like. If you've been curious, you can "look inside" The Lab here.
Onto this week's edition...
Inside this edition:
A new video editing tool that you can try for free
New Essay: How To Connect With Anyone
Free Virtual Event: The Connection Conference (Oct. 19-23)
How Jessica Lackey earns $300K/year (without social media)
SPONSORED
This May Be The FASTEST Way To Edit Talking Head Videos.
If you prefer to spend less time scripting and more time recording, the 1of10 team just released a new feature that will help you edit your talking head videos—FAST.
It’s called AutoCut, and it’s part of their new Video Editor.
I have a great video setup in my studio, but I don’t like scripting full videos. That means my recordings have all kinds of extra takes and dead space. It’s not hard to edit those out, but it’s time-consuming, and I dread doing it.
AutoCut takes your raw talking-head footage, watches it frame by frame, removes silences, rambling, and retakes, enhances your audio, and gives you a clean cut ready to post in minutes.
It doesn’t just put those extra takes in the trash—it saves them so you can instantly switch to whatever take you prefer.
The 1of10 team is known for their deep knowledge of YouTube, and this tool is already better and faster than any other tool I’ve tried for cutting your raw footage quickly.
Zack Arnold spent the first two decades of his career as an award-winning Hollywood filmmaker, editor, and producer (notable credits include Cobra Kai, Empire, Burn Notice, and GO FAR: The Christopher Rush Story). He has now transitioned to spending his days as a creative career coach (or as his students jokingly refer to him, a “career therapist”) at The Arnold Academy, talking to fascinating people on The Zack Arnold Podcast, and writing on Substack about the intersection of living as analog humans in a world being overrun by the robots.
As you'll read below, I met Zack through a cold email! And I'm glad I did. He's a generous teacher and a genuine cold-email artist. After booking one of the most impressive conference lineups I've ever seen, I convinced him to share his secrets.
It feels like the only way to thrive as a content creator anymore is to please the algorithms. Follow the data. Post EVERYWHERE. Yet no matter what you try, it seems like everyone’s stats are skyrocketing but yours. 😔
While you’re treading water, the people you follow and admire are killing it! You scroll their feeds. You devour their podcasts. You binge their TED Talks. And you’d love to know how they got where they are so you can, too. Yet despite your desire to connect, you’re instead frozen in place with a raging case of FORO.
Fear. Of. Reaching. Out.
Who are you to think you can reach out cold and connect with this person?! Clearly your work isn’t good enough. You don’t have enough subscribers. Or revenue. Or book sales. Or you’re horribly introverted and don’t know what to say. And no way you are going to bother someone that important.
But here’s the thing…there is a much simpler way to connect with people you consider “unreachable” that doesn’t require pitching yourself, spamming via LinkedIn DM’s, or using the robots to do your outreach for you. And on the other end of that cold outreach will be someone delighted to hear from you, eager to connect, and potentially even collaborate with you!
Because I still believe in the power of genuine human connection, I'm launching The Connection Conference, a 5-day virtual event (Oct 19-23) that brings together the world's top thought leaders—like Adam Grant, Will Guidara, Angela Duckworth, David Epstein, Susan Cain, Ethan Mollick, Priya Parker, and even THE Jay Clouse!—to teach us how to reach out and expand our networks in a more authentic way...without the algorithms (or the robots).
You might be asking...how did an under-the-radar creative career coach with no social following, no YouTube channel, and an email list under 5k book TEN New York Times bestselling authors with a combined 115 million TED Talk views?
Simple. Cold emails.
I've spent the last ten years working with hundreds of students and clients developing a cold outreach formula (read: NOT a template) that has a 70% response rate. When done well, your outreach will not only receive responses but also enthusiastic responses, helpful responses, and most importantly human responses.
I call it → The VSA Outreach Formula™
V - Value.
S - Story.
A - Ask.
This cold outreach formula (coupled with warm introductions from other speakers) helped me book every single guest for this conference with no formal pitch, no proposal, and no webpage. Two cold emails landed me NINE YEARS of editing work (on the shows Cobra Kai and Burn Notice) in the most difficult industry to break into, Hollywood.
I’ve had students use cold outreach to secure Zoom calls and lunches with Oscar winners, connect with future mentors, and even land dream jobs from a single email.
And if you don't believe me, ask Adam Grant himself!
"I remember when I got your first email, and I thought, wow, this is a masterclass in how to write a cold email. It was on my top five list of the best cold emails I've ever gotten from readers. I don't think I've ever gotten an email from you that didn't communicate this guy really cares about other people."
I didn't reach out to Adam Grant because he's sold millions of books or his TED Talks have millions of views. I reached out to Adam because I genuinely admired the way he writes and what he writes about. But more importantly, I admired Adam's mission: The most meaningful way to succeed is to help others succeed.
Outreach is not about optimizing CRM’s or doing anything “scalable.”
Human outreach requires following your intuition. Putting in real effort. And then taking a few big swings.
I'll be speaking at The Connection Conference, a free 5-day virtual event connecting artists, creatives, and entrepreneurs with the ideas of the world’s experts–including #1 NYT bestselling authors Adam Grant, Susan Cain, Will Guidara, Charles Duhigg, Angela Duckworth, Ethan Mollick, Priya Parker, and many more–to help us learn a more thoughtful and authentic way to build meaningful relationships and expand our networks of fellow humans.
If you’re afraid to reach out to people (and you don’t know what to say when you do), you’ll learn how to turn outreach and networking into an act of service where you provide genuine value to others and connect based on shared goals and shared values. You’ll learn how to build a strong support network of peers, experts, mentors, advocates, and future collaborators so you can navigate this next uncertain phase of your work and life with confidence and get back to making things that matter
Jessica tried the social media game. She hired a social media team for two years, did Ship 30 for 30 on Twitter, and tested Instagram. She never cracked 1,700 followers. So she built her business a different way: 50 guest podcast appearances, 50 guest teaching spots in other communities, 20 to 30 programs joined and participated in over four years. Every visibility opportunity landed 10 to 20 new people on her email list. It was slow, linear, and intentional. Today she has 2,000 people on her email list and 200 paying members in her membership. That's a 10% conversion rate on her list, against the creator industry standard of 1 to 3%.
Her business has earned over $300,000 for three consecutive years. Almost nothing she sells is one-and-done. The whole thing is built on renewals and retention, not growth and virality.
In this episode, we talk about:
How she built from 200 to 2,000 email subscribers through relationships and guest appearances, not social media
Her 3-offer stack (1:1 consulting, 6-month cohort, and membership) and how each piece supports the others
Why she does a 30-minute welcome call with every new member at $50 per month — and how she thinks about the economics
The KPIs she tracks with clients instead of followers and views: outreach count, visibility opportunities, and what she calls seeds, sprouts, and fruits
The trade-offs she's made by choosing this model and why she's made peace with them
By the end of this episode, you will have a clear picture of how a small, deliberate audience can support a thriving six-figure business — and what it actually costs to build one that way.
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Apple pushed him out. His partners left. His investors lost faith. Then everything changed. ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ FS | BRAIN FOOD Sept 6th, 2026 - #697 - read online - Free Version Welcome to Brain Food, your weekly signal in a world full of noise. Tiny Thoughts * Whatever pattern is repeating in your life has one common variable: you. ** One of the worst qualities a person can have is the need to show how smart they are by catching others' mistakes. In some areas, this may be useful, but in general life, it's a disaster. *** We tend to think the people who get ahead have more talent, better connections, greater opportunities, or better ...
