Everyone Hates Marketers | No-BS Marketing & Brand Strategy Podcast

EHM_Zeke_YT
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Zeke: The first thing that I realized is I had to be ruthless. Like totally 100 percent ruthless and I had to do whatever was in my power to try to make the things happen that I wanted. I think that you really, really have to soul-search within yourself before you do any of this. And you have to decide, like, am I really willing to sacrifice here?

Louis: Bonjour, bonjour, and welcome to another episode of Everyone Hates Marketers.com, the no-fluff actionable marketing podcast for people sick of marketing bullshit. I'm your host, Louis Grenier. In today's episode, you'll learn how this heavy metal musician built a big following, carved a niche within a niche, and built a powerhouse personal brand.

My guest today has the hair of an elf from Lord of the Rings, the body of Arnold Schwarzenegger in his prime, the musical talent of Black Sabbath in the 70s, and the marketing brains of Seth Godin. He's a guitarist, pianist, vocalist, and composer, and he's taken over the heavy metal slash psychedelic rock universe by storm in the last few years.

And that's why I'm super happy to have him on board. Zeke Sky, welcome aboard, man.

Zeke: Hey man, it's great to be here with you today, dude.

Louis: So I actually did my research and I looked at When was Arnold Schwarzenegger at his prime in terms of body and it was in 1970. And then I look at you now and I can, I can't see any difference.

So well done on that beautiful work of art without being sarcastic, truly. I know how much it fucking takes to build muscle. And so, yeah, congrats on that. But anyway, moving on, do you have a real job on top of being a musician?

Zeke: I teach music.

Louis: That was a cheeky question because one of the things you don't like is to, are people asking you this, right?

Like musician is not really a job and you're supposed to do something else on top of it and whatever. So what do you feel about that?

Zeke: Yeah, everyone has a different kind of response and reaction to this. There are some people who are very proud of the fact that they managed to do music and also have a full-time, like a normal nine-to-five job.

There are some people who really don't want to talk about what they do outside. What I do is teach music. And I, you know, have taught some students. Yeah, I've had private music students for a long time that I've known since they were 10 years old, who are now 18 and like getting pretty good at, you know, pretty good at guitar.

And I've taught at music schools. I think that you know, the obvious, which is you can't survive without money most of the time. So most people, especially at the beginning of their careers, have to find something they can do that's congruent with a musical lifestyle. People do stuff that is more flexible a lot of the time where, you know, they can sort of work when they want and not work when they don't want, but it's a struggle, man.

It really is a struggle. And it's a lot of the reason why some of the bands that you even probably like don't do as many albums or as many tours as you want them to do.

Louis: So let's set the scene a bit. I know almost nothing about heavy metal. I would say most of my listeners wouldn't know much. So, what's the scene like, like it's a niche within the music industry, people would say, you know, what can you tell me about it so that people can understand where we are?

Zeke: I would say that heavy metal, if you look at the top people in heavy metal, and the audiences they reach, it's comparable to any other genre. A lot of heavy metals are backwater though, especially, it's like, you know, it's not like a, like a well-visited place. It's niche, it's very niche, and it's niche based on guidelines that are actually kind of obvious.

One of the things that you're going to find very quickly is a turn-on or turn-off for some people is like a lot of screaming vocals, just screaming. Like no sort of tonal kind of sounds, just screaming. Some people just, if you talk to people about what they like in music, you know, I found that one in every four or five people are going to say, I like everything, but, and usually that, but there is either it's like country music.

Or it's rap music, or it's all that heavy metal with the screaming. So there's like your first cue right there that that's something that discriminates very actively between people. But mainstream heavy metal, I would say, is something that a lot of people really still enjoy. And, you know, it's something that is very musical and that can, like, be very down to earth at times.

Louis: So do you feel like the reason why most people or a lot of people would say they'd never listen to heavy metal is because of that cliche that it's about fucking yelling in the microphone with this guttural scream like "AAAARRRRR".

Zeke: Yeah, I mean, cause when you listen to the popular, like bands like Metallica, the, the like actual popular metal bands, they don't do that.

And you know, what's interesting, I've read something about they used to, the CIA used to use heavy metal to torture people. Do you know about this?

Louis: Yeah, and they also use Baby Sharks.

Zeke: Yeah, all of these things. And you know, so I am I was actually reading a book that said that they did use Metallica to torture people, which is interesting.

I think if you blast so some of the Metallica records aren't mixed and mastered properly. And if you blasted them a lot, they really would start like really having these nasty sounds in your ears. But yeah, I think the screaming thing can be like an impediment. So like to me, there's a very small function of that in metal.

I don't like a lot of screamed heavy metal. There are screaming and screams in some of my songs, but they serve a percussive purpose. They're not meant to take the same space as the vocals. So, I think for a lot of people, you know, when you talk about popular music, they're not even talking about a band a lot of the time.

They're talking about a voice. Vocals and song music is something that people really, really get into. And I think things get more niche as things get more increasingly instrumental. A lot of the time, you know, like, because you have to be a connoisseur, to understand it.

And you know, if there was a guitar solo in the middle of a Drake song, a bunch of his fans would be like, what is this?

What are you doing here? So I think it's, it's that you have to be a connoisseur to like, really, really understand it. And also just like instrumental prowess has a limited role in crafting brilliant timeless songs. Like, think about the best bands ever. The Beatles is one of the best bands ever. A lot of moments where there's like a great solo and something that happens, but that's not what people remember about the Beatles.

People remember the vocals. You know, people remember, you know, elements of the instrumentation that like, make them feel happy, not the parts that were the most demanding to play. And it's easy to understand why, to be honest.

Louis: Yeah. So it's, there is no correlation, or at least the correlation is very weak between the work that it takes to create music or art in general and how much people will like it.

In fact, the correlation may be even opposite, right? It's like the less effort or the less. The easier it is for the brain to digest, the better.

Zeke: It's kind of, well, okay, so there's two, I love that question. It's you're, you're getting onto some good stuff here, actually. I think that the easy digestibility part of it kind of speaks to a certain kind of listener habit.

Like there, there's easy listening, right? That's like a whole category of music. That's something that we think about, but there are whole swaths of people for which like also virtuoso mastery of an instrument is really important. They've done psychology studies on this, and I would actually be interested to see what the implications would be for things like how you market a product, but basically, men and women have different dispositions towards the playing of a virtuoso piano, and actually, it turns out that men and women at different times of the month have a different predisposition towards the playing of extremely virtuoso piano. I'm not going to outline all of that, but you guys can Google it and you can kind of figure it out. The digestibility part of it though, which you just said, is in the form of what you remember about that song. Because if you digested it, you remembered it.

Right?

Louis: Right.

Zeke: So if you had that part of the chorus that you loved, that you sang over and over and over again, it's more likely that you're going to consider that one of your favorite songs because you're going to remember part of it.

Louis: So together, let's try to challenge one of the biggest cliches of the movie industry in particular, which is, you know, that cliche of the artist creating like in one go creating the masterpiece and then fucking sending the CD to the label.

And they say, oh yeah, this is brilliant, let's fucking put it, put it out there. Right? I'm pretty sure I can. I'm certain. In fact, this didn't happen to you. It never happens to anyone else. So before we dive into that transformation and what you've done specifically inside in during COVID to be where you are now, let's talk about that, you know, the creation process. The reason why I want to talk about it in more detail with you is because marketing arts, to me, is very much the same thing when you think about the creation of it. And it's so fucking difficult. It's such a mind fuck. Always. It's never easy. At least that's what I've understood after years of trying it.

What does it look like for you? You said you created your album, and you ship some music videos and stuff, but is it that easy like describing movies or is it the reality is a bit more unsettling?

Zeke: The reality is that the creation of art is impossible to truly create. It's as close to being as impossible as, you know, any of the other things in your imagination are in, you know, trying to articulate them.

I think the myth of Sisyphus. This is the metaphor that I like most for thinking about creating art for people who don't know the myth of Sisyphus, Sisyphus was condemned. This is obviously mythology, but he was condemned to push a boulder up a mountain that kept getting higher every single day. You're in this task where you kind of see the peak up above you and it just continually gets higher and higher and higher because as you continually create your standards for creation get greater and greater and it becomes a sort of hunger and addiction. For me personally, what I've learned about the songwriting process is going to be different than other people, but I would say that I've been lucky and I've been blessed in that.

For whatever reason, fully formed songs come to my head and I just do the best that I can at articulating them. I don't just write guitar riffs. I think about wholly formed songs, which is why I had my own project that was mine. But I mean, there's a whole other side to this that would be prohibitive to anyone who doesn't quite have their shit together, for lack of a better word.

In the music industry, there's recording, there's getting the album out. So for a lot of people, this process is beleaguering. You might have to get band members together if you don't play multiple instruments or you don't write for multiple instruments. You might have to pay people to play on your record.

You might have to start meandering into social media to get people to know about your record, which is something that a lot of people don't like doing. Interestingly, for me at least, and I think this might be slightly different, I saw the experience of social media and music creation as being kind of uniform in a certain sense, I noticed the experiences that I was having on social media, and I noticed that there were certain ones that were really, really great.

I remember scrolling past certain videos of certain artists that I just like thought, like, Oh, wow, holy hell, there is just I cannot deceive myself about what the level of magic in this world is. And people often forget about that element when they're complaining so much about social media. They're forgetting that it's a window into all of this greatness in humanity.

I mean, Chris Rock had a great line in his last stand-up. He said there are two ways to be famous on social media. He said you can either have a huge butt. You know, big ass or you can be excellent. And the fact that we're missing this, the fact that we're missing this about the social media experiment is weird because it's provoked.

We're provoking all kinds of human excellence by having this sort of prestige hierarchy, which is really what it is. And I think people should be more honest and willing to engage with it and be less wary about the effects on their mental health, because if you're taking care of your mental health. And you're doing the things that are necessary to become a stronger and more mentally and physically fit person.

Social media is the last of your worries.

Louis: So when you say you're looking at, looking at all the videos and things that, you know, that please you, that you can't get away from, do you mean that you're taking inspiration from that, like what's the, what's the connection with your own song?

Zeke: Absolutely. The inspiration.

And you know, my dad, he bemoans the, you know, the world of the one-minute-long song, but now I've embraced it. You know, I still will write albums and I want to continue doing that, but I love this idea that you can turn your camera on, or you can just produce some audio that's like 55 seconds long.

That can tell a small story. It's almost like a new, new era of oral storytelling. I get that it's in some ways more condensed than some of the other art forms that are out there, and I think that's okay. I think what has to be encouraged is the interaction with the instruments and the interaction with the creation.

And by the way, I mean, like, it's not just for music I'm talking about here. I've opened up my feed to see people doing incredible athletic feats. I've opened up my feed to see dogs trained in incredible ways. And the fact that it can be encapsulated in a minute doesn't negate its value. In fact, It might actually point to the fact that it has more value.

You don't need four minutes or an hour to get the point.

Louis: So you mentioned your dad doesn't really like that concept of like the shorts entertainment stuff. Is it because like, what's, what's the argument, you know, from the folks who are against that you feel?

Zeke: I can tell you what the argument is, and I think they've been making it for a long time, but it's basically this whole phenomenological point about what the differences between consuming music is now from what it was then.

They talk about the era of vinyl, and they have this sort of voyeuristic romance about a time when going into a record shop when you held the physical album, it was the first time you heard from that artist in a long time. And to be fair, I think there's something great about that I think that's awesome.

And I think that people had that experience and felt so connected to the music physically that way is great. However, I also think it's incredible that it may be even more incredible that you can open up YouTube now and interact with musicians and music in a way you never could have. From just getting a vinyl, you can watch interviews.

You can get a guitar lesson from me on the Internet. You can find them. Or I'm just looking at the camera and just explaining to you how to play this guitar solo. It's infinitely more valuable. And I think that if people just took that a little less for granted, they'd be a little happier.

Louis: So you were talking about the process that you used to create, like, a fully-fledged song. Like, you see the big picture before diving into the moving parts, correct?

Zeke: Yeah.

Louis: So Like talk me through how you do this. And I know we won't necessarily have the time to dive into, every single detail, but like the process of creation, I'm almost so interested in, behind the scenes. So if you look back at it, it could be the one minute, one of the one-minute video you post, you know, like on TikTok or Instagram or whatever, but it could also be the.

You know, fully fledged song as part of your album. Like, how does, what does it look like? Do you, do you, are you in the room we're recording now? Like, what do you do?

How do you get there?

Zeke: So there is a podcaster called Dan Carlin. Do you know Dan Carlin? He's got a history podcast. He talks about a lot of stuff.

He talks about this thing, the extremes, and human experience. He talks about the range of things that people feel from incredible, insane love and success to the worst things that happen in war. And what I just try to do is I try to immerse myself in the most distinct spectrum of human emotions that I can all the time, literally, I am just constantly doing this.

I don't take a break from this. And I just feel like I'm constantly doing album research. So really what happens is like musically, I write things that. You know, I write a lot of music and I will pick and choose kind of in my brain, what I think fits what, and then from there, I'm just matching kind of the sound of a vocal melody, which will occur to me in my head.

I might not hear it with formed lyrics. That's the thing. When I hear something in my head, it's interesting. It's like an AI thing, almost like I will hear a guitar. Melody of the voice and drums, but I might not hear the lyrical context. So what I have to do is kind of dip into things I've written or things I've thought about to kind of write the context for that.

And it could happen anytime. There are times when I'm just sitting around and I hear a riff. I lived in another place, which I lived somewhere before here, and closer to a city called Philadelphia. This is not a place that I recommend people go to, but it was sort of nice when I was it was okay when I was in it.

And, I would just go for these really long walks in the park. Sometimes I consumed psychedelics. That happened. And I would just think as hard as I possibly could about what it was I wanted to say personally. What it was that I thought was, heroic in the human experience. What I thought was deplorable in the human experience.

Louis: So that's what you mean here by the extremes.

Zeke: Yes. The heroic and the deplorable are definitely one spectrum there. And like, I explored a lot. I mean, I was lucky enough as a kid, that I had an English teacher who was like, very passionate about Homer and epic fantasy and all of these types of things.

And I got kind of batted into my head there. And then in my 20s, I had like, a realization that this stuff was really, really important to me. So I kind of, you know, stick my head in that stuff, and I try to find the rhythm. How?

Louis: Yeah.

Zeke: I mean, I read it, and then I try to summarize it and think about it in the most concrete terms that I can.

And then I try to distill it into my own perspective of the world that's hopefully more modern and maybe more informed by the last 2, 000 years of events. And You know, it's not my intent to necessarily get into people's hearts about their day-to-day experiences. I'm trying to write about the things that I think are valid and important about human beings, you know?

Louis: So you mentioned the spectrum, like heroic, deplorable, deplorable, heroic. What other type of spectrum do you tend to gravitate to?

Zeke: Pain and pleasure is a very interesting one, laziness and I don't know, lethargy and ambition is maybe a dynamic that I think about a lot. Decay and growth would be the ones that I think about the most.

And I think about that on a personal level and a civilizational level.

Louis: So you would go on long walks, you would feed your brain with psychedelics. Sometimes you would also feed your brain with the books and all the stuff that you read around mythology and, and stuff like that, right? I might be butchering it a bit and overly summarizing it, but that's kind of what I got so far, right?

So you feed your brain to that and then you seem to let your brain produce stuff and. You do your best to catch it, right? You don't take it for granted. So let's say you have an interesting riff that comes to mind, right? You have this, like, maybe like a couple of like the melody, you can't really hear the voice, you have this guitar coming, the drums like it feels like the start of something and you are not.

Somewhere near a computer or whatever. Like, how do you capture that?

Zeke: I will sometimes hum it into my phone.

Louis: Okay.

Zeke: That's happened. That's not usually where the best of my songs come from. Usually the best of my songs, I happened, like, you know, when I was younger, I still do play a lot, but you know, I'd be playing 10 hours a day, so, you know, everything was constantly coming to me.

Like I was constantly near or around a guitar and I made a conscious process of that. So a lot of these. Things just became memorialized. And because of the way I learned music, which was purely by memory, I didn't really have a lot of formal music training. I just memorized everything all the time.

Louis: Well, so memorize everything.

Zeke: Yeah.

Louis: And then how do you capture it? Like do you. Put it on paper, like where does it go to be more of a solid form rather than...

Zeke: So, this is the funniest part of the process recently, but for the longest time, I would just remember the song, maybe try to teach the band the song. I wouldn't even really, I wouldn't make significant efforts to record it.

This is the first time album is the first time I made an actually professionally produced album, which is part of the reason why, like, I'm very excited is it was like the first, I mean, I could have done this a long time ago, but this was really the right time for me recently. What's happened now is I will map the song out on my own computer with the logic that I've learned to become, you know, competent enough to map out a song.

And then it'll evolve until it goes to studio and production, which is what happened on the last record.

Louis: Tell me about the shipping part, like the. Turning something that happens to you, like a creation, something that you believe in intensely, in the end, you put it out there, right? How does it feel?

Zeke: Amazing. It's, it's a very good feeling when you're proud of what you made to put it out there. There's also a part of me, where I had a standard for myself, which is I wanted a lot of people to hear the music and some artists are different. They're just trying to make the music. I felt the songs were good and I wanted to figure out a way to get the music to people.

And I'm learning about that process now. But the only reason I was like that really at all is because I wanted to build something that allowed me to make as much music as I wanted to. This was not the, I've never been like a money grab type person. I've been more of the Just wanting to create as much as I possibly could, whether it's writing, writing music, podcasts, all of these things.

And I wanted to build a life along those lines, and I sort of forced myself into it. But yeah, I mean, you, you can independently put out music now. It's really easy to get your songs on Spotify or wherever else. It did happen, so this time around, and when I say this time around, this was the first real record I made, even though I'd put out singles before and like a bedroom-produced record.

So I'd put this album out. Just all by myself independently, and I got a record deal after that. So about a month after I'd put out that record, I had signed a record deal that said, we're going to pull this album and then we're going to put it back out under our label, this label called Atomic Fire Records in Germany.

Louis: So I think we set the context a bit for what we're talking about here. Tell me about you from like a couple of years ago, where, you know, you didn't have the following that you have now. You didn't necessarily have the personal brand. You didn't have the album that you released. You didn't have those people knowing about you, at least not as many.

So what were you doing before all of this, right? Were you just teaching music most time and then trying to make it happen as an artist? What was the situation like?

Zeke: To be clear, I'm still trying to make it happen as an artist. It's a never-ending journey. It's a never-ending journey. But circa 2018, maybe just, you know, right before the pandemic had happened.

And you know, the time before it, I had played in bands throughout the past, almost a decade before that, not quite a decade, but six or seven years, just cover bands. And I had my first kind of taste of like really playing in front of a lot of people. I played at a music festival that had 10, 000 people at it.

So I had some real exposure in 2018 or 2019. 2019, I think. I had put together, right before COVID, had put together a band to do music that I had composed during that time, and we got a first great show. We opened for a band called King's X, and that was an amazing night. And COVID followed right after.

So by the time COVID had happened, I had some internet presence. I had probably 10, 000 followers, something like that. And I had put out one or two music videos and then COVID threw me into high gear because what I realized during COVID, which I think is imperative, maybe for everyone to realize at this point is the physical world outside of the internet is very, very vulnerable.

We don't think about this a lot. We think about the digital world as containing information that's potentially lower resolution and weaker than the stuff that's in the physical world, but COVID showed just how vulnerable the physical world was. The internet world, on the other hand, is extremely durable, and it has to be durable.

If something happened that closed down the internet tomorrow, that might be the end of humanity. Almost all currency is nonphysical, the incentives for production and creation and the infrastructure that preserves logistics all exist in the Internet. So the internet is basically one of the most important things we as humans have at this point.

It would be the thing that a future historian would look back at and sort of say, hey, you know, this is the thing that defined humanity at this point in time. And we're at the very beginning of it. This is the very beginning of the heyday of the internet, sort of dictating the terms of human existence.

And it's likely to become more dynamic, more all-encompassing, and likely to merge more with what we do every single day than it has now. I mean, I think it's very likely that some of these algorithms and some of these AIs, instead of just having the function of doing something that we wouldn't ordinarily do, they're going to know who we are.

On a very deep level, on a deeper level perhaps we know who we are. So, I recognized that a long time ago, and my dad has always said things like that, and my brother, who you've spoken to, has always been of that opinion as well. So, I took that opportunity to completely just go into the internet, and I released music.

I made an album that I loved and that I was happy with and I put it out and I focused on, you know, the exact things that I thought I was supposed to be focused on. You know, the guitar guy, I went for being the fit guy. I went for being the guy who posted inspirational stuff. And I went for all that stuff, not just because I knew that it was effective, but because it was me.

It wasn't so much a persona, really, at all, it was really, it really came for me a lot of the times, which is kind of cringe when you think about it, like, cause most people are just not, they're trying to get through their day to day life, they're trying to get to dinner, they're trying to get on vacation.

It's those moments in the morning when they feel like they're not getting enough done, where they want to see someone like me who's just constantly pushing the envelope. So, that was, that was one thing that I, you know, pick, some people would say, pick your niche. I would say, but I think it's more complicated than picking your niche.

It's like, picking your persona, picking what you want, and picking the parameters for your success. You know, what are the determinants of what you would consider successful in the vein that you're in? And the interesting thing about that is as time goes on, the victory conditions change. You know, there are a lot of people who I've talked to, you know, are like, well, I just want to get 10, 000 followers on Instagram, or I just want to do a record, or I just want to do, you know, I just want to get fitter.

You sounds like you don't know what you want quite yet because these are all just, this is like an infinite redux. This is just going to become the type of thing where you will get there and you're going to get there and you're going to say to yourself, well, what's next? Because if you stop there, if you just stop there, what was the point of any of that?

You really need to be in this for the long haul. And you need to be willing to make sacrifices to move from goal to goal to goal. Now in terms of specifics, if we're talking about social media, there is a whole just environment of tactics and strategies and things that you just have to know to succeed a little bit more.

It's not going to be as easy, even if you have the best content, even if you truly, truly have the best content. You're, and you probably don't have the best content, by the way, you almost certainly don't have the best content, especially if you're in marketing, like the CPCs on that and the CPMs for my, you know, it's a niche, you know, you're, you're not, co-opting like a large audience that way.

So you need to find out who your audience is, and you need to advertise to them on social media, most likely, or you need to directly reach out to people in your niche and see if they can get them to feature you. That happens a lot.

Louis: So let's go back to something that you said did the sacrifice stuff, right?

It's true, right? You have to ask yourself, what are you willing to stop doing in order to start doing that thing? People tend to like to add shit to their daily lives and whatever, and then they can't stick to it, right? So it's like, what are you going to be like, what are you going to stop? And usually, that's already a question that I agree tends to throw people off.

But then you mentioned what you mentioned, like you said, the victory conditions change, right? You need to set yourself those good objectives, right? And you said that like a bad objective would be like, get an album, like get a record label or something on this line. I completely agree. And I know what you mean here, but let's try to describe it a bit further.

So what does a good objective that is there to keep you doing stuff in the long term look like?

Zeke: Louis, you're good at this. You're good at this. You're asking good questions. So you're asking a question that is difficult for me to even answer, but I will give you an answer because it's something that I think about.

The victory conditions are a life of doing meaningful work and constantly growing constantly, whatever that is. And it's not, the goal is not to do X, Y, and Z for 10 years so that you can be on a beach sipping pizza through a sippy straw one day. That is a bad goal. This is the career goal that everyone has in our country or in my country.

Certainly, I'm surrounded by low-risk-taking types who just want a simple path of least resistance and bad, just a bad idea. You should be constantly committed to just pushing yourself through every possible, you know, accolade that you can possibly get through. Not for the accolades, not necessarily for them, but for you, so that you have a perspective on your own growth that's valid and that you understand in its own terms.

Because a day is not going to come, especially for someone like me, but for plenty of other people, where you're going to feel like you've arrived. And when I say, like, you've arrived, like, there are some people who will measure you know, I certainly was a person who might've measured arrival as like a certain amount of followership or a certain amount of musical success or the ability to do, or I might've done that.

And then there are certain types of people who they're just trying to get to the sports car. They think that when they get to that, you know, that nice Mercedes or that nice Lamborghini, that's when they're really going to arrive. But what these people don't understand is a couple of weeks after having that Lamborghini.

It's just going to be the car you drive. That's all that thing is going to be.

Louis: It's the new normal. And it's like this perspective I heard a few years ago, which is if you were to win the lottery tomorrow, it'll still be you but with a hundred million dollars. It's still you. It's still you and your insecurities.

It's still you and your, and the way you think, you know, it's still, you're still going to be the exact same person. So the way I understood what you were saying about this, like the bad goals are sort of like the better objectives. The way I see it is sticking to the things you can control and just process, not the result of it.

So like talking to one person new in your, you know, in your network every, every week, or shipping something on Instagram every day. I prefer this type of objective because it's something that I can control directly, but I can't control the result of it. Sometimes it will work out, sometimes it won't, and it doesn't matter to me.

So that's why, for example, I send emails daily to my list. I like doing it. That's why I ship episodes every week and I find it much easier to control and manage in my brain than any sort of fucking result-driven objectives.

Zeke: Yeah, because it's something with like a very obvious to-do list.

It's it's the day-to-day kind of drudgery. That stuff is like, it's easy to like, fall into that and sort of not have to think too hard about it. Your email is great. By the way, I saw your email. You're clearly conducting yourself in a very professional way on the internet. You have a lot of those characteristics that seem to be very, very good.

And that part of the process is just a certain discipline, you know, it's just a certain kind of how, how do I want to reach out to people? How do I want to appear in front of them? How can I offer that person value while also gaining some value of my own? I mean, that stuff is also totally imperative.

I do think there are a lot of people, and I don't know if this is you, I do think there are a lot of people who stick their head into stuff like that, though, without an idea of what the wide-sweeping goal is. And I would say it's me sometimes too. I think a lot of artists are just like this. You know, we sometimes really, really only think in terms of the creation.

We only think in terms of how we want to be perceived on stage, what we want our guitars to sound like, which is why we can be co-opted by, you know, business interests relatively easily. I guess for me, and I think for other people who are listening, who want to like learn more and be more and do more, I think there's a lot of untapped potential in people, a lot of untapped potential in people.

And when I say that, I mean, like you, first of all, if you're smart enough to get to a point where you're playing an instrument really well. You probably, if you could get over your anxiety and depression and whatever else, you could manage to market yourself. You have the IQ points for that you have the grit for that, okay?

So, a lot of people put themselves into boxes and they limit themselves a lot. One of the things that I noticed about, you know, going to the gym more and more, which is something that I've been doing since I was young, I've realized that there was something that was totally antithetical about bodybuilding from music.

I mean, in a sense they're both arts, but they're very, very different in what the goal is in a very big way. And when I started noticing how uncomfortable it was, the dichotomy there and how a lot of the musicians I knew were really out of shape. I knew I was onto something good. I knew that like pushing myself in both ways would be really, really great for me.

And so I did. And I did that mercilessly. And I became like, very, you know, I not what I would be if I was just constantly bodybuilding, but it became more knowledgeable. And I, you know, I pushed myself on those things. So, you know, this morning I had to push myself on something. I had a bunch of administrative tasks, everything from updating my car registration, all of this stuff that is just like really nitty-gritty, you know, and it's stuff that I was not good at five or six years ago.

But now that I've like gotten here as a musician and as a person, I'm kind of like, well, I did all this. You're telling me this stuff is a problem, you know, and that's an attitude I've taken on in life.

Louis: So going back to that story of yours and how you've started to carve that niche, did you, how did you go about it strategically?

You mentioned the word a few times, right? In terms of your strategy, the plan. So you have the grit, you have the drive. You have the willingness to sacrifice a few things to get where you want to be. You clearly are someone who is very strong mentally and you've developed that resilience. I can tell.

So what did you do then on the day-to-day? Like we were in the middle of lockdown COVID, it was very, and it still is, if you ask me a very kind of heavy atmosphere, right? So you have to be very, very tough mentally to fucking be there and show up every day. So what did it look like for you from a marketing perspective?

Zeke: Well, from a marketing perspective and from a personal, let me start from a personal perspective real quick, because I want to be clear about this. You can be a very strong person. I was in pain. It was scary, man. Like, everything was, my entire way of life had been falling apart. I was, you can exude as much personal strength as you want, you're a human being, no matter what, no matter how many plates you're benching, no matter what.

You are, you're really nothing but weakness. Really all humans. We're all just these sad, very vulnerable, you know, We're very recently at the top of the food chain. It's only been like the last, you know, a million or two years. We don't have the same confidence that a lion does and I just want to say to anyone watching, I was, it was hard.

It was a very hard time. In terms of the actual marketing, it wasn't something that I thought super duper consciously about at that point because by then, I had built an ads infrastructure and a posting infrastructure that was on autopilot. And I was able to constantly grow. I think the mental part of that was actually the tougher part.

The part where you're, you know, potentially a music industry is over. Are you going to double down here or are you just going to kind of save your money and do the safe thing? And I think a lot of people chose the other thing there. And listen, one of the things that kind of got me through that and thinking about that is I had faith in the future of the world.

I wasn't a nihilist about this. And when you believe in the future, it's easier to do two things. I mean, it's easier to take risks when you believe in the future is one thing. On a certain level, right? Like if you think the world's going to end tomorrow, you're not really taking a risk by shooting yourself up with a bunch of drugs and having a bunch of unprotected sex, if you know the world is going to end tomorrow.

But if you're taking calculated risks for things that you think are going to play out over a long time, it's because you believe the long time is going to happen, right? If you don't take risks That also seems to preach a little bit of faith in the future, right? Because if you're not taking risks, you're preparing for the future.

You're essentially saying that I'm going to have future mental states, and I'm going to feel those mental states. So I want to make sure I'm as fortified as possible in the present so that I can build. Whatever those mental states are I kind of looked at that equation and I realized that fundamentally I was a risk taker and I kept taking those risks.

I kept doing it constantly maybe even the air of a potentially apocalyptic world that was emerging with people who are a little bit more broken and defeated turned me on a little bit too. And this is something that I think maybe is under-explored in, literature in general. But I mean, if you've read your Nietzsche, you know that there are certain types of human vulnerabilities that are just constantly being exposed and that you have the opportunity to kind of rise above.

And I noticed that. And that turned me on.

Louis: So tell me more about those risks. So you mentioned this, this ad kind of system you put in place on the posting system. So describe to me what you put in place from an ad perspective.

Zeke: From an ad perspective. So I did make some mistakes that I have to be open about.

I don't have to be open about it, but I will just say that I really focused on social media. I was very uninterested in the rest of the music world at that point, Spotify and YouTube were things that were like passing thoughts to me. Even though I did manage to grow a lot on YouTube, I didn't manage to grow that much on Spotify during that, at least that beginning time.

I was extremely focused on social media because what I thought and still somewhat think is that the future of direct interaction with brands and people who make products or music that people like is, the model of the future. So whether it's Facebook now or Instagram in 10 years or TikTok in 10 years, people are going to be interacting with those brands directly on the internet.

And I wanted to learn exactly what the dynamic was of someone picking up a phone and looking at something and what makes them tick and what makes them click. So I had a series of content that I was looking at, maybe 10 total videos, where I was just looking at what was the cost per page like cost per getting them to, you know, YouTube or cause, you know, how did I drag people in and I found the piece that worked the best and I left that on for about a year and that was what I found.

Louis: How much money did you put, did you put behind it?

Zeke: You know, I don't know off the top of my head, not a lot, not, I would say like in the grand scheme of things, if I've spent 5 000$ to 6 000$ on ads, I'd be surprised and that's over years.

Louis: That's still a lot of money for a musician, right?

Zeke: I mean, you're thinking about like 1 000$ a year.

You're thinking about the difference between not going out to dinner one or two times more per month. It's a small amount. I think it's a small amount of money. And when you, when you look at the budgets that are really, really out there for a brand, it's really nothing. Most labels will spend a lot of money breaking artists and to, you know, to get something like, you know, to get to a critical mass on social media, 5 000$ in ads spent over a month would be typical for like a larger brand.

Louis: And so that's the, the ad side of it connected to the posting side, right? Where like you would post stuff organically, see what catches up. See what catches on and then try to amplify that a bit with ads.

Zeke: Yeah. And well, so I would, I would kind of try to bring people in with ads and see kind of what worked.

And then I would kind of test out posting. I would see what was working. Kind of measure what I thought was useful and what I thought was maybe turning people away And I made a bunch of mistakes. I made a bunch of mistakes. I thought at the beginning of things I thought that doing the new noodley guitar video every day was gonna be good but that became sour real quick and look, I capitulated a lot to the audience especially at first because I was thrilled that I was finally growing a following of my own and I had spent years in bands with people who said that it was impossible to do this.

So when it started happening for me, I was like, Oh, wow. And I had, I was Gollum and I had the ring of power. And no, no, seriously, it really is. It's crazy.

Louis: So your band members used to tell you that. Doing things on your own and promoting yourself on the Internet, wouldn't work.

Zeke: Yeah, it's just like the sort of what you had prefaced this conversation with, that there were just too many people out there, there was too much to get through, and that you weren't going to make, you know, really any money doing that. So you should just play in a cover band or do what was safe. And I basically felt at a certain point, this was everything I wanted to get away from. This is basically a day job. And like I had written my own music and truthfully, I should have just broken up off a long time ago.

It should have, shouldn't have taken COVID to do those things. I mean, there's a lot of cynicism and skepticism. People will be skeptical of you no matter what. I mean, no matter what, there's something in people where they're just like, you can't. You can't do it, you know if it's something.

Louis: They either project, their own insecurities onto you, or they're actually trying to protect you because they think that it sounds risky.

So, therefore, they're trying to protect you from the risk. But what they don't realize is that it's because it is risky that it's the least risky thing to do. Because few, fewer are doing it. Maybe. Do you disagree with that?

Zeke: I don't think, so I think doing risky things is risky. I don't think doing something risky, like, I know what you're saying with that.

And it's actually something I've thought about. I think for me, okay. So, interestingly, for me, not doing the risky thing is risky because that's something I would regret not doing a lot of the time, not doing the thing that pushed me to a point where I felt like I was making consistent progress.

Yes, that is something that takes a toll on my mental health. Actually, what's good for my mental health is to constantly be engaging in that. I don't know if that makes me some kind of. Strange psychological profile. I've always been like this. I've never not been like this. It wasn't COVID that brought it out of me.

I've always been, my mom and dad encouraged me to jump off large objects when I was a kid. You know, I've always had like people around me who've kind of like been like that too. My best friends were always risk-takers. So I've always behaved like this in a sense. And then at a certain point, there was a reward mechanism for it that I felt like I really liked.

Louis: So that's the Gollum, finding the ring.

Zeke: It is the Gollum. It is the Gollum thing and it's like it's when you're in it when you're really feeling it, you're really resonating with Gollum because you do know you're getting a little out of control. I remember getting to a point where I had like 20,000 Instagram followers and like 100,000 Facebook followers and there just was a point where I think it's about the same now. But when I really started posting a lot I would just get thousands and thousands of likes on a post and it would just like it did send me into this crazy mental state of which, like, you have to kind of recalibrate with sober-minded perspectives on what reality is.

Louis: I agree. It's one of like, this is, this is the difficulty with what we're doing, you know, creating stuff is the dopamine hits and forcing your brain not to chase this hit because it is very much. Addictive and it fucks with your concept of what is good and what's not. And this is why I like focusing on the process, even though, yes, I look at metrics and I look at likes and look at all the shit like that.

The process is what I enjoy doing. So this forces me to kind of separate the two. So that helps a bit, but I completely get the Gollum thing. When I started that podcast eight years ago and I started getting emails from people I didn't know saying, I fucking love what you're doing. That feeling is just insane, you know, and then making money online without ever talking to that person and just buying your shit.

Crazy stuff, you know.

Zeke: And he's just, it has to be controlled and it has to be, you have to have discipline about it and you have to continually remember what got you into things in the first place. And I think that can be difficult for people.

Louis: What's the biggest risk? You've taken in that period of time in the marketing side, like specifically, what do you feel was the biggest risk?

Zeke: You know, it wasn't on the marketing. It was making the record and doing the music videos on the marketing side there. I didn't take it monetarily. I didn't take nearly the same amount of risk. I didn't really. Market the album too much at all. I really in doing the record I mean the music videos are marketing but doing the record and doing multiple music videos that were an exertion financially and psychologically for me that was very difficult and it really forced some perspective into me as like a self-fronted, you know band leader and as like a brand creator, because I was coming directly into contact with what the struggles were of even just trying to get people in one place for a music video and find a location and a filmmaker you want to work with and making sure that, you know, you had a release date that was good.

So like being firmly into contact with that, and then really executing on a plan to, you know, record what was. Basically, 13 songs in a year and releasing four music videos on a budget was extremely difficult. It was, I don't even know how to put it a different way. It was, it was very challenging on my psyche.

Louis: Did it work? Like those four videos, how did they perform?

Zeke: I wouldn't say they worked in that they pay that like my YouTube channel was new. I wouldn't say that maybe they've made, maybe they've close to made back a bunch of the money. I don't know. I haven't completely paid attention to that end of them, but they were meant to serve the songs and to grow awareness of the band.

If I'm being honest, no, no, definitely not. They haven't like paid back the actual due that I put into them. They will over time, but it was always meant to serve as an awareness mechanism.

Louis: Yeah. Yeah. And that's what I meant. I didn't necessarily mean money-wise or anything, but mental, you know.

Zeke: Oh yeah, they were great.

They were great. There's one called Light the Sky that like I'm just so, I couldn't be happier about. Yeah. I guess you saw that one.

Louis: Yeah, I watched it over and over again.

Zeke: The filmmaker in that really, I mean, he did a fantastic job. I mean, Micah is just a phenomenal filmmaker and he captured me exactly the way I wanted the song captured.

Louis: Yeah. So for everyone listening, just Google Zeke Sky, and Light the Sky on YouTube. Actually, when we scheduled that interview, I was, I watched it a few times, and then before coming on, I was listening to it again to be in this, in the, in trying to be in the same wavelength. So it was fun. Man, you've been a pleasure.

Thank you so much for sharing all of those very deep thoughts. You definitely think a lot about stuff that I've never thought about that much. So I really, really liked that conversation. Last question for you. What do you think folks listening to that podcast? It could be obviously marketers, and entrepreneurs, but artists and musicians or whatever should learn today that will help in the next 10, 20, 50 years...

Zeke: It's going to be so cliche, but learn to enjoy the process, learn to enjoy just every single day working and growing and trying to become more articulate, stronger, better at what you do, learn to get the pleasure from directly that. And I think if you can do that, you're going to find a lot of happiness.

Louis: Where can people listen to your music, and learn more from you?

Zeke: The best place to do is just anywhere where you listen to music. Search for Zeke Sky, Z E K E S K Y, and you should come upon it really immediately. I have a podcast myself too called the Zeke Sky podcast, where if you want to hear more noodley, philosophical, historical reflections like this, you can also do that.

Louis: Nice. Once again, thank you so much.

Zeke: Oh, you're very welcome.