Ep 130: Ending the hiatus. Is this thing still on?

In this long-awaited return to The Crazy One podcast, host Stephen Gates shares an honest and introspective look at his journey over the past year, from leaving New York and launching his own studio to grappling with burnout and rediscovering his passion. In this episode titled “Is This Thing Still On?”, he opens up about the emotional rollercoaster of going independent, confronting career disappointments, and evolving his relationship with the podcast. With a renewed focus on authenticity and self-reflection, he invites listeners to join him as he reboots the show in a fresh, more spontaneous format. Tune in to explore resilience, self-discovery, and the challenges of staying true to one’s creative voice in a rapidly changing industry.

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Transcript

What's going on, everybody? And welcome to the 130th episode of the Crazy One podcast. Man, it feels like this has been a long time coming. I know for a lot of you too long coming. Look, I've heard you right. I've heard you every week. Every month for the last. What it been a year and a month since I recorded a show.

And it's been interesting journey to come back to this. Right. So I think for this one we're just going to call this like, is this thing still on? Right. Because I think for those of you who want to know where the show has been, where it's been at, and I think to set the stage of what we're going to do, going forward, we just need to kind of clear up what's been going on.

So for those of you who don't know what, probably two years ago now decided to leave New York City after being laid off for the third time. I just started to start my own agency. Made a lot of changes, right? It got to a place where I had to make a lot of changes. I think after you've been laid off for the third time and you just get so tired of feeling so disposable, I think whenever you get tired of.

I think for me, just how much of my life felt like it was on the way to something else, that it wasn't the job that I wanted, it was on the way to a better job, that it wasn't where we wanted to live. It was on the way to where we wanted to finally settle down. Right. I think just the weight of all of that became too much.

And so we had to make some changes. And I think, you know, if I'm being honest, the thing I want to talk about is that I think, you know, one of the biggest things that changed is my relationship to the show is my relationship to all the years and years, 129 episodes of content that I'd created. Because one of the things that I realized over the last kind of two, two and a half years of starting my own studio was how much the show was an expression of how profoundly unhappy I was that my ability to do a show every two weeks, every three weeks, really came out of the fact that I was unhappy at work. I had all this leftover creative energy. I had a voice that felt like it wasn't being listened to. I wasn't producing work I was proud of. And I think if I'm being even honest, that realization started to dawn on me after I got laid off the last time before I started the studio. Whenever they would ask you and say, hey, you know, can you do a case study or two for and highlight the work you've done in the last five years?

And I really couldn't find work that I thought represented who I was. I couldn't find work that felt like it was good enough. I had to go back to time periods before that. And I think for me, it just I had already realized at that point that I felt like I had become more of a politician and an interventionist and a therapist and, you know, a lot of other things.

Then a creative, a strategist, a leader, the things that I really love to do. And it was a it was a tough wake up call. Right. And I think that in a lot of ways, coming back to do this show, I had to just get into a better headspace in the relationship to that content, because I think whenever I looked at the show, the problem was what I saw was how unhappy I was.

I know that the impact has been different. I know that again, that it wasn't all that way, but but for me, it was just whenever I started to do work, I was proud of again, whenever I started to do work that I loved again, what happened was I didn't have the time or the energy or all of that leftover or whatever it was to do a show every 2 or 3 weeks, because all of that was now going into doing work that I was proud of.

And it's just it's a weird conversation, right? Because I think I've always said that, you know, so much of this show was about the audience, is about you, is about how do you help? But it was also probably more about me because it allowed me to be self-reflective. It allowed me to be able to take the time to think about a lot of these things, and the reason I want to share this is because, look, I think especially right now with the industry just being an unmitigated dumpster fire, so many people are going through this, right?

And once again, nobody's talking about it. I think, you know, I'd shared my job search, a very public face plant of going out there. And and I think honestly, being a little bit of a canary in the coal mine of sharing that journey, trying to almost destroy my brand, because I think I also have realized how some of what I've created has been toxic, has been a problem, because I think for a lot of people, you know, the number one comment I got after I got laid off was the number of people that would tell me, oh, you could work anywhere you want, right?

Like, oh, somehow, like I hadn't made it. That is such an incredibly toxic construct that I think far too many leaders in our industry propagate that at some point. Right. You make it or you can work where you want or you aren't subject to imposter syndrome or these sort of problems or these things. And that's just all bullshit, right?

It's not true. And I think that was a large part of it for me when I just said, look, I want to be able to share this publicly, even though if it's embarrassing, even if it hurts, like to, to just kind of destroy what people maybe think about me. And part of that was, I think I was also just destroying myself going through that process, because I think that's the hard part in going through any of this, is that it is such a mental health journey.

It is such a struggle for so many of us, and normally we don't ever talk about that or share that. So I think that's what I'm going to do with the show going forward. It's going to be shorter because I think I've had to just be honest that I don't have the time. I don't have the energy to do long form shows the way that I used to.

I also kind of still feel like the first 129 shows around a lot of topics, around a lot of things around in house still hold up, right? I think almost depressingly so, because so many of the problems that I experienced when I was in house, people are still going through. Right? But so again, I want to be able to do it shorter.

I'm going to release it in a bunch of different formats. So for those of you who love the podcast, great, the podcast episodes are going to keep coming out. I think I'm going to be able to start to release it on videos. I think I'm going to start with LinkedIn and Instagram, see if there's an appetite for that, maybe gone to TikTok and people are interested for that.

If you are, let me know. I think a lot of what I want to talk about is my journey in going out on my own, and a lot of the self-discovery and the things that I've done. If there are other topics you want to hear about, as always, let me know. Because again, I want to be a little more reactionary and a little less plan than how I'm doing a lot of this.

I think I'm still just going to release shows whenever I'm happy with the content. That's not going to change, and it's still it's free. So who are you going to complain to? Sorry. So but I think that's right. It is for me. Right. Because I do think that this platform of the crazy one is more relevant than ever.

I think it's more relevant to own who you are, to own your voice, to to understand that the things that make you different, that everybody else tries to convince you are a weakness, are really a strength. And we need that now more than ever. And so I think that's what I want to be able to, to do with this is to do something different, to try some different things, to experiment, to see what it's like to get back in the saddle, to bring the show back, to be able to do a lot of this because it has been right.

It's been a journey. So I started my own studio. It's called crazy. I fell into what everybody else did, where you take the name and you drop the vowels, so it's crazy. Why go check it out? It's crazy. Design.com and we've been doing a lot of work, and I've been doing a lot of stuff that I'm proud of, hasn't come with it's trials and tribulations there as well, because all creative work does.

But I want to get the conversation going again. I want to hear about what's on your mind. I want to share more of what I've been going through. I want to try to get back to a healthier relationship with the show and with doing this. And we're talking to people and knowing that I can still help. And while I lost my voice there for a while, it didn't need to mean it needed to be gone forever.

So I hope you want to go on this journey with me. We're going to start it back up from essentially zero again. So I, you know, look, I'm going to appreciate if you want to reshare it, you know, repost it, God forbid retweet it if you're still on X or whatever reason. But, you know, do whatever it is you want to do with that to be able to help kind of get the word out there to start building the community back again.

I appreciate the patience. I appreciate those of you who reached out all the words of encouragement and the people that I've talked to and those sort of things about the show who suggested ideas and other things like that. I took it all to heart. Right? I really did. I think it was just I wasn't in the right headspace yet to feel like I could come back and talk about it in a useful or productive way.

I felt like a lot of what I would speak from would be frustration and anger and things like that, and God knows we've got more than our fair share of that running around right now. We don't need another one. But so we're going to Sariah this up. I got a bunch of episodes that are already recorded that are in the tank for being able to do this, that we're going to release probably 2 or 3 a week going forward.

So I'm sure there's a good pipeline of that. So stay tuned. Let me know what you want to hear about. And as always, stay crazy.