Systematic 258

Brett: [00:00:00 ] [00:00:00 ]My guest this week is Aaron Mahnke he’s the creator of the Lore podcasts and a small empire. That’s grown up around it. How’s it going, Aaron?

[00:00:15 ] Aaron: [00:00:15 ] Hey, Brett, I am doing well. I’m doing well. How are you?

[00:00:17 ]Brett: [00:00:17 ] I’m good. I haven’t talked to you since 2016 and at that point a lot had happened since the last time I talked to you before that, and I feel like things have only exponentially grown for you since then.

[00:00:32 ] Aaron: [00:00:32 ] Things are indeed busy. Yes. And I like it that way. It’s been really fun.

[00:00:38 ] Brett: [00:00:38 ] Yeah. So I think we talked about this back in 2016, but when I first became aware of you kind of cross paths with you, you were of tossing ideas against the wall with frictionless workflow stuff and kind of putting out things like index cards and whatnot. And then all of this sudden. [00:01:00 ] You put out a podcast that I don’t think you had like strong, a strong inclination that it was going to change your life. And it, it did.

[00:01:12 ] Aaron: [00:01:12 ] It did it really did. Yeah. I tell people when they ask me, you know, how did you start lore? I say, have you ever seen one of those detective movies where the. You know, the clever detectives in the library of this English Manor and he sort of leans on a bookshelf and a door swings open because he leaned on the right thing.

[00:01:28 ]That’s how I fell into this. It was all complete happenstance and I have just been making it up as I go ever since.

[00:01:37 ] Brett: [00:01:37 ] Laura gained more and more popularity. Eventually got. Optioned as an Amazon show. What other Lore specifically, we’ll talk about some of your other shows soon, but like what other major avenues has Laura taken since then?

[00:01:51 ] Aaron: [00:01:51 ] Shortly after the TV offers rolled in, I had a number of literary agents reach out they’re these mythical [00:02:00 ] people that a lot of authors don’t think actually exist because. It’s so hard to attain. And I had a lot of them knocking on my door, which was super great. So I teamed up with one of them sold a three book lore series to penguin random house.

[00:02:12 ] The first of the books came out the same. I think the same. It was the same month. I, it might’ve been the same week as the first season of the TV show. So it was sort of a big October, 2017, I think 17 and 18. I think that was the 2017 was the, was like the big month where everything landed. Yeah. And and then, I don’t really think of it as a spinoff, but I’ve taken Lore on the road, you know, we’ve done.

[00:02:35 ]Chad who composes music for the show. He’s a amazing classical pianist. He’s got an album out now. That’s just tearing up the charts in his category. He recorded at Abbey road. He’s signed on with Decca records legendary. Record that. Yeah he’s the bomb and we’ll go on tour and do 15 or 20 cities across the country over the course of a few months, just, you know, go out and do a few come back home recuperate and do lore live in front of an audience of a [00:03:00 ] thousand or two people.

[00:03:01 ]It’s always a really fun time.

[00:03:03 ] Brett: [00:03:03 ] That’s amazing. So you started production company, I think is what you would call it grim and mild.

[00:03:09 ] Aaron: [00:03:09 ] Yeah. Yeah. About three years ago, was it three years ago? Two and a half. I, heart radio approached me and they said, Hey, we love what you do with lore. And we want you to make more shows. And so what we want to do is we want to Pay you for your services, but also provide you with production, muscle, and staff and people who can take your ideas and make them into shows.

[00:03:29 ] And the first thing we launched was a show called cabinet of curiosities which is my love letter to Paul Harvey and the rest of the story and a little bit of uh Ripley’s believe it or not. And it comes out twice a week. Each episode has two tiny five minute stories in it that are these little.

[00:03:44 ] You know, delightful, wonderful, curious, vignettes about inventions are amazing people. And then after that, it’s just been that’s the same model for every show. And when I went to re up that deal a year later, or two years later, I guess it’s been three because I just hit the year [00:04:00 ] Mark on grim and mild.

[00:04:01 ] Anyway, I needed a more of a. I needed to hire people I needed at the time I was doing cabinet with contracts, Unobscured. And then unobscured, that was another show I brought on. And I was doing that with paid contractors, but I wanted to hire people and, you know, give health insurance and all those benefits and have people on staff who could do other things too.

[00:04:19 ] So I started a production company to sort of be the umbrella for that expensive venture. And and now everything is sort of bundled up under that umbrella that I guess it’s a network in a sense of grim and mild.

[00:04:31 ] Brett: [00:04:31 ] How big is your team now?

[00:04:33 ] Aaron: [00:04:33 ] I have five paid staff members. And I have another, I think three contractors who still, they’d rather just be contractors, they’re doing it, you know, around a day job or things like that.

[00:04:43 ]I think, you know, Harry Marks he’s floated in our circle for years. Harry writes cabinet for me. He’s my main guy for cabinet. Yeah. And he does that around a full-time job. So there’s no need to hire him and all that. Yeah, it’s great. So yeah, th the team grows as it needs to and, you know, [00:05:00 ] there’s seasons for a lot of these shows and ebbs and flows, and so people can move around and, you know, we’re developing other stuff and working on other shows that haven’t come out yet.

[00:05:08 ] And it’s exciting. We do team meetings every month, every every Monday and writers’ rooms for different shows on a regular basis. It’s it feels like a. The production company.

[00:05:18 ] Brett: [00:05:18 ] Like I’m just. I did not succeed at being independent. Like I recently took a day job after a decade of doing my own version of throwing things against the wall and seeing what sticks and I feel like I am the typical story of people who try to make it independently.

[00:05:35 ] And you are the very atypical story of of independent success.

[00:05:41 ]Aaron: [00:05:41 ] Yeah. I like, you know, I’ve said it already and I’ll say it many times today, but I am making this up as I go. I. There was no manual to tell me what to do. It did help that I was running A small one person designed business for about seven years, but that just taught me about things like taxes and how to handle clients.

[00:05:58 ] But I did take a lot of those [00:06:00 ] skills, you know, how to sell a logo to a local plumber who doesn’t necessarily think he needs one to going out to sponsors, you know, in those very early days, it was like me knocking on doors. I remember just a couple of months after lore. Came out. And then the numbers were screaming up and I thought, Oh, it’s getting to the point where I can go get advertisers, but I didn’t know how to do it.

[00:06:22 ] So I just went to contact forms on websites, for places like Squarespace or Casper and sent messages into their customer service team and said, Hey, I’ve got this show and here’s its numbers. And I don’t know who in your company to talk to, but could you point me that way? And they always would. And and it work