 What's going on everybody? Welcome back to another video. I have a very special guest. Here is Tina Hwang. That's right in the flesh because we are at the Content Creator Meetup in Salt Lake City, Utah. I've interviewed Luke, I've interviewed Ken, and now I get the extreme privilege to interview Tina. If you do not know who Tina is, she is a YouTube extraordinaire, an ex-fang data scientist, entrepreneur, and a personal friend. She's inspired hundreds of thousands of data scientists on their way to break into the field. In doing so, she's broken into our hearts. Oh, wow. I didn't know I'd expect that one. Thank you so much for joining. I really appreciate you being here. Of course. It's been just absolutely amazing, just one meeting you in person because we've talked, we've chatted, we've done collaborations on not just our channels, but different channels as well. It's been super great meeting you. How have you been feeling about the whole Meetup so far? It's been really good because this is our second Meetup, but it's the first time I've actually met Alex here. I think the first time around, we were trying to figure things out, but the second time, all props to Ken, he made everything really, really good. 100%. The events that happened, the sponsors that were there, they were really in line with us as content creators as what we're doing. It's just been very inspiring in general because people are coming here with their own perspectives, their own way of producing content and their own content strategies and visions. I think content creation is generally a very lonely activity, so being able to have that perspective and creating content with other people, incorporating other people's perspectives is very inspiring. Yeah, absolutely. I 100% agree. It's been great just meeting everybody because I meet everyone online, but I'm very much in my own silo, so it's really cool to meet everybody. All right, let's see. I have a wide array of questions. None of them are necessarily related to each other, but I'm hoping to get to know you and let other people get to know you a little bit better as a person and as just a person instead of just as like a data science YouTuber, right? As a person? Yeah. Who knows what will come of that? Who knows these days? Like, I don't know. I don't even know these questions. I'm just going to say whatever comes into my head. Yeah, again, some are personal, some aren't, right? So one of the best things that I've found is learning about people's backgrounds in terms of people who inspire them. Who would you say is somebody who has been really important in your life to help bring you to where you are? Is there a single person, a book? It doesn't have to be a person. It could be anything. That's a really good question. I do read a lot, and I think I have incorporated a lot of things that I read into my life. If there's one person that has really changed my perspective of life, it would be my mom, because she has a very unconventional approach. So I feel like for most Asian people especially, there's this idea of getting good grades, like going to a good school, and then getting a good job, right? My mom is the complete opposite. She was like, Tina, why are you working at Facebook? This is like, you should be doing your own thing. So it's very different. And also, I think another, a book that is just coming to my head right now is a book called, it's by Victor Frankel. It's called Man's Search for Meaning. It's a very short book, highly recommended to people. It's about Victor Frankel's experience in the Holocaust. And it was not great to be put lightly. And through that, he developed a philosophy essentially. And I think one of the most impactful things I learned from that, there's this quote, I'm going to paraphrase here, is that the last human freedom is your ability to respond to whatever it is that happening to you. Nobody can take away your last human freedom, no matter what happens. And that was very inspiring to me because, obviously, I wasn't in the Holocaust, but anything that did happen in my life, like there was ups, there was downs, I kind of like hold that really deeply in my heart because, again, like the way that I respond to the external environment is going to be my last freedom. So knowing that I always have that control is very empowering. Yeah, that's, that's really powerful. I thought about similar things, but never in that light. Like it's really interesting how, yeah, you get to choose how you respond. Nobody can choose for you, or make you choose a specific way. Yeah, I love that. And so like, your mom, how would you say like, that has that way of her inspiring you of being more, hey, do your own thing. You don't have to do this, this and this. Has that pushed you more towards being like more of an entrepreneur, or kind of just do whatever you want? Like how has that impacted you? Yeah, for sure. So nobody in my family has managed to hold down a job. Sorry, I'm like revealing that about my family. Literally, nobody has managed to hold down a job because my entire family is very much entrepreneurial. I am by far the most highly educated person in my family. I think it's just the way that my mom thinks about things. And I mean, in general, my family in some ways, the way that they think about things, they don't they don't see things as a path. Like they are always been people is like, I don't know what's happening, but we'll figure it out, right? Like, they also grew up in a place in the time in China that was very volatile, like nobody knows what's happening. So it's like this confidence that you can be in control of whatever it is that you choose to do. And in some ways, that is very empowering, because even say like you work at a company, nothing wrong with that. But you actually don't have a lot of control in the company, they can fire you at any point. Like your boss tells you to do something. But when you're doing it by yourself, you actually have a lot of control. I mean, also in bad ways, because maybe you like you screw up and you lose everything, like that's part of that control as well. So that's something that was kind of like beaten into me as a child. They never told me to do specific things. But they that's like what they always told me. And then my mom's version of training me is essentially throwing me into very uncomfortable situations like this. He's just like, you just got to go for it. Yeah, I know. She's like, I mean, an example was, you know, when I was 17 years old, I was supposed to be renting a place I was I was showing me to help manage a property, right? I was 17 years old, like literally don't know what's happening. So she's like, he got to do this now, something called crap, like I got and you know what it worked because now I'm like, oh man, like I know how to do this now. So that's always been the way that she she does things. Yeah, no, I love that. I've noticed somewhat similar things with other people who I've met. They're like, my parents very much gave me freedom to do what I want and like push me to be more open-minded, which is really unique because most of the people I work with, they're like, you know, my parents, they wanted me to do this route and I kind of just did this. And they were always like, wish I didn't did more. My parents were the very, very similar. They were like, as long as you're happy, money is not the most important thing in the world as long as you're happy. And you know, that's kind of, I've always kind of followed that. And so I kind of follow my heart and my passions more than like, I'm going to go be a lawyer to make a lot of money because I almost went down that path. So I mean, that's, that's really great. I feel like me as a parent, I need to be, I want to be like that. I want to be like your mom. I feel like, okay, so my mom is, it's not exactly like that. She's not like go follow your passion. It's, it's, she does believe, she like, how do I explain it? She expects success from me. And it's not necessarily like do whatever I want and end up on the streets. You'd be like, that's not good. That's, that's good. That's a good thing. Like your parents are like, okay, you can end up on the streets if you want. Exactly. But yeah, like there, there is that like structure. They do expect things from me. And there are like, yeah, it's hard. It's hard to explain. Like they do expect things from me. It's not necessarily just follow like my happiness or my passion. There's, I think in Asian culture, it's like essentially there is a sense of duty. Like you do need to do your duty and you need to create a life for yourself that you can be successful in those ways. But within the way in which you do this is up to you. Yeah. No, that's great. I, I, I totally like, I understand the Asian culture fairly well. I'm obviously not as entwined, but like, you know, I've, I've been a part of that in many different ways. And yeah, the American culture is just not like that in, in several ways. And so, yeah, I think you've probably experienced that a lot more than I have and probably a lot of other people in the US, but really interesting, really, really fascinating. So like you've done your YouTube thing, you're still doing it. What's, what's next? You've done it for what two years, two, two and a half years? Oh yeah, two years exactly. Exactly two years. So like, you know, you're, it's always funny because like two years for a YouTube career is like halfway through your career, right? It is. So what's next? Like, are there any like big things that you want to either share or just like some things that you're excited about that you have planned? Yeah, I think I'm pretty realistic in, in a sense. Like I know that I am not going to be doing YouTube and making videos for the rest of my life. That's very rare that anybody ever does. So knowing that right now, I love making videos. Like this is something that I love to do. However, I don't want this to be my primary revenue stream because that's very stressful. It's very stressful because you have to hit views and it's harder to experiment with things because if you just do a wild card, it's very high likelihood that it's not going to do well. So for me right now, I want to keep doing YouTube, but I have essentially two companies that I'm working on. The first one is Learn Media, which is kind of why we're all together right now. And it's a, it's kind of like an agency in which we have a bunch of creators that we have over here. And then we also have brands coming to us and we understand like, basically we ask them like, what is it that you want to accomplish? Do you want to get a lot of views? Do you want people to do conversions? And then we help them design campaigns. And I think we're in a very good position to do this because we are content creators and a lot of brands are not very good at that, no offense to certain brands. I don't really understand how advertisement work, how content creators work. So that's one of them. And the other thing I'm doing right now is called the Lonely Octopus platform. Oh, see, I don't, I don't know about this. Lonely Octopus? Yeah, tell me about this because I don't know what this is. Yeah, so something I'm working on with, working with Lucon, Luc Bruce. So it's, because I think my channel over time, it's grown out of data science. It's more about like continuous learning education. It's really about adult learning and how to pretty much like craft a life that you want, which is not something that you can just go get a job and be happy doing that. It has to be a very intentional process. So what I really, it's the most simple thing is that most people, they want to learn something, want to do something, they want to transition to data science, transition to data analytics. So it's not necessarily they don't know how to do it. It's because they don't do it, right? So I think, and why is it that people don't do it? So we interviewed a lot of different people and there are two things that cropped up. The first one is that people were lonely. I love that. Very, very direct in the name because octopi have eight arms so you can make eight friends. That is so sweet. Yeah. So that was one of them. Like they feel really alone. I think it makes a lot of sense because when you're adult, people around you are not going to be wanting to do the same things anymore. You have responsibilities. You can't just like sit there and not go to your job or like not take care of your family. So that's your thing. Yeah, you shouldn't do that. Like very bad. Would not recommend. And then the other thing is people are afraid because they are, they have this feeling like, what if I do all of this and then nothing comes out of it? Like what if I do the data analytics survey? It takes me six months to do and nothing, like, like nothing happens out of this. It's a really big fear. And I think it stops people from actually starting in the first place. So a lonely octopus is about basically if you go through the program, we're not going to go like you, you're going to get a job, right? But I'm going to get you to a place in which you actually complete what it is that you want to do. So for example, the Google data, like certificate, you'll get that and you're going to be in a position in which you can be interviewing. So that's the promise if you stick here. I think in terms of content, like we are more about accountability, group learning. I've been live streaming for over a year and a half now with my study with me live streams. And that's kind of where this stems from. It's about keeping each other accountable to doing things that you want to do. And we're content second, accountability first. I think there's amazing content is out there already like Coursera, like Udacity and things like that. Like we don't go in, we don't need to go make more content. We just have to get people to actually use the content. Dropout rates are between four and 10, like only four to 10% of people actually complete a course, which is ridiculous. So we want to make it so that people going through this program able to do this. I'm not going to go too much because I feel like I'm going to ramble for a lot, but we want to make this program like very incentivized. So for example, going to data analytics, we're going to data science. It's not going to be like I can buy mentorship. No, it's about being groups of people you're going towards the same goal. And if you're we're going to keep you accountable, you're going to have a tracking everything that you're doing. And if you're consistent, you earn octocoins in which you can then trade for different things that you want. Like you can like say like 16 octocoins you can trade for a mentorship session, a resume review one on one with maybe me or Luke. So that's how we want to incentivize people to go through it. That's cool. Are you guys already doing that? Yeah, so that's fantastic. Alpha was pretty much my life stream. And we're building out the beta right now should be by fall to later this year. That is fantastic. Do you already have like a website build that people can go to like a landing page or anything? So we are building that right now. So that should be out pretty soon. And we're just hacking it together. Like I'm going to see it's like kind of terrible because it's the beta, right? So I think what we're trying to do is like we're not going to build an entire platform. We're putting together our third party tools. And as long as that works. Okay, well, if by the time you guys are watching this, it's out, I will have a link in the description. You can go check it out. I don't know if it's going to be any good, but based off what you told me, it sounds really, really interesting. So if you're a lonely octopi, it sounds like you can make some octopi friends. You have eight arms, you can make at least eight friends. Don't blame Luke for this theme. That was completely me. I don't know. You mean you get the credit. Luke does not get the credit. Oh, no, like I don't think Luke wants to get the credit for this one because it doesn't really make any sense. But anyway, well, either way, it's a really unique name. Nevertheless, because you can't forget that. Can you, right? If you're like, I'm part of the lonely octopus program. Are you really going to forget that? You'll never, I'll never forget it. So, you know, you've gone through, I mean, I've talked to you several times. You've gone through a lot, not just like with your YouTube journey, but your career as well as personal. Looking back, like going back and talking to yourself, let's say three years ago, right before you started YouTube in that space where you were still had a big tech job. You were just starting YouTube. Is there any piece of advice that you or anything that you wish you had have known going into this that you're like, if I had known this, if I had known this in either my career or my YouTube journey or whatever, that that would have made a huge impact on a lot of the decisions I had made. I have made up until now. Yeah, that's a really good question. I think what I would have told myself is to be more kind to me. I think that's a really big one because I've always been the type of person who's like, I must like achieve this goal. You know, like, I need to do this. I need to do that. And I think even prior to three years ago, because of that was the way that I was, like, I got to get good grades, like, you know, I got to my masters and do all these things. I was never able to explore outside of that. I was so afraid of failure. Extremely afraid of failure. And that means I never explored outside of the domains that I felt I was going to do good in. So being, I guess, like being kind to myself as in like accepting the fact that it's okay for this to happen. It's okay to not push myself so hard all the time. And pretty much back in December was a really hard time for me because I was trying to balance a full time job with YouTube. And I was not kind to myself, like I must make YouTube videos and they have to be this quality and I must do good on my job as well. But kind of hit a point where I'm like, wow, like, I'm literally having a mental breakdown. So, so yeah, I think that's what I would tell myself just in general, like it's okay to be kind to yourself. Yeah. Yeah, no, that's, that's fantastic advice. Really, really, I mean, I feel like there's a lot of intertwined advice in that in just what you said, it's not only be kind. It's also like, you know, take it easy on yourself in terms of like workload, take it easy on your on yourself in terms of like expectations. Like, you know, there's a lot of advice in that little like, the little sentence that you said, you know, I love that. So let me check because I have one more question I believe I wanted to answer. I don't want to miss it. This one goes back to your YouTube channel. Of course, we talked about a variety of things, but your channel has grown incredibly fast, especially in the data space, like, you know, you passed Ken, you've passed me, you were always passed me, I think. I don't think I ever was like, when did you start your YouTube channel? Like two and a half years ago. So maybe you did pass me at some point. I think we were like around, because I think Ken was first and everybody just kind of like showed up. Yeah. So, so, you know, you, you, if you haven't seen our channel, I'm going to give it a plug at the end. But again, you should go check it out because usually like 380,000, I believe. Is it higher than that now? You have, you have really taken off in a huge way in the lot where a lot of other creators haven't. You know, what do you think has like made you stand out or made you grow at that rate that maybe other, not that we don't have it, but like, what's, what's made you kind of have that growth that maybe other channels haven't? What do you think? What's that special sauce that I need to do? It's like, it's like, it's like, you know, startups like, what's your special sauce? Yeah, I need, I need to know this so that I can pass you in like the future. And I think it's like, I think each content creator is different, right? Like the style of content, like it really, each person has to find what it is that they are good at, like what their strength is, what makes them different. I think for me, I did a lot of experimenting. I started up very, very much about career and data science, very specific. And I guess there's like two factors. The first one is being very authentic to myself. Like, I don't try to pretend to know things because I don't know things. Like, you know, that's just kind of the way it is. And I'm just trying to share the fact that I don't know things. And people love that. They're like, thank you. I don't know things either. Yeah. Yeah. It's like, I think it was like, I don't know things, but this is how I'm going to approach it. And like, eventually I'll know things probably. So I think that's one. And the other one is I'm very experimental because I, you know, there's some, some channels are very like specific to a certain domain, which I think is really good. If that's like the domain that you're very interested in, and especially if you're doing as a business, right? Like this is like where you want to niche down. I think for me, I'm very experimental in the sense like if I feel like making content that's outside of the data niche or something like that, I'm going to go do it. Like worst case scenario does bad. And I just go back to the original niche, right? Best case scenario is I get out of that local maximum. And I opened up an completely new area of exploration. And for me, I think that those breakthroughs was going from data science into how to learn in general, like adult based learning. Again, it's very, that is very integral to what it is I'm doing. And another, yeah, I guess like there is like connection. I'm just like, I'm going to make a video about my cat. Like I'm not going to do that connection. I have a vision for my channel. And the vision is that I'm, I want to be a place in which young and ambitious people are able to find resources, like very practical resources on how it is that they want to design their lives. How does that they want to achieve their goals so that they are able to craft a life that they want? Because I don't think you should allow other people ever to craft your life. It is very hard to do so, but it is very worth it. So that is kind of like a central theme. I've done like productivity base. I've done like learning stuff. Now I'm just like commentary about certain things and like how to like all of this kind of has a similar thread in my mind. Yeah. No, that's fantastic. I mean, like, yeah, I know they're doing a workshop downstairs right now. But that's fantastic. It sounds like just a lot of testing, trying things out, like not being afraid to branch out from the content that is already done well. And you know, I've enjoyed a lot of the kind of different stuff that you've made that I'm like, I thought you did data science, but you do a lot of like productivity stuff, which I like the adult based learning stuff that you've done, because I'm like, I kind of somewhat do a little bit of that, but you have leaned into it really heavily, which is really neat. So that's all the questions I had for you. Thank you so much guys. If you have not heard of Tina or seen her channel, absolutely check it out. She's absolutely phenomenal. Her content is amazing. And she's always doing different stuff. And so if you like, like listening to her and her personality and hers a person, I highly recommend you checking it out. Tina, thank you so much for joining me on my channel. I really appreciate it. Thank you for those kind words and thanks for having me.