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Tasteful Skills
“Tasteful Skills” argues that the best agent skills are not documentation or best-practice lists.
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What 72 Hours with Colin & Samir Taught Me About Taste
TL;DR
Colin and Samir’s real superpower is people, not just content — Tom’s core takeaway is that their deepest form of taste shows up in who they gather, back, and build for, from Press Publish NYC to the creators they’ve championed along the way.
Their career took off only after they stopped centering themselves — after roughly 5-6 years of flatlined views, odd jobs, and no money, they found traction by turning the camera toward other creators and documenting the business of YouTube through interviews and behind-the-scenes storytelling.
They survived the brutal middle that kills most creator careers — before the Webbies, Time 100 mention, and a 130,000-subscriber newsletter, they endured years of being told their work was basically worthless, including a VC who called their videos “home movies” and told them to quit.
Press Publish NYC was designed around generosity, not status — instead of sorting by channel size, the event asked applicants two questions, “What are you here to give?” and “What are you here to receive?”, letting Colin and Samir curate for contribution and shared experience across 500 people.
Loss sharpened their sense of what actually matters — just six months after major career recognition, both lost their houses in the Palisades fire, and the experience reframed success around health, family, and urgency, pushing them to finally ‘throw the backpack over the fence’ and commit to the event.
Casey Neistat’s surprise appearance crystallized the whole thesis — his warning that the “creator economy” has drifted away from creativity underscored Tom’s broader point: the most meaningful creative chains happen when one person keeps the door open for the next.
The Breakdown
The room in Brooklyn that felt bigger than a conference
Tom opens on Press Publish NYC as something more intimate than an industry event: a rare moment where creators, educators, and builders were all under one roof and it felt like a neighborhood, not a market. Watching Colin and Samir walk onstage, he realizes this isn’t really a story about a conference — it’s about two people who “jumped the fence and opened the door for the rest of us.”
Samir’s Goodfellas moment and the first creative spark
Samir tells the classic origin story: watching the opening of Goodfellas in college, pausing it in bed, and deciding, “whatever that is, I want to do this,” even though he was an economics major at the time. Tom uses that to frame a universal creator experience — the moment something grabs you so hard you can’t return to the safe plan.
A YouTube upload, a stranger viewer, and a life-changing collaboration
The early internet piece is almost mythic here: Colin uploads a video, 500 strangers watch it, and one of them is Samir. What sticks is Samir’s description of finally collaborating with someone who could see the thing in his head — “that’s it, that’s what’s in my head” — which Tom presents as the emotional core of creative partnership.
Throwing the backpack over the fence
After building The Lacrosse Network into something legit enough to become Whistle Sports, Colin and Samir leave salary, benefits, and a parent-explainable career behind. They describe the leap with their favorite metaphor: someone has to throw the backpack over the fence first, because once it’s over, you have no choice but to climb after it.
Five years of a dead-heartbeat graph
Tom lingers on the part most creator stories skip: five or six years of videos nobody watched, random production gigs, and the feeling that the whole bet might have been a delusion. The low point gets distilled into one brutal VC meeting where an investor tells Samir they’re not making broadcast, they’re making “home movies,” and they’re not even very good at it — a rejection so memorable they printed the phrase on a poster.
Family pressure, debt, and what persistence really costs
The struggle isn’t just on YouTube analytics; it shows up at the dinner table, in immigrant-family scarcity mindsets, in debt, in moving home, and in asking partners to come along for chaos. Colin recalls meeting Maddie while he was $20,000 in debt without a car in LA, then dragging them both back after a last-minute brand opportunity saved the company.
The pivot: stop talking about yourself, start documenting the ecosystem
The breakthrough comes when they stop making the channel about Colin and Samir and start asking other creators how the machine works. Their interviews and docs — including the MrBeast Burger story, where they expected 10,000 people — become a new kind of media product: creator business coverage made by people inside the culture.
Success, wildfire, and the event that proved the point
Tom races through the upside — living-room dominance, MrBeast’s $100 million Amazon deal, creator brands crossing a billion, a 130,000-subscriber newsletter, Webby recognition, even Time 100 — before the floor drops out. Both lose their houses in the Palisades fire, but instead of retreating, they use that shock to commit to The Lighthouse and Press Publish NYC, designing it around intimacy, detail, and generosity rather than clout.
Casey Neistat, an open door, and Tom’s final lesson about taste
The surprise guest is Casey Neistat, who says YouTube once felt magical because there was “no distance” between the work and the audience, and warns that the focus has shifted from the creator part to the economy part. Backstage, Tom introduces stop-motion artist Burnaby to Casey, and that tiny handoff becomes the thesis of the whole film: the best creative instinct isn’t just what you make, it’s who you make room for next.
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