By now you’ve no doubt seen how incredible generative AI can be at helping to create outlines, emails, scripts and articles.
And the imagery and video that AI is capable of producing is advancing swiftly.
But all of that content is based on creative work that already exists, and that could potentially include your work! Is that something you need to protect yourself against? Where do you even start?
That’s what we’re covering in today’s episode of Partnership Unpacked.
Welcome back to Partnership Unpacked, where I selfishly use this time to pick the brains of experts at strategic partnerships, channel programs, affiliates, influencer marketing, and relationship building… oh, and you get to learn too! Subscribe to learn how you can amplify your growth strategy – with a solid takeaway every episode from partnership experts in the industry.
Imagine that you’ve spent countless hours building up an incredible, and valuable, archive of content – whether that’s blog posts, videos, or podcasts – and now suddenly other businesses are using generative AI tools to create content of their own that’s drawing on your work.
Is there anything you can do to safeguard your content, and your audience? Should you really be worried?
And what about when you’re working directly with brands, as an influencer or content creator, how should you approach these relationships?
That’s what Eric Farber is here to help you with.
He is the Founder and CEO of Creators Legal, the first and only DIY Legal Solutions company for the creative industry. He spent decades working as a sports and entertainment attorney and has represented a variety of artists and entertainers such as the Tupac Shakur Estate. Farber started Creators Legal to help those in the creator economy get high level, quality contracts and legal solutions at a reasonable price. And I can’t wait to get his expert help today with everything that’s going on with AI and influencer marketing.
Partnership Unpacked host Mike Allton talked to Eric Farber about:
♉️ How AI is impacting creators and influencers today
♉️ How creators and influencers can protect their work
♉️ Why contracts are important, and how to proceed with them
Learn more about Eric Farber
Resources & Brands mentioned in this episode
Full Notes & Transcript:
(Lightly edited)
How Influencers Can Protect Their Work Despite The AI Overlords with Eric Farber
How Influencers Can Protect Their Work Despite The AI Overlords with Eric Farber
[00:00:00] Mike Allton: By now, you’ve no doubt seen how incredible generative AI can be at helping create outlines, emails, scripts, and articles and imagery. And the video that AI is capable of producing is advancing swiftly, but. All that content is based on creative work that already exists, and that could potentially include your work.
Is that something you need to protect yourself against? Where do you even start? That’s what we’re covering in today’s episode of Partnership Unpacked.
This is Partnership unpacked your Go-to Guide to Growing Your Business through partnerships quickly. I’m your host, Mike Alton, and each episode unpacks the winning strategies and latest trends from influencer marketing to brand partnerships and ideas that you can apply your own business to grow exponentially.
And now the rest of today’s episode, Welcome back to Partnership Unpacked, where I selfishly use this time to pick the brains of experts at strategic partnerships, channel programs, affiliates, influencer marketing, and relationship building. Oh, And you get to learn too. Subscribe to learn how you can amplify your growth strategy with a solid takeaway every episode from partnership experts in the industry.
Now, imagine you’ve spent countless hours building up an incredible and valuable archive of content, whether that’s blog posts, videos, or podcasts, and now suddenly, Other businesses are using generative AI tools to create content of their own. That’s drawing on your work. Is there anything you can do to safeguard your content and your audience?
Should you even really be worried? And what about when you’re working directly with brands as an influencer or content creator, how should you approach these relationships? That’s what Eric Farber is here to help you with. He’s the founder and c o of creators legal, the first and only d i y legal solutions company for the creative industry.
He spent. Decades working as a sports entertainment attorney and has represented a variety of artists and entertainers such as the Tupac Shakur Estate. Farber started, creators Legal to help those in the creator economy get high level quality contracts and legal solutions at a reasonable price, and I can’t wait to get his expert help today with everything that’s going on with AI and influencer marketing.
Eric, welcome to the show.
[00:02:20] Erk Farber: Hey, thanks for having me. It’s great to be here. [00:02:22] Mike Allton: Awesome, awesome. Could you first just tell us why you started Creators Legal and how it helps creators and influencers today? [00:02:29] Erk Farber: I started Creators Legal from an idea I had a really long time ago. I worked with a lot of different types of creators.
I mean, in the old days, we. Called creators, filmmakers, authors, theater people, musicians, they were all creators. It’s a different, it’s a different term now. I saw how a lot of people just couldn’t afford lawyers and really needed to get legal help on a lot of things that were basic templates and basic help.
I decided to put together Creator’s Legal as the legal Zoom for the Creator Economy to make it really easy for people to get high quality contracts without really expensive lawyers. That’s why I did it.
[00:03:11] Mike Allton: Awesome. Awesome. Now I do a little bit of fear Monering in the introduction, right? Where we’ve got AI and, and people are stealing our content, but, and some of that’s true, but how do you think AI can be beneficial to content creators and influencers today?
Let’s kind of start there and then we’ll hit. Back on. You know what we need to worry about?
[00:03:29] Erk Farber: Well, I think for content creators, I think for just about anybody, it doesn’t matter what business you’re in. I think AI is gonna be unbelievably helpful to a lot of people. It’s gonna cut down on a lot of tasks that are repetitive tasks.
It’s gonna cut, it’s going to, I use it constantly. It seems to be more creative than I am. There’s going to be a lot of different things that AI is going to be used for, whether that’s creating images, whether that’s clearing backgrounds, whether that’s or writing. There’s going to be AI marketing. There already is.
All of these things are already out there. We’re at the absolute infancy of all of it, and we’re going to see it really increase for content creators. I think it’s gonna make their jobs a lot easier. Content creating is really, really hard stuff, and it’s endless, and I think that they’re gonna see great leaps in the ability to get stuff done through ai.
[00:04:21] Mike Allton: I couldn’t agree more. I mean, I love to write. That’s one of my passions. I enjoy spending my Saturday afternoon alone with my laptop writing, and that’s all me. But where AI helps me a ton is coming up with ideas of what to write about. I have a weekly newsletter that I go that goes to my email subscribers.
I have a LinkedIn newsletter. I’ve got podcast recaps and blog posts. I’m creating a lot of content and it’s super helpful to me. People say, Hey, what are 10 issues facing influencers today? And right there, yeah. Gives it to me.
[00:04:53] Erk Farber: It’s amazing. I’m gonna go a step further. I wrote a book a few years ago called The Case for Culture, and I still have a law firm.
It’s a worker’s comp injury firm, Northern California. I don’t really work there much anymore. I resigned my day-to-day. Duties to start creators legal, but I decided I wanted to try to do some more writing. I love writing and do a lot of it. I was having some trouble at the law firm and it’s a cultural issue, so I thought I need to come up with a new plan.
I actually asked Chad, g p t. And I have the plus version if it knows my book, and it did. I said, what would Eric Farber suggest in this situation? And it came back with a better response based on the writing of my book, which I wrote. You know, started writing five years ago, published three years ago now, and it came up with a better solution to the issue than I think I would’ve, but it was based on my own philosophies.
You can upload stuff. And I’ve done this at this point, I actually helped another friend of mine who’s in the middle of writing her book and I said, you know, I don’t like your introduction and I’m gonna take some more of the, I’m gonna take some of this, I’m gonna upload it into chat G P T, and I’m gonna say, please write like this person, but rewrite the introduction.
And it came up with a brilliant introduction. So I think we’re seeing the ability to write and it’s in my own voice, which is truly amazing. There’s a better version of the writer Eric Farber stuck in chat.
[00:06:22] Mike Allton: Love it. Yeah, I love that. We can take a link now with, now with Che Gpt, although that’s coming, but with Google’s Bard solution, we can feed it content from our own website.
Again, from me, I’m a prolific blogger, so I’ve got all this blog content. I can feed it several different articles and say, okay, now I want to take these topics and go deeper. Give me an outline, you know, what are some pain points and that sort of thing. To your point, we’ve recently released a feature within Agorapulse where you can build a social media, post, tweet, LinkedIn post, whatever, and then use the built-in AI functionality we’ve added to rephrase it, make it funnier, make it more professional, make it more serious, you know, whatever tone you wanna apply to that post.
So you can feed it your basic information and then spin it at hashtags. All kinds of wonderful stuff. So that’s the quality.
[00:07:10] Erk Farber: The quality has become pretty unbelievable, and to think that we are in the absolute infancy of all of this is both exhilarating and very scary. At the same time, you can do what you’re talking about.
You don’t have to go to Bard. You can actually open up, there’s now you have to go in, do the paid version, and then you can get access to Bing at least as well as several different plugins. There’s a plugin called Ask your PDF, where you can go upload a pdf, and then it’ll actually analyze the PDF and you can sort of have a conversation with it.
And I know several people that are actually building off of that idea and that platform already for various different industries. It was very surprising to me. Just this morning I read an article that although more than 50% of Americans have heard of chat, G P T, only 14% have used it. And to me that’s kind of a shocking level because it is the conversation at every dinner table.
Mm-hmm. It’s the conversation at every dinner party that, you know, talking about ai, but very, very few people have joined in the fund, so to speak. The early adopters are certainly there. I was there the second. I knew about it. I did know about the building of of it going on. I’m following this stuff very closely.
We’re about to embark on our AI build at Creators Legal to make it easier to create contracts, but this is only 14%. You can really get ahead of the curve still in learning and building. There may only be 30 or 40 plugins. I think there’s actually 80 plugins. Available or about to launch with chat g p T, but my guess is there’s thousands already Google extensions that are there for content creators.
You brought up a a very interesting point, and it’s being litigated already. AI didn’t come out of the clouds. So to speak, it had to train its models. There’s the large language models, but there’s the learning models and it has to learn. So when we build creators legal, we will also be putting in a learning model.
So, so the information that is actually being entered into will be used. Not the privacy stuff, not the names, things like that. But the data will be used to help further and build the AI platform. Chat, G P T and the other systems, mid Journey, et cetera, had to use something to learn on. And there are now lawsuits going on suing these AI companies for copyright infringement, for using these tax books.
Photographs, paintings, all of these different things to go ahead and, and create what is now known as Chachi pt. We’re gonna see where some of those things end up. It’s just making its way into the courts right now. And voices too. That’s a pretty interesting one. And I think that that one’s pretty, I think that one is actually probably more clear cut than anything is that there are voiceover artists out there without their knowledge, their voices were used to help train the language models.
[00:10:24] Mike Allton: And as you say, this is all just in its infancy. I mean, experts will tell you this isn’t even true. Artificial intelligence. Yeah. We’re just calling it that out, out of convenience and, and in many cases, ignorance. But you’ve touched on one of the things. That worries both you and I about ai and we’re gonna come back to that.
Besides the use of our own materials, what, is there anything else that worries you about AI
[00:10:47] Erk Farber: In a very, very big way? It concerns me that AI is going to reduce jobs in huge swaths around the world, and especially in the United States. The predictions are now that it’s about 45. To 50% of all jobs will be automated out because of robotics and and AI within the next 10 to 15 years.
I actually think that that’s a long timeline and I think it’s gonna start happening a lot sooner than that.
[00:11:19] Mike Allton: Yeah, very likely. So we know one of the major issues that’s facing creators and influencers today is this idea of copyright infringement, particularly with AI generators potentially drawing from their published work.
How can creators protect themselves and under what circumstances? Is it okay do you think for someone’s work to be utilized?
[00:11:38] Erk Farber: Well, there’s the doctrine of fair use. Which is the ability to use somebody else’s copyrighted material for certain things like education, comparative work, things like that. The Goldsmith versus Andy Warhol estate case just came down within the last week, which one of the areas of the fair use doctrine is transformative use, where you take somebody else’s work and you really make it your own work.
And I dealt with that quite a bit in the Tupac world. Where somebody would take a photograph of Tupac and turn it into a piece of art. That’s transformative nature. The court ruled against the Andy Warhol estate or trust. I think it’s sort of foundation. In a case where Lynn Goldsmith, a very famous photographer, took a picture of Prince and she did that under license with, I believe it was Vanity Fair.
I may be wrong. The photograph was not actually ever used, but Vanity Fair had a license for it from years before when Prince passed away. And it might have been earlier than that that Andy Warhol had used those photographs and turned them into his iconic look and feel. The Chairman Mao Marilyn Monroe, and he did about 10 to 15 different versions of it after Prince passed away magazine, and it might have been Vanity Fair, had taken that and licensed that from the Andy Warhol Foundation.
Lynn Smith’s estate then Sues and says this is copyright infringement. At the end of the day, she ended up winning that case. I think there’s a lot of people that, that disagree with that decision. I think I’m one of them. The fact that, and I actually dealt with this, where people would take a photograph of Tupac, a famous photograph of Tupac, and basically change the colors a little bit and stick it on a t-shirt and sell it.
It’s not that they would take that and turn it into a piece of art that hangs in a gallery, and it is an actual transformative artwork that they have made their own. They were doing it for the pure purpose of trying to sell t-shirts. We stopped a lot of those over the years for Andy Warhol, he’s turning it into a piece of art that is.
Primarily known as a piece of art from Andy Warhol. He was, he himself was that iconic, and he took that photograph and turned it into something transformative in a series of artworks of many, many famous people. That alone is going to have very, very distinctive reverberation through the creator community and especially the art community, because taking from others, as Picasso said, you know, great art is stolen, everything builds on something else.
Th there’s nothing exists in a vacuum. When people create, and I think we’re going to see even more copyright infringement, suits and, and claims of copyright infringement, which I don’t agree with. So did that answer any of your question?
[00:14:32] Mike Allton: Yeah. So we’ve got a new precedents. Thanks for that decision. Is it inherent that the work that I’ve created is protected simply because I created and it’s covered under in creation, copyright, or is there something else I need to do? [00:14:48] Erk Farber: Well, there’s, there are different types of copyright. And there’s common law copyright. Anytime you create a work, it is automatically copyrighted. However, that doesn’t mean a whole lot. You want to have a registered copyright that allows you to actually enforce your copyright through the court system.
They will not let you bring a case, a federal case for copyright infringement, and that falls under the federal statutes unless it’s registered. It also allows you to do things like get attorney’s fees and enhance damages, statutory damages when you have a registered copyright. Creators are creating so much content that it would be absolutely impossible to register a copyright, even though it’s fairly inexpensive and it’s a fairly simple process.
Every single time they create a piece of content. So people really need to pick and choose what they’re doing. If you create a film, absolutely. If you create a book. Absolutely. And I have a podcast. I have not done a registered copyright on the podcast, and I’m not anymore. And I never was a registration specialist.
I was an infringement specialist where I went after people who infringed and brought court cases. Maybe I’ve done five registrations. When it comes to ai, this is very interesting, and again, we’re in the infancy. I totally and completely expect this to change. There has been no update to the copyright laws since the D M C A, the Digital Millennium Copyright Act in 1999 or 2000, I think is when it came out, 1998.
If somebody creates something using ai, there is a, the basic that it must be human created. That’s the basic rule of being able to get a copyright on something because by definition it’s not human created. The copyright office refused. There was a comic book that was done by a woman and she, it was a comic book, so it was images and words.
They gave her the copyright on the total comic book, but the individual images. She started bragging on social media that she didn’t create it. She created them through Mid Journey, I believe it was, and so the Copyright Office actually caught wind of this. Her bragging about this and said, you didn’t create this.
We’re taking away the copyrights. Wow. Because it was not human created. After that, the copyright office came out with a letter opinion. I don’t remember if it was specific to her book or not, or her images, but there’s lots of tools out there. Nobody is sitting there and drawing using sketch pencils.
There’s plenty of tools. There’s Photoshop. There’s Canva, there’s paint. There’s a million different things that people use. Those are tools. Does that mean that those are not human created? The copyright Office recognized that. So what they essentially have said now is, is that if you’ve used AI as a tool and not the only thing done, like give me an image of two guys on a podcast, right on YouTube, and you put that prompt into mid journey and it spits it out, and then that itself would probably not get copyright.
But just by using a prompt. But if you then take that image and you make significant and they haven’t, uh, specified this changes to it, maybe in Photoshop or whatever it is, then you can get a copyright because then the AI only became a creation or an enhancement tool. However, that’s gonna make registration really interesting because they haven’t changed the forms to say, did you use AI and how did you do this?
But if it’s serious and significant work that you are working on, keep record of what you’ve done, show what it was like when it came out of the AI show, what it was like after you worked on it. Keep those records because you may need to use them if that copyright is very important to you. I’m also a person that believes that theft, for lack of a better way of putting it, is not necessarily bad for art.
It spreads the word. It helps you grow in very lack of a better way of saying it. Ryan Holiday, one of my favorite writers, wrote a great book called Perennial Seller. Lots of, he’s very, very well known for his books on stoicism. But I started reading ’em when he first came out. He wrote a book called Trust Me.
I’m Lying about How to Get, yeah. Which is brilliant book. But he wrote a book called, Perennial cellar, which is how to make art that lasts. And he’s not talking about stuff that lasts 20 years, or five years or three years. He’s talking about building companies and artwork that lasts for thousands of years, like the Zian symbol company started making gongs in the Ottoman Empire and they’re still around.
How did they last? And he talks about one of the best things that could ever happen to an author is that somebody grabs a PDF and starts sending it to their friends because most people. They may open it, they may look at it, but what they’ll eventually do is just buy it or they’ll download it and they will talk about it.
And that’s what you want. And I wish that would’ve happened with my book, that it became so popular that everybody wants to send it around. So a lot of people talk about copyright infringement. The average copyright infringement case is gonna cost you at least a half a million bucks. A trademark infringement case, about the same, a patent infringement case.
The average, I think is $6 million. Hmm. So be careful what you wish for. If you really want to control your art that much, that you want to go around and sue everybody, it’s probably not worth it. Not only is it not worth it, you may stop the spread of people learning about you.
[00:20:45] Mike Allton: That’s fascinating. Folks.
We’re talking with Eric Farber and the Creator Economy, AI and Influencer marketing. Let’s take a moment now to hear from Darryl pr. He’s the cmo, the Gora Pulse about another channel you may be overlooking in your marketing social media.
It’s the Arc de Triumph. Can you imagine if you’re in charge, if you’re the C M O of Marketing Paris?
What are your main channels? Wow, there’s. The arc de Triumph. There’s the Eiffel Tower, there’s the Louvre. Those are your channels you’re gonna use to drive tourism dollars in. Okay, now, but you’re not the CMO of Paris. In fact, you’re the CMO of your company product service. So what are your main channels?
So I’m gonna guess they’re things like pay per click, maybe trade shows, events, maybe content. Those are all pretty predictable, right? Let me ask you this question. Are you treating social media as a main channel? By the way, only 1.8% of you today measure social media and can prove an ROI in that investment.
HubSpot and Gartner say social media is the number one channel to invest in this year. Are you doing it? If not, I can tell you why you’re not doing it. Because you don’t have the tools, you don’t have the mentality, and that’s okay. We’ve got you covered. You changed the mentality. We’ll give you the tour of Go Pulse tracks all the ROI for you.
One place to manage all your social media activity, your number one channel, change your success, treat social media as the Channel one CMO to another. My name is Darryl. I’m with Agorapulse. I’ll talk to you soon.
All right, so let’s shift gears for a little bit because I wanna talk. Contracts. How important are contracts to creators and influencers? I mean, isn’t it okay to just have that email record back and forth of whatever you discussed, and this is what I agree to do for you as a brand. Isn’t that okay?
[00:22:37] Erk Farber: Is it a contract?
It might be if it contains all the elements that a contract needs to have. Here’s my take on contracts. Generally, you only see lawsuits when something does really, really well or really, really badly. Where people have made a lot of money, where they’ve lost a lot of money. Contracts to me, are about relationships.
Contracts set out from the beginning, what the parties have agreed to do, who does what, and it’s a step-by-step roadmap of what the relationship is gonna look like. That to me is the most important piece because when people do handshake deals, when people do emails, they don’t cover everything that needs to be covered.
And then you get to a certain point in it and somebody says, oh, I never agreed to do that. Well, you don’t have a contract to go back and look at. There’s too much left up to the imagination of each person. There was no ascent, mutual ascent. That is what a contract needs to fully operate, but to me, contracts are about relationships and building great ones, and that’s where you need them.
[00:23:48] Mike Allton: I love that. Thank you for sharing that. So they’re about relationships or about making sure that we’re not overlooking important aspects of that arrangement between those parties. So what are some things that creators and influencers should include in every contract? Well, [00:24:05] Erk Farber: I think they need to be very careful, you know, depending on what the contract is.
And very often, you know, the first thing a, let’s talk about a video content creator. Somebody’s uploading on YouTube. Probably the first person that they’re gonna hire is probably an editor, so they wanna make sure that. Somebody who’s prolific, you know, we work with the guys from Creator Camp, their advisors to our to creators legal.
They have very significant films, basically that they’re uploading. They will not own all of that copyright unless they have a written contract with the editor or a sound engineer, or a photographer, or anybody else who has worked on it in any way, shape, or form. We’ll have an interest in that ownership.
And unless you have a written contract as transferring the ownership, either as a work for hire or the actual transfer of ownership within the contract itself, then you have problems. That’s very important because when you upload, when you hit upload on, Any platform you have to ascent to that.
Distribution platform’s, terms and conditions, which say you own all this copyright. And you’ve gotta do that, and you’ve gotta build what’s called a chain of title of all your work. Recently, six months ago, there was a bunch of talk about Mr. Beast and his catalog being worth a billion dollars, or that somebody offered him a billion dollars.
He said it’s worth more than that. He’s probably right. He can’t sell any of that unless he’s got contracts in place with every single person who worked for him. And in the early days, my guess is is, you know, he may have had it, he may not have, I’m sure everything is cleaned up. He runs a major corporation now.
But you’ve gotta do the same thing. You’ve got to make sure your chain of title, that everybody who has worked on your product has signed off on it. So all the ownership ends up with either you or your corporation.
[00:26:12] Mike Allton: Okay. That’s fascinating and a little scary. Cause now I’m thinking back to some of the content that I’ve created with others.
And here’s a use case that I’ll just throw at you. And one of the kinds of content that I often create as a writer is a roundup post where I’m tapping into 10, 20, 30 influencers or brand partners. I’m asking them all the same question or series of questions they’re responding to me and including all that content as one.
Post, do I need to have contracts in place, do you think? With all of
them?
[00:26:42] Erk Farber: I think I need to look at like any good lawyer, we’re gonna say the same thing. I think you need to look at it. I don’t think you probably do. Yeah, I think that’s more of a news type. You’re interviewing somebody I. Right. So a newspaper isn’t gonna get a contract with each person.
If they go interview, I’ll give you a better use case. Represented a guy for many, many years that was a Wingsuit extreme sports athlete, one of the top guys in the world. He had built up a huge body of work, out hundreds of hours of footage of him doing all sorts of various things. Somebody came along and said, Hey, we wanna license this footage.
You know, they put that stuff up in bars and they wanna, you know, airplanes, you could watch these different types of stuff. Well, we had to go around and try and get people to sign off who had not previously signed off on some things. Well, it wasn’t gonna get paid a monster amount of money for all this footage, but we had one of his cameraman wing suiting is a dangerous sport.
Says, oh yeah, no problem. And then he died in a wingsuit accident and his widow refused to sign the contract, so the footage sits on a shelf somewhere. Wow.
[00:27:57] Mike Allton: Yeah, that’s, that doesn’t happen. Stuff does happen in my industry. [00:28:02] Erk Farber: Yeah. For you and I, I mean, we could fall off the chair during our podcasts and work on front of a computer.
Right. And, and, and according to my cardiologist, it can happen any day. So. Right.
[00:28:12] Mike Allton: Right. Love it. So what other advice do you have for creators and influencers that are trying to navigate today’s economy and all the technological changes that are happening right now? [00:28:27] Erk Farber: I’m gonna put this differently. One, there’s a couple of different things that I think that people need to recognize.
Content creating is very tedious and very difficult work. And you can get caught up in doing it 24 7. Take care of your health mentally and physically. It’ll help you be a better creator. That’s the first thing is. The second is, is don’t give up. You know, if you can get that balance in the stuff that you want to do, don’t give up.
This is an industry where anybody can jump in. I was having a conversation with somebody yesterday. And he said, oh, this stuff is really tough. I said, of course, it’s tough. It’s not made to be easy because anybody truly can do it from any corner of the earth. All you need is a smartphone and an internet connection because you can be an affiliate marketer because you can be a content creator, social media influencer, whatever you wanna call it, and anybody really can do it.
That means that there’s gonna be a lot of people who get started at it, but a lot of people who give up rather easily at the first sign of trouble. There’s a massive, massive learning curve, and you may not see any money for a really long time. Keep going, keep trying to learn it and spend a lot of time learning the craft and study the masters if you’re creating video to upload on YouTube.
Study the masters of filmmaking. There’s lots to learn out there, but the number one thing is, is take care of your mental health. It’s something that’s talked about a lot in the greater community, but still not enough. There’s too much greater burnout out there because it’s too easy to sit in front of your computer all day long.
[00:30:11] Mike Allton: Couldn’t agree more. Fantastic advice. I’m gonna be sharing that often. Eric, I just got one more question. My final question is the one I ask every guest. I love asking this question. How important have relationships been to your career, to everything? [00:30:27] Erk Farber: I was a sports entertainment lawyer for many, many years.
I could trace hack almost every client I had and most relationships that I had built back to. One original meeting that happened about three weeks after I passed the bar exam. It was a gentleman named Angela Wright. He was a legendary N F L football agent. I was out one night in Phoenix. He actually lived just a few miles away from me.
I live in Oakland and met him and he said, oh, we’re looking for a new lawyer, for a sports agency. And ever since then, it was sort of from one person to the next person to the next person. It’s important to stay in touch with people. It’s important to be kind to people, to do things for people. You also have to learn how to say no.
Because people make a lot of requests, but relationships are everything. It’s how your business grows. You can’t operate in a vacuum.
[00:31:22] Mike Allton: That’s so true, and I love how virtually every time I’ve asked this question, not only is the initial response, they’re everything without prompting. We seem to be wired to think about those one or two very specific relationships that jump out and say, okay, this was the one that allowed me to have the career path or professional path that I do.
Today. I mean, I’m just saying these words out loud and already my own origin story is popping into my mind how I got to where I am today with very specific people. So thank you for sharing that. I appreciate that. And this has just been a phenomenal interview. I think there’s so many things that we’ve touched on that are going to be.
Thought provoking and impactful. Everyone listening, but I know there’s so much more that we could have talked about. So let everyone know where they can connect with you, where they can go to learn more, where they can get the kind of help that they need.
[00:32:17] Erk Farber: You’re a contact creator. Head over to creators legal creators legal.com.
And I’m on LinkedIn. I don’t tweet. I do uh, a lot of the blogs and things like that for creators Legal, but you can connect with me on LinkedIn.
[00:32:31] Mike Allton: Fantastic, and that’s all we’ve got for today, folks. But make sure that not only you subscribed on whatever preferred podcast pair you want, but make sure you’re following me on LinkedIn because every Monday I’m releasing a special partnership unpacked newsletter that takes one of our past episodes and really unpacks some of the lessons and takeaways from that particular guest, and then releases that week’s.
Newest episode, so follow me on LinkedIn and subscribe to the partnership unpacked newsletter. Till next time, thank you for listening to another episode of Partnership Unpacked, hosted by Mike Alton, empowered by Agora Pulse, the number one rated social media management solution, which you can learn more about@agorapulse.com.
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