Chris:
Tell your story, words from our guests on today’s episode of the Get Overit Podcast, Maureen Sager in our discussions about being creative and the creative process. For a long time, for most of my life, I felt like I was not a creative person in the traditional way. I used to think about the arts and being creative. When I think about creative, I think about design and some of these abstract thoughts and being able to put things down on paper. And I always would think to myself, “I know that I have something to offer, but I don’t truly think of myself as a creative person.” And in my discussion today with Maureen, what I came to realize is that’s not true. I am a creative because everybody out there has something to offer.
Chris:
Everybody has something that they can contribute and create. And in that, you are in fact creative. We’re going to discuss today all of the ways her career and profession has took her in different things, and now she finds herself as an advocate of creatives and especially in its impact on the economy in trying to draw investment into the creative arts and creative sector. And you could really see how much creative matters to the economy, to an area, to a region, a destination, and I find it really fascinating. And for me, who does a lot of things, but does this art of podcasting and communication, that’s creative. Tell your story, do what you do. It’s okay to do what you do and be good at it and be able to tell it, but it’s your ability to tell the story. No one’s going to listen, unless you can truly tell that story and be good at telling that story and in that, you are actually creating and contributing. And so today, we discuss with Maureen this topic and a whole bunch of others around the idea of creatives, how the pandemic has impacted it, what is the state of creative in the economy today and why all of us out there are in fact creative if we just open up and let it go. So what do you say? let’s Get Overit.
Chris:
All right. So our guest today on the Get Overit Podcast is Maureen Sager. Now Maureen is the executive director of the Alliance for the Creative Economy, I will say ACE so I don’t have to keep saying that over and over again, a project of the Center for Economic Growth, the CEG. So ACE is, and we’ll talk about this, dedicated to promoting really growing the creative industries in the capital region where we are today, where we are recording this. Maureen is in Albany, I’m just outside. She’s also a lead consultant on CapNY regional brands initiative. Before moving here, upstate New York, Maureen was the executive producer and site director of nickjr.com the world’s… I’m sure everybody knows Nick. Nickelodeon, the world’s largest internet site for parents of preschoolers, I imagine that was a really cool role if we have time I’ll talk to you about that a little bit more.
Chris:
She had marketing roles at several MTV Networks, et cetera, internet brands. She has an MFA in screenwriting, that’s a master’s in fine arts, we’re throwing around a lot of acronyms here, in screenwriting from the American Film Institute in Los Angeles. She studied marketing at Fordham University, Graduate School of Business, and a BA in English and economics from Rutgers University down in New Jersey, where I’m from. Maureen-
Maureen:
No way. Where are you from?
Chris:
Well, I’m from Rockland County/Bergen County. So I grew up right on the border of both. I went to high school at Don Bosco prep, which is in Ramsey, New Jersey. So yeah, I lived there my whole life, came up here for grad school. So that’s a good place to start. So you said you were born in Brooklyn and then you moved-
Maureen:
Yeah. I’m seventh generation Brooklyn.
Chris:
Where in Brooklyn?
Maureen:
Yeah. I was born in Wyckoff Heights hospital, which is in Ridgewood section, which is on Queens, Brooklyn border. Then we moved to New Jersey when I was five years old, so I started kindergarten. Well-
Chris:
So your schooling was not in the city? You weren’t city school, you came out and were in Jersey when you went to school?
Maureen:
Indeed.
Chris:
Okay. All right. So do you remember Brooklyn? Do you have memories of it growing up there?
Maureen:
Yeah, I do. I remember long corridors and things that look nothing like New Jersey, there’s nothing like that. So yeah, I remember it and then I moved back there later, so-
Chris:
You did?
Maureen:
… And that’s where I had my kids, yeah. That’s where I moved up from 15 years ago.
Chris:
Well, I guess when you were working where I mentioned in the intro, that was in the city where those-
Maureen:
Yeah. I worked in the big Viacom building that’s in Times Square, that’s where MTV Networks is. And I lived out in Cobble Hill, Carroll Gardens, section of Brooklyn.
Chris:
So for people listening to this, they might not… I don’t know. Younger kids, do they know MTV nowadays? I mean, is it relevant now? I don’t even know.
Maureen:
I don’t know. It had started losing its relevance while I was there for sure. And so I don’t know that answer. I’m not sure. I think Nickelodeon still has relevance for that child market, but I don’t know. That’s a good question. We should call some kids.
Chris:
We should call some kids. I mean, because MTV was so a part of my life growing up back in the-
Maureen:
Me too.
Chris:
I mean the early mid 90s, we used to talk about… There was that show, my wife and I were talking about The Grind, where people would just dance with music. And that was all it was. It was just people dancing. And you would watch them dance to the music and it was like, whoa, what is this? Probably not watch that today. But it really did… And Nick actually now, they’re pushing this effort. They’re getting involved in football, I don’t know if you saw that initiative, which I think is a very smart thing. Their Slime Zone in the end zone, and they’re trying to expand out a little bit, so it’s a very cool brand. So you moved back to Brooklyn, then you came up here. I’m curious to know how you got drawn to the creative arts, but before we get there, was it a job opportunity that brought you up here?
Maureen:
That was exactly the opposite of a job opportunity. It was a career killer actually, for what I did. I worked in a big shop and I think I could probably point to 9/11 as one of the things that just really changed my attachment to the city. They were small at the time, I had two small kids. I knew people who died, I had watched the World Trade Center fall from my window. I was on maternity leave and it shook me loose. And I never thought that I would be shaken loose from New York. I thought I’d be there forever, and it just wasn’t working for me anymore. I was working so much. I had these little kids, I never saw them, and I don’t know, it was time to go. And when I came up here-
Chris:
You were over it.
Maureen:
I was really over it, but this ties really back to this starting other project in creative industries. When I moved up 15 years ago, there was zero connection, no film industry, no broadcast. There was just no networked place to pick up that kind of career. I couldn’t continue it because there was no next road. It was like bang, off a cliff.
Chris:
But so then why up here then? If that was true, did you… You know what I mean? Because the logic there would be, why go to a place where you might not be able to continue what you’re doing? Did you just like it up here or is it completely a void of a career choice? It’s interesting for people who are like… I get a lot of people who are questioning what to do. That seems like an interesting decision.
Maureen:
I think there’s even more people who are questioning where to go, right? And a lot of them since COVID are leaving the city in droves and they don’t know where to go, but they are coming here. And one of the things that… Because I looked for two years, where to go, and there’s a price housing bubble around the city that would’ve kept me tied to the city and that career that was not allowing me to have the time with my kids that I wanted. And so only after we got up around Albany, did that price break start to happen where I thought, “Okay, I could cut cords and I could have a life and try and piece something together.”
Maureen:
But it was that affordability that took me up here where I didn’t own in the city, I wish I did at that time. But so that meant that I had to… It was my first house I ever bought, I was 40 which is kind of late in life. Up here, people-
Chris:
Right. Because you could afford it.
Maureen:
… All had houses when they were in their 20s, not me. And so it was just getting started. I started an entirely different life up here at 40.
Chris:
That’s of the great allures of being up here is that you can afford to live, have a home, have a nice life without having to break your back and mind in just working constantly, just so you can afford that. I mean, that was one of the things… We always say if I want all of our families down south, down by the city, down by Rockland, for us to go back there, it would be a major change to have the same kind of life. It’s not a proportional jump it’s a very different jump. So I want to understand, Maria and I were talking a little bit about the creative and the creative brain. I like to ask people who have akin to creatives or in this space, when did you know that you had of that mindset? Was it early on in life, were you gravitating towards it, were people in your family creatives or was it not that?
Maureen:
I would say, no. People in my family were not creative. I’m a first-generation college grad on my dad’s side. No, it’s just not where I come from. My grandfathers were a plumber and a truck driver. It was people who did something you can describe and point to. Creatives is-
Chris:
Tangible.
Maureen:
Right. Exactly. Yeah. I know what a truck driver is. But a creative… No, it was not a thing. But I did have friends who went to FIT, the Fashion Institute of Technology, and they didn’t actually go into school, but I was like, “Huh, fashion institute, what on earth is that?” And it was so much different than anything I saw around me. So I would say that I didn’t know creative people, but there was this idea that you could do something creative that I don’t know why. I didn’t know anybody else in God, my entire town who had a creative career. And yet, for some reason I thought I should do that. I’ve started writing, creating stuff. When I went to college, I was about halfway through before I took a video class and then I started studying film and I don’t know what gave me this chutzpah, but I decided I wanted to go to film school. Why? Who ever? I never even met anybody who went to film school. My dad was like-
Chris:
But what was the fascination about it? Was it the creative of it? Was it the industry as in itself? Did you just like movies?
Maureen:
No, definitely not the industry. I didn’t know anything about the industry which was a problem later. But I just fell in love with film as a medium. I had a really good film professor. I had several at Rutgers, but one in particular really… She was super young. I just saw her obituary not too long in the New York Times. She went on to a big career later in film history and teaching, which is not a giant field, I didn’t think. But she was abno and I didn’t know that.
Maureen:
But she just really blew my mind as to all the things that were going on in a film. Historically, she tied it back. She was from East Germany and she tied these films backed by this filmmaker called Alexander Kluger who I know in sort of, but she tied it back to her own experience as an East German and how this filmmaker was expressing in a subtext of guilt over the war or their experiences, and I was like, wow. Yeah. Like what? I was totally blown away. And by her relating it back to herself, it changed everything for me. I started to understand that oh, someone made this with their own hands. It wasn’t like it came out of a book. A screenplay doesn’t come out of a book, you have to try on the whole thing. You have to process it through your whole being, to have it come out the other side and be its own thing, right? And I think that she planted that idea for me of that a person made this and that I could make that. So I think it came from her maybe. And then I never put that together before.
Chris:
You see, this is a good lesson in teachers and their impact and professors and their impact, because in my experience, I can recall it was in high school with a biology teacher who really made a mark on me. I always gravitated towards sciences, but I just remember a distinct moment. It was my sophomore year where the way that the information was conveyed, the passion that came across really connected with me. And then there are points in life where teachers, professors, they shine through and could really make a difference. It could be the difference in a direction that you take. In fact, it’s interesting you brought that up in creative. I was never interested. I was always science, in particular biological science minded and that’s where I went. But I took an art history, I went to the University of Miami down in Coral Gables, and they had a lot of arts things down there. And I took an art history class because I sort of had to get an elective, you know how that works in liberal arts. And I wasn’t expecting anything of it. And I expected it to be boring and not relevant to what I wanted to do as a 20 year old when trying to get into possibly grad school in science.
Chris:
But I remember the teacher was incredible and this stuff was so interesting. And I remember saying to myself, “I could take another class in this, no doubt.” And I think that it can really have an effect on you for someone to inspire you to keep going. So you followed that string and film in screenwriting and then where did that get to? Did you get to a point… Do you still write? Did it get to a point where you were like, “This isn’t for me,” but you stayed in creative or how far did you-
Maureen:
yeah. That’s exactly what happened. All right, I’m going to tell you a brief foray. So I was at Rutgers and I was studying film and I just thought I might want to go to film school. But in the meantime, I moved my ass to Brooklyn for no good reason, it was just something that I thought I should do. So I moved to Brooklyn and my parents were like, “We’re not paying for you to move to Brooklyn.” And I was, I thought-
Chris:
And how old were you at this point?
Maureen:
21. And so I had to go out and get a job the next day. And I went to an agency that sent me out and they sent me to Glickman Mark’s management company. And I was the receptionist for Kiss, the rock band. On a temp assignment, so I became the receptionist for Kiss. So that was-
Chris:
Imagine that. imagine you go to temp assignment to be the receptionist for Kiss, Jesus.
Maureen:
Hilarious, right? But that was my first exposure. When you were saying the industry, that was the first time I even could picture that there was an industry. They had 10 people working for them just on the management side. They had two staff artists. That blew my mind too, that there was that creative-
Chris:
It’s a business.
Maureen:
Oh, it was such a business. They had business managers, oh, they had, yeah. All sorts of staff, accountants. And I didn’t know they had a receptionist, I didn’t know anything about that. So I got exposed to the industry along the way for this weird six months job I had. And then I went to Los Angeles and I went to American film Institute AFI. And it’s a really small school, it’s like 100 people when I went there. And I was really young. Most people who went there were going around the age of 30 or older because they were having a career and then they were sort of using it as a finishing school, which is the way that makes the most sense to do. At 23, I had never lived anywhere else. I didn’t know anything and I had nothing to offer the people in that school. They were all like, “I worked here. I worked here.” I didn’t know any-
Chris:
“I answer the phones for Kiss.”
Maureen:
Right. That was all I had.
Chris:
So MFAs, are they research oriented? How does it-
Maureen:
No, this was a maker school. You went in with a specialty, it’s not like you could just study film. I went in as a screenwriter. You could be a director and that was super competitive program or screenwriter or cinematographer. Someone I went to school with has won several Oscars, or a production designer, or a producer. And so there were five specialties and we made films the minute you got there. That’s why I was like, “I’m not prepared.”
Chris:
Right. You were like, “I’m not there yet.”
Maureen:
No. I had zero preparation for this. But people came in, and on day one they were like, “Damn.” Crewing up, and I wasn’t ready.
Chris:
So did that frustrate you or did it fuel you, did it both, or what happened?
Maureen:
Because I’m from New Jersey, I like a challenge.
Chris:
Yeah you do. We do. That’s for sure.
Maureen:
And so it didn’t bore me . I was shocked, but I wasn’t going to tell anyone else that, right? So I just sort of did it, I was rolling with it.
Chris:
You’re true Jersey faction, don’t let anyone know what you’re feeling, just go for it.
Maureen:
Never, right? So yeah. So I jumped in and I started doing it. And halfway… People were so schmoozy though, and I’m not a schmoozer. And it’s like, I hate this other part, “What’s your pitch?” I was like, “I’m just learning how to write a screenplay.” And everybody wanted me to pitch it. And I was like, “I didn’t write it.”
Chris:
Yeah. “I’ve got to write first, right?”
Maureen:
It felt like bullshit to me. And in that way of like, I don’t lie. I would tell a true story but I didn’t know what the story was yet. So I felt like I couldn’t make that up. I couldn’t lie about my lack of experience, I was kind of straightforward with myself about it. And I didn’t like writing that much. I wasn’t terrible at it, I got really good feedback about it, but I hated the process of sitting down every morning. I wrote from seven to noon every day, and it was really hard.
Maureen:
And I had to churn out screenplays and I had to teach myself that. And I started to hate… I didn’t like that process of sitting on my desk. I ended up liking being on set a lot. I loved the backend, putting the product together. I liked reading other people’s script, I didn’t like writing them myself. I like writing dialogue, but I didn’t love the whole schmoozy thing. And so-
Chris:
So what do you do at that point? You don’t really like writing as a screenwriter.
Maureen:
I know. Wait, should someone have asked themselves that before they went?
Chris:
No, that would be logical.
Maureen:
Exactly. Shit, right? So I didn’t. So I got out of there not knowing what to do, except I knew what I didn’t want to do. One was I didn’t want to be a screenwriter. The other was, I didn’t want to live in LA. Well, there’s another thing that I just had made 100 good connections in LA, and I didn’t like it there.
Chris:
I’m curious, what was it about LA? Is it just LA in general? I’ve been in LA, it’s LA, I don’t know how to describe it more than that.
Maureen:
Yeah. I think that… There was one good… So I was young, I was 23 when I went to film school. I lived out there from 23 to 27, and that’s a really good age to be out in LA. I think because everything’s fun, we were out every night-
Chris:
Right. You go out. Yeah, that’s great.
Maureen:
Vegas, or the desert. We just out all the time or Mexico, iT’s so much fun, so it was a good age to be there. And it’s really nice to be a New Yorker in LA because everyone thinks you’re super smart. So if you just say you’re from New York, everyone puts you up 10 points, right? And you hang out with all the other New Yorkers and being all like puff puff. So we were having fun, but the schmoozing just isn’t me. It just really… And I’m not being like I’m above it. I actually-
Chris:
It’s just not you.
Maureen:
I think it’s just not me. And so I really wasn’t going to be able to thrive in an environment of like, “What’s your pitch?” I could do lots of other stuff, but not that. I would much rather be the girl doing the numbers, putting that stuff together in the back. I had studied economics when I was in college and I really, really, really liked it. If I was going to do anything else in life, I would have done that. Which will bring me to the ACE project in a minute, but just being behind the scenes really worked for me. And so when I went back to New York, I worked for a filmmaker, didn’t like doing that. I got a job though for the National Film Board of Canada, and then I hopscotched over. There’s like four film jobs. So I’ve already covered two of them in all of New York. There’s four film jobs, right? It’s just not a film town. And then this thing opened up that PolyGram Filmed Entertainment. And Polygram, the big record company, had bought up a bunch of really small film studios and made a film division. And I was like, “Whoa, that’s a real film job.” So I applied, I got it, which I was super-
Chris:
And that role was what?
Maureen:
Even though I had a master’s degree, I started as an administrative assistant and we released indie films. And this was around the indie film time of pretty early indie films. So I worked on the releases of The Usual Suspects, of Dead Men Walking, Four Weddings and a Funeral, which at that time was the biggest indie film ever made it. It blew out. Everybody was deer in the headlights because we were set up to have small releases for years, there was only a couple of us there in the New York side. And this film was… It kept getting bigger and bigger and nobody had seen a film release like that before. And we were just there 24 hours a day. It just took over our lives. And then we had several other hit movies afterwards. I was like, wow, it was happening. Because at that time indie film wasn’t a big thing, this was in the 90s. So it was like 93, 95-
Chris:
94, something like that.
Maureen:
Something like that. And so it was just at that where indie film started to become a big thing. And the studios started pivoting themselves toward indie film which is where they remain now. Or separate then, the Marvel-
Chris:
I just looked at the film, by the way. I’m just curious, I’m looking at the budget it was 2.8 million, that’s in let’s say English pounds. Box Office did 250 million.
Maureen:
Yeah. We had never seen anything like it. It was bizarre. And so that was super fun though. And I loved that part of the business. I loved being on the other side, right? When I read the script, I was like, “I wish I wrote that script. That’s a really good script.” And then when the film came out, I was like, “Ah, they did it. They did-“
Chris:
But when you disconnected… So the script was the script then it’s made, you’re not in that process though?
Maureen:
I wasn’t in that process, but I was jealous when I read the script.
Chris:
So you just saw it come out and you were like, wow.
Maureen:
Well, you’d start to see it. So when you’re in a studio, you get to see the film as it’s being made-
Chris:
Like pieces, okay. Yeah.
Maureen:
Right. You get to see it before it’s sweetened where there’s no sound in it, which is a very weird thing. I saw Fargo before it had the music laid in and it looked like a slasher film. I was really upset by it to tell you the truth. It didn’t make me feel good. So when you see a film before all the pieces are together, it’s really interesting. It’s really not there yet. How much each individual creative person adds to the overall product is remarkable.
Chris:
Right. I was going to say, that just gives you a sense for how much, for example, the sound or something contributes to the overall field. When people watch the Oscars or the Academy Awards, they always want to know who’s the best actor and all these things, but in all of those things the cinematography, the sound and the whatever, no one really cares about that. But to your point, it really makes a huge difference in how-
Maureen:
Right. And I don’t think I would know that unless I had seen it with my own eyeballs just what a big deal it is. So I watched those films and all their pieces come together. And then be the thing that gets handed out into the world, which was really super cool.
Chris:
You didn’t need to go to Sundance Festival when it came out, did you?
Maureen:
I didn’t. That’s the LA people, we were the New York people. You’ve got to keep us in… Not the same thing.
Chris:
So how long were you there at that road?
Maureen:
I think I was there for three years. I had burned out pretty badly and it was kind of hurting the relationship I was in, this man I later married, now divorced. But that’s okay Chris, things happen.
Chris:
That’s okay, That is life.
Maureen:
It worked out great for everybody. But that being said I was really damaging my relationship. I can’t work that much and think that everything’s going to turn out okay. And I keep learning and relearning this lesson myself.
Chris:
It seems like you’ve had that in your life. It seems like you’ve come across that crossroad a bunch of times in yours, you’ve come across these things and you’ve identified, recognized and made a decision whether or not it worked out or it didn’t, but a lot of people can’t do that. It’s just a self-awareness situation that I think a lot of people lack.
Maureen:
Yeah. I think I get a lot of cues from the people around me. So because I don’t have a lot of balance in that sense and it’s still happening-
Chris:
Because you go all in on something?
Maureen:
It does but I’ve got to say, so I’ve had this conversation a lot with my friend, Rachel Dunn, who also comes from the same kind of industries. The industry is built for weirdos, that is the price of getting a job in those places, you work, right? And that’s how you get in and that’s how you stay in. And so II guess I have a love… It’s not even love hate. I have a balanced thing where I do have that work drive, but it costs me too much. And so, yes, I’ve gone in and out of it several times because I don’t have a lot of balance. And the industry demands you to not have work-life balance, that’s not why you’re there. You’re there to work and work really hard. And one person one-ups themselves. “I worked 70 hours this week, I worked this that.” Everybody’s out over drinks bragging about how much they worked that week.
Chris:
I’ve been in that situation before, and I’m thinking to myself, I’m looking at this person, “Do you really feel good about that though? Are you-
Maureen:
I know, I totally agree. I feel like an idiot saying it, but I’m just kind of thinking it in the spirit of, I admit it. I don’t think it’s cool though, and I don’t think it’s good saying about myself-
Chris:
Right. It’s not a great thing to say. So where do you go after this now?
Maureen:
After Polygram, I took a foray into Scholastic, which is a children’s publisher, they were doing the Harry Potter series. A really interesting thing happened there, which was that they had a really wildly unpopular internet division that people going into the internet. And this was the late 90s. And I was like, “Oh, I want to do the internet.” When I was at Polygram, there was a little show. You can go see something about the internet, because you could read about it, but you couldn’t see the internet. So I got a folder that said, “Come see a demonstration of the internet.” And I was like, “Huh, hurray.” And I thought everybody on the world was going to go down there. Three people went to the demonstration of the internet and it was in someone’s closet.
Chris:
That’s awesome. That just shows you the difference in time. I know.
Maureen:
But I fell in love with it when I saw it. The thing that they showed at the internet demonstration was a promo for the Batman movie, starring George Clooney, which no one knows happened, but it did. And it was the world’s slowest demonstration of show on, show is rolling over dial up or something. But I saw it and they were like, “And this can be seen in China, in Brazil. And I was like-
Chris:
Whoa, instant access. Yeah.
Maureen:
Yes, I was totally excited. But anyway, when I was at Scholastic, there was a job open in the internet division and I was like, “I’m going to go do that.” And my friends were all like, “That’ll be a career killer,” because I was going to leave marketing. I was like, “I am going anyway.” So I went into the internet division and I loved it. That was the best move I’ve ever done. It was like all the things coming together, my love of economics and information and data. It was all coming in real time. If you’re making a movie, that takes like years for the product to come in. The internet’s like, bam, bam, bam. And I’m one of those people, right? It just suited my personality. And I was blown away. Absolutely loved it.
Maureen:
We launched the big Scholastic website. And not bragging, I wasn’t saying like… It just encompassed the whole company. It had to start thinking big as to how can a giant bricks and mortar billion dollar company-
Chris:
Put everything to these pages. Right.
Maureen:
Right. And I know it sounds-
Chris:
And back then I imagine that was incredibly daunting, right?
Maureen:
Back then it was a big deal. Right. Back then it was a big and kind of profound question, how do you do that? But as a creative person, that was so not daunting to me, because for a long time, I think I’d been asking questions like how do you condense someone’s life into two hours, right? It was a way that I was like, “Oh, I know-“
Chris:
I know how to do that. Yeah.
Maureen:
Right. In its own way, I knew the pathway you could take to do that in myself. And so I was able and really loved the scale of it, to be able to bring it down into a thing and make sure it was focused. All the things I learned in film school or other times from creative work, which is, what’s the central idea? How do you distill it right? What’s the right voice? What’s the tone? All those things they all got called into play and yet the pace was super fast and I loved that. So I started working at Scholastic and that was in that early dotcom era that things went super fast too. And so I wasn’t even in there, they were… VH1, which is a net MTV Networks brand for little do folks was looking for… I got a call, “We’re looking for seasoned internet veterans. Do you want to come over and interview?” And I was like, “Seasoned? I’ve been doing internet for eight months.” They were like, “That’s plenty. You’re in.”
Maureen:
So I went over and that job, they were like, “I think we’re going to give it to this other person. But I think we’d love to have you somewhere. We’re going to find a place for you here.” And then I ended up at Nickelodeon. So I’m with eight months of internet experience, but that was plenty because of how fast it was coming on and taking over New York. And so I don’t know, it’s happened. And that was a big leap, a big shock. That was-
Chris:
It was the consolidation of everything you’ve been doing now, and you sort of then saw and then had a real track if you will.
Maureen:
Yeah. And it turned out I had been trained for that, right? That creative training, maybe this gets back to creativity, why be a creative person is because it actually did set me up for that. It’s not a straight line and it’s not on your resume, but I knew how to go from an abstract idea in my head into something tangible at the end. That process I had done. And so I was even able to help other people do that too because that was familiar to me. And so I think that’s how it worked so well.
Chris:
I deal with this a lot and I get this a lot and I think it’s something interesting that’s happening. You get resumes and you look and it’s not linear. And if we define someone’s ability by what they studied, or what’s on paper, you lose a lot. And like for me, as I mentioned, I am a developmental neuroscientist by training. And I am in an agency where I direct digital marketing. If you look at the two on its freight, or you look at my resume, you’d be like, “What the hell is this guy doing?” It’s not about the subject matter, it’s about the process for me. And what I’ve learned, what grad school had taught me… Someone has asked me, I spent five years in a PhD program and years in our lab doing research. They say, “Was it worth it looking back now where you’re doing what you’re doing?” And my answer is absolutely. And the reason why is because it taught me how to think, it taught me how to assess and use data, make analysis, and that is relevant regardless of whatever you’re in.
Chris:
So it might not be a straight line, but it’s very, very parallel. And I hope… Nowadays in the world we live, we don’t just look at what… Try to say, well you’re here, you’re here, and then you have to go here because I think you might lose on good talent or not necessarily give that a chance where, like you’re saying, you are in fact trained for it just doesn’t look like that on it’s face.
Maureen:
It’s on that person too to be able to, I guess, have enough… I’ll use that word chutzpah again. To say, “Wait, I know how to do this even though it’s not on my resume.” You need to own that too. You can’t wait for someone else to discover that for you, it comes from inside of you to say, “I can do this, and-“
Chris:
Right. And I can convince you that I can, and I can show you that I can.
Maureen:
Exactly, yeah. To rise to that challenge within yourself.
Chris:
And that’s very Jersey like, rise to the challenge. By the way, this is a coincidence. Look at this. Can you see this? Can you see my mug? I don’t know if you could see this. It says Jersey right across the mug.
Maureen:
Yeah. I can. I like it.
Chris:
That’s a shout out to New Jersey. By the way, everyone we’re talking to Maureen Sager, she’s the executive director of the Alliance for the Creative Economy. And let’s go to ACE now because I’m looking at the time and I want to make sure we talk about it. So tell us how that was born, what it is so we can understand. And now with a good context of where you came from professionally, let’s see what’s in.
Maureen:
Okay. Sure. So the Alliance for the Creative Economy is about five years old now, And it came out of a dataset. People started… And this is something that’s super important to me about creativity. So this idea of a creative economy was a really re-imagining of what used to be called the art or what still is called, the arts and culture sector, which sounds so rarefied. And if someone had said to me, the arts and… Where I come from in the family-
Chris:
It sounds very like, “Oh, that’s not for us.” Right.
Maureen:
And I don’t come from a culture background, so that holds no appeal to me, culture. It sounds like it’s specialized or for rich people or something. And I fear that for sometimes when people say the arts, it’s like, actually the arts are this what we’re doing right here. Right? This is creative, so what is creative work? It’s anybody who says it’s creative, right? If you’re trying to differentiate it by your own body, your own self, that thing you bring to this world, that’s creative, right? So we add in things like artisanal food so that a cheese maker… I always use this example because it resonates for me. Craft tries to make a cheese that’s a commodity product. Every slice is exactly the same, every packet of cheese. But a creative, an artisanal percent tries to find something that’s different. They do the exact opposite. They differentiate themselves by using themselves as what is the point of differentiation like. Either I raise those goats and it’s going to be made with this goat’s milk, it’s going to have this, I studied and I taught myself this thing. That story of the beer, that ethos. What makes this-
Chris:
There’s something deeper behind it, right? There’s something else.
Maureen:
Right, exactly. Because there is. There’s me or you, there’s the person who’s brewing it, right? And so that’s what the creative industries are. And that’s what the creative economy conversation is about. It makes it much less rarefied, the arts. It’s more about no, we make stuff. And beyond that, we make what’s cool about the place where you live, right? We’re changing towns were, were really important to make ourselves relevant as a destination where we change everything, the creative people do. And the coolest thing about that dataset though, is that we saw that when we define the creative industries broadly in that way, not just like how many museums do you have?
Maureen:
Instead, we were counting all the people in all of the creative industries. It turned out to be the fourth largest employment sector in the Capital Region, a place that’s not at that time ever known to be a creative place, right? I didn’t think of it as a creative place, but when I saw that data set, I was like, and other too. Believe me, it wasn’t just me. But when we saw that dataset, we were like-
Chris:
There’s something here. Right.
Maureen:
There’s so much there. And then we started doing events and things to have people come out who identified as creative or who identified as freelancers because over half the people in the creative industries are side hustling or freelancing-
Chris:
Yeah. I feel like it’s moving more that way too.
Maureen:
… Have their businesses that just sped up, right? In this last century. So when we started throwing those events, we thought five or six people would come out, we were getting 150. Our last event had 350 people at it. People want to talk this stuff and they want to do that because they know what it is in their own life, they know what it is in the place where they live, and yet the articulation of it is so comforting to be able to see that statement of saying, this is a creative place. What you do is creative. What you do changes things economically for that town. To give it importance, that’s what the ACE project has been about. And it’s just really helping people put themselves and own that, what they offer to a place. And it matters, that pride matters a lot to help people move forward in there.
Chris:
So it’s awareness you hold… Tell us about on the ground, what is it are you’re raising awareness about? You open it for creatives to come in, is it open to non creatives? How does it look?
Maureen:
Yeah. You have to put parameters. So because it’s an economic development project and that’s how we define it, we’re not trying to be an arts organization. We’re so not an arts organization and there were such good ones out there, that’s why. The world doesn’t need one more of those. What it needed and still needs is the articulation to make it relevant to make it an investible sector. Meaning we showed how valuable it is to a place. And so we showed that it’s worthy of economic investment by the state, by private industry, by individuals themselves. So that’s what ACE does. That’s what we grabbed out. That aligned for the creative economy. That’s our path is to keep putting it in economic development terms. So yeah, that’s the-
Chris:
So let me ask you this question. I mean, there has been a lot of hard hit sectors or industries in this situation. And this creative one, I imagine is one of the biggest. How have you seen that and what’s the status of this right now? I mean, talk about that a little bit. I can’t imagine-
Maureen:
It’s been absolutely devastating for the creative industries. We’re still not started up again. And the data’s on a lag, the way it’s reported. You can’t see it for months and months. Even so, we knew anecdotally that there’s a lot of pain out there, but we just found out within the last couple of weeks, what the numbers look like. So for third quarter of 2020, performing arts and sports, were the hardest hit industries from a percentage basis, 68% of jobs lost. 68%. Well actually, film and television and sound recording 59% of all jobs were lost. This is rough, right? So on a dollar basis, it was the restaurant and food service sector. So the creative economy got killed and freelancers were hit worse than those who were traditionally employed because we didn’t have our access to PPP loans and things like that was not at all equal.
Chris:
Right. The support nests, they’re not the same, right? Yeah.
Maureen:
They are not the same. And so those industries were hit terribly hard. And now that we’re reopening again, I think it’s a danger to think, “Oh, everything’s going back to normal.” No. How do you run a concert at 25% capacity? What are the economics on that look like? How does that work? There’s musicians out of work for over a year now. This is rough. So the pain is real and for the creative industry, we are one of the hardest hit industries happens now-
Chris:
So what happens now? I mean, is there a move to get investment? I guess call it a stimulus or something to get it back and going, or it’s irrelevant because like you said, restrictions just make it only so much possible?
Maureen:
Exactly.
Chris:
Is that what it is?
Maureen:
Yeah. There’s bills coming up through the legislature to try and get relief on this, but it’s really hard to figure. Well, some of them are eligible for the business as are other businesses, some creative businesses. But for those individuals, this is ridiculously hard and it’s very hard for any stimulus package to be specialized into this sector. I don’t know. It’s rough Chris.
Chris:
Let me ask you this. We were talking about freelance and a move towards this freelance and I know freelancing has its appeal and it has its benefit, but it also always has that risk, right? Because you don’t have the layer of that security like other jobs come with, a salary and things like that. How do you think this affects that? I mean, this is the epiphany or the pinnacle situation that would threaten freelancers, right? Something like this, but I hope this is something that doesn’t become a regular occurrence. Do you think it alters how creatives or freelancers approach that? Do you think they say, “Man, I don’t know about this. I need to…” Or do you think no, they’re just going to continue forward?
Maureen:
Well, I think that a lot of us like to work that way, I’ve been freelance since I left Nickelodeon, actually I really like it, but it suits my personality. And the affordability up here, I would never do this in New York, I would ever be a freelancer in the city, right? That’s crazy. So I think that our affordability really helps that. So I think two things happen though. I think that more people are going to be forced into freelancing because there’s been job loss across the way. So I think that people will find their way into it. I think that companies like it, to not have to have so many people on staff like a graphic designer, not many non-creative companies need a full-time staff graphic designer, but they do need a logo, and so look all over it. It works to have this things decentralized and not on staff. So I think it always makes some sense, but I think what’s going to have to happen. And there’s a case in California and in England just now about Uber drivers. People going freelance, the government is going to have to start extending more protections for workers who go freelance because the economy actually favors freelance.
Maureen:
It’s cheaper for a company to hire a freelancer than a traditional employee, but the government has to meet that and offer those protections. For the first time ever, when COVID hit, freelancers were eligible for unemployment for the first time. If you’re a freelancer and you lost your main gig, you didn’t even have unemployment the next day, you’re out.
Chris:
Maureen, is it income based though? Is that how that works?
Maureen:
Yeah.
Chris:
Okay. All right. Yeah.
Maureen:
You have to track it over quarters, but yes. It was. And we-
Chris:
But you were eligible though, you were allowed to try. Wow.
Maureen:
Aha, and it worked great, especially when there was that $600 benefit. It helped people along the way. So the more that governments start to adapt themselves to that reality of freelancing and the benefits that it affords big companies, I think that we’ll start to see this third class of worker right now. It’s really stark. There’s traditional, there’s freelance, but a lot of this in the middle, this is what people are grappling with Uber. It’s like they work for Uber, but they’re not giving them any benefits at all. What’s this middle ground, how can we work with that? So hopefully that’s something that remains central to conversation.
Chris:
I guess if there’s a strong set of data to show, like you’re saying, that the impact on the economy is great and good when they’re working, right? That’s the impetus for them getting the protections there, right?
Maureen:
And if it’s cheaper for a corporation, right? Corporations win. Just go there, right? If corporations prefer it, then great.
Chris:
Yeah. You’ll get movement if corporations prefer it.
Maureen:
You’ll get some movement right. If Maureen Sager tells you or Chris tells you, maybe not, but-
Chris:
Even if some data tells you a lot of times corporations telling you has a lot more pull.
Maureen:
Right. So I think that’s what will get settled out in the next couple of years, or it has to. Also, the Affordable Care Act was great. If you had no access to health insurance, how could you have… So those things will all continue to help the sector, but the sector needs help.
Chris:
For sure. And it’ll take a bit to completely… Yeah. It’s interesting you brought that up. When I go to Italy, I go to Europe to visit family and a lot of these young kids who they’ve finished school, they’re young. My cousin is a painter and he paints when he paints and he doesn’t when he doesn’t. And he’ll paint a couple of days a week, and then he has enough money to do what he needs to do, and then he’ll pick up another painting job when he needs it. It’s like our freelance, but it’s less aggressive. And the reason why that lifestyle is easier there is because he doesn’t have to worry about the healthcare thing. A lot of the social program nets out there allow you to take as needed approach to your income. Whereas here, it’s a bit different, especially if you’re in that world and forcing people to work just because they have to work, but not necessarily doing the work that they need or feel like they should be doing. I think that’s always been a thing that has been frustrating for me here is that the baseline is different. And if you can provide people with a little bit of a baseline, you might spur more creativity or something like that, that might not otherwise take root because there’s just too much risk for someone possibly to go down that road.
Maureen:
Right. Creativity and innovation, right? There might be this smarter way to work. We really value butt-in-seat time, what good is that? I can sit my butt in this seat for the next 20 hours. Not necessarily anything’s going to come from that, I have to want that. And so to a person who’s motivated, a person who’s thinking creatively, a person who wants to do what they want to do when they want to do it, that person is generally, you’d have to guess, more productive for those hours that they spend, that time.
Chris:
Exactly, because you can’t force productivity, right? It comes out of true passion and what you really want to do. And it’s a struggle, especially when you have to be driven by it. Like we talked about being in New York, when you have to pay for your $3000 a month studio apartment, you’re driven by other things, right? And it’s different.
Maureen:
Yeah. For sure. Did that make me creative by being in New York? No. That’s the part that finally crushed it. It actually wasn’t fun anymore. So yeah. I mean, we-
Chris:
You just became like you were going through the motions. Yeah.
Maureen:
Right. We just outlined a really good case for universal basic income, right? We’re not replacing all of your income, but replacing that-
Chris:
Yeah. Or some sort of baseline to a standard of life. And I think in this country, we’ve knee jerked to these things. But if you think about it holistically, which I feel like just unfortunately people in our country, we don’t do. You see the whole picture and it has benefits, but people get stuck on what they view to be, “Well, I’m working, why can’t you work?” It’s not that they don’t want to work. It’s not that. They’re actually willing to work and work really well, it’s just that their type of work is not yours and so it’s a different situation. I mean, I don’t know how you could think that way.
Maureen:
The case needs to be made and if it’s not relevant and it doesn’t work, it shouldn’t go through. But there has to be I think the-
Chris:
You have to be open to listening to it. Yeah.
Maureen:
Right. You have to be open to listen to. But no, I take it back on us always. I take it back. If you want it, you’ve got to work really hard to explain. And if you didn’t explain it right, try again. It’s on us. If that’s something we want, it’s not on them to hear better, it’s on us to tell it better. And that’s true every time. To me, that’s a creative industries thing. It’s not like, “People don’t appreciate my goat cheese.” It’s like, does it taste good? Is it priced right? There are certain basic things you can’t ask the world to change for you. You have to tell it or-
Chris:
Right, and you have to be able to tell the story.
Maureen:
If I didn’t tell it right, then I don’t deserve their six minutes.
Chris:
Yeah. What I was saying when you talked about the goat cheese thing, I’m watching this thing about Italy and I was seeing how this person down in maybe the Bologna area up there. And they were talking about these cheese makers. And depending on the altitude at which the animals graze, you get a different flavor of the cheese and the gentleman that makes the cheese, he can tell you just by tasting it, what altitude it was at, which is tremendous. And so I’m thinking to myself here’s this cheese and I see this cheese, I buy it, it tastes good. I have no idea about that story. I have no idea that those animals have roamed and been there for how long. I have no idea that there’s different levels on purpose, different things. But to your point, it’s on them to explain that and to tell the story and I think that is a big defining thing. And our last few minutes I want to ask you this, just because as a neuroscientist, I’m also in mental health, it’s a big passion of mine, I host another podcast on that. And there has long been an association between creatives and mental health and mental illness, and not in a bad way.
Chris:
In fact, a lot of mental illness is born out of neurochemistry that your brain is wired in a specific way that gives you the power and ability to do certain things others can’t, but it pulls away from the other social aspects. And I think bipolar schizophrenia, a lot of those things. Have you seen that in your industry? I’m just curious, is that something that you [inaudible 00:56:15] or have you seen that around?
Maureen:
It’s such a good question. And it should be asked more often. I’ve seen it in my family, I think that’s our traditional portrait of the artist, right? Is this suffering person. And I think that the… Yes, I’ve seen it a lot. Some of it is that we’re not… Some people don’t feel hopefully the data of understanding where you fit in society, like of us saying, “We’re the fourth largest employment sector in the Capital Region.” Hopefully that helps someone who can’t see their value or can’t be felt, right? Their impact in the world. And so hopefully that’s something I hope it affords people. And we’ve had people walk into our events as freelancers because you work by yourself, It’s super weird sometimes. And they’ve walked into those events and they cry. And they’re like, “I didn’t know there were others. I didn’t know I mattered.” They love the data. I’ve seen that way, it’s validating to someone because you as a creative, you don’t always get a lot of validation in this world. Not everybody’s like, “Oh, it’s the best cheese ever.” They’re like, “This Jesus crap.”
Maureen:
They don’t get it. And so you have to have the fortitude to be able to do that. And a lot of our passion and ability comes from our weirdness, right? And so we walk around as basically weirdos trying to put on a nice jacket and not look weird. Trying to function in this world. And not all of us have that the self-esteem to be able to put that out there as like, “No, I’m wearing this.” It’s weird and creepy and you feel weird a lot.
Chris:
Yeah. And it could get very dark if you feel like you have something that really means a lot and is really special, but no one recognizes it or you feel like it would never make an impact. That’s got to have a major toll on you.
Maureen:
Yeah, it does. And this is what I would say to someone, don’t do it if that’s too depressing for you, because that is the experience, right? Not everyone’s from New Jersey. I’m saying it jokingly, but where you get put down a lot. So you’re going to get put down a lot, not everybody’s going to love everything you do. And I would say that maybe that’s a great reason to go do something else and have this on the side for yourself, right? That’s the best thing about side hustles is that your income’s taken care of, you do something where you feel solid about it, but then you can have this amorphous thing on the side where you’re finding your way through it until it’s ready to stand on its own. And there’s been so many businesses born that way, where you workout all those kinks, you get yourself up to speed and trained in the way. And really your fortitude inside is to a point where you’re like, “Okay, it’s time. I can do this.”
Chris:
Well, I think that’s a very tangible and logical progression. And I’ve read for entrepreneurs and I’ve read a lot about that is that if you’re doing something, if you have a full-time job, but you feel like you have this passion for something else, do it at night for a while, try to explore it and get into it not as your main. I podcasts, I’ve been podcasting for 10 years. And I do that outside of… I mean, this podcast is connected to my job, but I don’t have another show. That’s not. And I do it because I love to communicate. I like to have conversation and it’s a real strong passion of mine.
Chris:
And I think it’s the creative that I do. This is it. My ability to have conversations and I wouldn’t feel complete without it. Is it going to make me millions of dollars? Probably not. But does is it fulfilling? Yes. Does it give me an outlet? Yes, it does. And that matters. It really does matter in life. It’s not always about that. It really does matter to be self-fulfilling and sometimes it’s okay to start it like a small thing, and maybe it turns into something and you can fulfill a full-time job with it. Maybe it doesn’t, and maybe all it does is give you that fulfillment, and that matters.
Maureen:
Right. And if you’re tying it back to mental health, you matter, right? Just understanding that you matter or what you’re able to contribute or what your little path is from your heart to the world, right? That’s your mental health right there. So don’t put too much pressure on it. That way, everything can be to the side, but you’re finding your voice. You’re finding your way through and that’s creative. No one can judge that and you don’t always have to put that in a position for someone else to judge. It can just be for you. And that is super healthy for you.
Chris:
So our time has come to an end, but I want you to tell everybody where they can learn more about ACE. Where can they go if they want to get some more information?
Maureen:
Sure. You can Google Upstate Alliance for the Creative Economy. Or you can go to upstatecreative.org. We have a newsletter, that’s a lot of how we’ve been convening because we can’t put people in a room yet. But so that’s the best way to find us now and on social media. But that’s the best way to find that project. We’re also launching a new project called the CapNY Project, which is a regional brand. And hopefully people will hear more about that. Yeah.
Chris:
Awesome. Well, we’ll definitely link to it in the show notes for people listening and they want to see the link. It’ll be there for everybody. And she is Maureen Sager, I am Chris Pisano. This is the Get Overit Podcast where we come together to discuss the various ways to stop just getting through it and start getting over it.