Kirsten Dirksen, TV Producer and Unexpected YouTube Success

 

92-133. Kirsten Dirksen

SPEAKERS

Will Bachman, Kirsten Dirksen

 

Will Bachman  00:41

Hello and welcome to the 92 report conversations with members of the Harvard and Radcliffe class of 1992 I’m your host. Will Bachman, and I am delighted to be here today with Kirsten Dirksen, Kirsten, welcome to the show. Thank you will so Kirsten, tell me about your journey since graduating from Harvard,

 

Kirsten Dirksen  01:02

well, I majored in economics, thinking that was a really practical major. I think also I was comfortable with math, and so it just felt like something that could apply to a lot of disciplines. But it wasn’t really the perfect fit. And actually, my senior year, I found a creative writing course with Verlin Klinkenborg. Oh,

 

Will Bachman  01:21

you took Merlin’s course. How we know each other? So, yes, we were wondering how. We were wondering how we knew each other before we started this. Okay, so you took,

 

Kirsten Dirksen  01:30

so, yeah, I loved, I loved his course. My favorite course at Harvard, for sure. And I thought, what can I do with this? Can I, you know? So I thought, well, maybe I want to become a magazine writer. I think I wanted, I knew I wanted to sort of tell people’s stories. And then a friend said, Oh, I know somebody at the NBC affiliate in San Francisco, you could intern there. So I had to go and enroll in a community college in order to get you had to be getting credit so that, you know, aren’t taking advantage of labor. So I was back in college again, living at home and working it’s her interning, yeah, working for free at the NBC affiliate, which, you know, some of my mom’s friends would say, like, you went to Harvard and you’re, you know, working for free, and you’re back in. Wait

 

Will Bachman  02:10

a minute. Wait a minute. You weren’t working for free. You were paying to work because you had graduated from Harvard, but now you’re paying to go to community college.

 

Kirsten Dirksen  02:17

Yeah, no. And I had other, lots of other little jobs on the sides, like tennis coach at the, you know, high school and all these other things. So, yeah, no, it was definitely but I know I enjoyed it. It was really fun. There’s probably 200 of us interning as a huge operation of interns that really kept, yeah, and by the end of, like, almost a year, it’s about nine months, two of us had jobs. And so I ended up with a job, working the NBC elite was great because it was the old chronicle enterprises. So they had, there was a lot of for family money, and they put it into a lot of really good local programming. So there was two documentarians on staff, and I started working with them. And soon after, I started working on a teen show, and which was great. I mean, it’s we did a lot. We were really, I was sort of became the music, kind of the music person, not just me. I mean, which, because I’m not really a Music Fanatic. So it was perfect person to interview all the bands, because if you go in knowing nothing, then you kind of get a better interview. So, like, I think my first interview was this band called corn that it was their first interview as well. And I think I remember we just sort of had a ridiculous time, like they were falling down on the hallway. And, you know, I think in the end, I was always trying to get people to do different bands, to do different things, because I think they’re really sick of interviews. So, you know, we’d be like, band called elastica. I remember I was like, would you, let’s just or something? They came up with things too, about jumping on their bed and in a hotel room and talking about the experience of being in the hotel room, or, you know, those kind of things. So anyway, so from there I went, in an end of 99 just about the change of the millennium, I went to New York City to work for oxygen, which is a women’s network. And worked there for about a year and a half, and then they took everyone out of house. So then I started working freelance in New York City, a lot of different networks. Actually, my friend Susan Park was the one who brought me to oxygen, and she then pulled me over to MTV, where she was a VJ at the time, and did a lot of music stuff again, but we did a lot of, like, more reverent kind of stories, like we would play a little bit. We did this thing called party crasher when we were in San Francisco, actually, and we would go, we weren’t, I mean, we were kind of invited the parties, but we’d go and do little bit silly kind of interviews, or trying to, like, do something different, rather than, again, it’s sort of that theme of, I think a lot of people in me, in entertainment, get really tired of the same interviews questions, especially musicians. I think because not most musicians don’t want. Explain their songs. So if you just do something different and sort of have fun with it, it’s like so suchin And I would continue that a little bit at MTV. So we did a bunch of stuff with like the band Good Charlotte on their bus, doing, you know, what would we do with? Oh, yeah, I think she was trying to become a member of the band, and we’d follow them around. Or we went to Canada, and there’s a band called Simple Plan, and we kind of went back to all their original places of work, and kind of barely remember these. But anyway, so that kind of thing. And then I so worked freelance for a while, and then the Sundance Channel took me to Spain to do an interview with Javier Bardem. And what was the other part of that? Director of Luna cesol, I think, which is what he was in Mondays in the sun, and there were some other movies. And from there, I met my husband eventually, in Barcelona a little bit later. But so and do I continue just talking? This is,

 

Will Bachman  06:02

I interrupt. If it’s boring, no or Oh, okay, I interrupt. No, I shouldn’t say that, because the people think, oh, interrupt. No, no, I help prompt things along. But if it’s okay, like this, just keep rolling, rolling. Oh, you

 

Kirsten Dirksen  06:16

want me to keep talking? Okay? So, um, yeah. So then I, started working with an old oxygen producer doing like because I was just trying to find work so I could stay in Spain and keep living there. And so she was doing a wedding show with this magazine called the knot. And so there was a half an hour wedding show, reality kind of wedding show. So we would film weddings and, you know, location. So we went to, like, one in Mexico, one we did in in Florence, we and then I would edit it. So I’d have like five weeks to edit it, and I just bring hard drives to Barcelona and sit there and edit and then bring it back for a week to go over with the executives and make sure it was okay. And then that was it. So it was a great that was fun. And did that for a while, and then my husband had the idea to start a website. So we decided that was back when everything was sort of green, like Vanity Fair had the green issue at 2006 I think the same time we started the website. And so that was kind of what it was, environmental sustainability, and things have kind of moved from there, but that was the beginning of it. And so then I said, Well, you know, I’m, I’m, I make videos, why don’t I do some videos, and we put them on this little platform called YouTube and stuff. Just sort of sat around for a few years, and we were doing that, and I’m still freelancing a bit, and he was working as well. And then, and then we had the first viral video, which was a micro micro apartment in in New York. And the funny thing is, nobody was really doing those kind of stories as tiny apartments, but I had read an article in El Pais about micro pisos, which is like micro apartments. And so I thought, well, what got to be something in New York? And found this woman named Felice Cohen, and then that just everyone picked it up. It was the funniest thing. It took a little while, I think was about nine months. It was on there, and then it got picked up. And my sister in law, who was living in Italy, said, La Republica has your your story on their homepage. And like, was kind of everywhere I was in the was not the home of Yahoo, which is what, I think at the time, Yahoo was big enough that, as he sent like, half a million people my way, and, you know, in an hour or two, and, and so that picked up. And then, yeah, and then Good morning America’s did this, this story on the viral video apartments, you know, and those kind of things that was back in the days when a lot of news media wasn’t making their own video, so they were picking up other people. So that’s why it went around. So that doesn’t really happen anymore, but it back then you would get pick up a lot of times from news media, traditional media. So

 

Will Bachman  08:48

you start, I mean, YouTube started in about 2005

 

Kirsten Dirksen  08:51

oh, yeah, quite early. I mean, it was a few more years before anything really went viral, before you could monetize things, or before any of that. But yeah, it was early. It was early, and it’s just fortuitous because, you know, I wasn’t looking to, I just placed a host it actually, I think we thought, Oh, this is just a cheaper place of hosting it than doing phone, you know, because we started hosting, actually, we did. We started hosting on our own servers, and then we’re like, Well, why don’t just do it on YouTube, it’s free,

 

Will Bachman  09:15

and then you bet it on your site, yeah. And so you just happen to be kind of early, relatively early to YouTube, yeah. And when you say it went viral, what does that mean? In in that day? Like, what kind of views did it get? Um, response, like,

 

Kirsten Dirksen  09:32

remember, exactly, probably a million that first day. Then it kept going for a while. I think the video has, I don’t know, 30 million now or something. So it continued, I don’t know if, yeah, so you can sort of check there’s analytics. You can see, like if, if that video is continued or not. So now I have, God, we actually have a press page. I can tell you what we have. And just over the weekend, I hit 2 million subscribers. But the views are, see, um. Yeah, 700 and like, about 720 million views of 20 million and at least over 160 videos with at least 1 million views. I’m reading our press page together.

 

Will Bachman  10:12

We will include a link here in the show notes. But okay, YouTube, how? How can

 

Kirsten Dirksen  10:18

YouTube? Is just my name, which is so funny. I mean, we really didn’t, because if we’d been smarter, we would have come we would have come up with a fun name for, you know, eco living, or, you know, crazy houses, or whatever it is. But we were just thinking, Oh, this is just free hosting. So it was funny.

 

Will Bachman  10:33

So if you look up Kirsten Dirksen on YouTube, yeah, we’ll see the home of seven, 20 million views and 2 million subscribers. Okay, is that first? There was that for it wasn’t monetized yet. So you just like, Oh, wow. Okay, no,

 

Kirsten Dirksen  10:47

it was by then. By then, it was because, before anything, I think it was like 2009 when things went viral, or something like that. I can’t remember, actually, even later, um, because for a while, yeah, no, for a while, we were just posting, and it was like, and the stuff I was posting was like, I mean, just, oh, I’m cleaning my bathroom with clean, green cleaning products. Look how clean it got. Yeah. I mean, it was just kind of anything I could think of, kind of silly, um, but

 

Will Bachman  11:10

yeah, you’re posting a lot. You were posting a decent amount. Yeah,

 

Kirsten Dirksen  11:14

yeah, posting a lot, yeah. I mean, yeah. Now it’s really consistent. Now I post every Sunday video, and they’re much longer, they’re usually, they’re often over a half hour. I’ve done, I mean, I’ve done how many, maybe about five or six that are kind of documentaries, what I call them? I mean, it’s hard to know what to call a documentary, but, I mean, I guess one definitely. I mean, they are in that very sort of, I guess you would I always tell people I film in a very taste style when I’m trying to explain, like, what I’m doing when I come in to interview people, because it’s really not set up. I don’t do sit down interviews. I don’t set anything up. I don’t plan ahead. I prefer not to have a chat ahead of time or anything like that. So it’s just more so it does feel real, again, it is real, you know, when you have a conversation and then and moving around through a space or a place and walking and that kind of thing. So, yeah, we used to give people a bit of a headache because I didn’t use a gimbal for a really long time. I was trying to be really, really real, and I didn’t want to get a gimbal. And we got so many comments, people saying, you should buy a gimbal. It’s making me sick. They finally got a gimbal, which does make it smoother, for better or worse, but yeah, so I lost my train of thought. Oh, so documentaries, yeah. So I’ve done three are really family based. So we did drag our kids everywhere. A lot of travel, you know, just yeah, a lot of travel. They’re not excited about it. People think it sounds fun, but, you know, but we did like a one. The first one I called we the tiny house people, which was just sort of chronicling a lot of the tiny house movement stuff that I was probably one of the first people on the internet to do tiny house stories. And now then it became like tiny house shows picked up, and they would start contacting me, saying, we’re going to do a tiny show, you know? And then the second one was, Oh, our summer of family, love, where we would did this. We slept in a camper van across the Pacific Northwest, and all that the West for the summer, an old VW, a VW, a Westie, so. And then there, yeah, another road trip. And then the other documentaries I’ve done have been focused more on homelessness, because that’s something that’s just kind of because I’ve done so many homes and small homes, different things that just crept in there that, you know, I started telling stories about a lot of people who were really homeless. I mean, they were living in vans or living in cars or, you know, whatever it was, and some more, by choice. But other people didn’t have a lot of options. So started telling those stories, and then put something together into, like two, two documentaries on homelessness, looking at some looking at solutions and things, and mostly California, which has really been had more an effect on Well, I’d say that’s become a big issue.

 

Will Bachman  14:04

So do these kind of series, like you did a series of videos around living in no

 

Kirsten Dirksen  14:09

so one, I’ve just each one was about an hour. So documentaries, yeah, I’m always hesitant to say that, as I started in a very formal documentary unit. And so in, you know, San Francisco, and there really were more the style of really setting up your interviews and sit down and lighting and editing for months and months and months. And I edit for a couple weeks, you know, but I have shot for months and months and months and then and I have it in my head, and then I just sort of put it together. But I don’t have a lot of time to be, you know, focused on one thing, because I’m posting every week as well.

 

Will Bachman  14:41

So, and the weekly stuff that you’re posting is typically what,

 

Kirsten Dirksen  14:45

what it’s about, or what, what, yeah, like, what it’s about. So you’re right, like, it’s, it’s left. I’m for a while, people would approach me and say, Oh, you’re the tiny house person. And I’m like, well, started in that, but you know, you don’t want to stay in one little area. Um, so. Really more now it’s, well, I mean, I guess I sent you our book. It’s really the life changing homes, is what we titled it, because that, I would say, is sums up a little bit of all the stories we do, right? So they’re homes that, for whatever reason, feel kind of life changing. So it could be because you have a tiny home and you’re able to afford living in or if able to afford your own home, or you can build your own home or make your own home. Or it could be because your home is so different, because it’s underground, or because it’s just whatever the way it’s set up, that it feels like it sort of changes how you live.

 

Will Bachman  15:36

So you go around interviewing people and about their house and kind of touring their house and doing videos on that. And I gotta say, Yes, I have the PDF of your forthcoming book. Listeners. This is one of the most gorgeous books I’ve seen I have been going through this. The photos are just so amazing, life changing homes, eco friendly designs that promote well being with is so absolutely gorgeous. The I mean, you want to live in all these houses, right? And let’s, let’s talk about the book a little bit. There’s 10 chapters. Each has a theme, but it’s sort of cut in a slightly different way. It’s not about big house or small, clever sort of titles talk us through the book.

 

Kirsten Dirksen  16:22

Oh gosh. You know, we wrote it a while ago, and my writing thinking like you’d have to remind me. I mean, I know there’s a whole section on underground, so okay, I’ll think

 

Will Bachman  16:32

of one television. So let me just read the chapter title. Okay, okay, that’ll spark your memory of the book. This is just the houses, they’re not grand, big, giant houses, but they’re just like beautiful these places, you put them on Airbnb, they would kill right as sort of one of these air and be Airbnb special kind of places. So we got simplicity, slow, it Henry, impermanence, elevation, restoration, underground survival, resurrection and future. So kind of attention getting kind of thought provoking chapter headings and each seems like each chapter covers like sort of about two or maybe three different houses that fit that theme, and then you interview the the owner. Yeah.

 

Kirsten Dirksen  17:27

So what it is is the book came after the video, so a lot of the what we did is try to put them into categories. But it’s not that we go after a certain category or we’re looking for a certain thing. It’s more the story is super interesting. And a lot of people approach us saying, you know, I have, I did this. And so, for example, there’s a man who lives underground in a like, kind of little hobbit house Oregon and East, it’s just tip of Oregon, which is really difficult to get to. So we were driving and driving, and you never go through this. This, it’s the northeast corner Joseph, Oregon. It’s not going to place you ever go through. And I go to, I’ve driven from California, Idaho and different places in Montana and all these, and we’d never been through there. So, but anyway, so we arrive in town, and we just had a GPS direction. That’s right, we had GPS direction we arrive. And it was just a little slope down. And we’re, can you kind of look down, it just looks like grass. I mean, don’t see anything. And then he popped up, and we went down, and he had just dug under, and it’s just this land that he rents for, I don’t know, $100 a year, I think, or something like that, from a farmer, or from somebody in town, and he had originally built, he originally slept in a tent, and then he had built some sort of house, and he was robbed, and so he decided to build it underground. You really don’t see it, and it’s a skylight, and he really does stay under there. I mean, I think he spends his winters in Maui, surfing or something. He’d done something else. So, I mean, and he write, he’s a writer, and he really, I mean, he was well dressed. It wasn’t like, you know, someone comes out and they, you know, he obviously lives quite conventionally. I mean, he has as far as, like, going to the laundromat and doing all those things, but he was just living in a hobbit hole. And you can’t stand up in this hobbit hole. It wasn’t huge, but he had this crafted, this life out there where he was even cutting the grass with a scythe and keeping everything very neat. Everything was very neat. And the way he was living was, you know, cutting grass with a scythe, right? So it was just his whole lifestyle was also probably simplicity would fit that too, right? Like, so it’s very and traditional, and in some ways of and being in touch with the land, I think, I think that’s another theme that was that’s really common with the people I get, is a really in touch with their surroundings often,

 

Will Bachman  19:52

yeah? So these? So, yeah, I was going to ask you how you discover these, because there’s such a. Unusual type thing is it people kind of volunteering to be on your show? I mean, a

 

Kirsten Dirksen  20:05

lot of times it’s it’s people, other people who watch then tell me, oh, you should, there’s this guy in in Oregon who you should get in touch with and maybe will send me his contact info or something. I think that’s what happened with Dan price. Um, but you know, there was another story I did that was part of itinerancy, and it’s this man who lives in Aaron, who lives in a sheep wagon that he built, but tiny. I mean, it’s just the size of, you know what the sheep can pull. So it’s just the size of his bed.

 

Will Bachman  20:37

I’m looking at this one right now. Yeah, no, he’s interesting.

 

Kirsten Dirksen  20:40

And so he contacted me, and for about a couple years, I said, Well, I think we’re gonna make it through the Willamette Valley where he was living, and then we didn’t, and then we might. And then I think he got a little frustrated, so then he was getting a little bit mean online, and and then, you know, we were going through again. I thought, well, reach out again, even though he seems like he’s pretty angry. And he was like, Yeah, stop by. And we did, and he was just on the side of the road where he was letting his sheep eat. So he wanders and lets his sheep eat. He gets permission or any they eat. He’s been doing this for 12 years. This is not just something he’s doing for a season. And he lives out of his cart. And so the last couple of times. So now when we go up, because we often go up, because we often go up and do the Pacific Northwest. Since the last couple times we’ve stopped, and he’s been on a farm where he’s sort of being kind of like a landlord to a farm by putting his sheep there, and then the sheep also kind of mow the grass, and he takes care of like, yeah, landlording and chickens and all that.

 

Will Bachman  21:40

What have you learned about ways to live in the world from this experience of interviewing so many people in sort of non traditional dwellings?

 

Kirsten Dirksen  21:56

Yeah. I mean, I definitely think one of the things that always strikes me is when we hit a place and you think, Oh, that those were just pictures. And there’s no way somebody’s actually living like this. And and then you see that someone’s living in this completely different way, you know, like a dome home in Ontario, where they you go inside, and it was actually the what’s his name, William. What’s up? So, you know the movie where he teaches the geese to fly home, fly away home. The man in that so we went to his house, and he died leukemia a couple years before, but it was this widow, and his house is this dome. It’s like kind of slightly kind of underground, but more Earth bermed, as she says, Earth sheltered. Um, but everything is different inside. You go inside, and he has a refrigerator that, you push a button, and it swirls up and pops up like it just felt like Willy Wonka’s, you know, factory. And you think how people are actually living like this. And you go into the living room, and there’s a swing and, you know, the kids get on and they’re swinging through this huge, huge, domed living room. And everything was sort of different that way. And she was talking about her husband, you know, kind of just taking everything, not taking anything for granted, right? Like, so everything can be redone and reimagined and and I think that’s kind of how people, a lot of people we interview, live their lives, is they don’t just take anything for granted. They don’t just think, well, I need to save up and get a huge mortgage and buy a big home, or whatever home I can afford. It’s sort of thinking, Well, what do I really need out of a home? And what do I What skills do I have, and what could I make myself? And what would I want to make, and what can I do differently? And, you know, one guy was a chiropractor in Michigan or somewhere. And then he bought some land, sold his house, and bought some land in California, near the border of Oregon, and just started building like a tree house and a this huge sort of Earth ship along the really big where he grows all these plants, and there’s a bed inside you can sleep inside. And now he has all these people living there, and it’s his whole community. Um, his whole community. And it’s just kind of fantastical, like you think, Oh, he has a hobbit home there too. And he has all these different lots of people living there now, and not something that you would ever just it’s not the typical white pick offense. So it’s like people who are just like, don’t think you have to follow a certain path, and can try different things. And no and we even interviewed people like the chief architect for Apple, who has a home in Sonoma County, and it’s a little more conventional, but not really. I mean, His thing was number one, they they did live on the land first, but, well, it’s just, it’s they really had another home, but they would go camping on the land to sort of see where’s the best place to live on the land. Where do I want to, you know, it’s not the top of the hill, where the best views actually, sort of down the middle, where you’re more, you know, sheltered and and then he bought two pre, a couple pre, two free prefabs. I think that was just small called from, we house from this architect that we’ve interviewed in Saint Paul. I. And so they’re just small. It’s really small. I mean, he could afford what he wanted to keep it small and just a lot of glass and open and really in touch with the surroundings. And, you know, he everyone laughed. Was laughing because everything, I think only the bathroom has a bit of a door, but everything’s very open. And so his wife and kids were making, you know, saying, Well, yeah, everything’s very open, and just being, again, back to, like, that tent experience, being on the land and and so that that would be his dream not to have anything huge. Because, right again, it’s not that, it’s not just always about affordability, but it’s also about like, well, what makes the most sense? Because sometimes too big. People have said this, me several times, is sometimes too big of a house is actually worse, because you don’t have the views you’re you’re blocked in by your house. So you don’t you’re not in touch with the out the surroundings. You’re not open to what’s around. So, you know, I think that’s why we came back to this life changing homes ideas, because it’s the people who are okay about trying something different, and so then, in the end, their home does change their life in some way.

 

Will Bachman  26:10

I can’t remember the exact quote from Walden, but I remember there’s this passage in there where he talks about he wanted to have a big enough room that he could have a conversation, but there’d be space between the people to for the you know, ideas to kind of percolate in between. There’s something about that. And I’m wondering if you have experienced visiting so many of these unique play places, if there are some types of dwelling that just seem like you could have certain types of thoughts in one that you might not in others, and if different kinds might put you in, like a different frame of mind, or a different, yeah, maybe a different sort of frame of mind living in different dwellings. Talk about that a bit. Yeah,

 

Kirsten Dirksen  27:04

that’s interesting. I think that, yeah, Thoreau did have we’ve been to his cabin too to film, and he had three chairs. I think he talks about, you know, just the right amount, if, I mean, I could even probably pull it up. He says I had three chairs in my house, one for solitude, two for friendship, and three for society. I mean, it’s funny, because the person who we interviewed for at his house was saying, you know, it’s not like Thoreau was way out in the woods. I mean, it’s walkable, you know, to Concord, so you’re not it. People made it sound like he was just off as a hermit, but he wasn’t. People stopped by so but yes, like, I definitely think that that’s part of it for him, though. So he could have stayed in Concord and just gone out for the day, but it was partly to put himself somewhere else. It’s, there’s, it’s interesting. There’s a couple who he just emailed me this morning, and they went to live in the woods, like the row of Santa Cruz County, I believe area and or that area, and they call it innermost house, because, as they say, it’s for them that was about. It was more about being a place to reflect, to for kind of a living experiment in simplicity, in philosophical simplicity. I think he would, he quoted, he was in Emerson all the time about plain living, high thinking. So I think there’s a connection there for him and others that that you know how you live, and maybe the simpler you live can expand to sort of give you more space for thinking there’s a woman who actually talked about that early on. We were doing a story with people who had a tiny house in their backyard in Santa Rosa, California, and that was really early on, when people were really trying breaking a lot of the rules. And now it’s funny, because California has changed their adu laws, their accessory dwelling unit laws in about 2017 and now it’s much, much easier to put something in your backyard. But back then, these are all rebels, you know. And they had gotten fined, and they were showing me. I did a follow up story with them, and they had gotten tagged by the city and complaints. And you know how to move, and they had to move every 72 hours. You can have a house on wheels, but it has to move every 72 hours, and you can’t keep it in her she had her she had her parents backyard. Couldn’t do that anymore, but some of that’s changed. But I remember her her talking about how she needed that having too many things in her house, her home or in her space, cluttered her mind, and so she needed to get rid of a lot of stuff, and she needed things to be very simple and pared down in order to order to in order to really be able to think. And several people have talked about that. So

 

Will Bachman  29:51

what have you learned, or what has surprised you about which videos really perform well and people respond? On to and go viral, and which ones that you think maybe are going to be a great one and end up being comparatively more of a dud, like, curious about that part of your life as a content creator?

 

Kirsten Dirksen  30:11

Yeah. I mean, that’s a good that’s a good point. Now I’m forgetting the ones that are duds, because that happens a lot, like I could probably look on my just recently, because it happens like, all the time, and I’d like to forget, because, you know, I’m very positive every week that, you know, people will get this, but like, we’ll have, I mean, if it doesn’t hit a high. So that the last one was, that was, well, I Yeah, well, we had a young architect living in a 12th century mansion in or Mansilla Villa kind of thing in Spain that didn’t that was, but we kind of knew that one might not, because it’s more architecturally interesting. Some of them we know ahead of time. So let me think on that one. But I can tell you, as far as things that we didn’t necessarily expect, like last week’s video we had, we did a story with what’s called Special Operations that commutes to what’s the title it commutes to by flying car from rural, off grid home. My husband does the title. So you kind of that’s a big that’s a big thing too. You gotta get the title right. But he I, we didn’t expect it to do very well, because people usually want a home, and I didn’t get to the home until much later at the very end, and his home’s not completed, and he was there, but it was, I just thought this flying car thing I saw an article about, and I thought it’s just crazy that people are have flying cars now, and it’s in the Ultralight category, so It really is just like a flying drone. It’s not like we did another story with somebody who a company who’s doing it, but it’s more like a tax a helicopter taxi kind of thing. And so, yeah, I mean, so that was a fun story. So we arrive, and we actually get stuck. And of course, because I’m filming everything, I film the whole drive up, we film us getting stuck in the snow, driving up, trying to get to his house, and then he arrives and rescues us. And then we had a walk most of the way up there, and and, you know, he was kind of interesting. And we thought he was interesting, but my husband really didn’t think it would, anybody else would get that or not enough. And, yeah, it’s had, you know, I don’t know what it’s had 700 700,000 views in a week, or something. So, you know, it’s it. I think it’s because the guy who’s a special operations vet, and he’s, like, his whole life is really consistent, right? So he lives in the he bought land at the top of the mountain. He can’t really afford a huge home, so he’s building his own home over time. It’s just gonna probably be unfinished for maybe forever, you know, but he is doing what he loves, you know, he’s still working as a and rescue missions and with firefighters and that kind of thing. And, yeah, I mean, I think people see that, and they like the story, like the characters and those kind of things. And some of them don’t do well, not because, just because people don’t want to click on a certain thumbnail or certain title, and so it doesn’t get found, and then maybe a year later it does, you know, because someone finds it and talks about it and posts on Reddit, and I don’t know where they put stuff, but it’ll suddenly we see that a video surging, and we’re like, wow, people found that video. We liked it. Now, I guess you know. So, yeah, it varies.

 

Will Bachman  33:25

I imagine that you did not expect to be a content creator, an independent, sort of content creator in college. It’s not something that many of us were planning as a life for how has it kind of changed your outlook on life and making a living and just being a earning, earning a

 

Kirsten Dirksen  33:48

living? Yeah, it’s a good question. You know, I mean vain. I was working in television and and fully freelance at the time, and, and then slowly this crept up on me, really, it wasn’t something I planned, and I guess nobody was really then, but it’s really given me a lot of freedom. I mean, it’s, I have to say, I can’t imagine having children and working in television and the kind of, you know, there’s not a lot of freedom in your schedule, and you’re not, you know, it’s not like a nine to five job, which probably a lot of us can relate to. So I feel really, really fortunate. I mean, it was sort of the perfect timing, and also it’s, you know, afforded me an income that so I can make it a living at it, which is just really fortunate. So, yeah, I mean, I don’t. I think about it, and I even think about it when I tell younger people, when asking me questions, and I think, well, I don’t, I don’t know how easy that is to replicate, because if I were to jump in now, it’s a really crowded field, and I don’t know how easy it is to get a foothold, because I think there’s a lot of people who are making content. It’s great content. I mean, you see the stuff that. People make and there’s really nice so, but yeah, I feel lucky. I mean, it’s a it’s a bit of a treadmill. You have to keep producing content, and the travel can be tiring sometimes, but other times it’s a real joy. I mean, we had this young guy, probably about 25 who emailed us about in 2021 or so, and he had built a hut he converted to World War Two bunker in Northern Norway, which I didn’t realize. There was all this world war two activity there, and he had in the loftinton Islands, and he had, I knew, all these other stories, and he really wanted us to really wanted us to come up. So finally, last summer, about three or four years after he first emailed, he had found us about 10 stories of great things. So we said, All right, well, coming up. So we flew up from Oslo. And I don’t know if you’ve heard of the Lofoten islands, but apparently it’s where frozen was based on, and they’re beautiful. I mean, they’re just shoot out of the mountain, shoot out of the water, and surprisingly balmy for being above the Arctic Circle, because of the sort of currents and all that weather patterns and things. But we went and we did his his and it was this little town, and and then we just walked up above town, like behind some backyards, and we started walking up a hill. We get to the top of the hill, and there’s this concrete bunker for World War Two, because the Germans had been there because they were of all the iron coming out of Sweden, I believe. And I should remember the exact details, but like, it was because of it was strategic. And so he had converted this bunker that wasn’t his, obviously, but his was about sharing and having people come stay. And he’d opened it up to anyone who wants to come music. So as we were walking up, about five people walked down who had been staying the night, you know, a couple Italians and a couple Norwegians and whatever. So, um, and then he also showed us his friends, ex, his former girlfriend’s sod hut that she had built. So we filmed that, and it was really just a sod head. She lived in it for two years. So she was, she’s now living in she hitchhiked by sailboat, which was a new for me, to South America, so she was living there. So I did an audio interview with her, and then put together what we had from him and stuff that her, Well, I guess her started off okay, but I wouldn’t know. I don’t know if hers was, I thought hers might be more popular. Was sort of fun, or his. I guess they were. I don’t know how popular, but you’re asked that question now, I’m thinking about it. But great story though. I mean, because it was just, it’s beautiful. I mean, the whole area is so I just so beautiful, and never got dark, so so easy to film. We just kept filming and filming and filming. Gonna be 11 o’clock, and that’s fine, and that’s fine, and you don’t have to worry about losing light. And, you know, because we were there in July and and it was just, you know. And one of the stories we just found we got, we actually rented an Airbnb that looked cool because it said, you know, kind of off grid and out there by the water, and there was a boat available, if you wanted it, that we never used the boat, because we would be a mess on power boats in the water agency said it’s super dangerous out there anyway. The currents are scary. But it was, you had to drive past all these sheep and all these, you know, way out, kind of on the road, I mean, and well, we were about 40 minutes from a supermarket. We did figure that out. We didn’t really bring enough food and we but the city ended up being a story. I ended up making a video out of it, because the owner it had been in the family for a long time, and his father had grown up out there. When there was no electricity, they got to grow all their own food, which it’s really rocky, and I can’t imagine trying to, you know, catching a lot of fish. I guess that was their deal. And, yeah, completely off grid. So now it’s still off grid because they didn’t want to connect, pivot to connect. And that video actually did well, you know. And it was just a kind of thing we just shot while we were sitting, you know, we arrived and just kind of like, wow, this is crazy. I might start just filming with my phone. And, you know

 

Will Bachman  38:49

what’s tell us a little bit of the behind the scenes of what it takes to make a typical video. Like, how much time are you actually filming? How much editing is involved, how much time just producing the thumb perfect thumbnail, tell us a little bit of behind the scenes. Yeah.

 

Kirsten Dirksen  39:03

Um, so we usually, I usually film for what my husband, I film together, and it’s usually about two to three hours at a house or a location, or what’s

 

Will Bachman  39:14

that like? So you have a camera, and you’re filming the subject, and then your husband’s filming you, and the subject is that,

 

Kirsten Dirksen  39:19

and, I am the subject and whatever I mean. And I sometimes film him, if he’s talking, we just ask questions and talk. And I know, initially I didn’t even mic myself, and then I was like, Oh, this is why am I? So finally, we could just got some microphones for ourselves. You know, it was really slow with the tech, but yeah, so we film, and it’s just, it really is just a conversation, like with this guy out there showing us his father, he started showing us the place we’d rented, which was fine, but he was like, This is it was kind of boring because it was really clean. And he’s like, my father just wanted everything really new, you know, nothing old, because he he just got tired of lifestyle. But he’s like, but the old house is right there. Let me see if they’ll let us in. So then we drove down, and it’s raining, and I’m still wearing shorts because it was sort of. Warm earlier, and that’s freezing. And everyone videos like, why are you wearing shorts? I’m like, I don’t know, because we just started filming. And we go over to that house, and the woman said, Sure, yeah, you can. Well, I shouldn’t speak in English, but she was like, sure to him that we could film. And so we filmed that house, which was kind of leaky. You could tell. You could see why. Maybe it was kind of cool, but it was this beautiful house. So we kept filming there, and then went over to the boathouse. He was talking about the waves come and just wipe everything out. I mean, it’s just really rugged. So we filmed with him, but we, I don’t know, we hour and a half or so, but then we filmed ourselves. And I’d sort of go on runs during those couple days stay and I’d film in the morning, I’d stop and film something and run and film something and and then my husband flew the drone the night before we left, 11 o’clock at night, because you could still look like daytime. And we hadn’t done it yet, and we were leaving next morning. We’re like, oh, but the drone, I’ll be adding these two louds, I mean. And we’re like, well, we’ll just keep it, you know, near the waves. And there’s really no houses around there anyway, we kind of got ours. And those, those neighbors, I don’t, um, so, yeah, I mean, I’m drones part of it. I guess if you’re looking at production, we do that a lot more now and then. And then I was kind of bugging him and seeing if he had any photos of his dad or old stuff. And he was really hard to get in touch with, because he’s a school teacher during the year, so they go up there in the summer and rent it out for six weeks and then shut it down because it’s not a winter place. And anyway, so I didn’t get any photos of his dad, but I found a lot of great archive stuff that I used even these old production reels of something talking about from black and white the fishing up there, because the cod fishing was just huge. I mean, the water has become were crowded with boats and people cod fishing in the time. So, so yeah, and then I edit for a week. I mean, on and off for a week. I’m also during that week setting up other stories and doing other things, but, and then I post so, but that did make me think there was another story. He suggested that we did that I actually thought was going to be popular. So you asked about it. We took a ferry over to this other little island, skrova, and it was a huge cod fishing it was where they had a lot of the fishing operations went on. So they had a big oil tank that he bought that was just decommissioned, they weren’t using anymore, and he bought and turned into a house. And I’m like, this is a great story. It’s beautiful. It’s an oil tank. I mean, he’s funny. He’s talking about how it had like the chevron sign on it, or Exxon, I don’t remember which, and he had contacted the company, or, no, the content he the company had seen the photo of his oil tank home in some small Norwegian newspaper, and said, No, take that off. We don’t want that on there anymore. Our logo on some how. I don’t know why, but so, you know, he’s like, all right, pay for the paint. So they did, you know, and he’s fine. And he’s telling us all these old stories about all the old fishermen there, and he’s actually a cameraman for Norwegian television, and so he kind of knew the whole but he was taking us around all his friends, and we’re stopping everywhere, and we’re going, I’m not we were actually four or five hours with him, and then his friends took us by boat, this tiny boat, back to the main island we were on, or elfington. And that was a crazy ride. It was fairly fun. Anyway, the video didn’t do that well, so, you know, and maybe someone will find it. Maybe it’s sometimes we think times are too clean, too pretty. It almost looks like an ad. It doesn’t look real. I mean, some of those things can be problematic. So sometimes you see a thumb, you’re like, well, dirty that up a little bit, because you know what? It’s just It

 

Will Bachman  43:09

looks like a render it up. I could keep going. This is amazing. I want to hear about any courses or professors that you had at Harvard that continue to resonate with you. We

 

Kirsten Dirksen  43:20

already talked about him, Ferlin Klinkenborg, I mean, honestly, that was, that was probably the big one that was life changing for me, you know, yeah, that that you could make that into something you do, or that I gave an inkling an idea you could do something with it. Then I don’t know if I was sure I could ever do anything with that. If it was practical. I was very practical person

 

Will Bachman  43:38

back then. So that kind of really just unlocked the desire to go work at NBC and then led on and on. Wow, yeah,

 

Kirsten Dirksen  43:45

yeah, no, definitely. I think that was like, and just the way of thinking and the way of approaching creative work like he definitely, he didn’t believe in overly flowery language. I think he said, never use any adjectives or adverbs, you know. And I think that’s how I see television a little bit. It’s like, why flower up something when the story itself is these stories are amazing. There’s just amazing stories to tell out there, and people who living these, you know, incredible lives. I don’t, there’s no need to sit them down and light them right and, you know, make it all perfect. So, and

 

Will Bachman  44:19

we’ll give, let’s give a mention to verily, most recent book. I think it’s several short sentences about writing,

 

Kirsten Dirksen  44:27

and it’s which I loved, by the way, yes, yeah, it’s literally,

 

Will Bachman  44:31

it’s just sentences. It’s so and it is you think, how can you fill an entire book of just so it’s also

 

Kirsten Dirksen  44:38

about being sensitive to life, right? Into the details of life and to it’s just about, it’s about changing your outlook, changing the way you

 

Will Bachman  44:45

see, yeah, it’s wonderful book. Yeah, that was a wonderful, wonderful, wonderful to have that experience of for a long time. He wrote the rural life section there in the New York Times on the Op Ed page. All right, so curious. Kirsten, I think we already said it once, but we can, people can find your YouTube channel by looking up Kirsten Dirksen. We’ll include that link in the show notes. Any other places for people to find you online?

 

Kirsten Dirksen  45:10

Well, our original website is fair companiesdotcom and that’s where we have that Press page I was reading off of. So we still, you know, that’s still updated. My husband blogs on there. So yeah, that would be the main place. Gosh, yeah. I mean, I do a little bit of social media, but not much, all

 

Will Bachman  45:27

right, well, we include that link in the show notes. A little social media. I mean, YouTube is kind of social media. It’s sort of, you know, 700 million I’ve been trying

 

Kirsten Dirksen  45:35

to, like, start a tic tac account, because people keep messaging me like someone stole your videos and has 60 million views. You really should get on there and take the space. Oh, man. I should, but, you know, oh, God, it’s hard. And so, yeah, people like impersonate and I tell tick tock, and they take it down, but it takes a while. But, yeah, I don’t know. I don’t know if it’s worth it energy. We do have an Instagram page that, you know, we sort of post on and that kind of thing. But I it’s a lot, you know. So,

 

Will Bachman  46:00

okay, well, the book is life changing homes. It’s, it looks amazing. And I’m so thrilled to you know, heard, heard this update, Kirsten, it’s incredible what you’re

 

Kirsten Dirksen  46:12

doing this. I’ve been enjoying the show so much, really. So I’m, I’m appreciative you trying to get people to talk and and hopefully people will keep talking. I know that you’re running toward the end of of your list, but

 

Will Bachman  46:25

we are approximately, approximately 720 million views behind, behind your show.

 

Kirsten Dirksen  46:31

Oh, but they’re worth, really worth loving it. Thank you. Okay,

 

Will Bachman  46:35

thank you, Kirsten, it’s been great speaking with you. Thanks. Will you.