an

easy title to live up to, let me tell you.

In the beginning, you know, you have to do everything as a creator, right? Like no one took creator seriously for a very long time.

So it's not just about trying to get investors and brands.

It's also trying to get team members to come join you.

Like when you try to explain like, hey, I'm shooting, I'm trying to, you know, create content and tell stories.

And I do it all from my apartment using iPhones with no experience.

And if you can try to give some advice to the brands in the room through that lens, I think that would be really helpful.

And so I'm curious, like, when did your kind of inward or spiritual journey really start?

That's when I hit rock bottom.

Tell me about that.

Yeah.

You know, you learn so much from the lowest points of your life.

I think we all are trying to avoid those moments, right? You think that that is the place that you completely lose yourself, but that is actually the place that you find yourself.

And so I entered my 30s on a milestone birthday.

So would you give me the story of the 50 videos, nothing, and then how that 51st went viral?

Yeah.

So do you think by feeding one person it's gonna make any difference? And I was a little thrown off, and I was thinking about how to respond to that.

And as I'm about to respond, that homeless guy with his eyes closed comes up and he goes, "Excuse me, sir.

I had my eyes closed because I was praying to God that I don't go to sleep hungry tonight, and I open my eyes and your meal was right in front of me.

So I just wanted to say God bless you." And he walks off, and I turn to the businessman and I said, "It mattered to him."

Yeah

... which led to a 10-point brand lift for the NFL through an independent study.

But the type of content that we did is like we built a whole locker room for an underprivileged high school football team that didn't have one, plus gave them all new gear.

... that you use, and if so, what is it?

Well, first, on a philosophical level, I like to use the word, acronym HEART.

So H is honor your audience.

You always have to create content that resonates with your audience first, once you figure out who that is, and that's fine for you to test a lot of different content formats to see which one actually resonates.

E is earn their trust.

Once you actually have your audience, don't do things that are gonna make you sell out or seem authentic to that.

If I started as a purpose-driven filmmaker and then suddenly started doing things just because it got more views or because a brand deal was paying me to do so, suddenly I've alienated myself from the audience.

Mm-hmm.

Yeah.

I was at this important crossroads.

I decided that no, we have to stick to our mission, even if that means not getting brand partnerships.

So I made that decision two years ago, and then what has happened now? Brands, especially in this world of storytelling, are looking for emotional connection more than ever.

And who has an audience that is emotionally connected? That is what, you know, Dhar Mann Studios is most known for.

Three out of four of people that watch our videos say that they are inspired to take some sort of positive action after watching one of our videos.

We have, like, one of the highest trust factors out of all, not just YouTubers, but global entertainment.

Well, the final question we ask everybody, why do you think Dhar Mann and Dhar Mann Studios is one of the best brands on Earth?

Give

yourself grace.

Yeah.

Like we're dealing with so much stress.

Every single person is dealing with so much.

And then to have to deal with the heaviness and the burden of like letting yourself down because you're not the version that you're aspiring to be only drains you even more.

So the faster you can give yourself grace, the faster that you'll be able to move on.

Yeah.

And not to mention when you're broke.

Yeah.

It seems like wherever your life is now and where you're trying to get to is an impossible distance that you will never be able to overcome, but if you don't think of it as to where you are now and where that goalpost is and instead think about it as, what is that one step I have to take today that gets me one step closer, it doesn't matter the distance, as long as it's one step closer, and I do that every single day- And that could be as simple as all I'm gonna do is tie my shoes today.

I'm gonna put on my shoes today and I am gonna see where life takes me.

That's literally what my goal was at my lowest point in life, was to put on my shoes because I could not leave the house.

That's how paralyzed by failure and anxiety and depression I was.

But what I realized is when I put on my shoes and I went outside, now I was getting sunlight.

Hmm

Ah.

And so, you know, how many movies or videos or, you know, topics do you see on that, serving that community? So I wrote a story about how there's this mom who, um, has a long to-do list of tasks as soon as she wakes up.

So she has to get her kid ready for school.

Um, she has to go and, like, make his lunch.

Uh, she has to, you know, take him, drop him off to school, then she goes and gets groceries.

Then she picks her kid up.

She's making lunch and dinner, and she's cleaning up.

We'll wrap it with that.

do you build this? Are you building like a vertical team?

So yeah, we've already, from the date that we announced this partnership two months ago to now, we've already produced five films that are now in post-production.

We're getting ready to produce our next 10.

Things, again, I'm so blessed.

I'm so grateful to be in this position.

I don't take it for granted whatsoever.

even within our 120,000 square foot studio space and, you know, 250 plus team members, we've run out of space.

How does someone, when they're really against the wall, how do they maintain focus? How do they stay positive? How do they not have a panic attack, I think?

How long from ideation to the finished edit does that take? How many people touch it? And, and what's your budget for a piece like that?

Yeah, great question.

Um, so, you know, whereas traditional filmmaking can take years to bring abo- bring about a TV-length episode, for us, we're able to iterate within 21 days.

And so from the very first start of a script, we can go to screen in a matter of three weeks, and that is our longest division.

So right now we're able to operate on a seven-day cadence for our Facebook division.

Um, and if for some reason there's some sort of, you know, thing happening within culture or some collaboration opportunity or some brand partnership opportunity, we can actually squeeze and compress those timelines even more.

The reason for that is because we have a turnkey studio where every single component that's required for filmmaking is in-house.

Yeah.

Like, what'd you learn from putting that all together?

You know what's funny is as I was [laughs] ...

After I finished my talk doing the keynote at that Adobe Creator Summit, I get offstage, and this lady comes to me, and she goes, "Dar, I want you to look at this." This was a brief to work with a creator that the company was signing, and there was 24 signatures required from the brand [laughs] in order to sign this contract.

And she's like, "Whatever activation we were trying to do with this creator for this cultural moment that was happening, that cultural moment already passed." [laughs] So, you know, there's, there's so much red tape and bureaucracy, and, like, if you wanna work with creators, you have to move at the speed of creators and creativity, not at the speed that, you know, folks are traditionally used to.

Like, I have this acronym that I use, and if you follow these five steps, these are the five steps that I would say are critical to making it as a successful content creator.

And the acronym I use is HEART, H-E-A-R-T.

And so H is honor your story.

[laughs]

I'm scared I'm gonna fail."

You know, when I think back about putting out my first video, I had those same thoughts of self-doubt.

And keep in mind, I started putting out content in my thirties.

A lot of times, you know, people that are a little bit older might think, "Oh, I missed my window," because I see a lot of creators that are teens or in their early twenties, right? I didn't start my journey until my mid-thirties.

And when I was recording my very first video, I was stuck, you know, feeling that level of paralysis where, hey, what are people gonna think? What if people laugh at me? What if no one watches the videos? And what got me over that hurdle was remembering that even if one person watched my videos and it made a difference, a positive impact in their life, then that's a reason for me to keep going.

And I put out that video for that one person.And it was also a good thing I had that realization because there was probably only about one person [laughs] that was watching my videos in the beginning, and it was my mother-in-law.

Like, Laura's mom was so good at, like, liking and sharing my videos to all of her network.

And I'm like, "Mm, I'm not sure about that." It's, it's as much an art as it is a science.

I'm scared I'm gonna fail"?

You know, when I think back about putting out my first video, I had those same thoughts of self-doubt.

And keep in mind, I started putting out content in my thirties.

A lot of times, you know, people that are a little bit older might think, "Oh, I missed my window because I see a lot of creators that are teens or in their early twenties," right? I didn't start my journey until my mid-thirties.

And when I was recording my very first video, I was stuck, you know, feeling that level of paralysis where, "Hey, what are people gonna think? What if people laugh at me? What if no one watches the videos?" And what got me over that hurdle was remembering that even if one person watched my videos and it made a difference, a positive impact in their life, then that's a reason for me to keep going.

And I put out that video for that one person.

And it was also a good thing I had that realization because there was probably only about one person [laughs] that was watching my videos in the beginning.

It's, it's as much an art as it is a science.