Casey is the SEO Director of Digital Marketing at Co-Marketing, a B2B marketing agency in Boston. She has been in the digital space since around when Facebook launched, working on both our agency side and in-house, and she is a frequent writer and speaker. Casey once compared a shock at being invited to speak at Muscon to how Taylor Swift reacts every single time she wins an award. Even though she is a prolific speaker and a veteran to events like this, a love for Muscon makes this feel extra special for her. A talk is aimed at shaking up your assumptions about content creation. I'm sure you feel the passion in this one. We'll see you soon. Hello, Muscon. I am so happy to see you. I'm so happy to be here talking about content, counter-intuitive content. As you know, I'd love to talk about content. I've talked a lot about content over the years, content problems, memorable content, repurposing content, visual content, customer-driven content, content with data, content promotion, content gaps, and of course, counter-intuitive content. Well, what does that actually mean? Well, we'll get to that. I want to start by telling you about my search for content marketing tips because as a marketer, I like to see what other people are doing. But here's the problem. If you can't see that, it's 1.5 trillion results. That's crazy. How can there possibly be that much advice? What is that advice? Well, I decided to take a look. I wanted to find out. I took a look at the top 50 results from the past year and I pulled out all of the tips and I grouped them into themes. Here's what that looked like. You see things like brand voice and goals and be helpful and use your data. The reality is that there wasn't anything that was super surprising, aside from promotion being like leaps and bounds above everything else. Kind of weird in 2021, but hey, we're here. The thing that did stand out to me was new mediums. I grouped things like video and podcasting and that makes sense, right? This isn't surprising because things change, trends change, but this isn't necessarily advice. We got five years ago and I can prove it. Look, we were still talking about promotion. We were still talking about headlines. We were talking about user-generated content and guest posting and being creative. We were really high on how to format your posts list. This is so good, right? We're also high on buyer personas. Thank goodness those went away. There was also this. Thanks for that, Google. That's the thing there's good advice. There's bad advice. There's also advice that was once good, but now it's bad. Then there's advice that maybe it's good, but it just doesn't make sense for everybody. That's the thing. If you're a content marketer who's been doing it a while, if you're new, it can be really hard to figure out what to do because like I said, the technology changes, search results change, user behavior changes. That's where this idea of counterintuitive content comes in. Counterintuitive content is the idea of bucking trends to do what's right for your site. Do what's right for you. Here's some examples. Buzz demo comes out with this piece every year. They take a look at what makes the best headlines. They look at 100 billion posts. That's a lot of posts that should give us good data. Here's what they found. The best headlines have 11 words, 65 characters, and you should use the number 10 in your headlines. Okay, sure. Here's what happens for marketing. We have this piece that's been around for years. It has seven words, 47 characters, and it uses the number 14. Maybe we shouldn't blindly follow that advice. Let's look at some other examples. You hear a lot about frequency, right? That was one of the things that came out in the tips and the amount you should be posting. Really, we've always kind of been told more is better. Well, here's a client that we've been working with for several years. When we first started with them, that red arrow, we were creating 20 assets a month. That's a lot of content, but they wanted to move fast. They wanted to rank fast. Okay, we're going to do it. Well, guess what happened after six months? Thing that usually happens. Budgets are cut, resources changed, and we went from 20 pieces of content a month to four. Now, you'd think that traffic wouldn't improve all that much after that, right? But check this out. Traffic not only improved, but the end of last year where you see those big green spikes, we had been producing two posts a month. Maybe more content isn't necessarily better. Here's their leads. When we cut back on content, we started focusing on optimizing older posts and adding calls to action across the site to improve lead generation. Maybe less content is not a bad thing. This client would agree. For years, we were told to have a bigger site, right? Bigger sites perform better. Well, that's sort of changed because, yeah, it can be unless you have stuff on there that's no longer valuable.  And so this is what we did for a client. We took a look at the data and we found, look, there's a ton of content on here that we don't need. And so we got rid of it at the end of August. And check out what happened in October, right? We cleaned up that content and now the search engines aren't crawling this junk content, right? That helped. So not having this huge site with all this content was needed. Now, I'm going to kick it back old school because, yeah, these tips are tied to blogs and writing. Well, what about print? We know that print's dead, obviously. Well, someone told that to Yankee Candle because they still tend out a ton of direct mail. And one of these things is a catalog that has scratch and sniff. That is brilliant because I can't tell you how many times I've gotten a Yankee candle and thought to myself, I'm not going to buy this. I don't know what this smells like. Scratch and sniff, print, brilliant. And look, I think they seem to be doing all right.  But it's cool to see that, hey, print can still be done. The things that we know aren't necessarily true. Now, before we jump into adapting your own strategy, I want to end on this one because if we go back to our content promotion tips, our content marketing tips, promotion was the top tip. And of those, 25% were around social media. Well, at the time I was putting together this presentation, I saw the study come up at our news. 61% of marketers are boosting their investment in Instagram. Know what the best part about that article is? This right here. Instagram was not at the top of the list of the most effective social media channels for reaching business goals. What? To me, this is the perfect example of people doing something because they're supposed to. Why are you spending effort, time, and money for something that isn't effective? I've said before, I'll say it again, there is no one size fits all solution to content marketing. And while, yeah, there's some great advice out there, what we have to realize is things change, right? Those things change. And sometimes you have to think counter-intuitively. And that means you need to understand your landscape and your content has to be about you, which goes to this idea of content landscaping. It's taking stock of the elements to know where you stand and what you need. Because in order to create better content, to have a better content marketing, you have to look at the landscape. And these are the elements of that. We need to understand our existing efforts. We need to look at performance. We want to understand the competitors. Of course, we need to know what's happening with search and our keyword landscape. We want to understand social. And yeah, we need to know what's new and what's coming down the pipe. So let's start with what I like to think of is the foundation of our landscaping. And that's your existing efforts. Because when we're talking about our strategy and we're talking about how to get better, we have to know what we've already tried and what we've already done. Every year, clients ask me, what results can we expect this year, right? What are our goals for next year? And honestly, it's a great question because it forces me to look at what we're doing. And it forces me to understand what we can modify and do better. And when it comes to understanding our existing content efforts, we need to ask ourselves questions like this. How much content are we actually creating? And of that, how much content actually went live? What types of content did we create? What's the process for that? How much did it actually cost? And these are important because it leads to something like this. So this is an internal email I created for client planning for their 2020 goals. And what you'll see I noted here is this year's numbers were so huge because they hadn't previously focused on SEO. 2020 will be harder and we have a reduced budget. I had to look at what we did. I had to look at what the results were. And I had to look at what our budget was in order to understand what we should do and what we should expect. Because to help guide our strategy, give them accurate numbers and understand the future, I had to look at the present and I had to look at the past. Because here's the thing. Knowing what's happening, understanding those efforts helps me to dictate what's going on. And I need to understand performance. We know about performance. It was in there in 2015. It's in there in 2020. It's never going to change. It's always going to be in there. And here, if we go back to that goals email, so a big part of our content strategy and really the reason clients pay us is for generating leads. And one of the ways we're doing that is through the creation of banners that we're placing throughout the site. So if you look at these numbers, as again, was going into 2020. And if you look at these numbers, you can see that 2019 was actually down. But for 2020, I was proposing that we were actually going to go higher. And what I found was I knew that the banners had started making an impact. I knew that they were starting to lead to better performance. And that helped me feel confident that we could actually grow leads versus what we saw last year. And what's more important is that normally, we wouldn't tell our clients to give us budget to create images. Like, that's not really our strong suit, but we knew that they were working. So it's, hey, let's focus our budget on this thing and make it a priority. The most important thing to think about when it comes to performance is your goals, right? What were your goals and did you hit them? And look, you don't need to do this for every single piece of content, but you do need to have a general idea. And if you don't have goals, well, it's time to set some, right? Gotta have some goals. Here's an example of that in action. So I'm really big into these like guide-style assets for my clients. They're amazing, right? Like, we crush the featured snippets. They drive tons of traffic, tons of leads. And so at the beginning of 2019, I had this client, right? And we started creating these guides for them. And for all intents and purposes, this strategy should have worked, right? The guide had everything it needed from a cert perspective. It's probably like 25 words. It had gifts and charts, has banners, but it just wouldn't move past the second page. We built links to it. We added internal crossings. We built supporting content. Nothing. And so I thought, okay, maybe it's just this term. So we did it for another one, for a different keyword. And guess what? That didn't move either. And so I had to change tactics. Like, yeah, this is working for other clients, but every site isn't the same. And so we switched to creating these shorter feature pages, these solutions type pages that weren't as lengthy. We also switched to optimizing old pieces of content. And this was the result. When we shifted disability-improved and traffic started growing, should we have adjusted sooner? Maybe, but what's key here is that what works for one site doesn't always work for another. And by understanding the goals of our content and the goals of our program, we were able to adjust and adapt. So I know that can be hard, right? How do we even know where to look? Well, when it comes to performance, I really like to look for outliers. And I love looking in Search Console to see like what stands out. So this is a medical client and their core products are ADs. And if we look at this, impressions are miles above the rest of everything else, but our traffic doesn't reflect that. And if you look at the SERPs, they don't appear to be ranking for ADs at all, except when I dug in, they are. They're actually in the People Also Ask box. And what's so important about this is that their team has really been pushing back on these types of higher level assets, right? One of the key arguments is, our buyers don't need to know what it is. They don't need this high level advice. They're already educated. And maybe that's true, but with this search result, the intent is varied. So it has this high level content, but it also has shopping results. And so this helped us not prove the value that this is the type of content we need to be there, but also let's put products on those pages so we're hitting those people who are qualified buyers. Now, I mentioned this in the past, but if you're looking at Search Console, take a look at what's driving impressions, but not clicks. What's ranking but has a low click-through rate? Because this is great opportunity for easy wins. It really is. What does the search result look like for that term? And more specifically, what does your result look like? Why is that click-through rate so low? Because maybe all you need is a title tag update, a content refresh. Maybe you need to change the title. But it might not be the highest priority, but if it's working, take advantage of that. Sometimes there's just easy wins in this. The same thing can apply to just looking at what you're ranking for that maybe you're not aware of. So I like to just throw the domain into SEMrush to see what keywords we might be ranking for that I didn't even know about. Are there any impositions three through 10? Are there any opportunities to update things, to write a new piece? If I'm looking at this, if I'm looking at co-markings data, maybe we update Google SEO best practices 2017. Or honestly, if we're thinking counter-intuitively, maybe we get rid of that because I'm not sure I want people who are coming in looking for 2017 best practices. We also can look at competitors. And look, I'm never gonna tell you to copy your competitors, I'm just not. But I am going to tell you to make sure you understand what it is they're doing. I have a client in the cybersecurity space and we are running paid LinkedIn campaigns for them. And one of the challenges we've been having is that the creative just isn't sticking, right? Nothing's sticking like we'd like it. We're targeting CISOs, we're targeting VPs, like a pretty serious crowd. And here's the thing, like this is one of their competitors and this is the type of content that you see. It's pretty basic standard ad fare that you just gloss over because it's boring. But to be fair, we were kind of doing that too because that's the status quo. Well, when we started digging in and looking at what competitors were doing, we also found this. So one of their competitors is creating these pretty creative eye-catching ads. And we were able to look at that data to see, hey, people are liking this, people are sharing this, like maybe this crowd isn't quite as staunchy as we thought. And so we changed our ads to create something a little bit more eye-catching, a little bit more out there. And it's honestly one of our best performing ads, but we never would have been able to do that if we didn't see the competitors doing something of the sort, right? We were able to go to our client and say, hey, let's take a chance, right? And again, that's just something that you get used to doing. But looking at the competitive landscape can just help you to see like, hey, maybe there's something else I'm missing or I'm not even thinking about. I can go on and on about social networks and how I feel about them all day long. But I will say there are a lot of good things in them. And one of those is the ad transparency. So if you look at LinkedIn, you can go to a specific page and if you look at their posts, there's an ads button. So you can see exactly what ads your competitors are running. You can see the creative, you can see if people are sharing it, you can see if they're commenting on it. I think it's really cool just to understand that. Facebook has something similar. So Facebook has their ads library where you can search by keyword, you can search for individual advertisers. And again, same concept. So you can go through and see, are people actually advertising on these different keywords? What are my competitors talking about? How are they saying it? How is the audience reacting? That is amazing research, right? We don't get that all the time. The other piece is if you wanna look at ad copy, you can dig into SEMrush. You can also use spy food for this, which is free. But what I like is I can look to see what they're using in their ad copy, like the types of keywords, the type of messaging they're using. Because look, at the end of the day, you're not necessarily gonna copy your competitors, but it can inform your strategy. And maybe get your boss to take a chance on something they might not have. So to me, this might be one of the most important parts of understanding your content strategy. Or in the case of many reevaluating. So when I talk about the search landscape and I talk about the keyword landscape, I think a lot about what we do. And at the beginning of every program, we do this super intensive deep dive to determine what we wanna focus on, right? This huge keyword research doc where we look at all the landscape and we figure out, here's what our priority keywords are going to be, but here's what everything that's being searched to stop guides us. But what I can tell you is this, we often forget to go back and reevaluate those keywords, right? A year or two in, yeah, like, we're doing really well for these things. We're still targeting, maybe we added some more. But what are we actually looking at, right? Maybe they're ranking, maybe they're driving traffic, but is it the right traffic? Look, as marketers, we see a chart moving up and our brains go, yay, but just because something is driving traffic, it doesn't mean it's the right traffic. So again, this is where we have to think counterintuitively. Traffic's going up, but what about your balance rate? What about your conversions? So my client sells tide clocks and they recently had an asset move into position two for a keyword that has 27,000 searches per month. Like, that's a big win, right? And we look at this data and that asset is now 50% of their organic traffic. And at first we were pumped, right? Like, we've been moving this asset, like we've seen it move up the ranks, we've seen it started gaining traffic, but you can see what happened in May. Cool, except when we started putting together the report, we can see that it's actually not driving any sales and it never has. This is a $4,000 clock and while the search results used to actually be similar, they've changed a lot. And so now you see these like lower cost digital clocks and you see Amazon and so that intent is very different. The people who are buying that are very different. And so we had to change our perspective on it, right? We're not going to try to give them these assets that, yeah, drive a lot of traffic but aren't relevant. We have to go back and reevaluate our keywords and reevaluate those pieces of content to see. What are the ones that actually have a high buying intent, right? And that can be a hard mindset to change because again, we like traffic. The cool thing is, is that we can do this pretty quickly. So I think when, you know, when I think about, oh God, I have to go back and redo my work, but there's tools that do this. And so we can use Moz's SERP analysis tool to see like what content's ranking, you know, what keywords are in it, what type of content do we need? Like that stuff is amazing and it's all in one place. SEMrush also has their content template tool and that'll show you like related keywords. It'll show you like the readability. It'll show you like the recommended length. And again, it'll show you the competitors that are actually ranking for that. So again, you can get a sense of, well, what does this look like now and who are the people who are there? Another tool that I shared a couple of years ago but I really like and I still think is valuable is Storybase. And one of the reasons I think it's valuable is because they show you demographics by your keywords. And that seems pretty important, right? So it's paid but there's a free version of this. So this tool is demographics.io and it's actually powered by Storybase. Shout out to Mike King who brought this to my attention. But what's amazing about this is that what we can see here for that tide clock search is look, there's not a lot of 18 to 24 year olds looking for a $4,000 tide clock, not shocking. The majority of that demographic is 55 plus. So that's who we wanna tailor our content to, right? That's who we need to speak to and that's a certain style of writing. That informs what we're doing. If you're running paid campaigns, I also love to look at search query reports. It just gives me a sense of like what people are looking for, like both relevant and irrelevant, irrelevant. I said this before, but again, to me, this keyword in search piece is one of the most important parts of your strategy because at the end of the day, if we aren't showing business results, we aren't doing our jobs, right? And we need to understand that keyword landscape, we need to understand the intent to do so. I'll keep this piece short, but we do have to consider the social landscape as well. Remember this, right? People investing in Instagram, even though it might not be effective, it can be valuable. You know, I mentioned a LinkedIn campaign earlier that we're running and to be fair, it's one of the best lead generators that we have. It drives qualified leads, but that doesn't mean that every channel is for everyone and that's what we have to understand. Find which channel is for you, right? Take a look at your referral traffic to see what's actually driving conversions, what channels are your competitors spending time on, where is your audience? Look at that demographic data. Again, here, right? Look at that demographic data. So if you know who's buying your product, you can figure out how to target them and on which channel, right? We know this is a 45 to 64 age bracket that makes up the majority of these time clock searches. Well, this is Facebook's demographic and that's 26% of Facebook's audience. So given the targeting options, Facebook might not be a bad place, right? TikTok, maybe not the right channel, which leads me to this next section. How many times have you heard, hey, what have you heard about X or our CEO asked about X? What do you guys think? Should we try it? Our job as marketers is to stay on top of what's happening and be able to provide that advice. Sometimes we don't know, but one of the ways is to look at that data. For my client, like for this example, like when they asked me, should they advertise on Facebook? My initial reaction was absolutely not, but the data tells me something different, right? The same thing applies when it comes to these new things like Clubhouse or Twitter Spaces or whatever else is next. Is this the best place for my budget, my client's budget? Maybe not, but that doesn't mean I can't dig in and see if there are things that apply because look, it turns out people love talking about the weather. Weather TikTok is its own thing. So you might even be able to use something you already have, right? If you're creating videos, can you take them and turn them into something else, right? If you have images, can you turn them into something that's fun and useful? My point is, well, we don't wanna jump at everything, right? With these new trends and understanding what's new, we need to understand what's new, right? We shouldn't discount them either because there may be a way to repurpose what you're doing and to put it onto other channels you haven't used. So understanding your landscape is key to figure out this whole thing. It's key to your strategy. All these things we just looked at, it's about you, right? It's not about the advice you're finding online. It's not about trying to be everything to everyone. It's not even about using everything I just gave you. Some of it might work, some of it might not and that's okay, you have to be okay with that. It has to be about you. So all of this leads us to how can we create content on our own terms? And this comes down to five things. That first thing is testing, testing, testing, testing. And one of the problems we have as content marketers is there really isn't a lot of room for failure, right? So this idea of testing can be a little bit abstract. I spent all this time on resource, I spent all my time and money on this piece. I don't have time to test it. I think about paid and like I honestly love, like I think about switching to paid all the time because it's all the things we do as content marketers. It's writing, it's psychology, it's search. And what's more amazing is you can understand results so fast. But the good news is things are changing. So if you're addicted to Buzzfeed like I am, you might notice that if you visit the site a few times and you don't click on a headline, that headline changes. In fact, one of their data scientists did a presentation a few years ago detailing the tool that they use and the process involved in this. And it is awesome. She talks about like the tool they use, the process that they created and then it gets really data sciencey and I kind of got lost. But the cool thing is you don't need to know that stuff because there's more things coming out now that will help you. If you're on WordPress, there are now plugins that will do this for you, including Thrive. So Thrive's paid, it's like $19 a month right now but it will take your headlines and it will test them to figure out what works for you. This is really cool. There's also a free one. It hasn't been updated in a while. It's kind of the only free version out there. But that said, maybe if all of us content marketers are working together, they'll go and update it, right? Yeah, we can help. Now, there's other areas of testing beyond just your headlines. It's think about your content placement and specifically how you're inserting CTAs into your copy and site. So I mentioned earlier that that's a lot of what we do, right? We take CTAs and we implement into these like resource content assets that we're creating because really we wanna take people through the user journey. And especially when you're dealing in featured snippets where it's those top of the funnel searches, you wanna get those people who are ready to buy or we're further down the funnel onto that next step. So to do this, we started placing banners directly below the intro paragraph, but that's not random. When we think about this is we think about that user journey. So that piece of content that they're landing on, where is it? Is it an awareness? Is it in consideration? Is it in decision? And that's what we're going to take them to next depending on it. So for example, if someone comes in on a how-to post, we're not gonna send them to a demo, but maybe a guide is the right thing to do. The other piece of this to test is like where you put the CTA. So test your placements, test the banner copy, test the assets themselves. You may also wanna add UTM tracking to see if people are actually clicking on them. I get a lot of client questions like, hey, are these actually working, right? We just spent this time and effort doing them. Are they actually doing anything? And Google Analytics user flow isn't really that great when it comes to it. So I would suggest adding UTM tracking to those banners so you know if people are clicking through them and you can start testing that. Now, I'd be remiss if I didn't mention search pilots ODN, this was previously distilled. What's cool about this is it allows you to test your title tags like for SEO purposes and look like we don't do a lot of this, but I do think there's something to be said for it. It's really cool, the functionality is super cool and it allows you to get that real data. I think there's a future in this that people need to be spending more time on. The next piece is resources, are precious resources. Our time, our money, our effort. You know, when I think about that 2015 advice, there was actually a lot of stuff in there about outsourcing and I think there's a natural inclination to be like, ooh, we don't wanna do that. I actually don't have a problem with it because it can help you get things done quicker and for less money. Obviously, the key is making sure you're outsourcing the right things to the right people, right? You still want that quality, but you have to make the most of what you have, right? And most importantly, you need to make sure you're focused on the right things, right? Let's go back to this. Let's go back to that example we talked about at the beginning. We had to go from 20 pieces to four. That's a big change and that changes, our goals didn't change. That's the other piece, right? Our goals didn't change. We had to refocus and we had to figure out what's going to have the biggest impact. Had to focus on what's gonna drive results. Of course, there are tools because I would never give a presentation and not talk about tools. They make life easier, they make life better and honestly, there's just so many good ones out there, so many free ones out there.  So I mentioned earlier Moz and SEMRush both have really good content marketing tool sets, especially when it comes to looking at what's working, what you're doing, what you can improve. I also love Portland's headline analyzer and look, I'll be honest, I'm not sure if it's real or not, but it creates a spark, right? It's something that can just help you create a spark. I wouldn't necessarily use it verbatim, but it can drive that spark to get you thinking about, oh yeah, this is a good idea about this topic. I know I mentioned this tool a couple years ago and I won't stop mentioning it because it's awesome. I think it's important to revisit because let me tell ya, still seen a lot of stock images out there. So Recorder will actually allow you to create your own GIF based on screenshot. So earlier I showed you that screenshot of all the tips coming in that's made with Recorder. It's super easy, it's free and it allows you to give clients, like here's a product demo, here's something to add to your post to make it a little bit more interactive to catch people's eye. That's the stuff you wanna be doing. The last one I wanna share because I'm just spending a lot more time on Reddit and I honestly just can't believe it's like such a content gold mine. So Keyword it is actually owned by higher visibility, but it's still awesome, it's still forgotten about, basically you put in a term, it finds the subreddit and it gives you hear the things that people are talking about, right? That's crazy. If you wanna go back, so I had mentioned a bunch of tools in my 2019 presentation and there's tons of them in there and look like yeah, it's a couple years old but they're still awesome tools. There really are, I use them all the time. So along with testing and resources, we have goals. Goals, goals, goals, all content should have a goal. I can't stress that enough. Let's say you're updating a post. What can you expect to see, right? So if I'm creating a post, I actually just had an email today where the client said, hey, if we do this, what can we expect to see? I need to have a goal. And that goes back to understanding your existing efforts, understanding how your site performs and understanding how you can create those goals based on that information, right? I'm not gonna harp on this, it's pretty straightforward but remember, these are the goals, like you wanna set goals that make sense for you, right? That makes sense for your site. I'm gonna talk about this idea of counterintuitive content. There's something I wanna make clear. It doesn't mean you can't or shouldn't try new things. It doesn't mean you shouldn't take the advice of marketers, after all, you're at a marketing conference with people giving you advice. But it does mean you shouldn't jump at every new thing, right?  So be the expert, right?  I think about Clubhouse and I didn't accept that invite and guess what? People have all moved over to Twitter's faces. So think about what you're gonna get from that. Now, ironically, this last one is somewhat counterintuitive to the previous slide, but that's to be open to new things. So I mentioned earlier my client who didn't seem like a good fit for Facebook but the advertises of the demographic data showed us something different. It showed us that there was an opportunity and this was the result. I know these numbers are small, like two, three, but these products cost four grand, right? So this has actually become a really solid advertising channel for us and what's even better, like these people are older, right? We don't have to create anything crazy. We don't have to come up with new dances to get their attention. We know who they are, we know what they're looking for. Your content has to be right for you, right? And it has to be, you have to understand it and you need to understand the landscape and you need to do it on your terms. That's the idea of counterintuitive content that I wanna leave you guys with today. So as Tim Gunn famously said, don't make it work. And lastly, we did just put out a report on B2B marketing and content marketing performance. So go check it out. Thank you, Maz Khan, it was a pleasure to be back.


Welcome to the Knuckleheads of Liberty. This time it's the war on truth and science and the media and the media's role in the dissemination of misinformation and disinformation and sometimes outright falsehood. If we look over the last few years, we have seen several hoaxes in the news starting off with the Jesse Smollett case. I don't know if you guys are familiar with that, but Jesse Smollett was a guy who claimed that there was a hate crime, a racist and homophobic hate crime against him in Chicago. Well, he was just prosecuted for that little staging. He's now in jail. We also had the Russia Trump hoax. Where's the evidence? We have no evidence of that to date. We had, we now have the Green New Deal hoax where they're trying to tell us that we're about to become extinct in 12 years unless we spend all this massive amount of money to take us to this socialist utopia. On a fast train. On a fast train, that's the train that we're trying to construct from Los Angeles. Yes, yes, absolutely right. We also have the hoax of the Biden and the left trying to tell us his policies are not causing the energy crisis. And that is going on in the media right now. We are hearing now about the Putin price spike. We also have the January 6th hoax where they tell us where it was an insurrection. It was a coup. And all of those protests and riots, we had those were mostly peaceful protests. If you remember that one. We have now the most interesting hoax of all. It's the COVID hoax. Now that is not to say we did not have COVID. Yes, there was a COVID pandemic. Of course, I was infected by the COVID. Jason, no, Tim was infected by the COVID. So far, I think Jason has escaped it. And I wonder why he has escaped it. But. I'm not sure I did. It's, that's to get so. Get saturated. Okay. But the point of all of these things is that the media is out there pushing these stories. They're always pushing these stories. And we're even there. Now, even pushing stories that challenge science and science must withstand scrutiny if it has become knowledge. So what do you guys think about this thing? What is going on in our world where these hoaxes are becoming so much a part of our daily life? We have two of them ongoing right now. So what do you guys think about all of this? Jason. Well, you know, one of the biggest hoaxes I think that's not even on this list is, my God, you look at what's happening right now in women's sports.  And everybody says how brave. And I can't imagine a more dishonest narrative. I mean, you talk about these women with the swim team that are happening there. And that is that Penn State or something or University of Pennsylvania. And the, I think her name is Leah Thompson or something like that. But you know. Leah Thomas. Yes. Leah Thomas. Okay. And the whole team is terrified that nobody can stand out alone to speak against her coming in there and essentially stealing all their opportunities. So they have to come out as a group so that they can keep some anonymity for themselves speaking as a group anonymously to say, this is not right. I can't imagine anything more, you know, more of a war on science than that. And I mean, you know, I as a libertarian I have no problem if the voluntary group of people want to get together and set up a structure where that's allowed. But right now it's sort of being shoehorned on everybody's government schools. And I think that's just terrible. Oh, but anyway, yeah, go ahead, screamy. You'll tell us what you think. Well, yeah, I think I did. We had this as a topic. No, not the hoax. Not the hoax. We had another topic. You talk about Leah Thomas. Yes, you're right. Yeah. Yeah, okay. Well, yeah, I guess we've got a lot of hoaxes going on. And, yeah, I mean, we could take each one apart. I don't know, I'm kind of confused, Leon. Are we talking about? Take one if you want to, Jason just raised a hoax that I didn't even consider. I forgot about which is the Leah Thomas case about the transgenderism actually is easy, yeah. If you want anything on the list, if you want to talk about it, it's fine. Well, here's something. I just heard this from Tom Woods' show. I can't remember if it's him or someone else talking, but part of this whole thing with this Russia-Trump thing is that Trump instead of just taking the fifth, which would have been better, but he can't keep his mouth shut to save his life. But instead of not saying anything or to rebut these ridiculous claims of his collusion with Putin, instead of that, what he did was he tried to go too far the other way to prove that he hated Putin and he wasn't a shill. And so he did a number of things. And when I heard him all listed, I guess it was Scott Horton talking. So when Scott was going through this long laundry list of the things Trump did to make matters worse with Russia, in addition to all this NATO expansion, but all these other things that he did, including having troop movements right up within yards of the border with Russia under Trump's watch, these were things he did in response to all this nonsense that the state, it gets so convoluted, but they were trying to hem him in or rein him in. And that's exactly what they were doing. And they didn't care. All they wanted was the investigation. They didn't want a conviction or anything else. They just wanted him. And it worked. He was putty in their hands and he hired all these warmongers and did warmongering stuff against Russia to try to prove, oh, I'm really not in Putin's pocket. I'm really a good guy. I'm Donald Trump and I'm gonna fight Putin. And so it's just in addition to all the other things that got us to this moment in time where we are facing all these things going on to upset the state of Europe between Russia and Ukraine. And so, it's not just that these things aren't true. It's they're not true and they have serious repercussions potentially. But Tim, don't you think the danger, don't you think the danger is a disinformation and the outright falsehood that the media articulate and try to make it sound so real? Isn't that the danger to us? Yes, it is. I'm not saying it's not. I'm saying in addition to those very real concerns and dangers you speak of, of being lied to by the people that are supposed to be bringing you something close to the truth, but out and out lies on purpose. Aside from that, the lies can, depending on the situation, have potentially lethal and dangerous repercussions on down the road of history because they put a person like Donald Trump with really zero principles, in my opinion, other than what's good for me. Is it good for me? Okay, can I say you're fired? Do I get a chance to say you're fired? I'd love to say you're fired. I'm Donald Trump and guess what?  You know, I mean, if you do that to those kind of people, you have, and you're setting it up on a world stage because you're saying he's in the pocket of a world leader that we don't like. Can we as a country remain free if the truth is constantly being poisoned by politics? Well, that's danger, right? And I think it's a product of our echo chambers at the moment. We are able to get in with people who agree with us and it makes it really hard to get outside of those echo chambers and go back and forth. And quite frankly, I mean, I think one side at the moment is much more guilty of this than the other side. I don't see a lot of riots against speakers against from the left on college campuses. I see a lot, I mean, I see the riots from the left against speakers that they don't agree with. And it's like the nonsense we just saw on the view and where these women all thought that Tulsi and Tucker, as we talked about in our last show, should be thrown in jail because they don't agree with them on their patriotic ideas of sending us all to war in the Ukraine. So, yeah, obviously it's an assault on our liberty and our freedoms going forward. Indeed, indeed.


when shams do we have? I'm sure we do updates. So the Celtics have a couple of players on their side that are going to the season as out and Daniel Gallinari torn ACL. He's going to likely miss the season, but Robert Williams, their starting center last year, integral part all defensive center. He's he underwent surgery late September. He listed out eight to 12 weeks. I'm told that Robert Williams underwent a PRP injection on Monday to continue to promote healing in that injured knee. And he's going to return at some point during the second half of the season. I'm told his hope is sometime in December or January, but it could even be later than that guys. And so the Celtics are going to be very cautious. He tried to get back on the floor during the playoffs when that knee was just a few weeks off of meniscus surgery. So I think they're not going to make that same decision now. If it was a playoffs right now, he probably would play. But as of right now, Robert Williams is out indefinitely and hopefully coming back second half of the season.


You must be here to take on the combine did it lad Hey, where you going? You're getting fuzzy around the Good evening Lost Coast is a short free add-on for Half-Life 2 that was released in October of 2005 It's a single-level campaign that revolves around a Byzantine monastery on a cliffside Lost Coast is said to have been based on a scrap segment in Half-Life 2 that would have appeared sometime during the highway 17 Chapter this area however was never developed beyond conceptualization and was canned before any assets were created for it after Half-Life 2 is released in 2004 Val began finally putting wraps on the source engine's high dynamic range rendering system, which had been in development since at least 2003 looking to show off the new technology Half-Life 2's art director Victor Antonov made the choice to revisit the scrapped location believing that a monastery's warm natural colors extreme contrast and lighting and vibrant stained glass had great potential to create an Impressive display this led to the development of Lost Coast one of the only official Half-Life 2 expansions Which introduces a new interesting setting and a rather lovable one-off character? Additionally Lost Coast is notable for pushing a lot of graphical boundaries for the source engine and for being the first valve game to Include developer commentary notes. Hi, this is Gabe Newell and welcome to the Lost Coast To this day I consider valves dev commentary to be a genius way of getting young people interested in game design if you haven't done a Playthrough of Half-Life 2 the episodes are even left for dead with this feature on I highly recommend you go back and do so Anyway, today I want to take a look at this game which is often relegated to nothing more than a footnote in many other videos and try to give greater insight Into it and its development. We'll start with a simple question. What was Lost Coast all about anyway? Following the seven-hour war in earth since suing surrendered to the combine many resistance bases formed along the coastal wasteland of Eastern Europe In Half-Life 2 Gordon passes through a number of these settlements such as shore point base new little Odessa and lighthouse point Lost Coast introduces a new location in the form of a small fishing village called Saint Olga though never stated outright Saint Olga is heavily implied to be yet another of these coastal resistance strongholds holding city 17 escapees Inspiration for the village's name likely comes from Olga of Kiev the patron saint of widows Who was also the first recorded female ruler in Russian history getting back to the story after learning about the town of Saint Olga And its rebel inhabitants the combine devise a plot to eradicate its population and claim the area back as their own Soldiers are deployed to overtake the church of Saint Olga which sits on a cliffside adjacent to the town We're in a headcrab launcher is installed the next morning The combine begins shelling the village in an attempt to wipe out everyone in it if this attack isn't halted Saint Olga citizens will be overtaken by headcrabs and the town will become just like Ravenholm a coastal refuge turned horror show Luckily, however as Gordon Freeman awakens on the shore beneath the monastery He's greeted by a local fisherman who briefs him on the situation and urgently tasks him with destroying the canister launcher Unlocking a gate and letting Freeman through the fisherman witnesses Gordon climb the rocky cliffside dispatch combine forces with ease Jam the shelling mechanism in the monastery and destroy a combine hunter chopper all in the span of about 15 minutes Having finished the job Freeman rides back down to the shore in a makeshift elevator and reunites with the fisherman who gives him great Thanks and invites him back to Saint Olga for a feast of leeches Unfortunately before Gordon gets the chance to eat his first-ever meal in the entire half-life series He mysteriously fades from existence leaving the fisherman standing in bewilderment The sending leaves the player with several questions that likely won't ever be answered the most immediate being whether Gordon's Disappearance has something to do with the g-man. It's interesting to note that Lost Coast is the only half-life product released by Valve that lacks any sighting of him another question is whether Saint Olga actually recovers from the headcrab shelling or still needs to be Evacuated the fisherman seems to be under the impression that everything's gonna be fine But even if the headcrabs are taken care of wouldn't the combine eventually come back to finish the job It's hard to imagine them giving up so easily But the question that stuck with me in the near decades since I beat Lost Coast for the first time Just what is the significance of this mysterious fisherman? It might sound silly given his menial role But the fisherman is in my opinion one of the most underrated characters in the half-life series His performance is owed to the late Jim French who was also known for playing bill over beck and love for dead and Father Grigori in base half-life 2 the fisherman is said to have been the first character developed on the source engine without the use of a real photo for reference and since it's all but impossible to kill him in regular gameplay his model is also one of the Few with no ragdoll physics as for his physical attributes the fisherman is an older gentleman whose gray hair is far receded He leans on his harpoon while he walks indicating a bad back It might not surprise you the leaked files show he was at one point supposed to puff from a pipe Two early concepts from the fisherman show him donned in a yellow coat or just a casual button-up shirt Personally, I like the button-up look because I imagine it's what he would wear on the house And by the way if this piece reminds you of Team Fortress 2 that's because it was drawn by TF2's art director Moby Franky Given his age It's obvious that the fisherman remembers life on earth prior to the combines rule that probably plays into his passion for fishing and his Care for preserving Earth's original life forces Time like this. Hey now we lost enough species already It's actually pretty remarkable how similar of a role fathered Grigori in the fisherman play They're both older enigmatic figures who keep watch of a coastal town They seem to have a deep connection to the only differences that Ravenholm didn't last as long as St Olga has By the way if this ending is to imply that Gordon is being pulled back by the G man That would make the fisherman the only human character was seen Gordon be put into stasis And he seems to be weirdly unfazed watching a man fade from reality. Well, I guess you got other places to be Nice no one Yeah, is it possible that the fisherman knows about the G man and his powers probably not but it's still food for thought Going back to Lost Coast itself. Let's talk a little about the gameplay The Lost Coast level prominently features the players scaling a cliff and thus places great emphasis on vertical combat You'll find yourself fighting off enemies from both above and below Robin Walker states in the developer commentary that the cliffside combat was meant to call back to the segment and surface tension from half Life one where Gordon finds the rocket launcher and takes on an Apache helicopter and speaking of helicopters The one you fight at the end of Lost Coast isn't actually one at all at least not technically It's rather a reskinned gunship with the combine hunter chopper model applied. It even makes gunship noises The water in Lost Coast is filled with leeches that are meant to stop you from going out of bounds without the use of Cheats still it's very easy to break the game. The world record speedrun is 20.7 seconds long glitchless and a mere 3.7 seconds with glitches I'll never understand how people do this kind of stuff Unfortunately, however, there's not a lot more to say about the maps design since it's so short There's really just this cliffside battle to shoot out in the monastery and courtyard and then the helicopter fight However, Lost Coast was originally going to be a little bit longer and it wouldn't be a half-life video if I didn't talk about some cut content In March 2017 some files from the Valve developer repository leaked online This is not supposed to happen by the way This included map source files for Half-Life 2 Episode 1 and Episode 2 as well as some early versions of the Lost Coast level These files give a lot of insight into how Lost Coast changed throughout its development For starters, the intro was originally a lot longer and actually went through a couple of iterations One of the earliest builds featured the player waking up stranded on a tiny island with the fisherman picking them up in his boat Unfortunately, this version wasn't included with the leak So what you're looking at is instead a recreation based on information provided in an email from Robin Walker Notice these metrocop heads on sticks you can spot on the boat path by the way weird stuff a Second variation that we do have featured the player having to hit a switch and ride on this shitty raft That looks like a Gmod dupe until they reach the shore. Both of these variations were then to feature a longer exposition from the fisherman First he balances on this wooden beam in a cut sequence Then leads the player toward a set piece taking place inside this washed-up shipwreck Once inside the fisherman and the player have to work together to pull two roped hooks and affix them to another large hook Which then raises a makeshift gate Interestingly, this part was originally meant to feature a remark from the fisherman about how this mechanism was once used to catch Bull squids after the hooks are attached the gate would lift and there was a full sequence of nothing But the fishermen struggling to climb up and down some rocks before dropping his harpoon and continuing his walk up to unlock The gate as usual. I'm kind of glad they cut this. I don't like watching this poor old man hurt his back Oh Here goes my back By the way, if you boot up the final version of lost coast and make your way back to the shipwreck that had the hook sequence in it You'll notice the developers hit a 357 enamel for it there a nice little secret Some of these early builds of the level also feature more advanced geometry around the St. Olga area and a strange catapult like mechanism made from brushwork This has led to some speculation that the player was at one point meant to actually enter and explore the town Though no actual sources corroborated this probably the last unique thing about these beta versions of the map is that they featured Combined soldiers in the windows of the courtyard area This was probably cut because they're hard to spot and shoot and they also tend to clip out of the walls Which looks pretty weird. That's about all I've got for cut content though To my understanding lost coast had a pretty short development cycle now, let's talk about the real contentious stuff What is lost coast role in the greater half-life universe? Though lost coast has been dismissed as totally unrelated to the mainline half-life games by almost every developer who worked on it a Travel poster in the latest series installment half-life Alex shows what is unmistakably the church of St. Olga with the caption to visit The coast while it's more than possible that this poster was included as nothing more than a tongue-in-cheek Easter egg to catch the attention of loyal half-life fans It does seem to insinuate that St. Olga is a real location in the half-life universe This calls into question what other elements of the lost coast may be canon as well Is the fisherman a canonical character in the half-life universe? Does any element of lost coast story actually happen such as the combine unsuccessfully targeting St. Olga with headcrabs? A couple weeks before I started work on this video. I contacted series writer Mark Laidlaw asking about lost coast in this poster He dodged a question about the poster But he did go out of his way to tell me that the popular fan theory of lost coast taking place during the Nova Prospect Teleport was baloney So that leaves lost coast in canon limbo I suppose sitting on the bench with Adrian Shepherd to close this video Here's some fun facts about lost coast the only music you featured in the game appears when the player enters the monastery The track is called dark interval and it later appeared in episode two the fisherman has a lot of unused dialogue like a lot These infernal leeches will clean your bones in a trice, and I don't care what kind of fancy swimsuit you're wearing Just one of those things here live too long is what I done and now they're gonna take it all away from me Lost Coast was actually the last published half-life game that Victor Antonov worked on after leaving Valve He went to work for Arcane Studios upon learning this I became curious as to whether he worked on the scrapped Arcane lit half-life expansion return to Ravenholm Though I couldn't find anything to suggest that the lost coast level is prefixed with D2 Which insinuates that it was part of the second day of Gorin's adventure in Half-Life 2 This lines up with the timing of the coastal levels and finally lost coast was a test bed for interrupted and resumed dialogue If the fisherman is prompted to stop talking like you hit him with a prop or something He'll play a brief preset voice line meant to make the cut back to his script more believable and smooth Hey now we lost enough species already Well as I was saying I'll take it or where they made their base Valve have been prototyping the system since 2001, but they just didn't feel like including it in Half-Life 2 I guess that's all for now though leave a comment below to let me know how you feel about lost coast What you think of it how you square it in Half-Life's cannon what you think happened to the fisherman in St. Olga I want to hear all of it. Thanks for watching. Have a good day I'm feeling like an epic gamer. I like to game Play video games every day. I love to game. I love to game. I love to game I forgot to mention this in the main script But there's this sequence right here where if you try to go up these stairs a Combine elite will blow them up But if you use the gravity gun you can actually catch it and you can just you know gravel up it is normal