IX - I Collaborated with Inter Milan x The AI Boom

Good morning Reader

First off, my apologies.

I mentioned in Edition VIII that I would discuss my thoughts on why “Why gamers become successful (and unsuccessful)”. This will now be pushed back to next week.

Why?

Because earlier this week I collaborated with Inter Milan.

Yes, the great Italian football club Inter Milan who play at the San Siro.

In all of my achievements so far in my entrepreneurial journey this has been my greatest one to date:

But how did I get here?

As you can see, it is not just my name that is tagged.

Heather (https://twitter.com/HBCoop_) had been a client of mine for the past year.

Now? We are a team.

But at the start, Heather had approached me in help with building up a brand on (at the time) Twitter.

We chatted, and I could see some potential (always vet potential clients) so I was happy to onboard her.

A couple of months in however the “AI Boom” had happened.

Myself? I’ve seen this before. Another trend comes along, people jump on it and switch up their entire career for it to collapse years later (See NFTs as a great example).

In addition, I am someone who some may I’ve seen too much Ready Player One, but with all the positives; the negatives sounded much louder and it was something I didn’t want to get into.

For example, we have seen how gaming and pornography have crippled so many already, and along comes AI? My gut was telling me to stay clear and that’s what I did.

Heather? With her creativity and interest in visual content she had a different thought process.

One which aligned with her creativity and personality.

She knew my resistance, but I wanted the best for her and the strategy made sense.

And then we began.

Over the past 9 months I have had a front row seat.

I’ve seen Elon come out and voice his concerns, only for xAI to be founded shortly after - now that caught my attention... I see you Elon…

I’ve seen Heather create a community, test several tools and watched how rapidly AI has started to advance in a short space of time.

She has had multiple offers for collaborations, been flown out to LA for conferences and attended panels. She needed me just to keep her organised.

One day she mentioned to me “Thomas, someone is talking about a collaboration and he said he works with Inter Milan”

That got my attention.

Inter Milan?

Surely not.

I didn’t believe it.

Let’s set up the call and see what is said.

Did the call go smoothly? No.

But when an opportunity was presented to me and Heather to create Inter Milan poster art as a promo for their first Champions League game of the season I felt like a kid at Christmas.

Heather could see it in my eyes and I said we wanted to hear more.

There was no money involved, but this was bigger than that. Mine and Heathers name on Inter Milan's social media? An opportunity we couldn’t pass up.

I rang Heather immediately after the call ended and I explained about the Champions League.

Not only being my favourite competition to watch, but how Inter Milan had reached the final last season.

No small achievement.

And they wanted us to do art for the first game back this season in the same competition?

Again, Heather tempted me in to the world of Artificial Intelligence.

She had been testing my resistance and resolve of the course of the last nine months.

We are a fantastic team, and she told me I would pick it up quick…

Before we continue, we now side step to two other close friends of mine.

Dizmodo (https://www.youtube.com/@Dizmodo) & Derek (https://mailchi.mp/3764bc92da04/storyteller-writing-in-reverse).

Recently, I had been speaking with Dizmodo. We’ve known each other for a while in the presence of content creation and building business online.

We had worked on a recent marketing project together for an AI company... AI again, eh?

We had seen many ups and downs, especially on 𝕏 (Twitter) in the previous years.

We had both been lacking some excitement and was talking about what our enjoyment and fulfilment entailed.

We are here to start empires.

The time felt right for myself to expand to YouTube and Dizmodo had spoke about how he was returning back to Youtube from his time on 𝕏.

I told him about Derek who had similar thoughts on YouTube and was already creating on there.

This was the right time and opportunity to expand what we had done.

So we set up a call between the three of us.

We all know action is above all else.

Above planning, above prep, after strategy.

Dizmodo said let’s just “Create50”.

Create 50 videos.

Review all analytics and strategy later.

Let's start a new journey, and stoke a new fire.

And in that moment, an agreement between gentlemen was formed.

But WHAT was I going to do? Both Derek & Dizmodo had already started. Well, you guessed it. Artificial Intelligence. I love writing, enjoy stories, so I created this: