The Price of Fame with Nick Thompson

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Well, I put this at George G. And the time is right. welcome today’s guest strong and powerful Nick Thompson. Nick, are you ready to do this? Hey, I’m ready to do it. How you doing today? I am doing great, man. Let’s go. Nick is a storyteller. He is a podcast host. He is a reality TV star. excited to have you on. Nick, tell us a little bit about your personal lives more about your work, why you do what you do? Yeah, so the reality star thing always trips me up. So I apologize for the chuckle. Sure. So I think what I’ll start off by saying that is I’m a normal guy who happened to get a little bit of notoriety and and I guess, celebrity status from a reality show. But

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what I really like to focus on and really spend my time on is my podcast, which I launched a few months back. And the goal there is really kind of my my life mission is to talk about things that have stigmas around them, and sort of give people a safe space and a place to have a conversation about what they’re actually feeling or what their experiences are that led him to believe this way. So, you know, I like to spread a lot of awareness around self care, mental health, you know, a lot of conversations around news and politics because I think that these things just divide us. And they stigmatize

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these these challenges even more. And so I like to use my podcasts and use my platform to sort of facilitate these types of conversations and hopefully foster

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a safe space. So people feel comfortable that they can say how they’re feeling and be hurt. I certainly appreciate that we are, we’re living in a unique time where we’ve sort of gotten this thing. I don’t, it hasn’t been thrust upon us, because I don’t have to use social media. But it’s new to all of us. And to some level, we are now all reality TV stars, and we are able to broadcast our lives to the entire world if we are so inclined. And for a lot of people that’s kind of eating our lunch. And so I was excited to bring you on to talk about that. Because you were an actual reality TV star and you strike me as a regular guy from the Midwest like I am. Who this thing, it didn’t happen to you, but you have gone through this unique experience. Well, it’s funny that you say that, because I do say this kind of just happened to me. And ever since ever since the release of the show, I do feel like things kind of happen to me. But there’s a learning to have there, right. And that learning is that if you take things as they come, and you just let the rest happen, you’re gonna be okay, take it day by day, you don’t have to have all the answers. And thing with social media, too, is having a following. And I went, I think it was 348 people to over 300,000 followers in the course of a month. And as someone who posted about six or seven photos of my dog, the three before that on social media, that was a a culture shock, eye opening experience. And no matter what you do to prepare yourself for that, you have no idea, you have no idea what it’s going to be like you don’t know the level of support, you don’t know the level of hate, that’s going to come from social media. As much as you want to prepare, you really just don’t have any idea whatsoever. So I think, you know, a big learning there is is I’ve decided actively, and this is even in the last few months, I’m not going to just put these beautiful things on social media that make it seem like I’m living this lavish celebrity, reality TV star life, I’m going to continue to be me, and I’m going to be myself. So I’m going to share my good things. I’m going to share my my bad things I’m going to, you know, be vulnerable and be real with everyone because that’s that’s who I am. And I say I always say I’m unapologetically myself. So why would I be different just because I have 300 something 1000 followers now paying attention to everything that I do when in reality. I’m just still being me. And I’m just doing things that I do and some of them are, are worth sharing. Yeah, no, I appreciate that. Take things as they come. Tell me a little bit more about about about what you mean. Absolutely. So self care. self preservation are very important to me. I spend a lot of years being very reactive, being irritable, being frustrated with my situation. And I feel I look back on that. And I look at the person that I I’ve become and then you know the times that I still struggle with that. And I realized that like I can’t control other people.

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I can’t control what my job does, I can’t control how someone acts towards me or what they say. But what I can control is how I react to these things. So as I said earlier, I feel like things just happen to me sometimes, especially lately, when you know, you have so many people that pay attention to your every move,

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I can’t control the outside world, what I can control is how I take it, I can control how I react to it, I can control if this is going to break me, or I can control if this is going to make me happy. Or I can control if this is going to bounce off of me. And I find that if I keep that mindset, and I keep my inner peace and and my self control, then I’ll be okay. And I live by the principles of like my three pillars, I call them, my three pillars are that I really want to have inner peace. So in order to have inner peace, I have to know that I am acting with integrity at every opportunity that I get. And I know that I’m doing the best that I can. And if I take those things, and I internalize them, that gives me inner peace. And when I have inner peace, it doesn’t matter what other people say and think about me, because I know that I did the right thing with the information that I had, and that I’m doing the best that I can. I love it.

Unknown Speaker 6:20
You know, it’s easy to say not easy to always practice. Just to be clear. Yeah, that’s one of those sounds easy does hard for sure. That when you do recognize that we have very little control over the things that happen, but almost complete control over how we think and feel and respond to those things. And you do your best to put those into practice every day. I think then yeah, you can have a little bit more peace of mind. And then you can say, You know what, I’m going to take things as they come, I’m going to let the chips fall where they may. That’s exactly right. And that is the most freeing and releasing feeling that I could say I’ve ever had when I was finally able to stop caring what people think and what’s happening to me like I could control it.

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So you, you make the decision to go on this show you appear on the show. And the world explodes. You go from hundreds of followers to hundreds of 1000s of followers.

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I mean,

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I don’t know if you can try to prepare yourself for that. But from that time to where we are now about how long was that? And how long did it take you to sort of work to where you are today. So I’m going to start off by answering that to say I’m very naive.

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I was recruited for to be a contestant on love as blind through a LinkedIn message that I didn’t really take seriously. And next thing I know, it’s just snowballing and I’m like, you have to do this interview, you have to do this background check. You have to do this Psych Exam, you have to all this stuff. And all of a sudden, like a few months go by and I’m there, right? And it just again, it’s like I just kind of let these things come I took it day by day I put that into practice, I wasn’t going to be upset if I didn’t get selected. I wasn’t gonna be upset if I went home the second or third day. So from that moment on and going through the experience, I started thinking I’m like, okay, so I am going to have a platform. And I went and I watched season one I’m not a big reality TV show person, which is why this is also very ironic. And so I saw the types of followings that people from the season one had and I saw the types of following people from other shows heads, so then it got real. And you know, I kept telling myself, I’m like, I’ll be okay, like, I’m tough. I trust myself, I didn’t do or say or act in any way that I wouldn’t act in normal life. So I wasn’t worried about it. But then when it happens, and it’s just this influx of DMS, comments, criticisms, insults, people behind a keyboard can be incredibly cruel. And it’s unfortunate because like, you know, they’re projecting, you know, they are saying things they would never have the strength to say to you face to face. And then a lot of times, in a lot of cases, you know, it’s a bot or it’s a third account that someone has, but what really what really happened for me is, once the first month or two passed, I was just like, you know, I don’t know these people, like stick to your core values. You did the best you can, you’re doing the best you can, and you’re trying to get better. And I don’t really make excuses when I screw up. I just try to, you know, learn from it do better, and move on. And so I started getting that mentality probably after like the first month or two, and that helped a lot. And then after that though, you have to figure out like, Well, who am I going to be on social media and that

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is its own challenge, right? Because I myself, but myself is not someone who spends a ton of time on social media. So then it’s like, well, I’m going to just keep being myself. And the people that want to be here are going to want to be here because I’m providing some sort of value entertainment or camaraderie or community to them. So I just kind of started taking that approach. And then I was like, You know what, I’m gonna just keep being myself. If someone doesn’t like that. I was super excited about the new Halloween movie this October, and I was talking about it and dressing up for it, then fine, they can unfollow me, they can say something bad. So it’s just a it’s sort of like a process where you have to kind of make peace with yourself, and then make peace with the fact that, hey, people are going to unfollow you. And you know, I said, last night, someone posted something on a reel of mine that said, unfollowed, and I sat there and I was like, Okay, you could have hit one button and unfollowed me, but instead, you did u and f, O L, L, O, W, E, D, then so that’s nine clicks, then you had to go to my profile. 10 then you had to unfollow 11. So if someone wants to spend 11 clicks, just to tell me they unfollowed me. That’s on them. Not me. Yeah, yeah. Yeah. There’s no doubt about that. It’s interesting, right? We think that you can look at different experiences in life where you go into something, and you’re either naive, or we just don’t know what we’re getting ourselves into. And, and when we open ourselves up for criticism, maybe you’re in a sales role for the first time you’re getting it on social media, and now people can you just get to experience Happy, happy, good stuff is awesome. But when it’s the negative stuff, or the rejection, that that will toughen your skin up. So I appreciate that.

Unknown Speaker 11:55
How do you think so I’m doesn’t matter how old you are. I’m 44. And so I’m not native to social media. I was, I was, you know, 30 some years old by the first time that I actually got on the platform. How do you think it’s different? Or do you think about you know, young people who are younger than I am, who are actually social media natives?

Unknown Speaker 12:19
So I I’m 37. So I grew up in a simpler time when you would select your your top friends on MySpace and picked up a song in high school to talk about your, your friends, upsetting you, or a breakup of some sort, and you you know, move those around and cause drama on your friend group. That was basically how I grew up with Tom playtimes for sure. Right. Exactly. So I think the interesting thing now and this isn’t just for, you know, reality stars, or you know, influencers or whatever you want to look at, I think this is for everyone. I believe what I’m seeing with younger people, they’re not too young, like I don’t know, when people should get on social media, I don’t, you know, it’s between them and their parents. But I feel that what young people are doing, especially on Tik Tok that I can see, it’s cool is like, they’re actually they’re building,

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you know, a platform that like reminds me of what it was like on the playground, where there but it’s on a bigger scale right there, you’re meeting new people, you’re communicating with new people, you’re playing different types of games, you’re playing, you know, Red Rover, or then someone else comes in is like, No, we’re gonna play tag, and you’re all just communicating. But now it’s happening through content. And we’re kind of circling around each other. And then I think the really cool thing that younger people are good at with social media is they use it to organize, they use it to organize around a hashtag around an idea. You know, they Gen Z just came out big time in the midterm elections, and they organized on social media so that they would all get out and vote. So I think like, those are the kinds of things that they are doing natively, where, you know, I have to go and like learn how to do that. I have to learn what I should and shouldn’t put in certain types of content. So I have this really cool way I think about it now. You know, for from an Instagram perspective is my stories are like my group chat with my friends. So if it’s something I’d say to my friends, or talk about with my friends, I should talk about it on my story. Those people are here, here to communicate and have the community with me. But I posted on my on a real it’s something that I think needs to extend beyond it’s almost like the marketing for me in my content, my message in my community. And then if I post something on my timeline, I think of that as like, this is a moment in time that I would like to capture and remember. And so that works for me. I didn’t come up with that all on my own. You know, I’ve learned that from others. But I think when we come up with sort of the use cases for social media, everyone can get better at it and we can use it and explore new ways to use it as kind of

Unknown Speaker 15:00
Have a town square or a local playground?

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As you are, as you are

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moving ahead and doing the kind of work that you want to be doing to help to destigmatize, and to create places where people can comfortably converse and share their insights and insecurities and everything.

Unknown Speaker 15:25
Like, which I think is we need more and more and more of that. Do you think that? Do you have hope for the future? Do you think that that, that we’re gonna figure this out?

Unknown Speaker 15:37
Really good question. I think we all have to have hope for the future. Because if we don’t, what are we doing every day. But I do think, to your point, my hope for the future comes from the individuals that are wanting to participate in a community not even just be part of it, but participate in the community. I love with my podcast, and even through DMS and through other content, I love to have these conversations, because I’m not judging anyone, I don’t know where people came from. Everybody has a reason to believe and feel the way that they feel. And I think that when we give them an opportunity to share, where they’re not going to be judged, they’re actually going to be able to be vulnerable. But you’re also going to be able to connect on a human to human level. And that’s what my hope for social media is, is that instead of becoming this dark Haven black hole of of being mean, and cruel, and projecting, I hope that we can realize, hey, this actually gives us an opportunity to get together with people that 20 years ago, we never would have come in contact with. And if we can do that, and we can recognize each other as human beings, instead of a blind profile. I feel like we can actually start to facilitate some of these changes. Not even in our society here, but just across the world.

Unknown Speaker 16:53
Yeah, yeah, I think that that’s a powerful opportunity.

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So looking back, I’m sure that there’s parts of your experience on on reality TV that you hate, there’s probably parts that you just love.

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And it it gave you this this unique platform?

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How How, how do you sum it up? Do you think about that?

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I do I actually think about it a lot.

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And again, I, I take things as they come, I let them happen. And then I choose how I react to it. And so everything hasn’t been kosher. It hasn’t been perfect. But this is my path. And I’m excited to be on it. I’m excited to see what comes next. And I’m excited to use whatever platform I have to try and make the world a better place and do the right thing. So from that alone, you know, that’s, that’s just me with 348 followers, and that’s me with 348,000 followers. So I’m just hoping that

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my message, my, the way I behave the way I conduct myself, just help some other people. And now I can do that more. So on a larger scale, hopefully.

Unknown Speaker 18:12
I love it.

Unknown Speaker 18:14
Well, Nick, thank you so much for coming on. Where can people learn more about you? And how can people engage with you? Obviously lose social media? Yeah, you can definitely engage with me through social media. You can find me on Instagram at N Thompson 513. You can find my podcast conversations with Nick Thompson, on any platform that you listen to podcasts, including YouTube, and I don’t go on Twitter because it’s a dark, dark place. And

Unknown Speaker 18:46
so connect with me on Instagram if you get the opportunity. And if you listen to the podcasts, I’d love to hear what you think. Excellent. Well, if you enjoyed as much as I did, show nick your appreciation and share today’s show with a friend that also appreciates good ideas. Follow Nick on social media on Instagram. His handle is N. Thompson 513. And then listen to the conversations with Nick Thompson podcast wherever you listen to your podcast and also on YouTube as well. And I will look link all of those in the notes of the show. Thanks again, Nick. Thank you. And until next time, remember what we’ve been talking about. Do your part by doing your best