Mike Gaston — President of Stage TEN Studios on Bankruptcy, Founding Cut.com, and the Future of Livestreaming

Mike Gaston is the President of Stage TEN Studios, and a creative and social provocateur known for "programming between the lines". We discuss launching a profitable poetry press and soon after declaring personal banktuptcy, selling his first music video to MTV, founding viral digital studio Cut.com, and how he’ll shape the future of livestream media. 

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EPISODE TRANSCRIPT:

Chris Erwin:

Hi, I'm Chris Erwin. Welcome to The Come Up, a podcast that interviews entrepreneurs and leaders.

Mike Gaston:

This is going to sound insane. And I'm going to share this, but my thought was, is it possible to rob a bank and not go to jail? I'm like 19. Now when I'm thinking this way. And then I thought, yeah, I'll just take out a bunch of money on credit cards and then claim bankruptcy. And so like I took on all these credit cards and then I've just started traveling the world in a way that was just absurd.

Chris Erwin:

This week's episode features Mike Gaston, the President of Stage Ten Studios. Mike is a creative savant, who's known for programming between the lines. He had breakout success when he founded a viral digital studio, cut.com whose first video was about Grandmas Smoking Weed. You see, Mike is the ultimate provocateur, and he's been conducting social experiments since an early age. Like when just 20 years old, Mike launched a profitable poetry mag while apprenticing for an Irish poet. And then intentionally went into personal bankruptcy. Or when he created a music video for a friend's band, just for fun and ended up selling it to MTV. In Mike's current role at Stage Ten, he'll shape the future of live stream media. He talks about his recent work as well as some of his creative side projects at the end of our chat. All right, let's get into it. Mike, thank you for being on The Come Up podcast. So let's talk about where you grew up. What was your household like? What was your parental situation? Tell me.

Mike Gaston:

I grew up in West Seattle and my mom is an immigrant. She's from the Philippines. She didn't become a citizen until two years after I was born. And my whole family actually immigrated from the Philippines. So all my aunts, my uncles, my grandparents, my cousins, they're all here. And so had that very large Filipino side of the family around me. And then my dad, he's a white dude and he had a very small family that the only people I really got to know were my grandparents and then his brother and my cousin. But we weren't terribly close to them. And so the family was interesting. I had a bunch of essentially under five foot tall Filipinos about. So culturally, everything that I perceive was very much from a Filipino-American experience and not from the experience that my dad had. There wasn't a very strong kind of like a family philosophy or perspective from their side. But from my mom's side, my Filipino side, it was very strong. It pretty much informs everything that I think about today.

Chris Erwin:

When you mentioned that there was these the strong Filipino identity and cultural values, what were some of those that you remember growing up.

Mike Gaston:

Family is primary. It's also a very... It's a matriarchal culture. It's funny to say that because you look at authoritarians like Duterte, who actually is leading the country right now. And you're like, Oh, that seems very macho. And that's true. But it's really the women that do things like handle the finances.

Chris Erwin:

Interesting.

Mike Gaston:

And are really leading the family. And it's very common to never move out of the house, to live there forever and then your parents die and then you just take over the home. And so it's a very tight knit family structure, that's one. And then the second thing, which kind of I experienced growing up and then moved out of was this sort of mystical form of Catholicism. In Filipino culture, I felt like my grandmother practiced a magical form of Catholicism where it was like, everything was steeped in sort of miracles and possibility, right? I mean, this is a country where they crucify people, literally crucify people as part of holiday rituals in certain parts of the country. And so it's this sort of magical realism idea when it comes to religion. And that informed a lot of my early childhood.

Chris Erwin:

And when you say it informed a lot of your early childhood, because I'm also thinking to where you are today, which we'll get into, this like visionary in the media space and a point of view of the responsibility of creators. But what seeds was that planting in you at an early age?

Mike Gaston:

Honestly story. So I was fascinated by the stories that my grandparents would tell me and my mother would tell me. It was interesting because my dad converted to Catholicism as part of his wooing of my courtship of my mother. And he was never, I would call him a believer. I kind of think most Catholics are, it's very much like a more bureaucratic than it is like a belief to him. Whereas the Filipinos and my family is very strong believers in that kind of thing. And I remember as I was growing up, we would go to church every Sunday. And then right after church, we would go to the movies. And at some point, I want to say, when I was around eight or nine, I somehow convinced my parents that we should stop going to church and only go to the movies, which is probably why I make videos now. And I'm not a priest.

Mike Gaston:

But it's just something, there's some weird connection that was happening there between this religious communal experience that I was having in church. And then the kind that you have in a dark theater, staring at a screen with a bunch of people experiencing different states of emotional catharsis, right? Somehow I attached a more profound meaning to my experience with movies than I did with my experience in the church.

Chris Erwin:

And as you matured, maybe your sense of, Oh, I have to go to church to have the theater experience. And then you realize, and I think there's some parts of this story that will come out even more later, I don't need the church. I can just go right to the theater. And I think that comes up about you thinking about some of your coursework in school and saying, "Well, some of this coursework is great and some of it is not, I don't need it."

Mike Gaston:

Yeah. That just general sort of obnoxiousness definitely found its way into my schoolwork too.

Chris Erwin:

And so thinking also about your character as you kind of grew up and as a teenager and going to high school before you went off to college, reading some of your blog posts, you described yourself as a scared of everything extrovert. Tell me a little bit more about that.

Mike Gaston:

I've pretty much always been comfortable in social situations. I don't mind meeting new people, although it does have a tendency to impact me energy-wise. But any new scenario that I was in would instantly hit me with a kind of anxiety. There's just sort of a discomfort that comes with suddenly being presented into a new situation. Anytime I had to meet new people, initially, I would be kind of really timid about it. I was sort of in a corner, kind of a bit of a wallflower until I got acclimated to the temperature of the room. And then suddenly I was in the center in some way. And maybe it was certain aspects of my family life or in the early days we moved a bit around. There was so much attention from my mother's side of the family that I felt always like there's a spotlight on me.

Mike Gaston:

And so that made me kind of shrink into myself. So I would be freaked out a lot about different scenarios that I would be put into. But at the same time, once I got again, acclimated to the temperature, it wouldn't be tough for me to perform suddenly. But yeah, initially I would be freaked out by a lot of things, pretty often actually.

Chris Erwin:

Did you feel that people sought your attention or sought to interact with you? Because I look at you now and people seek you out for, they want to hear your point of view. They want to hear you speak, at conferences, at summits and for you to attend their events, but you don't always immediately engage. And so curious, going back, did you feel that social groups were like, "Hey, this is an interesting guy. We want to interact with him." Or did that attention not exist?

Mike Gaston:

So this is strange given it feels like a backdoor brag, but it's not intentional. I was friends growing up, I could be friends with literally anybody, with all the different kids. But I was popular among the popular kids, but I wasn't necessarily a popular kid because I didn't behave like a popular kid. I didn't behave in a way where I was seeing differentiation between me and other kids. So I was friends with a lot of kids. And then for some reason I would end up popular among the popular kids. I think maybe it's, I just knew from very early age, I would ask myself what I wanted. And then I would only just do the things that I wanted. And I think that that creates a gravity that people are attracted to because I think a lot of people don't ask themselves what they want or are uncertain about going after the things that they want. And so it's attractive when you see it in other people.

Chris Erwin:

So