Ben Glassco (00:00):
I think if you focus too much on growing your audience, you can find yourself growing the wrong audience. You really hit the mark and you get a big viral video out there and you get all these followers of people from the other side of the world who have nothing to do with photography or something. It doesn’t necessarily mean a conversion for a lot of your potential clients. In the end, the watershed moments we’re basically watching what people want, watching trends and being able to apply your brand and your personality to that trend.
Ross Borden (00:34):
This is creator, the podcast for Matador Network. I’m your host, Ross Borden, and I believe creators are the future of all global advertising. So join me as I sit down with top creators to hear about how they got started, the challenges they’ve overcome, and the tips you need to become a full-time creator. Alright, welcome back to another episode of Creator the podcast. Today we have Ben Glasgow, Vancouver based travel photographer, filmmaker, and social media creator. Ben, thanks for coming on the show.
Ben Glassco (01:09):
How’s it going? I’m happy to be here. Honored you guys for bringing me on. There’s a lot of amazing creators on here, so it feels like a privilege to be on here along with them.
Ross Borden (01:18):
So Ben, you are Canadian, right? And where are you calling in from?
Ben Glassco (01:23):
Calling in from Vancouver. You can see the lovely weather behind me we’re having, it’s a normal, nice, moody, rainy day, but in terms of photographers, it’s like you can’t ask for better, beautiful, flat, lush light here. So I’m in my happy place when I’m home in Vancouver. It’s rainy, it’s moody, it’s miserable, kind of like me.
Ross Borden (01:44):
I’ve been so lucky. I think every time I’ve been in Vancouver, we have actually team in Vancouver at Matador and every time I’m up there it’s gorgeous and people are like, oh, well this is not normal, and everyone’s just like, but it is, other than the rainy weather, it’s a pretty incredible place to be from and to call home. Right? I love it up there. So I want to jump right into it. You just got back from Bhutan, is that right? I saw something on your, saw a bunch of amazing videos on your feed.
Ben Glassco (02:13):
I did. It was an incredible, incredible experience. I literally cried at the end of it. It’s one of those things where I think a lot of creators, photographers and travelers in general, it’s a place that dreams are made of. It’s incredibly unique and as I present it to my audience and I present it to the world, I keep describing it. There’s so many different ways, but I keep describing as the most mysterious country in the world because it is intriguing to a lot of people. It has the highest happiness index
Ross Borden (02:48):
In the world. Oh, I heard that.
Ben Glassco (02:50):
Yeah. They’re hyperfocused on having their population be really happy and that kind of bleeds into a lot of things they do, including tourism and travel. So if you want to travel there, it’s not easy. You have to pay a certain tax every day, almost like an entry fee, but it’s a daily thing. It’s pretty expensive. It hovers around a hundred US dollars right now.
Ross Borden (03:16):
Wow. Just to be there per day.
Ben Glassco (03:18):
Yes, just to be there per day and it’s pretty crazy. And you think, oh, that’s a little unfair. Well, it’s their country and their policy as I learned when I was there is they just want people who really want to be somewhere. They don’t want drifting backpackers, although backpacking is amazing and you have amazing culture there. They want people who have worked their whole life to try and see something beautiful and they’re very protective of their culture. You see it with the people. Their formal dress that they wear to work is, I can’t remember the name, but I think it’s zong and then there’s a different word for the women and it’s completely foreign to me. I haven’t seen anything like that before where it’s not just a cultural gimmick or a thing they do only on festivals they wear every day. It’s just things like that that you see there that you just won’t see anywhere else. That they truly are just a unique and preserved culture. And if you want to see it, you want to visit yourself. They’re very protective of it and they just want people who are really interested in the culture, the history, and seeing a beautiful place. So they put a lot of barriers in the way,
Ross Borden (04:33):
And this was a paid project as a creator. You’re working with the tourism board there, is that right?
Ben Glassco (04:38):
Yeah, so it was actually a three pronged and it actually turned into a much larger project as a lot of the people who work in that industry there started talking to each other. They found out I was planning to come, and so it was kind of broken telephone. They’re like, oh, this creator’s coming, we’d like to work with ’em too. And it started with one organization and it turned into three or four, but the main ones were Bhutan Airlines, tourism Bhutan, and then an organization called Yang Fell Adventure Travel and Yang Fell was probably the superstar of the group. They’re the most incredible organization. They basically are the biggest and the best in the country for organizing people there because when you go to Bhutan, you can’t really just do it yourself. You have to actually have a dedicated tour operator who is organizing this for you. So not only do you have to be paying this daily tax to just be there, you need to have an official organization who is running your
Ross Borden (05:51):
Trip, sponsoring your trip. Do they have to be with you the whole time or they just need to know where you are? And when
Ben Glassco (06:00):
They do,
Ross Borden (06:01):
They do have to be with you.
Ben Glassco (06:03):
They do. And it’s funny because a lot of people ask, they’re like, what was Bhutan like? And I jokingly say to my friends, they forever beer. I’m like, you know what? It’s like if North Korea was good, I
Ross Borden (06:13):
Was thinking about North Korea. I was like, where else is that true? I’m like, I could only think of North Korea when you need sort of a chaperone to be a
Ben Glassco (06:21):
Tourist. It’s more like they don’t want people wandering off. It’s also kind of a dangerous country. It’s pure Himalayan Alps. It’s an incredibly dangerous system, wander
Ross Borden (06:34):
Around.
Ben Glassco (06:35):
And so they want to have control over what the people are seeing and what they’re experiencing, but they want them to be safe because most of the experiences there involve river rafting and climbing mountains and visiting ancient monasteries that are very culturally sensitive. You can’t just have some backpacker coming in drunk to a monastery. They do not want that. And so you got to have someone with you to explain the cultural intricacies of the place and to be respectful of those who are just living their lives. There.
Ross Borden (07:15):
Any highlights from the outdoor side of it or the culture that you think for someone that wants to go to Bhutan would be like a must like don’t miss it.
Ben Glassco (07:24):
So I would highly suggest I only scratch even with eight days. I barely scratched the surface and we did our best to cram everything we could. My favorite probably experience was getting as deep into the Himalayas as possible to gang Tay, G-A-N-G-T-E-Y. And it’s this beautiful valley drive up and you drive up and you drive up and eventually getting to Gente, you’re, I don’t know, 3000 meters, I don’t know. It’s up there. You have very thin air, Himalayan Plateau Valley, and it’s where the black neck cranes come in from China and they nest there, or at least they congregate on their way in and out on their migration. So it’s this beautiful peaceful valley and right at the center of it is this small mountain with a monastery peaked at the top. It was, it was something out of Lord of the rinks. It was just this. You come over this mountain valley and you see this huge misty cold Valley with one monastery poking up through the mist. Unbelievable.
Ross Borden (08:36):
Yeah, sounds unreal. I’m dying to go to Bhutan. I’ve never been to even the Himalayas, so I got a lot of travel to do in Bhutan and a bunch of other zones. Take us back a little bit. Let’s go back. So you started as a photographer and you’ve been I view full-time photographer and creator since when? 2011.
Ben Glassco (08:56):
So 2011 is probably when I started shooting for fun and I’m in university or just out and I just started experiencing travel on my own and I did the classic thing coming out of college and I started to work and on my time off I would run off somewhere to experience something new as I ventured through my twenties. I wanted to be a lawyer. I studied political science and ended up in marketing and spent my whole entire twenties throughout the 2010s. So twenties, I’m just like wander ground from marketing firms, tech startups, basically as a marketing and sales rep for most of it, learning the trade and just trying to climb my way up this corporate ladder, making my family happy and trying to make them proud of me living out here in BC on my own and just struggling honestly. I would sit at a desk and I would look out here in Vancouver at the mountains just like in the corner through the trees and I’d be like, why
Ross Borden (10:16):
Am I not out there?
Ben Glassco (10:18):
I should be out there. And I know that that’s what photographers do all the time, but I was like, I just can’t. And I always remember, I always used the story. I’d drive to work sometimes I’d be like, maybe I should just drive off the road and I’d break my arm. I’d dad in the hospital then I don’t have to go to work today. My God, I’d rather have a broken arm. I know you were really miserable at work. I know I was like anything, but I have to go to work and go through this grind again of always having someone breathing down your neck with deadlines and with sales targets and you always feel like you’re kind of walking on eggshells. You don’t want to piss off your boss, you don’t want to and you want to stay in line, you want to overperform.
(11:06):
It always just felt like I was building somebody else’s dream. I did make it to the end of my twenties doing quite well and making a good amount of money for my age more than most, but I was so empty inside and by the time I was done in my twenties, I was just like, honestly, I can’t do this anymore. And I did save up enough money and it was my partner. She told me, I kept talking about one day I’m going to quit it all and I’m going to buy a motorcycle and I’m going to drive through Asia. I’m going to do it, or I’m going to drive from Alaska. And then one day I think we were having beer. She just, just do it. You keep talking about it. You’re almost 30 years old. Do it now. And she’s like, you could. And I think that’s what everyone’s afraid of is they’re afraid of taking that leap or I think more than anything they’re afraid of losing their stability and losing their place in line in the corporate grind. That’s what really always irks me is I know that feeling that, oh, if I leave for six months trying to get another job, they were like, oh, so what were you doing for six months? You should be allowed to take time for yourself no matter where you are in the corporate world. I think it’s unacceptable.
Ross Borden (12:26):
So was that it was that the push out the door that you needed when your partner was like, why don’t you just do it? You’ve talked about this enough, go for it.
Ben Glassco (12:34):
I think she was honestly just sick of me talking about it and she was like, just do it. Maybe she wanted me to get out of the door too and screw off for six months. And so that’s what I did. I sold as much as I could. I had saved enough money, quit my job, told my friends and everyone, I’m like, I’m off. I’m gone for in definite amount of time, six months maybe. I bought a really good camera, a Cannon five D Mark four was, yeah. And that was my workhorse, but I didn’t know enough about real photography. I was still like this hobbyist. And yeah, I went to Vietnam and this was in 2017 and I bought a motorcycle and that was kind of still a newer thing to do in Vietnam at that time. I know it’s very popular these days. And yeah, I bought an old Honda click or something for 200 bucks and I rode it to India pretty much. Wow. It took me
Ross Borden (13:34):
A $200 motorcycle. You rode from Vietnam to India.
Ben Glassco (13:38):
So that’s a bit of an exaggeration because anyone can call me out on this because they’re like, how the hell did you get over the borders? Well, technically I got that bike through three countries by the time I hit Myanmar, you could still cross the border, but I couldn’t get the bike through. They wouldn’t allow it. So I had to sell that one and buy a new one. And then I just started kind of going over borders and buying a new motorcycle and then going as far as I can. And by the time I got to India, I went to India and Nepal and then ended up Sri Lanka. I was basically off the bike, but I did drive approximately 10,000 kilometers.
Ross Borden (14:19):
And at this point, did you have an audience? I mean you have hundreds of thousands of followers now on TikTok and Instagram, but were you just kind of doing this for you and taking photos and is that when you started posting to the platforms and building an audience or did you already have one?
Ben Glassco (14:34):
I had a small kind of a normal audience for an adventurous young guy. I don’t know, a few thousand, maybe five. And I thought by the end of it, it’s funny, by the end of this long eight month, eight country journey, I would be super famous, but I wasn’t really at all still. I finished it and I was still under 10,000. I think it was like eight. So I had barely grown on social media by the time I was done. I did catch enough eyes to start getting hired when I came back to Canada, so it worked. I didn’t become this social media icon that I thought that I might, but I did catch the eye of enough people to start hiring me to do different photography jobs, small things like weddings and small commercial shoots and adventure shoots here in Vancouver and around bc.
(15:31):
So it worked, but it was still a grind. And I think the lesson from that is that no grand gesture. I see guys and girls do it all the time, is they go on this big journey and they think it’s going to change everything, but that’s not what necessarily will work. What really works is consistency and dedication to your craft and your brand. It’s time. And so if you’re able to commit to that, if you’re able to commit to your passion, you will get there eventually. There’s no easy fix can work, but mostly you got to just grind it out
Ross Borden (16:12):
And you have to be yourself. I mean, I’ve talked to a lot of creators that they have that. I think it’s a trap that you’re like, oh, you got to do this trend. This silly trend is going viral and trending. And I think it’s actually you do yourself a disservice by falling into those traps where you’re just chasing views or trying to build followers. And it seems like the people that I know who have been the most successful at building really high quality audiences are just like you said, on their own path, doing their own thing, true to themselves and doing content that they are passionate about in the first place, rather than try and do the latest trend to go viral and get followers.
Ben Glassco (16:52):
It’s true. I mean, I think there’s a good balance. I’ve learned recently that there’s also a thing with don’t take yourself too seriously. I think that was my biggest hurdle to get over is that nobody really cares as much as you care, you take yourself really seriously and you should be true to your passion. You should be true to your brand and your identity, but at the same time, you shouldn’t be afraid to be cringe. You shouldn’t be afraid to do the things that are trending or try something else else out new. You’ll find that sometimes the greatest road to success is just experimentation and nobody will remember if you screw up, nobody’s going to say, oh, this guy’s a cell it because he did one video that was using a trending sound. Something like that. I think the best artists are able to evolve and to change with time, and there’s a difference between making money and being an artist that usually for most artists, it’s two different things and you have to be able to balance those things. Is that just being this pure artist, this moody guy who refuses to do anything commercial, is that you probably will end up back in that desk job because you just
Ross Borden (18:23):
The grindy desk job?
Ben Glassco (18:24):
Yeah, you got to balance it and you got to play the game a little bit in order to get people’s attention, and then you can start showing what you are made of.
Ross Borden (18:34):
When you got back from that trip, the original trip to Asia, you had a few thousand followers, now you have hundreds of thousands. Was it just time in the market doing your thing, producing great content, and you built slowly over time? Or were there any kind of watershed moments where you ended up posting something that really reached a lot of people and you got a bigger audience?
Ben Glassco (18:58):
I found that audience has been, it’s a great boost to have on your brand because a lot of people who will hire you as a travel creator or a photographer or a videographer, they are looking for the numbers sometimes, but most of the time it feels like it’s the connections that you make and the quality of the content that you create. But getting to that moment, I think if you focus too much on growing your audience, you can often find yourself growing the wrong audience. And that’s what I think that I may have experienced a couple times is you really hit the mark and you get a big viral video out there, but it doesn’t really match your brand and it’s a silly, I don’t know, an avalanche or something, and you get all these followers of people from the other side of the world who have nothing to do with photography or something.
(19:59):
And although it is good as something that’s on your page, it doesn’t necessarily mean a conversion for a lot of your potential clients. So you have to be a little bit careful with that. But in the end, the watershed moments, we’re basically watching what people want, watching trends and being able to apply your brand and your personality to that trend or to that movement in social media. So being able to understand that and then applying it and making it relevant to your brand are the two most important things to creating those watershed moments and converting people into dedicated real followers who actually care about you. They don’t care about that one disaster video you posted or something, or somebody fighting someone else in the street that’s not going to help your brand. You’ll get a lot of views and maybe some followers, but they’re going to be some dude from the other side of the world who’s spamming you.
Ross Borden (21:03):
Yeah, so in terms of stuff that has been on brand for you, the stuff that I’ve seen that I’ve been really impressed with are these, it’s almost like you did an entire trip to get one shot or to go to one location in terms of some of those bucket shots, anything that stands out from the last couple of years. I saw the lantern festival, I think in Thailand that looked like a photographer’s dream. Where was that? Was that in Chiang Mai?
Ben Glassco (21:30):
That’s in Chiang Mai, yeah. That’s a place that was interesting. It took me two times to catch that. It’s called the Yiping Lantern Festival, and it’s coupled with the Loong Festival. So those are often confused, but they’re essentially the same thing. They’re part of the same celebration, which kind of is a cultural norm in that part of the world is letting go. It. It’s interesting learning about the different festivals in India, in Myanmar, in Vietnam, China even, and then of course Thailand, which are famous for letting go of some kind of lantern or a floating lantern down the river that symbolizes letting go of your problems, of your issues. You see a prayer and you let it go. For me, it was an incredible photography moment, waited for years, went a few years ago, completely screwed it up, missed it, just wasn’t ready, didn’t know the area, and it’s for the photographer.
(22:35):
You only have one shot. You have one moment when everyone lets them go and you have maybe 10 seconds when they’re all floating up at the same time. And I just screwed it up. I didn’t have the right settings, I wasn’t experienced enough, and then I came back two years later, which was just a few months ago, and nailed it. So it was, I think the combination of that, the kind of the storytelling with, I screwed it up, I’ve waited my whole life. There’s all this buildup. Having that buildup and that story behind it, I think it really resonates with people. And then of course, the aesthetic, the visual payoff of seeing them actually floating into the sky. It is such a cool experience for both me and those who are following along on social media.
Ross Borden (23:25):
Yeah, unreal shot. That was really cool. Awesome. Well, we’ll wrap up pretty quickly, but I do ask every creator who comes on here the same question, and it’s almost like the more well traveled they are, the harder the question is. So here we go. If your passport only worked in three countries for the rest of your life to live, travel, stay, visit, what would those three countries be?
Ben Glassco (23:50):
Can I exclude Canada, my own
Ross Borden (23:52):
Country? No, Canada would’ve to be one of the countries
Ben Glassco (23:58):
As a Canadian right now, I’m sorry to say, but United States has to be one of those places, and I think people completely misunderstand the United States. It has the most incredible culture. It’s a melting pot of the best foods in the world, and the landscapes are vast and sometimes unparalleled. So the United States, I love that place
Ross Borden (24:21):
There. Yeah. Yeah. Okay. Us number one or just one of the three?
Ben Glassco (24:26):
Yeah. Number two, India. It is the most difficult place to navigate and to travel for a westerner. There you will find the cradle, I believe, of civilization, the most diverse and incredible cultural tapestry of language history, and of course beautiful photography. It is an amazing place with amazing people. So India, number two, number three, I’m sorry, not to say Canada. They’ll forgive you.
Ross Borden (25:03):
It’s okay. Your countryman will forgive you for this one,
Ben Glassco (25:07):
It’s tough, but I got to say Vietnam, I think it’s because my photography journey started there. It’s an incredible place to see the amazing landscapes that all are scattered across the north makes it probably my favorite place. I brought my brother there. I flew him there one time when he had never been to Asia. I was like, if you’re going to see Asia taking you to Vietnam, and we’re going to have a beer on those plastic chairs on the street, like Anthony Bourdain, so love Vietnam.
Ross Borden (25:37):
Alright,
Ben Glassco (25:38):
There
Ross Borden (25:38):
It is. US, India, and Vietnam. Well, Ben, thanks for coming on the pod. I’ve really enjoyed following your adventures. I’ll continue to follow you and see where you go next, but appreciate you coming on.
Ben Glassco (25:51):
So honored you had me, so thanks a lot. I appreciate it.
Ross Borden (25:56):
Creator, the podcast is produced by Matador Network. We are a leading global travel publisher focused on travel and adventure. If you enjoyed today’s episode, please subscribe. Every week I interview a new top creator. New episodes are released every Tuesday on YouTube, apple Podcasts, Spotify, and everywhere podcasts are found. Thanks for listening.