We recently connected with Noah Grossman and have shared our conversation below.

Hi Noah, thanks for joining us today. One of our favorite things to hear about is stories around the nicest thing someone has done for someone else – what’s the nicest thing someone has ever done for you?

The kindness shown to me, both by strangers and those close to me, has changed the course of my life on many occasions, and always for the better. The simplest example I’ve experienced took the form of a stranger whom had gotten off the City Bust no more than 10 seconds before helping rescue me from thr situation I had gotten myself into out of sheer stupidity. I was driving in the city, leaving a gas station, and I somehow partially missed the driveway exit, driving over the curb, causing my very low to the ground mini cooper to bottom out. If I were to reverse or drive forward, I risked severely damaging my car. As if it was planned, a bus stopped had let off passengers to my right and out walked my savior. Without breaking stride, this man walked over to an active construction site, grabbed two sandbags and whistled his way over to my car. We never exchanged words, he just placed them in between my wheels and the curb, creating a surface I could now very easily use to reverse back into the parking lot, saving my car from damage and from me having to pay for a tow truck. I had a twenty-dollar bill in my wallet I offered it along with my heavy thank you, but he just waved away my offering, smiled, and continued on with his day. I’ll never know that man, and I will never forget him either.

As always, we appreciate you sharing your insights and we’ve got a few more questions for you, but before we get to all of that can you take a minute to introduce yourself and give our readers some of your back background and context?

My name is Noah Grossman and I am an Actor, Comedian, Creator and have been working professionally in the Entertainment industry, mainly as on camera talent, as early as 2010. Early on in my career I found work mostly through commercials, and later Live TV and hosting through work with Nickelodeon. I actually celebrated by 16th birthday in the NY Viacom Headquarters, next to the studio we filmed in. I joined the YouTube comedy brand, Smosh In 2015. As a cast member and creative collaborator within Smosh, Smosh Pit, and Smosh Games, I’ve been able to help create thousands of videos that entertain millions around the world. Apart from my Youtube career, I’ve had the opportunity to create my own phone app, that consequently got removed by google for being too successful too quickly, and produced my own videogame-based competition gameshow, Even The Odds, that pits Plebs against Pros in the virtual arena. I’ve come to hone a passion and skill for creating. I pride myself on my ability to function in high stress and demanding environments. Thriving individually and in group dynamic, pushing myself and the ideas around me to their fullest extent. My on-screen persona is true to who I am, positive, observant, lightly cynical, and always trying to create the best version of whatever I get my hands on.

What’s the most rewarding aspect of being a creative in your experience?

It’s difficult to nail down the most rewarding aspect of being a creative. The process of creative and editing an idea, into a full script and flushed out concept is incredibly fun. When you finally release a video, and for it to receive a positive response, you feel a sense of fulfillment. However, the most rewarding aspect of being a creative, is the time spent on set, with the other cast and crew, rehearsing your lines and blocking. Nothing feels better than rehearsing and watching as you and your castmates all become more comfortable with the material. You enter a flow state where you know your lines and the whole scene so intimately you can do it without thinking. You start to find depth and moment to highlight in the material you could never have found on your first pass. I originally was trained in improvisation, so once you know your lines, you can start mixing all your skills together, and it always makes for something memorable. After productions like that, you feel like you’ve truly done something worthy, and you’re just glad to have played a little role in the whole grand picture.

What can society do to ensure an environment that’s helpful to artists and creatives?

As a society, there are many ways we can improve in almost every aspect, and supporting our artists is important. When possible, I like to look at problems as opportunities for developing new solutions. Most of my work is done on social media, mainly YouTube. In the current online landscape, content creators and viewers are connected through algorithms that curate feeds to each specific user. This is interesting when it comes to providing suggested videos for someone to watch, but it also creates a short-sighted feedback loop where in the long run, less varieties of content are created and consumed. A modern creator makes money either by making paid promotional content, or by revenue based on viewership. Again, on paper it all makes sense, but in the high velocity media environment, it creates an incentive for people to “game” the system, by producing lower quality videos that maximize generating an interaction, so that an ad is served to the user, generating the profit, but with no care for the end user, which is the audience you’ve grown and care about. A view is a view, no matter if it’s for a 30-minute video of someone building a squirrel obstacle course, or a 30-minute video about how the earth is actually totally flat. Eventually the lower effort content that generates the most interactions will float to the top within such a system, leaving a creator no option but to tailor their content towards what the algorithm rewards. I don’t inherently view that as “wrong” in a market sense. We have more stuff to watch than ever, and the buy in to start creating and publishing your own stuff is nearly zero, that’s pretty cool. However, my worry as a society, is that these algorithms may be a little too effective at finding the right audiences, and with their thumb on the scale of the creator and the viewer side of publishing and distribution, their influence forms a kind of soft power we all must wade through in order to watch or create content. In the most cynical sense, curation algorithms take advantage of our individual susceptibilities, whether age, emotions, interests, data scraped from other apps and websites, or even your relationship status to feed you content you’ll have a higher chance of interacting with, therefore successfully serving you an ad in the process, generating the profit. Rinse and repeat. Essentially making endless doomscrolling an inevitability, just based on the economics of the platforms. We are all inadvertently influenced by the media we consume, especially during our early years of important development, so the idea of unregulated content moderation doesn’t seem like a very good one to me. I have worked on projects with a wide range of demographics, so I have empathy when I imagine there are kids out there whom instead of being offered our content, which is friends hanging out, playing games, making each other laugh, and generally being positive role models, you might be offered something that gets a “bigger reaction”, like Andrew Tate telling you to start eating lion meat, or a hate speech filled meme account on X. So, I believe it’s incredibly important we as a society find a healthier and more useful version of our current heavily algorithm curated media environment. The technology isn’t going anywhere, we just need to ensure it improves in a way that is more helpful than harmful.

Contact Info:

• Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/noahgrossman214/
• Youtube: https://www.youtube.com/@SmoshNoah

Image Credits

Even The Odds photo as well features Mari Takahashi – The photo of me in green hat costume with the other blonde cast member is Courtney Miller – The group photo from left (in red shirt) Jacklyn Uwek , behind me blonde Courtney Miller , behind obscured in blue headband is Keith Leak and lastly in purple is Olivia Sui