Rising Stars: Meet Sam Pocker

Today we’d like to introduce you to Sam Pocker.

Hi Sam, we’re thrilled to have a chance to learn your story today. So, before we get into specifics, maybe you can briefly walk us through how you got to where you are today?
I went to a lot of art schools when I was younger but never really had a clear vision of what I wanted to do. I was also of the age that digital works were starting as I was coming up, so the teachers would say, “you’re the last class that’s ever going to learn things this way”.

In my 20s, I had a lot to say but no outlet for those thoughts and I ended up becoming a published author and saying the things I wanted to say in a subversive way by writing a book about business and mostly speaking about my feelings.

After losing my job, getting divorced, and going through a bankruptcy, I ended up in L.A. with a pocketful of hundred-dollar bills, a perfunctory knowledge of songwriting, and a lot that I wanted to say. There were about two years of me trying and failing at lots of different things before I kind of accepted that I was not going to succeed as a new musician in my late 30s.

When the pandemic started, I had some ideas for music videos I wanted to make with the songs I’d already produced. With nothing but time and some ideas, I really went headfirst into making videos. My skills improved quickly and I got certified in a lot of different software related to video creation. By the second year of the pandemic, I already had about a dozen music videos, my own knock-off of 80’s MTV called SPTV (I made about five one-hour episodes, all the videos are my songs), a. 360 travel channel, a vlog, and then stumbled onto TikTok. My first channel @whatsuplosangeles got reasonably big in the first month with about 250k views. That kind of got boring after a hundred TikToks, and somewhere in there I stumbled into making fast food TikToks which went on to consume an entire year of my life.

Once it was clear that I couldn’t get sponsors because this content was just so far ahead of corporate America (a common problem with my work), I started to branch out and work on the cartoon. I spent four months (starting from scratch, learning Adobe Animate and Adobe Character Animator) writing the script, animating, editing, producing, etc.

Since then, I’ve been learning how to compose a symphony (I finished the first movement last week) and have gotten into AI prompt engineering. I used AI to create an entire cookbook (and photos) of food that does not exist and it was weird enough that I thought maybe there’s some other interesting things I could do with it that I haven’t seen anyone else doing yet.

I’m also hard at work on my meditation channel (“Sam Pocker’s Mental Vacation”) which I’ve had some new ideas for after a long dry spell. Hopefully, I will write my first feature screenplay this year (I have a treatment that I wrote a few months ago and forgot about) and possibly my fourth book (which I sketched out over a year ago and forgot about).

As my friends will attest, I make so much stuff that I can’t remember most of it. Like I just remembered I started a podcast last year and it folded after one interview (Tommy Chong) because none of the other people on my list said yes or replied. It’s a shame, I had really great questions for people like Paula Abdul, Mike Jittlov, Rusty Lemorande, and others. The whole premise of the podcast was to ask artists and producers questions they’d never been asked before. Tommy seemed quite surprised how many questions I had that he’d never actually been asked before. If I were famous, they probably all would have said yes, but I don’t blame them for not wanting to waste time doing an interview that ten people might listen to.

Anyway, I’m still here in Hollywood, scraping by, making stuff, eternally hopeful that one of my works will become popular enough to support making bigger and stupider works financially.

Every once in a while an artist I admire will come across something I’ve made and tell me how much they admire my work and that always feels good.

When I was a kid my favorite toy was a pen and a notepad, I could occupy myself all day just scribbling, coming up with ideas, imagining things I wanted to make but didn’t know how. Not much has changed other than I have access to more stuff thanks to computers, phones, and the public library.

It’s been my experience that life is cruel, most people are fake, nothing really matters, and to just keep doing whatever interests me at any cost. That’s what I’ve been doing and that’s what I’m going to keep doing. It can be very lonely and sad sometimes, but it beats being stuck in a situation where you have a lot of resources and can’t use them effectively. I’ve been in both positions and this is by far the better way to go.

I’m sure you wouldn’t say it’s been obstacle free, but so far would you say the journey have been a fairly smooth road?
Depression
Debt
Delusion
Disappointment
Disgust

Appreciate you sharing that. What else should we know about what you do?
I’ve done everything from writing books, making documentary features, painting, songwriting, animating, and really just a little bit of everything.

In the last couple of years, my main focus has been on video: my primary TikTok account @fastfoodlegend now has over 13 billion views and I completed making a pilot for an animated Saturday morning cartoon called “Sam Pocker’s Magic Banana”. I’m currently working on the opening of a fast food legend themed restaurant in LA and writing my first symphony.

We’d love to hear about how you think about risk taking?
I’m a bit of a compulsive gambler in the sense that I take all of my energy and whatever money I have and throw it into whatever I’m working on. My attitude is that I could die tomorrow and I might as well try to do whatever it is I’m doing to the best of my ability. This often leaves me very broke and very depressed, but at the same time it leaves me with stuff that normies don’t have like my own coloring book(s), opera, animated cartoon, etc.

I love my normie friends, but I’d rather be poor and unknown with my own body of work than have to attend a parent-teacher conference and pretend that it was remotely meaningful.

Contact Info:

• Website: sampocker.com
• Instagram: sampockerofficial
• Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/theprettycolors/
• Linkedin: https://www.linkedin.com/in/sam-pocker-8a5b35226/
• Twitter: demagnetisation
• Youtube: https://www.youtube.com/sampockerofficial
• SoundCloud: https://soundcloud.com/sam-pocker
• Other: https://www.tiktok.com/@fastfoodlegend