Jay W. Richards - The Human Advantage: The Future of American Work in an Age of Smart Machines

W hen the disaster struck, Daniel and Kelli Segars could have been a statistic.

Daniel studied food and nutrition in college. In 2000 he started work as a personal trainer and nutrition counselor at a fitness club. Kelli earned degrees from Central Washington University in psychology and sociologyundergrad favorites that dont exactly chart a career path. In 2006 she found herself at the same club as Daniel, selling memberships. They fell in love, got married, and after a while mustered enough savings to do what everyone else in the greater Seattle area was trying to do at the time: They bought a house. The sale closed on a weekend. It was August 2008, the dawn of the Great Recession.

The following Monday, Kelli had her hours slashed and Daniel lost most of his clients. The Segars, like millions of other Americans, were slammed by what few experts had seen coming: the greatest financial crisis since the Great Depression. And the tsunami struck the very market in which the Segars had just invested their life savings: housing.

The Segars had no control over the crisis that soon swept over the globe, stripping away their livelihoods and threatening them with joblessness. They had control over one thing: their response to it. They could have blamed NAFTA or the WTO or the rise of the robots. They could have joined Occupy Wall Street and denounced a heartless global capitalism that allocated all the wealth for the one percent and left personal trainers to fend for themselves. They could have gotten depressed or climbed onto the government dole. Instead, the young couple found several part-time jobs to stay afloat. Kelli wrote how-to articles on the Internet at night, explains the Seattle Times in one of the couples only published profiles, while ironically working with an organization that helped unemployed people get back on their feet. Daniel apprenticed as a plumber. These jobs paid the bills while Daniel and Kelli worked on a side hustle.

Given their fitness background, the Segars noticed that gimmicky workout videos had started to populate the Web. Most of these followed a simple formula: a grab bag of lessons led by a cut, steroid-swelled guy or a bleached-blond, spray-tanned gal who tries to motivate you with unrealistic promises, corny comments, and drill sergeant antics, all the while coaxing you to upgrade to the deluxe package.

Daniel and Kelli knew far more about fitness and nutrition than most of these characters. Granted, they knew nothing about video production, but no matter. The house they had bought was a financial albatross, but it did have a nearly finished garage. So they added some drywall and white paint, bought a few hundred dollars worth of video equipment, and started to shoot their own videos. We taught ourselves how to use editing software and though we have a cameraman (who has become a good friend over the last few years), we often still film and edit our own videos, Kelli told me in an email interview.

Their first pieces were just thirty-second snippets of single exercises: agility dots (level one), crunch with toe touch (level two), mountain climbers (level one), deep glute stretch (level one). Nothing groundbreaking or all that popular. But before long they discovered what people wanted: individual workouts and workout plans. Their website, FitnessBlender.com, went live in 2010 and became their full-time job two years later. As of this writing, their YouTube channel has over four million subscribers.

Im one of them. I had used other gimmicky video programs. They were better than nothing, but I kept looking for something better. One day I found Fitness Blender. Its success is its simplicity: no corn, no music, no pitch to upgrade. Just a simple white background, a user-friendly search function, variety, and routines that dont call for fancy equipment.

Indeed, much of Fitness Blenders success is due to the Segars themselves. Daniel is cut and seems to always have the right amount of facial stubble. Kelli is statuesque with long, dark-blond hair. (As my annoyed wife says, She doesnt need Spanx, but you cant help but like her.) At the same time, theyre the couple next door, the kind of people you could picture meeting at a block party. They even fluctuate a bit in their body-fat ratio. If you ever work out, you know how it goes. You throw out your back or get the flu or get depressed, and next thing you know youve added a useless layer of winter blubber that takes five times as long to work off. At Fitness Blender, you wont see anything as dramatic (and unsustainable) as the feats achieved on The Biggest Loser. But you can see Daniel and Kelli get fitter over time in multi-week routines. Theyre like personal trainers who are there for you. They feel your pain.

The strategy wouldnt have worked twenty years ago, since the Segars would have had to charge every user for their services. But YouTube, which is owned by Google, shares the profits from its ads with partnersthe people who produce the video content. People like Daniel and Kelli Segars. Through ad revenue, royalties on their e-book meal plans and exercise guides, and donations, the couple makes a living without charging anyone by the hour. They wont become billionaires, but in the face of financial disaster they found a new way to live the American Dream.

The lesson here isnt that everyone is cut out to launch a YouTube fitness channel with millions of subscribers if only they would show a little pluck and resolve. Indeed, the Segars success was not assured. They could have gone broke before they got things turned around. But while millions of Americans doubt that those who work hard and act responsibly can prosper in this country, the Segars found a way. Their troubles are a microcosm of whats happening everywhere in our economy.

And they offer a model of what to do in a crisis. Their jobs were disrupted by events beyond their control. Rather than get angry or depressed or blame their bad luck on someone else, they got busyusing technology to deliver the value of their expertise in a new way. Producing YouTube videos is an obvious way to do this, albeit one that may not work for everyone. But our emerging economy holds promise far beyond the most obvious, for those who are willing to adapt.