James Smith - How To Be F*cking Confident and Why “Traditional Marketing is DEAD”

0:00This episode completely changed my outlook on life. It's with James Smith who is the rambunctuous, divisive brutally honest uh fitness influencer and marketeer he's a genius marketeer he breaks all the rules of marketing and has amassed a huge following a massive business um and recently last year he launched a business and a drink called newtonic with chris williamson uh the podcaster who does modern wisdom and luke betts amazing product i literally chin fucking loads of these bad boys before i did podcasts and it's like i'm i'm dialed the fuck in it's amazing behind James's sort of rambunctious character is a super self-aware super intelligent and just yeah it has an ability to spot things that no one else sees like harsh truths that no one else sees and this episode is just jam-packed with wisdom we go into the success paradox never stop doing the things that make you successful as you get bigger I love this and this is something really hit home with me why the attention landscape is changing and if you don't accept that and If your ego gets in the way of that, you're absolutely fucked.

1:06Confidence. How to be confident. Like, I've struggled with confidence. He talks about the TED Talk versus Tinder confidence rule. You can be confident one part of your life and awfully, awfully, like, unconfident in other parts. And action is the way out of everything. Why negativity is progressive overload. Progressive overload at the gym for creativity. I love this. They've got gorgeous. The ugly sibling honest marketing rule. How to be happy. Uber surge charge happiness rule. why all wins feel the same this literally changed my life this rule so celebrate every single win like it's a like it's a big win we go into the british weather um why it's actually our super power why clap and bass fitness influencers are ruining the world i just did a little walk around the common today and saw bear of them so this is interesting um unusual jujitsu and marketing laws where you've got to force yourself into uncomfortable positions there's just tons in this um obviously talk about my hero Nassim Taleb, the swimmer's body illusion.

2:03You don't pick your sport. Your sport picks you so, so good. I hope you're going to love this as much as I love recording it. As always, please leave a review, a five star review would be amazing. If you've got a smidge of value from it, please share it with a friend. I'd be so grateful. Thank you so much as always. In fact, James, thank you for doing this. I have a big consumer of your content over the years. um it's it's super intriguing and i think what i want to start with is actually this this eye juice and the word and the word eye um i think you've got a unique ability to almost find common uncommon sense and you you kind of look like an eye you're super curious and then you find these truths that other people can't see but you've seen them straight away and then you put them in these really pithy aphorisms through like really hardcore kind of storytelling.

3:02And I think it's genius. I really want to get into this kind of how you see things to begin with, and then how you create these aphorisms. And for listeners, and we'll go through some of these today, I think they're amazing. So all wins feel the same. I think that that's unreal. The swimmer's fallacy, you don't pick the sport, the sport picks you. Unreal. In your confidence book losing uh losing is not defeat i really really really liked and i think the reframe and yeah the framing of confidence isn't your uh relationship with um is actually relationship with failure not success um and there's just there's tons and i think that the quote i want to start with is the world is full as full of obvious things which nobody by any chance ever observes and that's sherlock holmes so starting with some fucking eye juice and sherlock holmes um but i'd love to know how like what is stuff that you're currently seeing and observing that no one else is seeing and then we can go through some of these uh principles very flattering i think you make me sound more intelligent than i am with your introduction i maybe don't even see this myself uh i do like spotting trends one thing that i've often said to people is uh i suppose i I got validation from Gary Vee recently as to what it is that I'm interested in.

4:21There are so many people that like stocks, ETFs, investments. And to me, that's never really appealed. When I got into social media, it was kind of day trading with people's attention. And that's why I've become obsessed with cameras, recording, editing, pacing, storytelling, all of these things. Because while all my friends were doing sensible things in their 20s, and up until 27, I'd actually never accomplished anything impressive in my life. I was kind of learning the landscape of getting people's attention and even now when it comes to products two years ago if you'd asked me if I'd ever have a drinks business I would have said nah I actually said no to my first book deal I was like mate I'm a PT however over the last maybe five years I've realized that using people's attention using maybe sounds like a bad word getting in front of people is quite an interesting and powerful way to conduct business brand in the online space.

5:14And even if you look around, I used to be a bit annoyed seeing my nephew using his iPad all the time. But now I'm kind of at peace with it because this is the way we're going in the world. You look around, you think, do I want a billboard or do I want to be on someone's mobile phone? No one's walking down the street looking at a billboard. I think most billboard sales now are sold to people so they can have a photo in front of it to put on social media. So this was just something that I kind of observed early on. And even now, I have to really watch people's habitual ways of absorbing content.

5:45For instance, I think the most people that you and I would want to do business with do their doom scrolling in bed at night. They do it probably in bed next to their partner. They've done their work and administrative tasks. They've done their training. They've probably eaten dinner, maybe absorbed some type of television media. Then they give themselves 30 to 60 minutes of pure, unadulterated binge. and in that period people are very what would you say they're very conscious of who they give their attention to and who they don't which really gets me to focus on how important say the first two seconds of content are whether it's visual verbal whatever it is so i'm really just trying to look at my own actions and behaviors the actions and behaviors of people slightly outside of mine and how i could win those people over whether it's with honest marketing direct marketing or the slower form of mediums like books and audio books.

6:39And I find it fascinating because some people you would have had on are true visionaries and true entrepreneurs and true CEOs. Actually, if I was to look at the sales funnel, just see myself as that brand awareness. Really, all I do is send people to websites. So if you would say, James, I'm going to give you a team of 15 people. I'll go, they're all going to quit. They're all going to leave. None of them are going to want to work for me. I'm not going to be able to lead your business. but what I can do is sit down with different social media strategies to get people that haven't tried the drink to have it people that haven't heard of the brand to recognize it and that's really the more I've come to realize that's my skill set the better I've come accepting where I sit within a business so it's observing observing the landscape of attention is I think what you said which I think is a great way of putting it and as and I think what you said there about you know and it is that it is what I was trying to get to is it's that sitting back and seeing what people are doing how people are acting where they're going as you say people aren't looking at a billboard they're looking at their phone these days what have you learned that other people probably don't know or haven't been that obsessed with it about that in that landscape of attention how do you get people's attention and this this is sort of more from a first principles perspective not necessarily like a tactic on youtube versus tiktok like what is the first principles of getting attention?

7:56I think the first has to be, and this can go back all the way to my coaching days, where it's not about giving someone an optimal workout or diet. It's about giving them something that's optimal for them. So everything has to be, first of all, understanding of where that person's at. And I think the landscape that we're in is ever changing. And people, probably through ego, are quite hard to accept the fact that the landscape is changing so much and they need to adapt with it. So one thing at the moment is an interesting kind of shift from maybe six, 12 months ago, very fast in your face, really sharp edits, lots of animations, lots of visual and audio kind of hooks to keep people into it.

8:36I think we're starting to see some fatigue with that. I think longer format, slower format, text-based format is coming back a bit, where even I like to try different things on different platforms. In the moment, just typing things on LinkedIn, which I've always been terrible at on LinkedIn. And rather than trying to take something that works on Instagram Reels and putting it somewhere else, I think that now we're almost seeing a bit of a comeback to typed, thought out content in the sense that so much of what we've had probably since the pandemic is short, viral, in your face, obscene, obscure, TikTokification of social media.

9:11And now we're starting to see a little bit of a bounce back from that. Similarly to how politics goes left and right, left and right, the same thing happens on this landscape in front of us so i like to temperature test with that a lot of the time if you ever see a random post from me on a platform it's probably me just trying to gauge how it works i always i joke around with people and say when you first start dating a girl you have no idea what she's into and what she isn't you kind of have to play around and gauge the response by looking at them yeah yeah yeah it's the same absolutely everywhere else and uh yeah it's i like to just have a look at those things try different things out and even 10 years into this game i still transparently would say to people i don't know what's going to work I have a feeling that this could benefit you.

9:48I have a feeling that this could be a good way of doing it We spoke offline before that even I feel traditional marketing For so many departments still feeling quite archaic with for instance One creative I was given was almost going to war with coffee for the drink. I said this is ridiculous Well, isn't you working with a you had an agency of giving you Chris our social steam within new tonic was right? Okay. Yeah, here's an easy shot We have 120 milligrams of caffeine and nootropics. That's just 100 milligrams of caffeine, easy shot. And I'm thinking, do you know what? If I try and portray this anti-coffee, it's not going to be disingenuous, it's going to be ineffective.

10:23So what would be an interesting way to start the content would be to almost semi-shit on the marketing department. So I started a video saying that the marketing department told me that coffee is a bad thing. I ordered a cup of coffee in my hand. I'm like, this is great. This is fantastic. This is a different product to what I'm about to sell you. And I even say to people, and I make money on this. And I think that first hook is a little bit refreshing, a little bit different a little bit oh that makes the change from everyone trying to say their product is superior and i kind of said to people you should start your day with coffee i think if you start your day with a fizzy drink you're something wrong with you and your dentist probably won't be too happy and to take someone on a little journey where you actually were honest in the onset is so different to what we see in traditional media for instance the majority of people on tv are they're playing a character which is so easy to see as fake when i'm on tv they're like james welcome welcome to the show this morning i'm like whoa chill the fuck out yeah yeah yeah human emotions don't go that high even if we're in a bar with all my best mates we're not like oh dave fantastic to see you then the second they cut to an ad break the face drops they're on their phone checking twitter i think there's so much fake stuff out there that just being real with people is almost a hook and a trend in itself where people go oh that's refreshing i think liquid death again we're very good at going against the grain with media that was so unordinary the title or the brand name kind of doesn't make sense older people are like hold on what did you just say then the marketing the videos they put on youtube i mean they didn't actually promote the drink they just made viral videos with the drink and again that's where i think a lot of brands are maybe taking the wrong avenue there is a lady in america who is thinking up creative ways to destroy the drink that she works for and i think her hook is proving a marketing department and I can make better creatives than them.

12:12And she drives over the cans, destroys them, does really weird things. But she's getting the attention of people on short form content platforms. Do you know what the company is she works for? Can't remember. So she's not that good. Yeah, yeah, yeah. No, it's just, it is interesting. It's, I think with all your, a lot of your content is you are pushing against, it's again, it's almost as observing where is the attention landscape going. Say it's moving in that direction and you push against it with raw, authentic, just truth. And this is what I was saying to you at the beginning is I think you've got these abilities to spot truth that other people aren't necessarily cognizant of.

12:50I think as well that so much, I suppose the purpose behind this is so much of anything that I've had in the realm of success is because of attention. Yeah. And I think that really the true first tier audience of people for this product are people that also want attention because there are so many better authors than me that didn't sell any books. There are so many better coaches than me that never had a fitness app. There are so many better entrepreneurs than me that never started a business. And it's all because they couldn't get people's attention. And we're now in a world that when people are filming, editing, even you think about this studio, the fact that we've got professional lighting, good audio, it's all part of getting attention.

13:28And that's really where I feel the masterclass that I would like to give to people is that if you can capture someone's attention, everything trickles down towards a business. And there's been traditional old media paid ads. But now we live in a world where organically, because the majority of all of our sales have been organic to begin with. Yeah, just on Newtonic. Yeah, and I think that in itself is again kind of counterintuitive. People go, oh, just get some paid ads behind it, just do this, just do that. But in a world where you can get attention, again, Chris Williamson, his podcast is just an attention-seeking machine.

14:02The guests, the conversations, the clips, all thought out methodically so that when he presents his argument or his clip to a YouTube browse page out of eight videos that you see on that page it's his that you click it's all about getting the attention of the people that are spending time on social media a biggest downfall of YouTube is people try to optimize content for search seeing thinking of it as a search engine but really YouTube is a browse engine you want to optimize your titles and thumbnails for people browsing not searching if you were saying how to open a beer bottle with only two fingers next time you're camping that could be one it could be something that people could be searched for how to open a beer bottle but if you were to then pick something obscure 99 % of people can't open a beer bottle this way that's something that would capture someone in a browse yeah kind of mindset so yes having all of these things in mind that really there's i bet there are so many products that have been thought of planned strategized but they just lack the attention to grow it that is the first principle isn't it i love the way you've just boiled that down is yeah you can have the best business in the world but if no one knows about it there's no attention then you're up shit creek let's go into and i'm asking this selfishly here as i said like kind of skirted around with youtube had had things recorded was doing on the iphone to begin with to get the podcast going was growing organically um we have a great thumbnails guy uh and but we're not you know this a b testing that thing you're talking about like what what is the art um and almost like kind of your craft of getting attention like and maybe maybe we can use a specific video that's absolutely booted off and but i would love to kind of go into the process behind the scenes of how you created that attention packaging is something i've invested a lot into recently so what annoys me is i wish i was such an arsehole surrounding packaging when i did my second and third book because I wouldn't have signed off the titles and and the covers really I was more concerned with what was in the book than how it looked what would you how would you have what would you have called the not another diet book and not not a diet book was great that was the first time we were actually pissed in Hawksmoor in uh Borough Market right blind drunk yeah and the strategy director at Harper Collins was like what are we gonna call this because it's not a diet book and I was like that's what we're gonna fucking call yes and it was it worked and then we tried to play off that we actually tried to replicate a thumbnail again for not a life coach and it just didn't work yeah went over too many people's heads similarly to the in content everyone that doesn't know you is looking for a reason to leave they're looking the best way this can be explained is someone that isn't watching your content or watches it for the first time hates you and they are just waiting for you to give them an opportunity to never watch your content again so uh that second book cover and again arguably i should have been on the first because i was getting a lot of exposure the second one you've got something you should you should have been on the actually on the first one yeah the second one maybe uh it could have been a good time to take me off again in thumbnails people seem to think they need to be on the thumbnail but if the video is about them sure but if the video is not about them they shouldn't be there and this would probably take me into my most successful youtube video is what sorry just what would you have called the confidence book i haven't figured it out yeah because if i do we're we're fucking reprinting it's interesting because i've read that book and it's like it's fucking banging book and we'll get into it but i was reading it's like as much a book about sort of human evolution like behavioral economics biases like all sorts obviously health and fitness as well and then the it's almost like the iceberg is the word confidence but i was reading the book there's so much in it um we called the tour the c word and i think we actually should have called the book the c word and i'm actually debating i'm going to write another book and i've spent about six months with the advance in my pocket don't feel bad for me thinking of the title and i was actually leaning on using the c word legitimately in the title so that i could never go on tv and talk about it and that so no bookshops would want it yeah and that would be my marketing angle so that you know hey guys i've written a book you won't be able to find it anywhere because the title is so abhorrent you know or i was thinking of another title that would be please don't read this or something that would really get people going why and you could then sit on tv people go why did you call the book please don't read this and i go well if you read this you're going to face some uncomfortable truths um even with those two lines we're creating inquisit where with the title how to be confident they know what the fuck it's going to be about and they're going to go now i'm all right yeah that's such an interesting point that is because because the word confidence is is like you're going i think i don't know who said it but the pain is the pitch and it's confidence is one of those only words that people think they've got in abundance or would hate to say that they haven't got confidence you know and even even myself like when i read that book i think one of the really again this is something like i think you observe things that people don't understand necessarily see at first on sort of the first level and it's that that beautiful nuance and in the book which i love there's a there's a bit where you're sort of saying all that kind of the synopsis is you know you can be really confident in one area of your life but fucking awful in the other area of your life and i think that is such such delicious nuance i think most people himself myself included will spend so much time almost on that area of their life where they're really confident and almost blind them from bringing up that other area you know what i mean so like i can i'm happy to speak to anyone on a podcast but thought of going up to a girl and asking for a number at a bar like it's absolutely shit myself do you know what i mean but you but i will lean on the confidence bit of like oh no no i've got i've got a podcast i'm fine and i think i'd never seen someone sort of uh frame it as that before do you know what i mean yeah so it's a weird one and do you know what i some people would think i started making content because i was confident but it was actually the content that made me confident It was a weird journey where in the beginning I was putting out content purely because I didn't want to prospect on the gym floor.

19:50There's nothing worse than going up to someone and going, hey, mate, there's a little mistake you're making with your breath. Fuck off. Cheers, mate. You have a good day. And you go through that like four or five times. So in the onset, making content was all about that. And then I'd be writing blogs on what's better out of a potato or a sweet potato. And then someone would in the gym go, oh, I liked your blog. Oh, sick. Then I remember maybe 2015, I was in Waitrose Cafe and the guy next to me nudged me and goes, I like your blogs. And that gave me the fire to write more of them. And then my first video was in maybe 2015, early 2016.

20:23Then when that first video takes off and then the comments in that are saying, this is great, this really helped me. I never thought of it that way. It just keeps continually sparing you on. I actually think that no one is a confident entrepreneur until they accidentally make money. And then it's kind of you're creating evidence to stack up to why you are potentially an entrepreneur or why you are a business owner or why you do have these skill sets. I even think that I launched a business last year that I wasn't sure if it was going to go well. And it's done so well. What was the business? It's a business mentorship for coaches.

20:54Yeah. Real simple stuff. Email marketing, sales pages, social media content strategy. And in the onset, it was just a whim. I was like, I don't know if the demand's there. I don't know if we're going to get a good row on the paid ads, whatever it is. And continually, in the beginning, I was like, oh, this could be survivorship bias where just because it worked for me doesn't mean it'll work for someone else these people aren't six foot blonde from berkshire maybe it won't work yeah yeah then we have a little discord subset that says post your wins and every time i read those it invigorates me to become more confident to help other people it makes me more authoritative with the things that i say because i'm looking at the evidence of it actually working and content for me helped me so much that i didn't build the following because i was confident i was confident because i built the following yeah it's a real chicken and egg scenario yeah yeah yeah it's such a good reframe and actually i'd love to i think um like one of my obsessions at the minute is the kind of negativity and creativity and i think if you actually think about the most creative people of all time they've got like a really abhorrent negative voice in their head where they're looking at their creative work and they're thinking that's shit that's shit and i think that's almost like negativity is like progressive overload for amazing creativity you know um i'm happy moaning i love moaning yeah yeah yeah my friends and even people i work with they go you fucking love my i'm i say hey guys i know i'm about to be negative for a few minutes but i enjoy this let me get it out yeah yeah yeah i completely agree with what you say the constant i think you almost need to be consistently really disappointed with your best efforts yes it's a weird paradoxical mind fuck that you will create something amazing and then the second it goes out straight away you bury it let's do it better i think it's the same i get this probably from video games yeah i would let's say playing call of duty i think my best ever game was like 31 kills three deaths and then the second i won rather than going that was impressive i go cool imagine doing 33 kills no deaths yes and straight away you suppress your achievements because you think it might nullify your ambitions to do better it's almost you know um if you're two extreme positions so you have like he talks about it in um uh like an investment it starts as an investment strategy so you'd have like a load of low risk you'd put on that side of the barbell loads of low risk investments like bonds and just i'm not not finance quite at all but like that and then you'd balance that with loads and loads of um uh uh high risk stuff but because there's because because it's two extreme positions it creates this tension and creates a barbell which is a really strong strategy and i think with creative work you almost have this kind of supreme confidence that i can fucking do anything and say the beatles have you seen the beatles documentary when they um about them creating the get back documentary sick so they basically think we're going to write we've got 10 days to write this amazing album supreme confidence but then they've got supreme negativity and self-doubt which is this is shit this is shit the whole thing it's like a three-hour documentary they're going john lennon's looking at the thing this is shot shit this is shit and then they write hey jude but because they've got the confidence to create something really really good but the self-doubt to constantly look at the work and moan and say this is not good it's not good and i think it's this kind of virtuous circle of as i say negativity is kind of like progressive overload for creativity it it forces you to get better at at the pursuit of of the creative craft that makes sense yeah there is a negative feedback loop with this when you introduce kids as i found out so i had my son born three four months ago yep and i would definitely prop my productivity with some kind of negative self-talk uh i've kind of pretty sure i've got some form of adhd i know it's trendy i actually went to get a psych evaluation and they said oh you've got anxiety as well i was like fuck that's not cool i just wanted the cool one yeah yeah yeah i never wanted one you can talk about at a bar yeah exactly on a date but it was it was great actually because this time i i tried therapy a few months before i hated it tried to hate it just didn't i just didn't vibe it i was like that was i just didn't enjoy it and it was costing a lot of money was that was that just because you didn't like the get on the therapist or is it just because it's interesting someone like um you know you're you're super self-aware and you write these amazing books um yeah it's interesting how you didn't jive with yeah i just didn't i just didn't i didn't enjoy the whole process i don't really like talking about my emotions yeah yeah yeah yeah i'd rather not i'd just rather lump it if and and i know that is considered negative but it's some form of coping mechanism and i just i just didn't vibe it so then the psych evaluation i had for adhd i've never felt so seen in my life and i was kind of explaining i would explain a little bit about how i am then she tells me some of the reasons to why it is so then i tell her a little bit more and then before i knew it i was really sharing some of the most idiosyncratic things that I do on a daily basis and rather than being seen with judgment it was seen with reason and I left that and went back to my missus my partner my business partner and I said to them like thank you I've never said thanks to them before my chaotic mind my lack of organization my terrible short-term memory all of these things I've actually been putting on people around me I've never even thanked them before same way that Luke my manager today will be like here's the address 2 p.m get here this is like here are some of the talking like he literally does so much of my thinking for me because he knows where my weak spots are my missus knows that when i tell her oh i've got a haircut on friday at 1 p.m i'm not just telling her i'm asking her to remind me so she in the morning goes oh you got your haircut later i'm you're gonna go thank you so much i went i thought it was on friday she's like it is friday oh you know this is where i have those weaknesses but one thing we did discover uh with the psychologist was this tendency to create a really, what would you call it?

26:40I suppose anxiety is creating a negative outlook on the future, but I quite like that because it motivates me in the short term. So rather than someone going, I should get my work. So say that again, negativity. I would say anxiety and maybe even depression in some realms is perceiving a negative outlook of the future. Yeah. That's why I think fertility rates are lower than ever because there's never been so much of a negative outlook on the future. So I don't actually think it is sperm counts and, you know, IVF treatments, as much as we think, I think it's a subconscious decision to not procreate because of potentially a thought process and a prediction that the future is going to be dire.

27:15So if you knew that the economy was growing and the wages and opportunity were getting better, you go, yeah, pop a couple out, let them live good. But when all you get exposed to is news, negativity, and war and all of this, but running out of this and running out of that, you kind of think, oh, I might as well just enjoy myself and not have kids. yeah so one of my productivity mechanisms was definitely for a long time creating a catastrophic vision of the future so it was more so if you don't finish your work tasks you're not going to make any sales if you're not going to make any sales you're not going to need money if you don't any money you're going to lose the house if you lose your house you're moving back in with your parents and this kind of negative self-talk would gee me up i'm going for a nap and i'm like no you're not get a couple of these down here do some work at my desk 9 p.m and then i can kind of fully switch off and relax but then when i had kids or when i had my first child suddenly there was something more important than my productivity but i was using my productivity to pin up how well i felt about each day so it's not that i've really you know it's just how well you felt each day is post having your your son right yeah so now okay 45 minutes getting a burp out and i might have just started sitting down to get into the discord might have just got into my emails and then you're change in a nappy and then I'm having to really reconstruct in my mind that look it's okay if you're not productive for a week maybe even a month even now the past month I've lived out a suitcase on the floor at my parents house and it's crazy even my parents are really mindful of their energy bills so every time I go in a room it's freezing the radiator has been turned on they've got like a hot water immersion heater so it needs to be turned on to get hot water for the showers but it needs to warm up for like an hour so there's so many things I'm like waking up at 5am the baby wakes me up i'm like that's great i can go put the hot water immersion heater on i've said to my parents as well i was like look next time i get a big pay slip let me let me sort your hot your hot water out one of these things so it's kind of stressful being at home i've not created any new social media content really in a month i've not seen my videographer i've been doing some amazing things like podcasts just like this i've been doing all kinds of different things but i've then had to really say to myself like snap the fuck out of it this isn't the end of the world it's one month like you said before about progressive overload even training less and working less can set you up to a really good productive you know series in the next few weeks and months so that coping mechanism of using negativity to fuel ambition and creativity comes to a slump when suddenly you end up without the productivity and just the negativity so it's something that i'm working yeah that's so because i think the more i'm reflecting on that as I think a lot of...

29:51Have you got kids? No, I haven't got kids, but I'm just 30. But I'm using a lot of the creative negative kind of voice in my head, which is people saying you're not good enough. The usual fucking suspects that crop up, like, oh, you're a fucking idiot. I'm like, well, fuck this, let's go. And I'll work and I'll work and I'll work. And I get to a point where I've done enough, not necessarily tasks, I don't see it like that, but I've done it enough then I can kind of it just it kind of dissipates that voice in my head and I think another thing which would be loved to explore with you is I'm trying to not look at I think you can get dopamine you can actually you can choose where you get your dopamine from and especially with content you can either get it from the actual process of doing the work or you can go and get it from something outside your control aka the views but that if you do this video that you spend ages on and it does shit then you're just gonna if you've got that you know that voice in your head that's called you a piece of shit it's just gonna it's gonna run rampant and one thing i'm trying to do now in terms of that a bit like a productivity slump is is um you know as you said you can't um because of because of your situation now you've got all the negative but you don't have the the barbell to you know to do the productive things so your kind of barbells like that i'm trying to work out this barbell here of like i've got got to this negative voice and sorry this dopamine that i'm chasing but do i where do i get it from how do you how do you do that delicate dance yeah it's interesting i never realized that i wasn't sure the last few years if i had an incessant need for attention which could be some coping mechanism from i don't know yeah early childhood whatever yeah i had a great childhood i don't know why that would be the case or it's like a dopamine chasing thing and then looking back at how much i love video games with age of empires call of duty whatever it was yeah i think it's probably a dopamine reward system where the content was just a part to play and that's why i get really impatient where say i would film something really good with my mates i want it out the same day so even in australia i film at 10 and 11 i want the edit by 4 5 p.m because i want to post it and see how well it does we even get to the point where i will post it at a suboptimal time just so when i wake up in the morning i have some analytics to look at the idea of you know this is where people's organization come in they go we'll release this in two weeks i'm like how the fuck do you do that i'm like i want it out tomorrow they're like oh you just released one yesterday get it out tomorrow uh so i'm definitely guilty of that as well 100 i want to put things out and one thing i like is with this business working with chris very organized he's the organized party i'm the chaotic one so chris will we we lost sleep over the fact whether or not there should be a dash between research and backed and i was on a call this was like a half hour discussion and chris was adamant he saw it and copied that there was the dash wasn't there he wanted heads to roll from that whereas I'm the kind of person sat there on the call just glazing over my eyes I'm like I'm not listening Chris will message me going I need your opinion on something in the Slack channel about a new flavor or product development and I'll reply thinking oh shit yeah and he'll go that was from a month ago he replied to a message from a month ago but then on the flip side of that we'll get some feedback on the creatives that we need people will go to bed and they'll wake up to three videos already edited already done already good to go because i'm on the inverted time zone i kind of wait for them to go to bed at 10 a.m and i know they're waking up at 5 p.m so i want everything done by then i'll stand over my videographer's shoulder and i'll be like come on mate let's do this chop here let's move this so i love that side of delivering in a short term period but again if you gave me 10 things to do you'll get none but if you give me one thing to do i'll do it really well the same day again where people can mismanage me by giving me too much but even often I'll say to people okay give me a brief of the task let me know the audience we want and let me know what you want them to do I just need those things I don't want a script I want to add creative just tell me what and where to do it well so what are the three things the so tell me what is the uh kind of idea of the content what you want to do do we want to promote the drink do we want to expand into a territory do we want to notify territory we're restocked who's the audience are they existing customers are they previous customers are they uh people that have never seen the drink before?

34:02And where do you want me to send them? Do you want me to send them to the website? Do you want me to send them to a sign-up page? Do you want me to sign them to a squeeze page or try and get their contact information? That's really where I enjoy the strategy. And implementing things like chatbots, where just doing a post and saying, click the link in a bio, I think is kind of losing its strength. But instead saying, DM me the word restock or comment the word restock, then sending someone a little message going, hey guys, appreciate you. this project's really important i'm really looking forward to growing this this could be massive to get your next case use this link below little ps in that message just let you know if you didn't like the taste or you think of uh not delivered on any of my promises here's my personal email address if you buy 12 cans today i'll refund the other 11 if you don't like it you get to give someone so much more in an area that they have personalized conversations that then they know if they click the link and they buy they can come back to that message from you and it's got your that's that many chat thing isn't it or that's one arm of it because i want to selfishly like if i'm we've just tried to implement that with uh the clips we're putting out on socials right to dm them to get the full episode yeah like how would you be using chatbots if you and me to grow the grow the grow the audience or is it is that so the first thing you can say is dm me the word let's say james for this episode yeah i'll give you a link so when you're ready you can watch the episode even the wording of that means that you're considerate that they might not be in the right mindset and mind like so here's another thing that people make a mistake on youtube is i would often try and get my instagram following to go watch my youtube because my instagram following was a thousand times bigger but the problem with this is let's say i'm at the train station on the way to this podcast my train's coming in four minutes i might be just doom scrolling away just trying to kill time until the train comes i then see my story my story says hey click this video and it's a 12 minute video i then get on the train but then when i get on the train i'm going to get my laptop out and do emails so even only a few minutes into that 12 minute video i click off and i never return youtube will then go this guy got bored at three minutes in therefore this video is not that great so if you're sending people from an audience where they're having a shit waiting for the date they're on to go have a piss they're waiting for a train or they're in their car at a railway crossing where they're just checking their phone illegally if they're coming to a youtube video and not sitting for a distance or length of time that's going to be uh congruent with good quality of that video you're sending suboptimal traffic to places it's similar to having a brewery and trying to send alcoholics in here you know you're sending the wrong people in they're not going to buy much and if they do have a zero percenter they're probably only going to have one before leaving really you'd be better off sending alcoholics in here yeah yeah yeah yeah not real advice so sometimes we're sending a suboptimal uh person towards a full length episode, which then even if a thousand people go and the average view duration on a one hour episode is only two minutes, it's not going to score highly in the algorithm.

36:59Yes. Okay. So one, I think when you send people the episodes, just be mindful that it might not be the right time for them. Or you could say, here's the link, come back when you're ready. You could also send them a preview clip. And this is what Chris Williamson does really well. And so I was on a podcast yesterday where they do shorts and they do the full episodes. but what Chris does incredibly well is he chooses one clip from the podcast to spearhead it and releases it a day before the full episode so if you were to say what's easier to sell and package a 90 minute conversation or 10 minutes from our conversation you could then go through this whole entire episode and go this 10 minutes was fire here's the packaging for it we're going to release that day before the full episode so that people don't just click on a very clickable well packaged clip they finish the whole clip because it's 10 minutes and it makes them leaving wanting more that then sets up the full episode drop people have already bought in and invested it's like they've already tried your product and they like what they had it makes them excited for it case in point feeding the baby two days ago ben shapiro chris williamson i go sick this will be a good chat oh it's only 10 minutes i'll watch it the 10 minutes was pure fire last night when i get in bed i already know that i'm going to click off joe rogan and go to chris williamson and start the ben shapiro episode so you can spearhead a longer format video but just a small part of that and if you look at Chris's best performing podcasts you go to YouTube then popular you have full episode full episode 10 minute clip full episode full episode 10 minute clip so is David Goggins maybe eight eight minute 10 minute clip has got maybe eight million views so he would have made not just maybe ten fifteen twenty thousand pounds from that clip he's been siphoned millions of people that want to go watch the full episode yeah I love it's almost like you're again another way you approach content is with huge amounts of empathy uh as to what people are literally doing and thinking about that like i haven't even thought about it it's like yeah i if someone's getting on the train and they're doom scrolling it's just not the right time and then as you say if they hop onto that clip and then you know i got on the train up here today like i was a fucking all over the shop one minute i was on slack i tried to read a book like it was just a cataclysmic and again hd fuck fest i mean it's all over the shop so then if i leave a video to just simmer it will get less views in the onset but it's not the same algorithm where we want to get loads of views really fast we want the people that click and watch that video to be your best fans that are going to sit through it you want people that maybe in three days time are going to download it for a flight you want people that are in the right viewing mindset to do it also when people are browsing on youtube the duration of the video is a part in their determinations whether they click or not if you give them the link and they go straight to the video then see the video is too long and leave you're just destroying your own score on that so it's one of those things where we just don't want to send a subprime audience to it and sometimes it takes and again let's say you're sending people from instagram they could be the wrong people for that so if you just leave that video to simmer youtube will go okay cool these people from these backgrounds are enjoying it and watching it more let's show it to more people like those where it goes these people are actually coming maybe men start watching it and leave straight away but women come and they're really interested because it could be a video on menopause then over time youtube's going to go cool women that are between 40 and 55 seem to be staying longer let's show it to more women between 40 and 55 if you just spam people to go towards a video sometimes you can get people that aren't right for it and that's going to make it incredibly difficult for youtube to find the right people for it which is what they want to do youtube wants your video to get a billion views but the only thing stopping it is the quality level of that video because youtube sharing the monetization with you for every dollar you make they're making a dollar so it's in the real good mindset shift to me was every social media platform wants everyone to watch your video but you have to not only make it good enough you have to package it well enough and sometimes that velocity i will leave a video a week or two sometimes before checking in on its performance so you so it's almost the again right at the beginning of conversation we said that attention bit and that's how you package it with a thumbnail then i suppose when we're getting more in terms of getting people to the main episode you're having that link that 10 minute clip whatever the fire clip you're using many chat to then send that to people because it and you're almost saying look listen to this when you're ready i.e not fucking around on a train they listen to that they're hooked and then that that will lead them to the full episode imagine um who would you say is one of the most influential people that you're rory sutherland yeah you had a mom right yeah like four times he's coming on again in two weeks i love that guy yeah he's a fucking i was showing my mom and dad him last night yeah yeah he's amazing they're like oh what's this podcast tomorrow's that man dad rory sutherland's been on it yeah yeah who's that i'll fucking show you it yeah yeah uh so for instance chris will uh take the clips of him saying why you want an air fryer wife and in that one minute because i would before i know who rory sutherland is i never watched that and actually it was the short that introduced me to rory it was a 10 minute video that made me go fuck me this guy knows his shit and also made me realize there's a lot of value i can get from that the moment the full episode comes out i'm in but if chris had just released the full episode i wouldn't have watched it with you it's so interesting we had a clip go out of um him saying because i've got i've got an irish brand that i used to do a bit of work with and they said there was no uh curry houses in ireland in dublin and i basically said that to rory and he was like oh no no i found one in uh in like in the in the west uh key like or something and he goes and funnily enough all they did was potatoes and the amount of beef i got on there been like you brits like one we don't call them curry houses we call them indian restaurants and there's fucking loads in dublin but it's absolutely gone ballistic because it's quite controversial but he's just sat there he's he's i think he's he's an absolute um he's an absolute genius how did you and one thing again in your book you talk a lot about um uh in the conference book at least about Daniel Kahneman, who Rory's obsessed with, who's sort of the founding father of behavioural economics.

43:01And I think one of my obsessions is kind of creative partnerships. And I think he had the guy, it was Amos Tversky, who was the guy he wrote that book with, but then Amos died. And then Daniel Kahneman won the, it was the Nobel Peace Prize, but he'd already died. And there was a huge amount of conflict and tension in that. I didn't know that. Yeah, yeah, yeah. so so there there was a guy called amos basically who was doing it they were like a partnership and they came up with all these kind of biases and stuff uh he almost died daniel devoted the uh noble peace prize i think or noble prize to him but there was this tension same again back to the beatles mccarthy lennon you know there's there's constant tension in these partnerships i'd love to get into this uh with you and chris like how how i think the first place to start is how is your sort of curiosity the texture of your curiosity like different and then how when you i know you talk about order on order and chaos like how does it how does it kind of rub up against each other do you know what i mean so it's like uh luke is the gatekeeper between us my manager yeah yeah he's he's what i mean it's been about a year yeah yeah so he's he's there on one side and um he he will just keep the oil between the cogs let's say because it's not that chris and i don't get on we get on very well but sometimes we will definitely see things differently and Chris might you know be really interested in the detail and I'm like this isn't the most important part but to him it is and to me it's the creative or the framing or how we talk in content so for instance the other day the team said right I'm coming into London I said let's give out new tonics bring 300 cans and we give them out at King's Cross and they were like okay maybe we could do this this this i was like no just keep the camera rolling i'm just gonna give out 300 cans then we went through to do a two-hour tiktok live shop uh tiktok shop live and they're like okay uh maybe we could do this do this i was like no we'll just just go with it i said let me see the comments and we'll have fun for two hours and they said this is so much different to working with chris with chris it's where we are this time what we're doing what we're saying we need it scripted we need a teleprompter let's do this let's do this and it works very well for him but to me that just seems too organized i want to go have fun with people we set up shop outside a coffee shop and as people are going in i'm like you don't want that have a can of this and i much prefer the off-the-cuff natural stuff same way that chris i believe goes into his podcasts premeditated with what clips he's going to get from it so really i think every single clip you have is on his ipad so i believe the strategist will go i think this title will do well to get this title to perform we need to ask this question that's mad yeah yeah yeah yeah yeah super strategized whereas me i'll do a podcast with my mates and randomly on the way to the podcast buy like a really hot chip and be like oh who's who's eating this then and you know like dying from the hot chip to me that's entertainment whereas to chris it might be really asking a very intricate question but where we align so much is we're two british guys i hate the term like self-made but Chris had a podcast that no one listened to for years I had a fitness social media account that barely anyone paid attention to for years it took me four years to get to 10k another four years to a million and both of what we did was very much the same Chris came to my events I've been on his podcast since 2018 and we both kind of emerged through our own means so we're both right in our own respects bringing those together uh it's been very fun at the same time but i wouldn't i wouldn't even say challenging i quite like it where i've had i've actually been the decision maker in everything that i've done so far and actually it gets to the point where i say to chris the reason i'm not active in the slack is i'm going to give you creative control over this because you're better than me at this so where it is between the research backed dash i'm not commenting because I know you know the right answer and then when it comes to creatives or actually interestingly enough a lot of the stuff I was doing for the brand was using chatbots and for chatbots at the time I don't think you can now you can't collab posts so to use a you choose either to collab the post or to have the automation you can't have both so maybe five newtonic posts in a row were all on my own page not collabed so Luke messages me screenshots the home page and goes this looks very much like chris's drink i can't see your face here and i knew that was passive aggressive so as he goes to sleep i'm like right you fucking wanker so i go i go there to the gym and we create this creative where um i pull up in my car and i bought an audi r6 which i love best car in the world don't know if you're into cars that much but that was the hook and i said i start my day pretty much the same day by getting caffeine in whether it's a cup of coffee a can of white monster or a new tonic and the scenes were pulling up the car me taking out the new tonic me taking out the coffee me taking out the white monster so this meant that i had to go to a pet station get the white monster go to a coffee shop get the coffee go to the gym get this i had to get in and out the car for every single shot with that then we had to drive around with me sipping each one of about 600 milligrams of caffeine this morning but i knew that that creative could be important then there's another shot in it where i'm walking to the car then away from the car and I talk about mental health where actually if I don't train in a day I'm fine if I don't eat well in the day I'm fine but if I'm not productive in a day I'm fucking hell to be around and I've come to realize that being productive on a day is probably the thing that's most sacred to me so I made that point in the video and I said whether or not you have a coffee this product or a white monster you'll pretty much get the same benefits but if you want to get this comment the word restart what about and within 24 hours there's a million views and that was my way of being like you know fuck you to you guys yeah yeah but it was constructive yes then again chris was moaning at me for not using the slack so i made that a video i said hey guys please buy this drink so chris williamson will stop abusing me for not reading the slack messages and then people in the comments are classic classic chris we're almost creating beef between us because then it looks good as well on the front end so having two founders that are at each other can also potentially benefit the brand but if i presented that to chris and go let's fall out he'd be like why whereas if i said that to luke he goes brilliant you know beefing wrappers yeah it's such it's like i had it's such an interest that's what i was trying to get to is that tension and and thanks for kind of detailing that because i think it is this in any you know for formidable and forceful creative partnership there is just this this rubbing up against you know i think will store talks about this in the status game where he talks about how even though lennon had it was always Lennon, McCartney, McCartney, and McCartney, and one, and every record label, even after John Lennon fucking died, John, Paul McCartney would try and make it McCartney-Lennon, you know, that just one word switching around, it just shows, even though they passed away, it was that creative sort of tension and ego in there, how does, so you're kind of more the chaos and the kind of off-the-cuff creativity, his strategy.

50:08How does living in you being an Australian, him in America? Because I think one of the things I think you guys have done really well between both of you, you've kind of been like a kind of, you know the UK is just so fucking like quite like sardonic and just a bit like, oh, ambition's squelched here, right? I think you guys have really kind of like the Anglo-Saxon high agency, you know, antidote. you've basically said look if you fucking put your mind something you can go and do whatever the fuck you want to do whereas obviously in america ambition is like go up go getters go getters go getters whereas i think here it's a bit like you know you know if people are trying to really be ambitious it's the tall poppy syndrome thing how has being in australia versus the us like how what's that tension like in terms of building a brand uh just the time differences on the calls and to preface what we said before actually what's great is i still learn from chris although i go at him all the time so uh when we did our tour in america last year one night he just got smashed and let his hair down i'm pretty sure a guy in the toilets was like oh i like a podcast he was like cool just took the guy's vape and just went and i was like chris this is my kind of guy so i think i was helping chris relax his shoulders a bit but then recently i listened to podcasts i did two weeks ago and i said the word like way too many times so i've now reached out to chris's speech coach to start getting lessons to help me speak better chris doesn't um he doesn't uh yeah he doesn't say like and there is so much methodic detail behind the scenes that people don't see and such as he has a speech coach i'm pretty sure he has someone that helps him protect his voice so if his voice is crackling from doing live events he gets given like a prescription of ginger honey all of these things he's very protective of his energy even we're in vegas i'm like bro strawberry daiquiri we're going out and then 7 p.m his airpods go in he's off to his room stays at home i feel like he's got the weight of his world on his shoulders just through how successful he is becoming which i think could be very difficult so although i quite like the banter between us of being slightly different.

52:16I still need to take my hat off to him a lot of the times because the way he raises the bar with his intellect and approach to business is sometimes I'm like, oh, fuck, this is impressive. So as much as I love to poke holes in his approach, at the same time, I'm also, you know, when you rub alongside someone who's doing better than you, I definitely feel that. And especially when I see some of the numbers that he gets, not only his downloads, not only his views, but some of the financial ones i'm like fair play mate yeah yeah as far as territory uh we did have a bit of fun and again some people when they talk about their products try and make it amazing i love saying on podcasts we have three flavors and this is the third best like you have to have the ugly sibling of the yeah although i have shat so much on this as a flavor i had one just then as we started i went i've really missed that i think that if it was just the duality in flavors I would miss this a lot and we were supposed to launch Australia UK America now Australia is probably a little hybrid between UK attitude and America or probably UK economic state and American attitude I think their attitude is good sorry I think the economy is good but the attitude can be semi relaxed I'll say relaxed because if you grow up on a beach in an amazing safe neighborhood you haven't got that much to work for in life yes i listened to a um tyler cohen podcast with this aussie guy uh fucking so interesting and he was basically saying how i think tyler cohen was saying why is why is australia even though you as you say you've got similar kind of um demographic wealth you know enough people enough good universities there why are there not enough startups and super successful founders there and kind of what he was saying is almost like mate the weather's too good you know as you go to the uk the weather's shit and it's like he literally blamed it on the weather he's basically in new york if you go to these cities where the weather's shit and it's cold like the level of graft kind of goes up through the roof and ambition i'll answer your question in a second but the beautiful thing probably the best lesson what helped me with the real second not a life coach book was when i was writing it i was in a cafe i'm in bondi and i can see bondi beach been to australia yeah when i was a little kid yeah ages yeah you must go back yeah fucking miles away but it's amazing and bondi beach is there so i'd wake up and it'd be something real trivial me and my friend in the uk i don't give a fuck if it's your birthday if we're going for a dinner cool you know i'll have to come into london put jeans on it's pain in the ass in australia we'd get a message we're meeting at 6am on the beach it's cam's birthday one of the girls will bring a cake suddenly you and all your mates some meeting at 5 45 you're getting out of bed at the crack of dawn sun's coming up the water's cold you go for a swim then all of you wrap your towels around you get a coffee it's now 6 30 in the morning i've done more wholesome shit before i would even have usually woken up i go home get dressed get ready for the day and i'm sat there on my laptop in a cafe looking at bondi beach thinking i'm fucking happier now than i've been from you know half the shit i've done in my life but then i'd look at the girls working in the cafe and i'd be like fuck there's three hot chicks here and the dude is pretty good looking as well what the fuck are you doing in a cafe because no offense to britain but you go to a prete a costa a nero you've got miserable people and you know no one in there is really love like loving their life but the people in here i'm getting eggs on sourdough they're happy i'm like how's your day yeah great and i'm trying to fathom and understand why there's good looking young people in a cafe and i observe them for a bit and i realize they're work in 6am probably see the sunrise on the way into work probably to about 2pm they're getting better wages in australia than they are here they're clocking off gonna walk their dog go meet their mates on the beach for sundown have a couple bottles of cider maybe have some food from somewhere local go to bed repeat and i was like shit if they did that for the next 50 years they'd have a better life than most people whereas you couldn't say the same for people in british culture someone could be living in you know norfolk or could be living in you know sunderland they're not gonna wake up 6am work at a prep till 2pm go walk the door well they might do but I just don't see that happening so much so it really got me to slow down a bit where my rent in Bondi was 150 pounds a week we do things weekly so for 600 pounds a month I was living by the most iconic beach in the world with two lads you know it was great bills weren't expensive my overheads my business is doing quite well at the time I kind of sat back and went I don't need to do any better I could just live here as a bachelor into my 50s.

56:49Loads of hot girls in Bondi. I'll go surf. I learned to surf, pick up girls at the beach. Done. It's not quite how my life went, but that relaxation to think, oh, this is great, really helped me with every part of my life. And again, I moaned. I've told this story a few times. I moaned to Luke a few weeks ago. I was watching a YouTuber and he had a Lamborghini Urus. And I like him.

57:41But I felt a little bit of resentment. work-life balance in Australia, having the weather, living on the beach, having, even though I'm so far away, I'm doing so many podcasts on this run at the moment because there's nothing to fucking do there. There are no, there's maybe one or two podcasts in Australia which never really get that much momentum because there's no one coming through Australia. It's so far removed from everywhere. Even if everyone starts nuking each other and terrorists are, no terrorist is coming to Australia. They don't want to deal with the jet lag. So it's one of those things that you just removed away from everything.

58:12you're kind of zoned out and that's helped me with kind of I'm still ambitious I still want to accomplish things but then I kind of think to myself if I pay down the mortgage we have a we have a shop called Bunnings it's like Sainsbury's Homebase but bigger and better and on a Sainsbury's and Homebase no you know like Homebase is it Homebase by Sainsbury's or is it no no Homebase is the like the where you get yeah yeah call it Homebase call it Homebase for some reason I thought it was Sainsbury's Homebase maybe there's one near me like that so it's called Bunnings and on a Saturday they have a little barbecue out front they have a little sausage sizzle they give you a little sausage and a bit of bread it's like a rite of passage in Australia but whenever I go into Bunnings whether I'm getting a shovel or a new hose for the garden the people in there are so fucking happy the dudes in there are like 65 probably semi-retired joking around with the lads oh yeah I'll take you to the power tools section and sometimes I go into Bunnings and I think you motherfuckers are happier than me you know you guys are happy as shit because when you're working in business sometimes you spend a lot of time on your own and I was like you know what I'll pay down the mortgage and then one day if I can't be fucked with this I'm just gonna go work in Bunnings and I'm just gonna be as happy as these old boys I'm gonna be pulling pranks on people that work there having banter with people that come in and I think because you've got the suns blue skies it's pretty much summer for three four months spring for two two and a half months either side then winter is like six to eight weeks of coldness but even cold for us is six degrees and it gets to 15 to 18 during the day start the day with a woolly hat and hoodie, midday you're in a t-shirt, by the end of the day it's the same.

59:44But the one thing I really didn't expect where every time I come back is how continually grey it is here. At least in Australia, when it rains, it fucking rains and it floods. When it's cold, it's fucking cold. But there's no grey drizzly wetness that goes on for days on end. If you have a shit day's weather, the sun's out the next day. Whereas in the UK, I haven't even seen it rain, but it's just wet all the time. And it starts to drag on your, how you're feeling about yourself how your day's going and it kind of ruined me for life after living there for a year i don't think i could ever live anywhere that didn't have blue skies yeah it's so interesting so um uh john hegarty who created sachi sachi and he's got a great little book on creativity he says if you want to go speak and be creative go to where you have to go somewhere with bad weather and he basically the weather's so bad that it sort of forces you inwards and if you think about all the best music is from up north like the oasis stone roses the beatles i just i really believe there's something in like the bad weather being good for creativity in some respects i did a thread i'm fucking around with threads at the moment i feel like it might be making a little comeback not not to ever the size of linkedin or anything else but i think if i'm going to make some text-based content let's put it in different places and see where it performs it's just a copy paste job but on threads i went uk's grim the weather's shit the taxes are high the crime's out of control uh you know like it's it's just grim here and then on under it i went which is probably why it produces so many extraordinary people because the british british men do well when they get to us right we get there the aussie men they're bigger than us more handsome more muscular better tanned and they got cool tattoos but they got no chat because english guys we've always struggled we've we're a bit ugly a bit fatter we drink more lager and often our teeth are worse so we have to create good chat right have you been to the devonshire since you've been over here you know the pub that everyone's all about in soho no there's a new pub called the devonshire and soho uh and it's literally just it's booted off like it's it's unreal and it's um but i was speaking to the founder osch who's talking about ireland the weather in ireland's fucking even worse than here yeah and you know they say crack as in c-r-a-i-c yeah like crack and he was basically saying i was like why the best irish some of the best novelists of all times james joyce oscar wilde all the best storytellers or lots of them are from fucking ireland i was like why why why the irish you know they're such bubbly people he's like because the weather's so shit we go into a pub and we just want good crack we want chat and i think it links to your point about extraordinary people and you know what you said the weather shit and as you go to australia and you're just like you're not doing anything productive on the beach yeah you go down there you take a book and then you go i'll close my eyes for a bit then you get a bit of a tan yeah but like my life in australia i wake up take the dog for a walk i'm walking up and down like a nice beach get a coffee come home and then i'll sit at my desk for two hours drink probably two three cans of this and then get all my work done i'll train from 10 to 12 come home have a little sleep hopefully the baby's asleep middle of the afternoon i'll do any more admin but then as 5 6 p.m comes around my day's kind of wrapping up i might if i have a nap i'll look at my missus i'll be like let's go for a little swim we live opposite where the beach is and i moved an hour south of sydney where i could actually afford to live close to the beach because if you're in bondi bronte anything like that's crazy yeah and then we're in we're like having food in the evening and i genuinely think to myself i could just relive this day every day forever i never felt like that in the uk but then you do get into this kind of relaxed culture but what i do love is i can come back to the uk where it's manic it's chaos it's podcasts do you think you could have built what you've built if you would if you'd started in australia i'm not sure because what i didn't expect to happen was when i moved to bondi i started doing live videos on my balcony and i'd post content every day i never realized that the background was what maybe was making people watch so you've got grim weather here there's an english guy in australia at the beach with blue skies and birds chirping i never realized that the life i had albeit only 150 pounds a week rent life was aspirational there were so many people that would go oh i'd love to go to australia i'd love to see bondi beach when they were watching my stories i actually don't think they're invested in my brand they're invested in my life because uh when i was younger i'd gapped i had a much more interest in life i even looked at my story views a few months ago i was like oh before the baby they were tanking and i was like there's nothing to see here i'm just living fucking groundhog day with my dog and my missus but then when i was in bondi we're doing cool shit going to new beaches going to new places swimming here recommending restaurants and even people in the uk even if they had no plans to go to us they were taking it in oh there's a beach called bronte oh there's a coastal oh there's this and i think that that meant that when they were to go to australia i would love to know the amount of pts that moved there to kind of emulate the same thing yeah fitness culture there is a lot denser here when i was in a pt in bracknell there were six five or six pts i went to a same size gym and honestly there were 32 pts yeah what's the as i said it's that it's that high i think it's like the high agency antidote to kind of a somewhat lethargic culture over here i think it's actually chris who says this he goes the only way to understand your culture is by being in another culture which i think is a really good point and i think who did i have on the pod who she lived in um found a rude health which is a they do like oat milks and shit like that she'd spent a lot yeah she like that she um so that's a bit yeah i probably reframe that they do really good granolas but she um she lived in japan and she was like from living in japan i actually really understood the uk so and you spent a lot of time in the states as well you did i think you did that was it a world tour yeah like i'd love to we've sort of talked about the the flavor of ambition in australia flavor of ambition in the in the uk if we then go on to the other side which is america where it's like let's fucking go baby you know what i mean like what's that like and i suppose the question is like what is the world tour taught you about the sort of the different flavors of ambition around around the globe so what's interesting with america have you listened to the george mack episode with chris um they talk about how a british accent is a superpower that you can only use if you go to another country so they don't realize how many british people have this superpower because they don't leave but then i think that the uk and america pro rata have the same amount of smart well-educated people coming out of universities yet the uk produces five times less comedians and they have a theory that if you're a comedian in america you go hey i'm gonna be a stand-up they're like man that's great we're gonna come to your show man yeah yeah you're doing america they're doing the uk they're like get a job mate you know get a real job and george mack has a theory that the funniest man in the uk is probably in a steelworks factory in leeds whereas in america he's got his own but then on the macro level we've all got very good crack and chat because of that like you know you one of the most hilarious people like in the pubs and the cultures because the weather's so he would have had his ambitions squished to the point that they go don't waste your time being a comedian just be funny at work yes where in america they said don't be funny at work you can make something of yourself and i have a feeling that you know Say I'm on a train in New York and I'm drinking this.

1:06:48I'm like, hey man, it's cool looking drink. Like, oh, it's mine. No way, man. What's it called? I don't drink them, but I'll fucking buy a case. That's what they're like. So much of even, I haven't got the biggest following in America, but the second you tell someone that you're being entrepreneurial, they love that go get attitude. Because in the UK, I think they have this kind of zero sum attitude where if you're doing well, it's because you're oppressing other people. Oh, your business made a million pounds. How many people were oppressed for you to do that? Whereas in America, they go, you've got a business you hire people you employ you pay your taxes god damn man that's that's what we need and there's there's definitely a culture issue in the uk with this where it doesn't mean you can't do great in the uk but certainly people are a lot less happy to see you do well and i think even a lot of maybe even the people that follow me are actually watching to see me fall off to see me you know fail at something see me get cancelled because tearing someone down makes you feel better i think that for a lot of people anyway especially those with maybe more fixed mindsets surrounding success and what it looks like there's a real bitter taste to and i think i think it has got a lot to do with the economy do you know what's crazy since interest rates went up comments have got worse real it could be social media i can't say this for sure but when i look at it i now genuinely see unhappy people and it makes me sad even if they're ripping into me taking the piss out of my hairline whatever it is i don't like i look at it and i think fuck this is just a a temperature test of unhappy people and i think that maybe if our economy was doing better would they be in a better mindset because if you take away someone's the amount of pubs closing nightclubs closing the amount of people that didn't go on holiday couldn't afford a holiday all the people that's even just financially becoming worse off they're just becoming more cocooned in their home more into echo chambers algorithms are feeding them things they want to see and things they don't they're becoming bitter and resentful a lot of men probably more lonely than ever the dating market is only going to make things worse we have like this perfect recipe for very bitter people not to say they don't have the same problems in america but in the uk it's not like today you're not exactly gonna go for a walk and clear your head it's pissing it down with rain it's freezing and i even my parents have been gaslit september we got all the radiators on my missus from australia she's freezing i'm like it's september they're like so what i'm like i feel like there's someone i should be able to complain to i'm like ibiza still have closing parties for the next month we should not be here in coats and who can i complain to bloody labor government what are they done ruin the weather for us so like uh yeah it's it's one of those things that culturally here it's it's difficult it's a bit of a slog but it's still it's still fun america as far as the markets get into we've our sales are about 50 50 between america and usa at the moment and when we were in australia sorry or no america and uk for newtonic okay we can't actually produce in australia because where is it produced is it so we have factories in the uk and america okay so we have different how did you because yeah just before we go into that is did you have because that's a really smart move from people like you know dash water yeah that's like jack who's the founder that's my good good mate of mine and they've moved to australia but they've actually built a factory whereas most people try and ship it and it's fucked like who told you to do those two things was it so one of our partners is a company called gem flow yeah and gem flow help creators monetize through products with their supplements whatever so they have pre-existing relationships with the factories in both places which meant that once we had our formulation we could go to america find a good factory work with them that work with some of the biggest brands same in the uk the cans have got to be different in different territories we were hoping to launch in australia as well however the tga the therapeutics goods association are your dickheads.

1:10:33So even theanine, we have 400 milligrams. In Australia, you're not allowed to have more than 250. So on one nootropic alone, boom, can't produce the drink there. And the shipping is extortionate to get it in. But then when you look at Australia, 27 million people, when you look at America's population, you think, hold on, we could just increase our sales by 10 % in America and you're not going to lose sleep over Australia. We are going to look to diversify our offering to get into Australia. but America as a territory to get into and to crack I think is going to be a priority because one customers two culture three I also think that there there are so many big carbonated heavily caffeinated drinks for your gym bros but there's still this massive culture of people editing scripting hustling trying to get people's attention to go after and even just from a taste perspective Chris brought a suitcase full of all our competitors drinks and the common theme was just how sweet they were the first sip you're oh that's really nice but by the time you get to the end of the bottle you're a bit sickly we see that with prime hydration as well right prime energy was actually pretty decent a bit too carbonated but it was actually a decent product so where everyone's trying to follow the same footstep of 500 milliliters 200 milligrams of caffeine really sweet drinks we wanted to create something actually that's a little bit more moreish and i've been nailing probably two of these cans a day for six months and i'll be honest with you even it being my product there was something in the back of my mind that goes you're probably going to get sick of this after three months what i do with every song i find on spotify is i think i'm going to listen to this song forever then i listen to it yeah non-stop for a week and then i hate it yeah yeah and then i think how did i used to love this song i hate this song um but i've been almost abusing this and drinking it far too much and i'm still not bored of it and there comes days as well where I won't drink one for a day I'll probably wake up and for whatever reasons I have three or four coffees and I think I probably shouldn't chase that with a new tonic and then the next day I'm salivating at having one I'm actually I sometimes look at this and forget it's mine and I'm kind of really glad I'm a part of it but I think that if we can establish ourselves a bit more in America and just grow that I've said to the guys Luke as well he's a bit crazy in the sense that when we did the book tour he sent me to norwich to sign 45 books it's like two hours there two hours back considering the royalty is a pound a book he uh he also got us a viano he said i'll come with you because no one wants to go to norwich so i think the viano was about 1800 quid for the day we're only making 45 pound on royalties but what's the viano that's like the mercedes v-class yeah seats in that okay yeah yeah yeah it more so for him than me i would have gone in anything but so we go there we spend 1800 pounds to sign 45 pounds worth of books and come back because to him he knows how important that is to go meet people go to towns that people aren't usually there but we're also the same guys that if we wanted to go to venice beach if they said james we're going to send a pallet to venice beach we need you to go give out 3 000 cans i get the next flight i probably wouldn't even expense it to the business me and luke could be like let's do it let's go out there let's go give cans to people because we know that out of all those people if one in ten end up drinking it forever or for the next however many months the acquisition of that customer would be so easy and it would look good we can do stuff on social similar to what we did in london we're actually at the point now well whatever it takes for us to expand in those u.s territories we're happy to do yeah and having a product that's honestly i believe so good that when i give people a case all i tell them to is to drink it cold i'm not trying to sell them into it i actually i'm not like we've got four nootropics here it's like a brain stop but i'm not just fucking drinking mate you're like yeah yeah it's not one of those things that you know you need to convince people like athletic greens like this is good for you probiotics prebiotics those are vitamins and minerals i'm not getting 20 on every sale yeah so yeah it's one of those things that i'm just excited to get it into places even when podcasts whatever we send way too much stock because i know it's going to find its way to videographers editors bar staff and i kind of know that we're going to intertwine into society and we're going to get repeat business from it yeah if you're a challenger brand that's absolutely killing it in d2c but you're struggling to crack retail then you've got to listen to this maybe you've got an ocado listing maybe you've got a whole foods listing maybe you're absolutely killing it in selfridges maybe you're absolutely killing it in your farm shop and your indies but my friends making the leap crossing el chasum crossing el rubicon to grocery retail is not easy it's the Champions League of FMCG.

1:14:59It's super hard. It means playing at a higher level. And that's where some of your amazing brands sadly stumble. Look, retailers want stories backed by data, not dreams and a pretty pitch deck. And let's be real, supermarkets are not just going to magically make a space for you and your little brand. They need data. Something's got to go for you to get in, for you to get on shelf. And that is why I've got to tell you about Northstar. they are the team that's helping purpose-led fmcg brands go from gut instinct dreams to unstoppable pitch decks that actually unlock retailers northstar i'm not like another data company that force feed you data like foie gras that act like a nasa space mission it's super super simple to use their team are amazing and they actually get the challenger mindset northstar are your shortcut to smarter decisions stronger pitches and investor confidence all built specifically for challenger brands like yours you don't need a massive sales team you need north star link in the show notes click that link and you'll be able to book a free demo with north star highly highly recommend that and thank me later how are you thinking about building this brand as separate from you and chris and i don't want to say the word personal brand but like yeah your two brands in in your content modern wisdom and new tonic because i spoke to libby uh who runs piper and piper basically buy brands they buy brands once you once you hit a certain level they buy it they did proper corn which is the uh uh popcorn brand uh they've done they've been what bike they've done fucking loads really interesting she basically said there's an issue with where the founder's identity becomes too attached to the brand that we can't but prime exactly so how do you how are you sort of seeing this as like right chris does modern wisdom you do your um your content then how does this thing this this being which is what a brand event has to become exist without you there do you know is that something you're thinking about yeah i think i i truly believe and i'm obviously going to say this because mine that there's like a certain r0 to this so with covid the r0 was above one so there's uh when you look at infectious disease they look at what is the rate in which it becomes so if you have an r0 of 1.1 i'm pretty sure for like every 10 people uh they sorry for every one person that gets the disease they spread it to 1.1 people right which means that it becomes infectious infectious infectious and when you get an r0 beneath one then the infectious disease starts to shrink so it's like a really weird way to say that for every 10 customers that we acquire i feel like they're going to infect even just maybe one or two of their friends and then that's just going to keep on going i think that the the rates of infection between people say they buy a case their friends go oh what's this or that's on a shelf they go oh that looks interesting i think there's such a stickiness to it i think that there's such a chance that people will then become our advocates like brands like eight sleep eight sleep i can't shut up about it you know what it is yeah it's not the the cold temperature control yeah and i'm i promote it in every single podcast they don't even pay me i'm just obsessed so then people will see their friends having a white monster and they go no no no you need to have a little bit of this and what was amazing have you heard of a guy called dylan page he does the news on tiktok he's like a english guy or south african accent but he's got 11 or 12 million followers on tiktok seen him no i haven't seen him no let me uh show you let me show you a second you see his facial name and he messaged me on instagram and he goes no way where is it If I put in Dylan, he'll come up.

1:18:4312.9 million followers. Seen this guy? No, I've never actually seen him, no. So have you guys seen this guy? So he pretty much does his own version of the news, but look at the views he gets. 50 million, 11 million. That's absolutely wild. He just overtook the Daily Mail. And whenever anything kicks off, he gets there before anyone else. And instead of being in a studio, he's just in his bedroom. He's like, Hezbollah have just had their things blown up. There's more news incoming. and he just presents the news but to younger generations who don't subscribe to BBC whatever he messages me he goes no way bro I've been drinking your drinks for two weeks I never knew it was you and Chris he said I was on Amazon it came up looked like the type of thing that I'm interested in I read the ingredients like the nootropics just up my street bought the cases it's been two weeks later I see you promoting it and now I've realized it's yours and that is exactly high agency high functioning young person ambitious sees a product even just through the similar to the packaging the inquisitiveness new tonic a play on nootropics and tonic yeah they see the eye which was ai generated we had so many different it was what was the the what are the other sort of um on the cutting table that didn't sort of the other versions of this so none of them had eyes in and we were given a page of all different designs then there was one eye and And Chris and I, and actually all of us went, oh, we like this.

1:20:04Can we show us some more designs? There were some lazy, some more. This one was just a trippy AI generated eye. And we looked at so many variations and we actually kept it to the very first one that came out. Again, Chris has been, how far does the eye wrap around the can? What is the sizing? How does it look? And it's almost like a mind control where they see it, they're drawn into it. They see productivity drinks. So then similar to how your thumbnail gets people to read your title on YouTube. Your title here, people want the context. Cognizant, Roddy La Rosera, Panic's Ginseng, Theanine, Caffeine.

1:20:37There's definitely a lot of work that needs to be done around the education space on Nootropics. But I think by 2034, they think it's going to be a$4 billion industry, Nootropics alone. So we think that the brand should have enough stickiness without the founders to do what it needs to do. And there is some of that happening anyway. I think as well with the landscape of, I think that another trend I'm kind of seeing is influencer-based marketing is slowly dying. And we're seeing this UGC content. Even you look at the format of TikTok shop, rather than paying, you know, your mate from Love Island, 10 grand to promote your drink.

1:21:11Normal people are doing it for four pound commission. We don't pay that commission either. TikTok are paying it to get people into their ecosystem. So now you've got Sally from down the road going, oh my God, I had one of these. Although I do struggle to sometimes be sold to with that i saw one the other day of someone selling a coffee machine i was thinking oh i do need i do need i do need a new coffee machine and if the chinese communist party are going to be subsidized in 100 quid off i can buy one so i think the landscape for products in general is changing and to be honest i don't think i'm alone where i was necking six pills and a white monster when i was at my desk and for that to be offloaded for someone to put together a product for you i i don't see the incessant needs so you do see logan paul ksi having to be so fundamentally involved in all the promotion their business i think that if we can get a certain cohort of people drinking this it could be one of those things that you just leave and it's evergreen it builds on its own and then our own campaigns would just be little bumps in the road that then similar to when you would post on youtube your views spike yes so when you release a new podcast then you have trickles of people going back to old videos so i would say that we will always hopefully be involved in the brand but the brand should do a lot for us it's so interesting so um jamie lang and ed williams have been on this podcast ed's been on who's ed's the co jamie's co-founder and candy kittens ed's been on a couple of times and they were saying it for about four years they actually didn't even have jamie's name on the brand of for candy kittens they wanted it and you know candy kittens is absolutely flying here uh they had it right at the beginning then they let kind of took jamie off and then they've now brought him back in a little bit but i think it is so interesting as you say in terms of letting there's enough that nothing that sort of early adopters of brand evangelists who are going to just do that treacle effect for you that you can kind of give it some welly to begin with ease off and then that's how you get the um get it growing and existing without you having to be so attached to it what do you think went because you know the prime sales absolutely bombed like what from the critics i think that you know they talk about cpg and i also think there's this sort of creator package goods things happening now especially in the states from the creative creator perspective what where do you think they went wrong with prime why did it bomb products it became a status item it was almost a luxury good not an actual genuine product so what they were trying to do was create a hydration drink and the problem behind that would have been electrolytes and hydration similarly to we see the the gap in the market being people taking nootropic supplements with an energy drink i see i see the gap in the market that people don't particularly like having to take all the supplements or if you can reduce the supplement regimen that that person's taking and offload some of it to a drink that's a solution that can remain permanent semi-permanent three six months whatever the customer lifetime value would be whereas with prime the real problem wasn't really addressed.

1:24:07If it was a hydration beverage, firstly, the solution of sodium and potassium should have been the right way around. So when we look at sweat, when we sweat, the main thing we lose is salt, sodium. We do also lose a substantial amount of potassium. Then the other electrolytes, calcium and so forth, are almost negligible. The gatekeeper is magnesium, but ultimately we need to replenish salt. Now, glucose speeds up that absorption rate. So when you look at things like Powerade, Leucozade, Prime were trying to virtue signal that they had a superior hydration product. But actually, sugar, glucose is a very important part of rehydration.