Kallaway - The Most Valuable 3 Hours For Any Business Owner in 2026 (Content Masterclass)

21:55So entertainment media would be like Mr. Beast, streamers, anyone who's like just trying to entertain at like the highest possible volume, highest possible audience size. Education media would be like, and the difference between education and entertainment is just education videos, you can watch them and then tactically apply something to fix a problem. Anything else is entertainment. So technically like my tech and AI videos would be like entertainment media. You would think they're education because they're like tech, but actually most of my videos, you can't walk away and like apply something.

22:23I'm more just telling you about something so that you have the information. That's a nuance, it doesn't matter. But first game is entertainment media. Second game is education media. Those games need a shit ton of views to play. So like there's a certain strategy around ideas, around niching, around how you actually execute the videos to get a ton of views. Okay, so those are the first two. The second two are about consumer products. If you have a consumer product at the bottom of the funnel. Number three, like the third one would be, You know the first of the consumer products is if you have a commoditized consumer product and what I mean by this is like You don't need to educate the viewer on how the product works.

23:02So like clothing or you sell couches or you sell hats Like every person can look at a couch and be like that's a couch. So you don't have to educate them on how it works However, you need to get them aware. So there's a strategy there less context. Yeah, exactly You don't need any context. You could just show the couch and be like, this is a sick couch. Or like, just have a cool person sitting on the couch to be like, yeah, I fuck with that couch. Like, that is clear. So we can talk about the strategy, but like, there's a strategy for that. Then bucket four is like consumer products that do require education.

23:31So this could be like AG1. AG1 is just a green powder in a box. If you see that, you don't really know what that is. Like, that could be matcha. That could be greens powder, which is what it is. Like, you don't know. So the viewer needs some amount of education to close the gap. Now they don't need a shit ton of education. You can give it to them pretty quick But that's a different content strategy. So that's bucket four bucket five is like everything b2b so that's like You're selling business services coaching info products b2b sass everything where Lots of education is required, right? So those like the five content games you pick based on the business model Right because everyone's making content because they're trying to make money Like let's just be honest you pick whichever business model you want to play media, media, consumer product, consumer product, or B2B product.

24:16And we can, we'll break that, we'll use that framework to explain the differences and the nuances of like how to play short form, how to play YouTube, et cetera. But that is a critical first step. You have to pick the game and adjust accordingly. So good, so good, so good. Spring styles are at Nordstrom Rack stores now, and they're up to 60 % off. Stock up and save on Rag & Bone, Madewell, Vince, All Saints, and more of your favorites. How did I not know Rack has Adidas? Why do we Rack? For the hottest deals. There's so many good brands. Join the Nordic Club to unlock exclusive discounts, shop new arrivals first, and more.

24:50Plus, buy online and pick up at your favorite Rack store for free. Great brands, great prices. That's why you Rack. It's crunch time at work, and you need to bring wings to your workday. Visit redbull.com slash gettingitdone and answer a couple questions about your work style to get a Spotify customized playlist tuned to your productivity. Plus, score a can of Red Bull on us while you go from to-do to done. And remember, Red Bull gives you wings. Supplies are limited. Terms apply. Visit the website for more information. I think something really key to point out there is on those first two buckets of media, talking about the entertainment and education.

25:29First off, blending both. I think you get an asymmetric outcome from that. If you can actually educate and also entertain, And then also be very, very careful there in playing that CPM game. You want to also be playing the brand game. I talked about this with Samir, Colin and Samir, about if you feed a very narrow ICP and you really audience match correctly, then you can charge a premium for that. And I think that that should be the goal of anybody in content. You don't want it to be just a direct CPM game. You want to be like, hey, I can charge more money because I'm positioned in the marketplace as such.

26:07Yeah, I think the, in general, you'll make way more money playing the products, services, offers game than you will the media game, A. B, within the media game, agreed, you can make way more if the audience value is higher. C, three, whatever, whichever I said, that media game is arming to zero. That game's going to zero. Like, AI content will run that media game over, and we can probably get into that later. but like the reason why all the mainstream YouTubers, like there was a tweet that went viral the other day. Most people watching this will have seen it where the guy was like, I have 7 million views a month and I still live in my mom's basement.

26:44That guy is an entertainment YouTuber. Now he's not only making five grand a month. Like he's probably making 30, 40, 50, but he has a big team. And so he's netting five or whatever. The point is like the media game is a dumb game to start in 2025, 2026. It's just not the right game to play. It's a losing game. Mr. Beast is one of the winners of that game. Netflix is playing that game. The NFL is playing that game You will lose to mr. Beast netflix in the nfl and so my proposition to most people and like where where I specialize is the other buckets of like Do you need a personal brand to accrue trust to sell something?

27:22That would be like bucket five And then strategies within buckets three and four You have consumer products and you can you can build like these ugc swarms like these other strategies that we can talk about but I'm like not that interested in the entertainment game. My tech and AI is that. And that's where I started. And I'm realizing that like, oh shit, that's a losing game. So like that we can talk about that, but that's. For more clarity though, you can start in the media game, i.e. media entertainment or media education, build a personal brand, build a trust, and then you flow into bucket three, four, five and you actually sell a consumer product.

27:56Yeah, so the most common, so the, and this is a framework that I think we should talk about. All business just boils down to is traffic traffic funnels offers. That's it. It's just three things. So you either start with an offer where you know what you want to sell, and then you got to go get traffic to funnel to that offer. Or you start, you don't know what you want to sell, which is very common. And you start with traffic and you're just like, I want to figure out content and I'll figure out the offer later. That's the path I took. What most people end up doing is they either pick the entertainment bucket or education.

28:23If they have no skills, they're going to be in entertainment. They do have skills. They sometimes niche down into education, but usually they end up in entertainment and they start making content and they get addicted to the views game. And so they try to rev the views as high as possible. To do that, you broaden the aperture, you expand the TAM of the ideas and you become less focused on one audience avatar. What happens then is you're like, okay, I'm making 5, 10, 15, 30, 50K a month, whatever, like varying degrees, but you realize there's a cap and you realize that is gonna decay over time as the competition, the niche rises and as AI content comes out.

28:59So you're like, I need to build an offer, service, or product that I can sell to this, that I own, that I can sell to my audience. And you start doing that. And one of three things happens. A, before you even build the offer, service, or product, you start asking the audience what they want. And you realize they're all over the place because you have a super broad audience because that's what was required to get a lot of views. Or you just pick a slice and you build it. But when you go to push, because you assume I have a huge audience, I can push people to it. Not that many take it because there's not that many people in the audience that actually want that offer.

29:29And so what ends up happening is you're like, shit, I don't have the ability to sell through the audience I already have. What do I do? And one of two things can happen at that point. You either stick and just keep playing the media game, which is what a lot of people do, or you have to rebuild a second audience from scratch, narrow, using the offer that you wanna sell. And that's exactly what happened to me. That's why I know it so well. Yeah, I mean, for us, for people out there listening, we're almost, at this point, will probably be on episode 20, is just like, we may be serving too many audiences.

30:02We might have too much variety of the guests on this show. And once you have a massive audience, you have escape velocity, you're Joe Rogan. You can talk to MMA fighters, comedians, scientists, and Donald Trump. But if you want to win in the beginning, I do think you got to go narrow with the ICP. But that's the thing is, Joe Rogan's playing the media game. So he's accepted. But it's a barbell though. It's once you get escape velocity, then you can play that game. Because there's just so much money to be made on just the CPMs. Yeah, and even at the beginning, if you want to be a face, you want to be famous, you want to be an influencer, you want to be a creator, you can play the media game.

30:38It's a harder road. I think we also need to give context for out there for the people listening. I definitely do think that there's two sides of the coin listening. There's the creators and then the business side. I mean, you could have a one or two, three-person team doing a million dollars, a million and a half dollars. We've had RPN on. We're just talking about if you want to make, I don't know, there's obviously allies, But if you want to make$5 million a year in profit,$10 million a year in profit, like people that are playing the media game, there's not that many people that are making well in the seven figures doing that.

31:06Right. And that's, and that's, I want to demystify that piece of it, right? Because I think a lot of people think being a creator, when I say being a creator, I mean the media side, because really, if you're the other side, you're an entrepreneur using content. There are like two sides. People think if you're a creator, you're just like rich, you're flush with cash. It's actually very hard to break into seven figures as a creator. Only the top 1 % or 0.01 % in the niche can do it. But just to give a context, I never wanted to be famous. I'd never wanted to be a creator. I'd never wanted to be an influencer.

31:35I'm a savage entrepreneur that has identified organic content as the cheat code lever to fuel businesses. So that's why I started figuring out how does content work. The byproduct, unfortunately, was that I grew audience and people kind of know me. but like that was never my intention. So I do think there's two buckets. And again, like we said, the five different business games, there's two buckets here. If you wanna be a creator and you wanna have influence and you wanna be like at the parties and you wanna be plugged in and tapped in, the media game is the best way to do it because you get the highest views, the most exposure and it feels like you're in that world, right?

32:14The other world is like entrepreneurs in the trenches that don't actually want to be known, right? These are two different buckets. Like the approach is different. And so that's, I think it's important for people to like self-select into what they want, right? And then build the strategy accordingly. I think another big thing to know too is on the former, when you're playing that CPM interview game, it becomes very, very difficult on the sponsor and partnership side because you're so wide that you don't have these narrow products and services to sell into an audience. It's a very, it's just like you have 20 different types of people listening to your podcast.

32:47Yeah. And that's actually a good thing for people to think about is like, Like the reason the brands are paying you is because they want to get a return on the spend. They think your audience avatar matches their buyer profile, which is why they're taking a bet. The wider your content ranges, the wider your audience ranges, the less confident they are that that bet will pay off and the less they'll pay you to do it. So it's like, in a way, going wider is antithetical to dollars. Not in a way, the way. Like that is the truth. So it's like the wider you go, the harder it is to be like specifically valuable for a certain slice, which is kind of counterintuitive.

33:23But then it's also an ego game. You're going to get less views. The more narrow you go, the less views you get. Yeah, exactly. The slower the game is. It's so funny too, because for people out there listening, we'll have context obviously in the trailer. Not only, Kane was a former rapper, guys. We're going to pop up right here. His rap album, it's actually really, really good. Kind of like a Logic. You sound like Logic a little bit. But also you were in management consulting and... Hobbyist rapper. I think... What'd you say? Hobbyist rapper, not a pro. I think it's good, bro. we're gonna show so we're popping up we might stop and just play it and play a song yeah i think it was good yeah i wasn't gonna glaze you either when you sent it to me i was like yo i was with my girl i was like nice yeah i was like this is questionable but it was good yeah it was good but yeah it makes sense to me that you're formerly like a management consultant like going through your content like there's just no way that you could know the stuff that you know without obviously having a business background yeah and to tie a bow on that i just i feel like the future i'd obviously put myself in the same bucket as you.

34:17It's like, yeah, I'm a content creator, but I'm an entrepreneur and operator by trade. I just see how this is going to play into my future. I think that is going to be the future. I think that there's, for entrepreneurs and operators out there, it is a hard game. It's a content creation game, but there is asymmetric benefit. And I think there is so few people in the arena. There is so few people in the arena. I mean, we talked about how many creators can come on here and really have a business conversation. It's shocking how much white space exists. Like if you're, if you're a young kid and you're ambitious and you have a little bit of this like analytical slant, dude, the game is wide open.

34:57Like the cost of building is coming to zero. The cost of attention is coming to zero. And you can use data and like a science-based approach to out-engineer anyone else who is playing the content game, like by gut feel, dude it is like it's open season it is so open in every niche it just doesn't appear that way from the outside because you see so much volume of shit i'm telling you it's wide open in every lane i'm with you on that man let's dive into how people get that awareness let's go a little bit into kind of like formats visuals and editing a bit first off anything you want to close on on that well those five content games but the one other thing i wanted to say which is will be a framework to like the short form stuff, everything I look at, I try to break into Lego bricks.

35:42This is like how my whole worldview works is like, see a thing that doesn't make sense or feels complex, break it down to the studs into like atomic units, figure out the options that you can use for those atomic units, those become Legos, stack those Legos into a stack, and then you can make whatever you need to make. So for short form, there are seven Lego brick categories that matter. And I'm sure we'll get into this and for YouTube. And I want to contextualize this now because we're going to talk about other categories within short form, which is helpful to have this framework. The seven Lego bricks for short form are topic, angle, hook structure.

36:19And within the hook structure, those three things we already talked about, visual, spoken, text hook, story structure, which is the way the story is actually laid out. You could also call this like video type. So you could have like a case study, a breakdown, a listicle, a storytelling narrative, whatever. Number five is visual format. How are the visuals actually laid out on the screen? Are you doing split screen, full screen? Are you doing the little circle thing? Are you in the world? Are you doing a vlog POV? There's a bunch of those. Six is key visuals. So what visuals are you actually using in the visual format?

36:47A-roll, B-roll, graphics, whatever. And then seven is audio. So, and audio is music and sound effects. Those are the seven categories of things, elements that make up a short form video. So all you have to do is figure out what videos and creators are winning in your category, explode their best videos into those seven pieces, hold as many constant as you think are world-class and improve on the ones that aren't, restack into your own new Lego formation and post. That's like this Lego brick framework is the sauce to content. Guys, get out your pen and pad. Stop right now and get out your pen and pad.

37:23You're dropping just bombs right now. If you're driving, pull over. Pull over right now. You're dropping bombs right now. But that is really important to think of the world that way, I think. Like, I would also say too, a good way to look at that is when you look at those seven buckets and you look in kind of the cohort that you're playing in, think about contrast too. What can you do that's radically different than the other people in there? And you dissect each one of those seven. What can you do completely different? So to give explicit context and direction to people, if you're a beginner, the reason you're struggling is because there's so many unknown unknowns.

37:54There's a hundred things that you can't do. And there's another hundred that you don't know what to do. The easiest way to reduce the sphere of unknowns is to hold constant a bunch of them for what's already working in your space. So when people say like, just copy what other people are doing, what they really mean is of the seven buckets, topic and angle are probably going to change for every video. But like hook structure, story structure, visual format, you can hold those constant and replicate what's already working. Now, some people say copy. I don't really think you should copy, but use like, oh, I see the split screen with the motion from the left to right is catching my eye.

38:30I'm going to do that for my visual execution, but I'm going to switch the topic. This is why the beginner should do this. Now, as you get better and you close the gap on some of those unknown unknowns, then you can be like, oh, I'm going to invent a new visual format that people don't have. The problem is beginners try to invent new shit because they're like, I can't replicate what's already there. I don't think that's the right way to approach it. When you're beginner, close down the things you need to learn until you learn the fundamentals. Copy what's already working. Once you get better, then go back to the things you were copying.

39:01You're like, can I do this in a new way that no one's ever done? Or can I borrow from this industry and remix it originally for my own space? That's how to think about like stair-stepping based on your skill level. What about from a, when I look at these seven, what about like formats? Like what short form formats do you think perform the best right now? So when you say formats, You mean the story structure, like the type of the video, like case study breakdown, listicle, like the way the information is presented? Or do you mean visual formats, the way it's laid out? You can chop it down however you want under those kind of seven buckets.

39:30What is working right now in short form if somebody is watching this in January of 2026? Yeah. So you can get any format to work in most niches. I won't say every format in every niche. The hottest thing right now is narrative-driven visual storytelling. It's like by far the hottest. So Chloe Shi is a really good example. maybe you guys can play this up, is like she had this like 30 lessons in 30 days by age 30. And basically most of those videos were her taking an individual story from her life or her experience, using like cool shots and visuals to make it, whatever, I call it visual storytelling.

40:06But a lot of the narrative was like, I experienced this problem. Here's what I tried to do to solve it. Didn't work. Here's what I did do to solve it. If you have a similar problem, here you go. It's less like you should be doing these three things. It's more like I did this thing take it or leave it That's very popular right now. This like personal narrative driven storytelling and I think the reason why oren may have mentioned this I don't I don't know where I heard this but You go through seasons of formats where like certain formats work and it really It really matches with like the maturity of the platform.

40:36So initially when instagram reels came out 2022 tiktok in 2020 The like lower effort more transactional formats worked because there's no supply So like you could say, here's the five best AI tools for doing this list, symbolistical. Or you could say, let me break down how to like flip your camera setting to get this shot. And it's very like transactional. Information-based. Information-based tutorial. Those became saturated because like the market sees it opportunity and fills it. So then the next season after that was kind of like these case study breakdowns, we'll say. So it was like this person achieved this result in this way.

41:14Let me explain how. Still like a how-to, but adding more original context that you couldn't do. The first one is like a reporter, right? Like a newscaster. Yeah, exactly. The first one's very transactional. Anyone, like you could argue AI could probably come up with five tips for whatever. If not now, they're coming up with it very, very soon. Right, right. So there was that season. Then there was like this case, and I'm talking mostly educational content. Obviously, entertainment's a different bucket. You had these like case study breakdowns. What's happened over the last five to eight months, unfortunately, not largely due to me, but partially due to me is I open source the playbook for how to do these like transactional formats on my YouTube channel.

41:51And a lot of people did it. And so the supply really increased like between Oren and Alex Garcia and me and like a few others on YouTube, the sea of volume increased on all these transactional formats. Like guys, no gatekeeping here. No gatekeeping. Yeah. I'm when we explain the hook things or the how to make a hook or these three components, people actually take that and then use it and then, oh shit, their hooks get better. It's like there's a lot of people doing well now because of the last six to 12 months of education. So now, to close the loop on this, the reason why personal narrative-driven storytelling is working now is because it's more one of one.

42:32It's like there is less of a formula. Like you could break down the storytelling formulas for the hero arc or like the A versus B or like I tried this and failed. And like, there's a few common storytelling patterns, but the actual lived experiences are more one-of-one. Like Chloe She worked, I think at Deloitte for a few years and then struggled with her own stuff. Like she can turn that into a single one-of-one experience. It's harder to copy those. So that's why that's in vogue. What is the next? I think that is staying in vogue. You're going to say what's happening next. I think that's going to stay in vogue forever.

43:08Yeah. Because that is that one unique piece of sauce that no one can copy what's happened in your life. Well, by definition, one of ones will stay one of ones until you could copy them. And you won't be able to because they're lived experiences. So I agree. That will always be a mainstay format. It's a lot harder to execute than people think to write an individual story structure that maps to storytelling. Visually tell it well. The way she does it is pretty cool. She shoots in the world. But even if you didn't do that, the motion graphics required to keep the attention is pretty tough. So it's just getting harder and harder and harder to cut through with the base shit like you need you need more unique Individualized formats It's so funny because I did watch one of your youtube videos and I do know who chloe is and we're actually doing our quote-unquote like Off-site to really map out what next year looks like the next three four days and one of my like ideas and things i'm thinking about is like 40 under 40 like 40 lessons.

44:04I learned before I was 40 and kind of interweaving in obviously lessons through open residency, my own personal lessons, and then from an aesthetic perspective, matching this aesthetic. So we get kind of like a compound effect of what's going on here. And then my own unique take. Nice. Yeah. There's a guy, Marshall Haas, you know who this is? Marketing Max was going to introduce me to him. He just sold his company. It was somewhere maybe? Yeah. It was the staffing, overseas staffing company. And he sold it. I think he sold, I don't know if he owned the whole thing, but he sold 30, 40, 50 million.

44:33So he's making videos now and he's not like a creator per se. He's like, he's more in this entrepreneur bucket, but he's making these personal narrative driven stories, but only he can make them, right? He's like, these are the eight cars I bought after I sold my company. I have like the 911, the G-Wagon, like that's more one of one. Like only so many people can make that video. And so even if the editing sauce is a little bit less crazy, those work better because you don't see that shit every day. And that's the thing is, if you're making stuff that is commoditized to where 50 other people, could also make it, it won't cut through unless you're the best out of the 50 at executing and or you have an existing personal brand, which most people don't if they're starting, right?

45:14So for example, like I'm going to take over marketing short form in 2026. Like right now, I have zero presence. Like my YouTube is top of the charts, but I have no short form presence for marketing intentionally because I'm building things out. When I take that over, it'll be as if I don't really have a personal brand in short form for marketing. So I'm going to have to put these principles to use and be like, okay, what ideas or topics do I have differentiated knowledge on that other people don't? It'll be tough since I've given all that knowledge away and everyone now has it. Or what formats or personal stories or experiences can I tell to cut through?

45:52So people will be able to follow that in real time, like at Callaway Marketing on Instagram. Right now it's like a zero channel, but that's a perfect example. It's like even I, who have a pretty deep personal brand on one platform, it's non-existent in that vector on another platform. And so I'm going to have to figure out how to cut through. I'm doing the 40 for 40, just so you know, too. There's not many people that got a DM from Rick Ross and then pulled up to Atlanta with a couple of his team members in his house. We could show that video, tell that story. A lot of crazy, crazy stories have happened with the 10 years with Iconic.

46:20And obviously before is definitely going to do it. And you probably have the footage for it, right? We have all of the footage. Yeah, that's the biggest part. We literally have three and a half hours in Rick Ross's house. Evander Holyfield's Old Estate. It's an hysterical story. Dude, I have a zillion of those stories. I'm doing it. I'll be a case study for your format. In relation to that too, another big thing that I've seen, and this is actually how my wife popped off, was when you do those, is the 30 for 30, the 40 for 40 is actually numbering them. It increases that kind of like bingeability when you number them because then if you number them and then going back to kind of that thumbnail and someone sees the eighth one and they see on your Instagram, two, three, four, five.

47:01That's how you get people to get that, again, time under attention as well too. Yeah, exactly. Numbering them. Yeah, I think the human brain is basically like a puzzle machine. So if you say, there's a puzzle in front of me, like you need 10 pieces. Here's eight, number nine and 10. I'm like holding in here. Everyone's like, I want number nine and 10. Like give me it so I can complete the puzzle. So it's like, if you create a series of 10 days of this or solve this problem in seven days and you're like, here's day four, I'm going to want to go back and see day one two three if I like day four so it's like it's it's more like forcing the connective tissue to drive the bingeability now that the con of doing it numbered is that if you commit to daily and then you don't want to do it daily you'll burn out and you won't finish and then it will not meet the promise that you set to the audience you got to just stack yeah exactly you guys if you're starting a podcast and you don't have five stacked and you're on on the treadmill yeah that's a big big mistake but that's but that's it's a huge hack I think to do the series, especially so Chloe, Chloe basically combined the numbered series, the personal narrative driven storytelling.

48:01She executed it super well. And, and like, there's a few other like visual pieces that she did to pop off. When you stack those together, it cuts through significantly. A good kind of tie in and question actually directly in relation to something like this is, I guess the downfall of stacking is you lose out on kind of that like A-B split testing and the learnings that you would get from video one, two, three, four, five. Yeah. You're saying batching? Yeah. So like, how do you use like A-B testing and outlier analysis to like find these breakout formats? Yeah. And that's to that point, I don't batch.

48:36And specifically because yeah, when you batch, you lengthen the iteration cycle. Kane says he disagrees. Okay, continue. Well, I'll talk about - I got a good baseline, bro. I got a good baseline. I could rip like five. Well, the reason you can batch if you know what you're doing because then it's like you don't need the iterative learnings as much like the iteration distance is much shorter. But when you're when you're a beginner, the best way to do it is make a rep struggle. Post that rep. See that it sucks because the data will be horrible. Look at that rep. Use the Lego framework that I just went through and be like, OK, the topic's number one.

49:09OK, is this topic relevant to the audience that I want to build? Yes or no. Is this topic interesting? Have I framed it? Like there's like these checklists you can go through. You want to then iterate. Think about what you need to change. Focus on a couple things. One, if you know, one thing is best, but like if you can do multiple in one, that's great. Make rep number two, do it again. You need to iteratively improve. If you batch five in a row, you don't get that data back until number five is done. You've made mistakes from the same mistake from number one, two, three, because you didn't get any learning.

49:40So it's like a beginner should definitely go one at a time. Once you know what you're doing, you need to build a system, right? So you can get the volume. and that's what everybody wants. They try to shift to volume before they have the fundamentals and they know what to look for. So that's - I'm going to say something that's going to blow your mind for people out there listening. I think it's going to give a lot of people a lot of reassurance. I've been following you a long time. I remember not thinking you were that good in the beginning. Your enunciation, you're in the beginning, years and years ago.

50:03For shorts. Yeah. Yeah, I was horrible. That's crazy to think. I remember in the beginning, I was like, this guy's not that good. I was like, and then I started seeing you get better and better. For people out there listening, you got to just start. And yeah, for beginners, definitely one by one. Everybody is ass in the beginning. Everybody. Because of the unknown unknowns. Like there's a hundred things you know you need to do that you suck at. And there's a hundred things you don't yet know you need to do. And so you definitely suck at those. Imagine there's 200 things. Everyone at the beginning, nobody born is like, yeah, I'm doing three hooks.

50:33Like no babies, like I'm doing three hooks. You don't have that knowledge. So like you got to systematically close those gaps. The people that are good are the ones that can close multiple gaps in one shot that are egoless about the learning and that don't stop. That's all you have to do because eventually those gaps are closed and then you have one video rip and then you have a chain reaction where from there, all of your reps get better, incrementally better. So yeah, if you scroll all the way back to my shit, it sucks. Like I'm super monotone. Well, I still am, but I'm super monotone. The pacing is slow.

51:05The topics are not that interesting. I don't even look like I want to be there because I probably didn't. Like everything sucks, like objectively about those pieces. but if you just have an urge to want to get better and then you are emotionless about the fact that it sucks in the beginning, you'll get better. Guys, you should probably binge my channel, but you might want to avoid a couple of those early ones. I started off a little slow. On the podcast? I think the early ones are good. Episode one with Dee is good. I thought it was good, yeah. And then the next couple, I was like a little, I didn't respect the audience's time.

51:36I just wish I could just go back and just edit a little. Yeah, I wish you could edit and re-upload. A little more just in the beginning. Like no one cares about my caloric deficit and how many grams of protein I have. Well, why don't you guys just, this is what I would do. If you really think the episode stands on its head, take that, cut the, cut the stuff you would have cut, re-upload it just as like a, you know, you can call it like from the vault or no one's really going to remember. And then just delete, like first delete the original one so that, cause what you have to do is, and I know this cause that this happened to me.

52:03If you have an old channel, like let's just say with videos that are, that you want to repost. YouTube's copyright system effectively has a memory of the video. So you got to delete that video to like sever the memory. And then when you re-upload it, it's like a fresh video. So what I would do is just take those old ones, delete them from the channel, wait three days, at least you can schedule whenever you want, but at least three days, chop all the stuff you want, re-upload them as a new episode, let it rip. You can retitle it, repackage it. There's no reason not to do that if you're bummed about, unless you want like the historical archive in order, but I don't think there'd be a reason to have that.

52:38All right, let's just go see how much I suck. We're just going to leave that out. Maybe I'll do another episode with those people. Yeah. I guess we're talking about there is editing, specifically in short form. What do you think is the most common kind of editing mistakes that people make? Yeah. So editing is like my, personally my worst thing. I never wanted to be an editor. So I have a bunch of editors. I've trained them up. So everything I say is like framework and fundamentals. And like I've brute force it for the first few hundred videos myself. But if you want to really, really become a master of editing, there's probably other people on YouTube to study.

53:06The biggest mistakes are misalignment with the visuals, which you talked about already. You're using the wrong visuals at the wrong time that are not matching with the words. The pacing is off either too fast or too slow. So a good test for this is like the eyes closed test. Whenever you make video content, after you have it like ready, you should close your eyes and listen to it. Don't watch with the visuals, listen, if you're bored, it's too slow. Like the chopping is too slow. So that's an editing thing, right? The pacing, how fast or slow you chop the actual sentences. That's a huge mistake.

53:36I think sometimes people do it way too fast where when you close your eyes and listen to it, you're like, holy shit, there's no way I could absorb this. You got to add a little breathing room. Some people do it too slow where you close your eyes. You're like, damn, it's so boring. You got to chop it down a little tighter. So that's, that's one like small thing. People are going to think this is on 1.5. This, uh, yeah, I kind of, I talk pretty, pretty, pretty fast. My mom says we got to slow it down a bit, but no, no, no. We're going to keep the pace. I'm trying to think what else from the editing perspective.

54:01I think just like visual selection is really important. At the end of the day, it's like, you got to think what is the best possible way to visualize this sentence? Sometimes it's no visual. Sometimes it's just you on the screen and that's fine. But if there is a visual that will help add more absorption, add more clarity, add more comprehension, you want to use that visual. And if you use the wrong visuals at the wrong times, it confuses. And effectively, comprehension is just a decaying graph. So when you first hit the video, it starts at 100%. Every word, pixel, sentence, frame that happens, that comprehension can only go down.

54:37It can say the same or go down. So at some point, that comprehension hits a level where the viewer is so confused that they bounce. That's why people churn, right? They don't churn because they're clear on what's happening and they're interested. They turn because they're unclear and or uninterested. And so as that comprehension is decaying, that's when they leave. So you have to figure out, how do I make sure the visuals, especially in the first five, 10 seconds, are really, really tight with what I'm saying so that comprehension stays high. If they leave, but they're clear on what the video's about, well, that's fine.

55:06That wasn't for them, right? Even a good video is going to have a smooth line going down. Yeah, yeah. You just don't want that like asymmetric hockey stick where just they fall off a cliff because then you know. You can look at kind of each piece of it. Exactly. You can look at the retention chart and see where the biggest, it's going to look like this, but you can see where there was like abnormally high bounce. And usually that bounce is because they didn't understand what you're saying or the visuals didn't align with the words you were saying. And so they didn't understand the visuals. Let's talk about people bouncing and that retention, looking at short form, that first block that, I don't know, let's call it two and a half seconds is that hook.

55:37If you're looking at, let's just call it, I don't know, let's make it easy. A 60 second video, the first two and a half seconds is a hook. Like, what are those like blocks that you look when you're analyzing from a retention perspective? How could someone look at a block that's short? So there's definitely a bunch of metrics. I don't actually look at the retention charts or anything. I just go pure intuition. So like when effectively, when I watch it, I go one sentence at a time. And I ask myself, am I clear on what this sentence is and what I should be taking away from it? One sentence at a time.

56:06If I'm not clear, then there's going to be drop off. So I don't actually go data video. I go video and just let it live. But that's obviously because I've baked that into my brain. So for people who don't have that muscle yet, I think the stat on YouTube shorts, which is the thing that really shows the retention the best, is after the first three seconds, you want the, I think you want the viewer retention to be at 70%. If it's above 70 % viewers held in the first three seconds, you're going to have a banger. If it's below 70%, if it's below 50, you have a huge problem. But the problem is what do people actually do with that?

56:39This is why I don't like analytics. Cause if you look at it and you're like, oh, that was, it was 49%. It's like, okay, yeah, I should make the hook better. It's like, yeah, no shit. You should have made the hook better from the beginning. It's like data is confirmatory. It's a lagging indicator. The leading indicator is like, just follow the principles that I'm saying when you're actually making the video. And if you can't intuitively tell, that's the beauty of content is you can watch it and be like, is this clear to me or not? If it's not, it's not gonna be clear to them because you've watched it 10 times, right?

57:05So it's like, I don't actually use data as much as people think Because I think people can get obsessed with the data and it distracts them from what they actually need to do, which is like make the video better.

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58:05Disney Plus wants to know, are you ready? Yeah! For Marvel Studios, Thunderbolts, The New Avengers. Now streaming on Disney+. Let's do this. One of the best Marvel movies of all time is now streaming on Disney+. Hey, you weren't listening to me. I said, Thunderbolts, The New Avengers is now streaming on Disney+. Meet the New Avengers. That's cool, man. Marvel Studios, Thunderbolts, The New Avengers. Rated PG-13. Now streaming on, you guessed it, Disney+. Pragmatic. I just always picture you as like a data scientist. So that's actually very, very surprising to hear, but it makes a lot of sense.

58:42Just going sentence by sentence. One framework on that too, I'll say. I don't think I've talked about this anywhere. The easiest way for short form to like validate the story, you write the first line. The first line should open a question in the viewer's head based on whatever it is. So if the first line, which is context usually is like, Google just came out with Gemini 3 and it's a crazy AI model. the question that should pop in someone's head from that is, what can it do, right? If when I read that first line, I'm not sure what the question should be, or there's multiple questions at like about equivalent strength, you have a problem.

59:19You need to make it more clear. So it's one question. Now, whatever that question is, answer that question in the next line. That next line will pop another question. Answer that question in the next line. If you just do that all the way through, your story is perfect. So like Google just dropped Gemini 3. It's a crazy model. The question is, what can it do? It's crazy because it can do da-da-da. Next question is, how do I use it? If you want to use it, go to this. The next question is, how much does it cost? And if you go here, you can actually get a discount. It's just logical thinking one question at a time.

59:47That's the easiest way to audit whether you're kind of like the story flow makes sense. From a compression perspective too, I'm just going to keep using 60 seconds. I'm always under the notion, obviously, within 60 seconds, how many open loops, closed loops can you do? Well broadly you can do like three Story loops or like sections really so it's kind of like the intro piece that opens that first. Holy shit. What is this? There's the for me It's like the how it works or kind of breaking the breakdown and then there's the implication but that's that's more like story structure I'm talking specifically sentence by sentence.

1:00:22It's just like When a viewer watches the video What's really happening in their brain is that they're guessing what they think will come next and then you're either telling them or you're telling them something else, like to add contrast. But that zigzag is happening in their brain the whole way down. So if I say something and or show them, this robot has muscles that look like humans. Paid off, sell up, pay off, sell up, pay off. Exactly, it's like, how are they doing that? Why are they doing that? Where are they doing that? It's like, that's the question a viewer would have. Like if you were having a conversation with that story, you would ask it those questions one line at a time.

1:00:58Yeah, dude, it's so crazy because me and Jake were talking last night at dinner about, I'm not, I listen to like a couple of podcasts, but I'm starting to kind of consume more, especially in kind of other niches to get more like ideas and concepts and structures and such. And like, dude, I just, I can't watch podcasts that just like, they open it up and then they don't close it for like, I was like 16 minutes into a podcast. I'm like, yo, what are we doing here, bro? I can't do that. The easiest way to get the, I got to go on 1.5 X speed. You know what I mean? This is the speed that I'm at, bro.

1:01:25Yeah. This is high octane for sure. So like I have this framework that I don't know if i've said it or not But it's basically like it's like the two dopamine hit framework If you can get somebody to two hits of dopamine before they churn you've got them locked If you can only get them to one you might have them if you get them to zero they're bouncing And so what is that? What is a hit of dopamine for an educational piece of content? It's like tell me something I can actually use that when I implement will solve a problem for me So in this episode And I was talking all over the place tons of dopamine coming in this episode.

1:01:56Yeah, it's a dopamine casino know in here. Hopefully, hopefully I was kind of all over the place when I was doing the hook thing, but hopefully when people watch that in the first minute or two, there's at least one nugget that they heard that they can be like, oh shit, that's valuable. Now the thing I said, I think that they got nuggets on that. We'll see. I think they got nuggets, bro. I'm pretty confident. Like the thing I said about the Instagram thumbnail and the DMS, that's a guaranteed dopamine hitter. Like nobody knows that. So when you hear that, you're like, oh shit, I could use that.

1:02:25Boom. Dopamine released that we'll say that's number two. Hopefully they got one before that. At that point, you've got them locked in because they've heard two things that they didn't know that they can actually use. And they're like, I have to keep listening to this because there could be 20 more things. You're not giving yourself enough credit here. There was way more dopamine hits than that. That was actually a random dopamine hit for me. I'm sure that you felt that because I'm like, damn, I'm going through that right now. I woke up to six memes this morning and I was like, I'm going to pick two.

1:02:51I'll have time for two. So that's crazy. Guys, quick break. This episode is sponsored by Universal Ads, a division of Comcast. I have spent tens of millions of dollars on meta ads. At one point, it was 95 % of my marketing spend. That is super dangerous. With one algorithm shift, your whole entire business can stall. A great option is layering in advertising on streaming TV. I thought it would take weeks to set up and a big agency to maintain. Guys, it took five minutes. Universal ads gives you direct access to a ton of premium publishers. NBC, Paramount, Roku, all the big networks. 100 % of your spend, goes to actually reaching people, not middlemen.

1:03:28And the best part is there is no fees. Same workflow as Meta, upload your creative, target your audience and launch. I've already moved massive brands spending millions of dollars a year on CTV over to their platform. I've negotiated ad credits for my audience, plus free creative and measurement services. If you're running CTV or spending six figures plus a month on paid, email us at info at openresidency.com with subject line universal. platform dependency is dangerous. Don't make that mistake. Link below for more. On to more dopamine hits. You have tons and tons and tons of content set up. What's your tactical process for planning, let's just say a month's worth of social content?

1:04:08Yeah. And this is, this is somewhere I need to get better. I don't really plan in advance, right? So I'm, I'm operating in like a just in time scenario, which is not ideal for my life, but that's cause I'm spread a little thin. But for the tech and AI content, basically I try to get to four to five pieces a week. Sometimes it's three. I've got brand deals coming in on one side. I've got organics on the other side. And maybe we can just talk about my operation, like my team would be helpful. So I have two editors that are dedicated to tech and I've got what I'll call like an ideas guy. So this is a guy that I hired.

1:04:39He's technically called an EA plus. One second on those two editors, are those in-house? Are they agency? Are they sourced on a per video perspective? They're full-time dedicated to me from an agency from the Philippines. they're both cracked like absolute shout out to the Philippines we back baby so if anybody wants to get the editors that I use we're putting that link below yeah we can put the link below so I've got two of them each one of them can make a video a day or like a day and a half depending on like how long it is or how crazy the visuals are how rigorous systems and templates that you've embedded in these guys brains yeah so what I do is like because I'm not an editing savant I'm like and they are I basically tell them yo if we ever have an off day where I just like can't get to a video I want you to spend the whole day building templates and systems for the other one so that you guys can go faster.

1:05:23So it's like I've embedded speed into the system for them when they're not editing. When they are editing, they're like trying stuff out or whatever. I've also given them virtual credit cards so they can sign up to any AI tool they want to generate the visuals faster. So I'm like trying to get them to be both editors, but also like proactively systematizing. It's worked semi good, but like it helps a little bit. I have the same exact system. I have a team in the Philippines and they are, I just yesterday approved some new adobe program for them. Yeah, I love that. They're cracked. Yeah, so i've got those two and then So if you think about the workflow for short form, it's idea research Scripting recording editing posting that like six piece loop you just loop it so That's what I just described solves the editing.

1:06:07Obviously the recording is going to be me You could use an ai avatar, but it doesn't save that much time. So the recording is me So this idea research scripting piece is really where this the time saving sauce is but it's the hardest part to automate away. Editing is pretty, I don't wanna say commoditized, but like it's pretty clear. You get an editor, you hand them the footage, they edit the footage based on a style. Like you can solve that pretty quick. The hard part is that first part. So I've got an ideas guy. I call it a content operator. He's also overseas, but I basically cloned my brain into him.

1:06:36So like effectively what I realized is as an entrepreneur, you're just in the cloning business. That's, I'm just trying to clone myself as much as possible into people. And then they can become me and they can do the things to a level that's like close to me. So I I spent like three to six months cloning myself into this guy So like what is a good idea how to look for ideas how to how to filter out good versus great ideas How to go develop those ideas? What are the core pieces to that make for good ideas in my niche? What is this 180 page google doc? What is this? A lot of it was like live calls.

1:07:05I find is good and looms so the way we have it set up is like he He goes and scans what I call idea pipes So it could be like other creators in the niche twitter reddit youtube newsletters For me, it's like those are the pieces, but there are different pipes for different niches. He's trying to find good ideas. What are things that are interesting? And we're talking about for tech and AI. What are things that are interesting that I could make a video about? He then creates a shortlist and develops those ideas. And by develops, I mean he goes and finds visuals from either the company or Twitter or like we have live examples or whatever.

1:07:38He's curating what he thinks is interesting, what he thinks the angle could be for the video, and what the visuals are. And this is just a Google Doc. each idea is a tab. He puts it into, he drops that stuff in each tab. Then once or twice a week, we have a pitch call where he pitches the ideas to me like a showrunner would in Hollywood. And he's basically like, all right, I have this idea. I found this. It's time sensitive. So if you want to make it, we got to make it in the next 24 hours. Here's why I think it's good. Here's what I think we could do with it. Here are the cons for why we wouldn't make it.

1:08:06What do you think? Now, I'm sitting there and I'm just like, nah, Tam's too small or visual's not good enough or, oh yeah, that's a winner. And we, I filter out the shitty ones. I take the winners and we have a short list that saves me so much time. Like I don't have to go scrolling. Now I'm like one step delayed and knowing the news, but that's a trade-off I'm willing to make. Cause I don't want to be like scrolling all day. So I've outsourced all of that, like idea process, which is huge. Dopamine's hitting right now. Just keep going. Yeah. This is, this is, this is, this is a systematized sauce for sure.

1:08:38So we do that. Then when it comes time to make a video, The next piece would be if I could train the scripting sauce into him We haven't fully got there yet, but we're doing that now. I also have sandcastles We haven't even talked about which is my software for trying to automate this It's good but not as good as me off the dome yet So it's great for people that are beginners like level one to five One to six if you're a nine or ten the scripting is not good enough for any ai platform to like place you is what I found So usually I will sit down I will pull the idea from the list and i'll write the script in 20 minutes Then i'll shoot it Hand it to the editor and then it comes back usually done.

1:09:17So that like that system is what i'm doing And i'm trying to bucket it like we said before for the first 300 reps I was going one at a time because I wanted to get learning up now i'm trying to bucket it where I do two or three At a time eventually maybe we'll do five to ten at a time But that's kind of the the flow I have right now. How long have you had this ideas person? I had never heard of a quote-unquote ideas person until the Sahil Bloom episode. He told me about it. Yeah, I've always actually thought about the curation and the taste is what makes this, this, and I can't source that out, but I actually love this concept.

1:09:48How long have you had this type of guy? I've had him for like six months, I think. So it took three months to, I mean, to install my brain into someone is very hard. Like you can hear, like I'm a psycho. Like I'm so deep in the weeds on this stuff that For anyone who doesn't want to be this deep could never do it and then for someone who wants to be this deep i'm like pulling you into it like The nuance that I go like the details crazy. So it took a lot of time just to like First first he's he's raw then it's like you got to aim him Then you got to get him moving in the direction you want then you got to get him on the nuances Then you got to have him do it and review him doing it So it takes like three to four months to clone yourself in this way But it's paying dividends because he's legit as good at finding ideas as I am.

1:10:36And he has like the systematization to do it. Guys, I'm hiring for this position. Email below. Yeah, I call it a content operator. Content operator. It's the person that is like the quarterback of your first half of the process, right? This person is not going to edit for you. And ideally, you can get them to where they find the ideas and write the scripts all in one and just hand you the script. That's the dream, which we're going to get there soon. But yeah, the way to find this person, the cheap way is to go offshore and bring somebody up to speed, but it's very hard. The other way is like to find someone like you have with Jake or someone else who's like been doing this type of thing, but like doesn't want to do it alone.

1:11:12And it's like, it's hard to find a unicorn, right? This goes back to, I talk about in the Mark Manson episode, or he talks about it is like everyone has their own sauce and you don't want to hire yourself out of that sauce. I think if you can duplicate yourself, this is a no brainer that you don't want someone internally on your team. You want to find someone net new that's passionate about the topics and the podcast and you as a personal brand. Yeah. You just tell them everything and they do all the like work. The other thing I have, which I hired very recently is, and this is pretty much unique to the AI space, but there's kind of two categories of things I cover.

1:11:45There's like news and then there's the Gen AI tools like Higgs field dropped some new model. I have a guy on my team now that's dedicated to playing with the tools all day. And when we have a Gen AI video, he just, I'm like, yo, make something sick. And then he develops. Understanding all of the nuances. Yeah. Because so basically what I realized is There's just not enough time to go down every rabbit hole. So you need a rabbit for each hole. And I can only do a couple. And the more projects you take on, the less rabbit holes you can go down. Some people love, and I do love going down the rabbit hole.

1:12:19I love scrolling Twitter for three hours and seeing interesting shit, but it's just not productive. It's so crazy you said that too, because we're just now starting to bring on more partners and sponsors. And someone will come, they'll reach out, it'll be interesting. and like, I have to go down that rabbit hole to see the use cases. I have to test it. I need to champion it or else I'm not going to obviously make that partner or sponsor. And then even for the ad reads is what are those overlays and B-rolls in conjunction with the product? This person could just do all that. Exactly. But basically the curriculum that I've made for short form and now YouTube is essentially a manual for upskilling these people.

1:12:55Like it's also the playbook for anyone to actually use. But like, if you think about it from the other direction, In theory, I could hire any content operator raw, give them my curriculum, and they come out 90 % upskilled without me having to do anything because I spent all the time to like codify the process. So that's one of the things we did with my guy. I had just made the curriculum for short form and really it was like skinned for my style. So he ran through it. He watched every single video. He watched everything I had on YouTube. And I was like, spend two weeks and go all the way down.

1:13:27Like, I want you to watch every single video. I want you to take notes as what I would expect someone to do, like who's interested in this. And he comes back and he's like using terminology that like is mine just by default. He knows all the weird nuances. Yeah, so I was like, it worked. Like it worked. Now you got to iterate that person because like I said, the strategy is the easy part. The iterative looping is the hard part. So he has to go, we got to go through hundreds of ideas and I have to yes, no, yes, no, yes, no. So he can learn what I actually think. But like, that's how you clone yourself.

1:13:57bam so two editors the content operator the bunny going down the AI rabbit hole that's on the short form side yeah anybody else no on short form well I have my manager Rakugo shout out Rakugo hey us too yeah they've done it yeah there you go they bring the deals in obviously so that helps with like the admin on the email side but that's the whole operation for short form today I want to I guess that's a good shift let's get into to YouTube why are you so bullish on YouTube well a lot of it is the content minutes thing so it's like If you want people to buy, they need to trust. If you want them to trust, they need to watch a lot of stuff that's valuable.

1:14:34And if you want them to trust as quickly as possible, you need them to watch as much stuff as quickly as possible that's valuable. YouTube allows me to compress the value. I wouldn't even say compress. It allows me to give more value per rep. So it's like, if I make a short and it's the best it could possibly be and people watch 45 seconds, I'm really transferring like one idea. If somebody really likes my YouTube, I can transfer like 10 ideas in one video and get them to watch 10 minutes worth. And they can also see, it's cut fast, but you can see my mannerisms. You can start to like understand me and like me.

1:15:09And there's a lot of like X factor that comes with longer form. And so for the combination of just the math that I need you to watch more minutes and the psychology, I need you to like seeing the way I think and explain stuff. YouTube's the perfect medium to get trust accruing quickly. I also think it's a longer rope too. Like if someone is 19 minutes into our podcast, I have a 90 second window where I can probably, you know, not be as compressed in the conversation and they're not going to churn. But I mean, people are going to churn on short form in fucking two and a half seconds. So it gives you more rope and kind of bobbing and weaving in there.

1:15:46The other thing is you kind of have to understand, have you ever custom built a player in Madden? I have not no so like if you play Any sports video games and you want to custom build a new player there's like attributes and they give you like 100 points And it's like split the attributes across like speed jumping agility, whatever Every person is like that in real life There are these different attributes and some people have a lot of xp in one and low in another so you kind of have to understand like where your strengths are I'm, like off the charts at explaining shit. I'm not that good at editing creatively.

1:16:23So it's like short form rewards editing creatively disproportionately than long form. Long form rewards explaining disproportionately than short form. So my unique abilities are rewarded at a compounding rate on YouTube. It's just like better for me to explain stuff to get people to understand me. So I prefer that and people prefer that as well. If you're not good at explaining stuff and you're really good at like the editing sauce, short form might be better because it accentuates your unique abilities. We talked about audience matching kind of before. If you're looking specifically for YouTube, I want you to just to further go down that rabbit hole.

1:17:00What do you think wins on YouTube? What type of content wins now and will age well? Which game are you playing? Oh, yeah. Give me like we're in the Caleb episode right now. It's all about the positioning and what's the end game. Yeah. And mostly just because if you're going to do work, you want to make sure you're walking down the right path so you don't have to come back and restart. So if you have an offer or product, you should be able to pick which game pretty quick. If you don't and you just wanna like accrue a personal brand in a category, I think the high value niche-based educational content where you have proof and credibility is the best positioning you can go after.

1:17:41So for me, I mean, so just take me as an example. when i started i had no skills i mean like i was management consultant but basically no skills i had no skills no proof and no offers and no audience and nothing context what year was this this was like 2022 it was like two and a half years ago probably yeah jesus but i like lived as a professional for eight years so i at least could like talk and like write emails like i had some skills but no no like actual real entrepreneurial skills no audience no offer nothing how old are I'm 32 right now Forbes 30 under 30 is tripping We were talking about this I didn't know if you had the slot to make it I wasted my 20s selling my time to a corporation But basically And this is where a lot of people are I think listening You have no skills, no audience, no offer, nothing So the question is like what should you do, right?

1:18:31The first thing is not make content The first thing is go get skills Like actually get a valuable skill that people will pay for Develop that skill That to me, the best skills right now are content related. So it's like, can you generate attention? So it's almost like a self-fulfilling loop, but like the best place to start is to get a skill where you can actually generate attention on demand. That could be organic. It could be paid, although that's not really on demand, but you pay for it. It could be written. So there's different formats, but like you need to build a skill. You could also build skills in product.

1:19:07You could build skills in sales, right? There's like these core buckets that matter for business. But at the end of the day, like I said, business is just traffic, funnels, offers. So you need a skill in one of those three. Offers is building offers. You just read Hormozy's book, Problem Solved. Building a product is very tough. So that's like either physical or digital. That's a whole set of skills. Funnels, pretty transactional. You can learn funnels pretty quickly. Although there are people that have made a ton of money as like a specialist. Like your many chat guy, he's doing really well. He's like carved out a niche within funnels.

1:19:36Awesome. Or traffic. So you got to pick one of those three buckets and build hard skills. What does build hard skills mean? Do the thing and get the result that you would want to charge people to help them do So what I did at the beginning is I was like Offers is not as valuable as traffic because you could have traffic and monetize without an offer But you can't have an offer and monetize without traffic. So it's like traffic is the most Valuable thing in this next era for business. So I was like i'm gonna go become a weapon at traffic Like that's that's what i'm going to learn the best way to learn content is to make it and so you want to grow Your own channel On something now, this is where it gets like hard because you can't really grow a content channel on how to grow content without having done Content it's like a self-fulfilling loop people need to listen to that one.

1:20:20Yeah People shouldn't be giving content advice when they haven't actually mastered content and the way to master content is not to make content Advice from scratch. It's to like pick a different niche and learn how to do content in that niche So I picked tech and ai because that's what i'm interested in and I knew the brand deals would be lucrative but that's where I started. You have to build a skill first. So this whole question was like, what niche should someone pick basically or where should someone start on YouTube? If you're gonna do educational and you're gonna build an offer at some point, you need to have a skill.

1:20:48That skill either has to be the products, like I'm the best protein bar manufacturer in the world. Okay, so now you can make the protein bar and go on YouTube if that's the right play or you need to learn traffic, one of the two. So it starts there. Now, assuming you have a skill, you're like a really great tax accountant you're amazing at b2b sales whatever the best way to monetize that skill is with an owned offer either and there's many services agency info products coaching consulting there's a variety of different models sass build a personal brand around that expertise using high value content on youtube what is high value non-obvious tactically implementable?

1:21:35If I'm a tax accountant and I know a bunch of shit and it's vaulted in my brain, can you say that shit in a video so that when I, as a business owner, who would pay you for services, hear it, I can actually make a change in my business and save money, like get the result? If true, if that's true, I will trust you and eventually ascend down the funnel if I'm like the right type of customer for you. It is that simple. I think we're going hyper niche, hyper educational, hyper value driven. The non-value entertainment stuff will arb to zero. There will be AI content that is more personalized, like AI Netflix shows that are more personalized to me than something that a random person that doesn't know how to make content could make on YouTube.

1:22:18So it's like, you're going to lose that game. So that's a long-winded answer, but. So it's a race, being an attention expert just backed into building trust. It's all just about right now is about building distribution and trust. That's what it all backs into. Exactly. You want one-to-one trust at scale as fast as you can get it. And the way to get it faster is to have higher value density in your content and value, like I mentioned, is non-obvious tactically implementable things that can get someone the result. Let's dive more into YouTube. You say YouTube is a packaging game more than a content game.

1:22:47Yeah, 100%. I agree in a big way. Why do you think that it's that? Well, it's just like blogs is like a headline game versus like the actual body, right? You need to get the clicks so that people actually get into the world. and if they don't click in, the video might as well have been a black screen. And that's mostly, like everything in the world I view is either math or psychology, everything. And so that's purely just math. It's like, you don't have enough eyes on the video. You won't have eyes on the video if they don't click in, right? So it's like, you have to focus earlier in the funnel, which is the packaging.

1:23:17So YouTube is generous enough to put your shit in front of people for free, awesome. But if they don't click, it's worth nothing, you know? So that's why Mr. Beast, and Mr. Beast figured this out pretty early. He was like, yo, it's not that it has nothing to do with the video. The video obviously matters. But he's like, if we don't over-invest in the packaging and get people to the video, all that money on the video that we spent is worth nothing. So that's why you have to have a solution. If you're gonna play YouTube, you have to have a solution for packaging, titles, thumbnails, the actual idea itself kind of wraps in there, and the intro confirming that click.

1:23:52We can talk about that, but the core difference between short form and long form, Short form, the viewer doesn't have a choice. The feed puts it up. You don't need to do packaging. The hook is the package, but that's also part of the video. It's way easier to win on short form because your shit just gets served automatically. Long form is a completely different game. What percent of your time looking at the, let's just call it idea pre-production all the way down to the click of the button distribution, what percent of the time do you focus on pre-packaging? I don't spend any time personally because I hired that away.

1:24:21So my thing was - When you were doing it yourself though, pre-six months ago. I started with a team from day one. Wow. And I and I here's how I looked at it. YouTube is like a professional sport Short form was like fledgling It's getting to be professional, but it's still like winnable by anyone So I thought if i'm gonna play a professional sport and I don't have the professional skills I need to go pay for them from experts So I gotta go get money somewhere else to fund the youtube team so that I can have the a players from day one because I identified The packaging is critical and what is the packaging?

1:24:54coming up with the idea for the video, but most importantly, titling and thumbnailing that video so that it gets a click. There are savages that know everything about YouTube and everything about packaging that are out there selling agency services. I was like, I'm paying them immediately. That are not that costly. Yeah, they're not. 3K a month. And I can walk through what they do and we can put it in the description if you guys want the same people I use. But basically my YouTube team from day one was the ideas team, the strategy team, which does the packaging, my thumbnail designer who just executes, well, he comes up with the designs as well, but like they work in tandem.

1:25:28And then my editor. So all I do on YouTube personally is write the script and record it. That's it. We all have that dream trip we've been wishing we could go on. But too often life or usually price gets in the way. That's why Priceline is here to help you turn your dream trip into reality. With up to 60 % off hotels and up to 50 % off flights, you can book everything you need for your next adventure. Don't just dream about that next trip. Book it with Priceline. Download the Priceline app or visit Priceline.com and book your next trip today. Go to your happy price. Priceline. Spring is here and the shopping list is long.

1:26:08Time to make a Lowe's run. Buy three bags, get three free of stay green one cubic foot garden soil. Plus, right now members can earn four times the points on an eligible purchase. Start spring off strong with these deals and more. Our best lineup is here at Lowe's. Ballot through 325. While supplies last. Soil offer excludes Alaska and Hawaii. Loyalty program subject to terms and conditions. See lowes.com slash terms for details. Subject to change. Point boosters subject to exclusions and more terms apply. One time only offer. What do you think is the most common mistake that people make when they're doing that title thumbnail?

1:26:39Outside of just not doing it. Well, the most common one is they do it at the end. So like, we'll have just said it's the most important thing. And then they'll be like, skip. And then they'll make a video. They'll spend like 20 hours because really the editing takes the longest time, but it's the least important thing, I would say. So we'll spend all that time. They're burnt. They're like, oh my God, it's three days to make this video. Like, I don't even know if it's good. And they just do the packaging at the end. Like they're just, oh yeah, I'll throw some. Like that is the worst thing you can do.

1:27:07The reason they say make the title thumbnail first is both because you have to confirm the click in the first couple seconds, but also you want to put the most effort when you're the freshest on the most important thing, right? So the biggest problem is they just do it out of order. That's number one. Now, that's obviously not tactics that people want, but that's the truth. You should do it first. If you're designing the thumbnail yourself and you're titling the video yourself, you need to get that solved before you waste your time on anything else. Because if you can't solve that, the video is basically a dud.

1:27:40What's good though is formally, you could only A-B split test thumbnails. You can ask A-B split test titles. that does give you a little bit more malleability. I do think they should be done beforehand. But I think understanding and knowing the macro identity and like a rough idea of what it is and then knowing how you're going to open and make sure it reflects that. I would argue that we're moving into a world where that works as well too. Ideally, you have it all done, but as long as you have a good, good idea of where you're going to, and what are the key words you're going to use, I think that's enough.

1:28:05What we do is the titles are done, but we don't have the thumbnails done before I make the video. But that's because I know I have a guy that can execute it fresh. So I make the script I record it and then I hand the finished script to my thumbnail guy and my editor at the same time separately They edit it. He does the thumbnails it comes together But the only reason I do the thumbnails after is because mostly from a systems perspective and because I know this guy is a pro If you don't if you're doing it and you're not a pro you shouldn't wait till the end, right? So that's that's how I kind of do it The biggest thing is that People don't trigger what I call a desire loop in the title So if you think about how the psychology actually works when someone's on youtube You're scrolling scrolling scrolling scrolling your eye catches a thumbnail You don't know what it says yet, but you like lock in that's this like first awareness Angle the next thing is you read the title people look they look right below and they're like, what is the title?

1:29:03and they're trying to find key words that Trigger awareness around what I call a desire loop. So it's like you either need to you want to solve a pain or you're feeling FOMO about missing out on having solved that pain or there's like a benefit or desire that you have, right? So I was looking at the one you did with Oren. It was like, this is the most valuable marketing conversation you'll hear in 2025, right? It was something like that. FOMO, got a lesson here. A marketer seeing that is foaming at the mouth because they're afraid they're FOMOing that they're gonna miss some nugget, right? So you create a desire loop.

1:29:37There's a, they have the desire to need to know that information. The thumbnail then, after they see that title, they go back to the thumbnail. That thumbnail needs to complement and amplify that desire. It doesn't need to repeat the words because it's just another canvas for you to increase that desire. So if you would have said on the thumbnail, marketing conversation, that does nothing because you already said it's the most valuable marketing conversation. What you said in the thumbnail is, I figured out the cheat code or like I solved the cheat code, which ratchets up that desire even more because now I'm like, damn, this guy must know it.

1:30:10I have to click. So if you're a marketer or a business owner who wants to solve marketing, you're going to click on that. Guys, it's the dopamine, more cheat codes. In short, thumbnail, title, thumbnail, intro. They look at the thumbnail first and the title, reaffirm and then they go in. Yeah, and so that's how it goes. The most important thing to understand about YouTube is like the thumbnail title's job is to get the click. Okay, once you get the click, their job is done. The intro's job is to confirm the expectation that confirm that desire loop immediately So if if you say this is the greatest marketing conversation of all time and you and I click I better be hearing in the first five seconds something about marketing to validate that you're not bait and switching me, right?

1:30:53So the intro's job is to confirm that and then get you to the first main dopamine hit in the body Once you get to that first dopamine hit it should come within like 30 to 60 seconds. Hopefully People will have forgotten what was on the title thumbnail like the title thumbnail does not it's like discarded It's like a rocket you blast the rocket up the booster Well, shout out elon But like before that the booster was just falling in the in the ocean discarded His job is just to get the rocket up there Same thing with the packaging the packaging job is just to get you to the intro The intro's job is just to confirm the click and get you to the dopamine hit that dopamine hit is meant to Tease you That there's value here.

1:31:30You should keep watching but at the dopamine hit the title and thumbnail is being forgotten like i guarantee if you're watching this right now you forgot what the title was and what the thumbnail said i guarantee it and that's because we're i mean we're probably an hour and a half in but like your brain is like a gerbil you can't you're caching the information like every 15 seconds like you only could process so much at once in your brain yeah i would say too you said something there about a bait and switch like we've had that issue before where like the good stuff this is when we weren't doing it beforehand like the good stuff came 45 minutes in and we're like fuck we want to make it the title and thumbnail but then they're gonna think we're just reorder it bait and switching them this was early in the game where we didn't even realize that yeah you can cut in that and reorder the thing is you you want clickbait you don't want bait and switch right you want to bait and then give that's like the whole people are like oh it's too clickbait he's like no you want clickbait i'm trying to beta click.

1:32:26But when they click, I want to give them the bait. I don't want to switch. Right? That's the whole nuance. That's a good way to put it. When you're looking in YouTube Studio, what are those big metrics that you're evaluating? So again, with the metrics, I try not to go too deep on the metrics because it's the same logic around the inputs. But overall, there's really two ways to approach YouTube. There's from a business perspective, like I want dollars out and there's from the media perspective, like I want views. If you're playing the business game, you don't actually care about views. You care about on target views.

1:33:01Really, you care about dollars per view. If you could make a metric that says, I got 5 ,000 views on this video and it generated$50 ,000, that's$10 per view. This video had 300 views, but it generated$300 ,000. That's $1 ,000 per view. I should make more of the one that got the most dollars, right? If you're a business owner, that's how you should actually look at it. The metrics in YouTube are not built for that, right? The metrics in YouTube are built for the media side because they want more views because they monetize off ad revenue. So if you're looking in YouTube studio, typically you look at the one of 10 ranking because you're trying to see like relative performance, but that only matters if you care, if you're playing the media game and you want more views.

1:33:39So the reality is you're only, it's only as good as the tools you have. And so for me, like, and for everyone, you only have YouTube studio. So when I look, I'm basically looking at CTR, click-through rate, which is how what percent of people that my thumbnail was being shown to are clicking. But that's a noisy metric. You could have that be high in the video, do worse. You could have it be low in the video, do high. It's not clean. And I'm also looking at the one of 10 relative ranking. And roughly, here's how I'm breaking down my analytics process. If the video is, again, for the media game, if the video is a one, two, or three of 10, I'm letting it go.

1:34:14Because it's outperforming the relative ranking. What I'm trying to do is study what I did in that one so I can replicate it again. There's a lot of variables that go into a YouTube video, like hundreds of things. So it's tough to like isolate one change and be like, that was the reason this one did better. Typically it's conflating factors. So it's kind of hard to like extract that learning, but that's, that's like the, the one path. If it's a four, five, six, four, five, six out of 10, like ranking wise. So the only thing I look at in YouTube studio is the one of 10 ranking. And the one of 10 ranking is just like, what rank out of your last 10 videos is this one relative to views?

1:34:53But it's a very, like I said, it's for all the caveats, it's a crude metric. So if it's a one out of 10, that's the best. If it's a 10 out of 10, that's the worst. One, two, and three out of 10 signals that it's outperforming relative to the field of my own videos. So it's the best apples to apples metric you can get for your own channel. If it's a four, five, or six out of 10, it's kind of like middle of the pack. I'll again still leave it but i'll try to figure out Was there something different usually if it's a four five six relative to a one two three It's just the idea tam was smaller, right?

1:35:23So if I made a video about storytelling, that's a big tam versus a video about Systematizing your short-form content engine. That's kind of a small tam So it's like if I see that small that six out of ten I can't really hold myself Like in too much contempt like like negatively because It was a smaller idea. So like it's going to get less views So that's why that metric is kind of weak. I think most people want to know what happens if you see a 7, 8, 9, or 10 out of 10, like you see a low performer. Typically what I do is there's only one thing you can change in real time. It's the title thumbnail.

1:35:56You can always switch the title thumbnail. So if it's 7, 8, 9, or 10, I'll ask my ideas. Guy like, yo, this is not performing well. Do you think we should switch the title to this? Usually I'll come to him with a guess for why it's not performing well. And he'll say yes or no, and we'll repackage it. Or we just let it go and we try to say, what didn't work this time? Let's take that for next time. It's so hard to get conclusive evidence for anything. I mean, if you do a thumbnail test and you do three different thumbnails, and one of them is like, I've seen as high as 45 % compared to the other ones, and it's still not enough conclusive evidence.

1:36:29It's got to be almost over 50%. Because they're with all other things consistent. What you should do is once one of the three is breaking out, set that one as the winner. And ideally you make two more that are closer to that one to test all three. Another dopamine hit. Love that, doing that. I think another big thing, and I mentioned it in the Caleb episode, is forget if you're playing the media game, one of those first two buckets, but if you're playing the consumer game or the B2B SaaS game, soft skills, offline stuff, understanding and knowing, an example. For certain episodes, I get texts from certain people.

1:37:03and the intellect of that human that texts me saying they got a lot of value out of the episode. I mean, I've gotten one text from people and I'm like, wow, this person got value from this episode. Like you have to take that into account on their bucket three, four, five. And those things don't show up on the stat sheet, right? So it's like, the problem with analytics is there's so many conflating variables on the analytics side. And there's so many conflating inputs that drive those variables that really the best way to improve and I don't say this in a way to be annoying. You wanna find somebody that knows what they're doing that can objectively look at the inputs and be like, this, this, and this, we're not good.

1:37:44Look at this, this, and this as a better example and improve that way. It's not that you have to have a coach, but you need, that's what Mr. Beast had. He had three or four homies that were all about the same skill level. One of them would make a video and the other three would look at it and be like, nah, these things are off. And you have objective feedback at somebody at your level or one level above, that's what you need because there's too much variability in the things that could change. There's 20 variables that drive the performance. Nobody is gonna be able to look on their own with emotion and be like, yeah, that was definitely like the hook was too, they're not gonna be able to take emotion out of it.

1:38:18So you need somebody that actually knows what they're doing to give you that feedback. That's the best way to improve, period. I have a very strong stance on this, specifically to YouTube. I think you 100 % do need a coach and an expert. And I mean, again, we were, I don't know, two, three, four episodes in, we paid money for very high level people. Fuck, I would have paid four times the amount of money that I paid for that. So I definitely think that you can get from a, I mean, even listening to podcasts like this, like you could really get to top 10 % in the world and understanding and knowing YouTube if you just put in the time upfront.

1:38:51Yeah, 100%. I want to close up on YouTube and move on to the next topic. The last thing is I really want to touch on what are those like biggest kind of expectations mistakes that founders make when they're going onto YouTube? What do people fundamentally misunderstand about the platform? So many. Well, first of all, if you're playing the business bucket, you're not a YouTuber. You're an entrepreneur that's using YouTube as an effective free traffic source. So because of that, you want to look at YouTube just like you look at all other marketing channels, which is iteratively testing with data.

1:39:25You would not go into paid ads and put one ad out there and be like, oh man, it didn't work. And like, give up. You wouldn't, you'd be like, all right, I'll put a hundred out there and see what performs and double down. Like that's, that's, you would think of it with a science-based approach. YouTube's the exact same way. It's just people are more emotional about it because each rep takes longer. And really because they, I guess they're romanticized by the idea of being a YouTuber potentially, but you really want to look at YouTube like a series of iterative experiments. You have to go through the process of making a video, sucking, learning what didn't work, making a second video, et cetera.

1:40:00Just like I did with short form, you have to do the same thing with YouTube. The shitty part about YouTube is that every rep takes five days instead of one or seven days, right? If you're posting once a week. So it's like the growth is just slower. The iterative learning loop is slower. So the expectations are A, you don't need as many views as you think. You'd rather have on target views that convert to dollars. So that's great. Like you don't need a hundred thousand views. You could, you could a couple of thousand. I mean, a thousand, a couple thousand views is huge. You don't need a ton of views, but you're going to, it's going to take way longer than you think.

1:40:32Do not start YouTube unless you expect to put three to five years into it. Like I've built this whole program that'll come out in the next month or so where I'm really trying to operationalize the playbook for YouTube for business owners. Cause it's really not out there. A lot of the teachers are all like entertainment focused. My goal is that if you go through that in 12 months, you can have a machine that's driving meaningful lead gen. But that doesn't mean in 12 months, you're going to be a celebrity. That doesn't mean in 12 months, you're going to have a hundred thousand views every single video.

1:41:01Like it just takes so much more work than people think so many more reps than people think. So that's the biggest, the biggest expectation mismatch is really the entire expectation of what, how fast people expect it to go. It's so slow. Yeah. I mean, the two other huge things to touch on there too, was one is it's evergreen. It lives forever. People can go back and binge there. It lives forever. Especially like the links in the description live forever. And then secondly, it's long form usually for the most part. And you can disseminate that down to short form and cross pollinate and all the other platforms.

1:41:33So it's like the best of the best is you get all this content and you can just chop it up. It's other stuff. You can even chop the videos into words and newsletter, et cetera, et cetera. Yeah, the way I think of it is like every video is a sales agent. If your content is aligned with your offer, every video is a sales agent. Working 24 7 for you that at any moment can reactivate get juiced for free to all of the buyers Which is insane Shorts are not really that way shorts are a little bit more short term. Obviously like it's in the name They only last for the half-life on shorts is 72 hours, maybe five days and then if if you really share one on a different feed, you might be able to get a second life YouTube's evergreen unless you make news-based content.

1:42:16That's time sensitive. So I mean, I can't emphasize how powerful YouTube is as an engine, depending on the game you're playing, of course, as the caveat. It's so powerful. Yeah. And I think another interesting thing with YouTube is to tie a bow on that too, is you have the ability to repackage after the fact in title and thumbnail. So you actually can revive stuff. I mean, there's stories of videos that were left for dead and nine months later, they changed the title and packaging and it goes crazy. So you have way more at bats technically. All right. So let's shift a little bit towards distribution and growth.

1:42:48You obviously have a massive following across a ton of different platforms. I guess let's just start with, what do you think is the biggest myth about virality? I think the biggest myth is that you need virality. I don't think you do. I think this idea of like on target views versus total views is kind of the fundamental thesis that I believe. And I, I didn't always believe that because when I started doing the tech and AI, which is fundamentally a media play, I needed more views, like the more views, the more money. So like that, cause that was the media. Cause that's a media play, right? So brand deals, brands will look at your last 10 videos and based on an average of the views, the engagement, and then you're following, they use those three metrics to judge how much they'll offer for a deal.

1:43:31And you can obviously negotiate it up, but like, that's the band that you can charge is based on that. So fundamentally, if you're playing the media game, you have to have more views, which means you're going for virality, which means you're broadening the ideas. You're broadening the TAM. You're making them more sensationalist, more shocking. There's a bunch of like tactics you can do to get more views. But the myth is that like, that's not actually where the money comes from. In the media game, yes, but there's a cap on how much you can charge for brand deals. like in varies niche to niche but the most these huge mega celebrity people that have seven million followers they're not actually getting that much for brand deals because their audiences are so wide the brands now know they're not worth it but like the real truth is that dollar per view or on target views that convert to the offer is where all the money is that's where all the actual fandom, like category level fandom comes from is depth in a narrower slice.

1:44:31So that kind of applies to like myths around virality and positioning and strategy. But I fundamentally believe that to be true for sure on long form and on short form, you could make the argument both ways because of the way short form works. So you could win short form playing the views game and you could win playing the niche game. But YouTube for sure, you don't want broad virality. So subscribers and followers basically mean nothing to you. It's just a proxy to people that are uneducated for how much they should trust you. This is how the psychology works. Someone sees a video on a short form feed and they either judge this is good or bad to them.

1:45:09Then they look to the right and they see the metrics, the likes and the comments and the shares or the saves. If those metrics are above a minimum credibility line and that line oscillates, there's no like perfect number, they will trust you more. But if it's below a line, they'll be like something's off here. This should I liked it But no one else did because like the group thing kicks in They'll then click to your profile And if your followers are below the minimum credibility follower number They will not trust you. They won't follow you. It sucks. But like that's the case. I completely agree if it's above they will so followers matters If you're doing brand deals, it's one of the three attributes they price on So it really matters if you're doing brand deals and if you're not it does matter in a binary state whether or not someone trusts you But the difference between 180 ,000 followers and 365 ,000 followers is nothing.

1:45:56That doesn't matter at all. So I only want an incremental follower or subscriber if it's on target to the offers that I'm selling. Yeah, I think there's like a minimum amount of followers you need to have on each platform to be like, quote unquote, real. I think Twitter, it's a couple thousand. I think Instagram, over 10 ,000, you're real. Probably the next lever is probably 100. I feel like with YouTube, it's probably 10 ,000 subs. So I think just racing to get to that minimum level where people can look at you and be like, okay, this person is doing something. And the same goes for engagement.

1:46:23And the blue check used to be a proxy for that even harder really than the number of followers. But now that's gone because you can pay for it. Yeah. The engagement stuff too, is sometimes absolutely criminal. Like you see people with massive followings and they have no engagement. And it's just like, and the thing is an unsophisticated viewer would not know the difference. And so if you're selling a commodity product, you can pay for followers and not have the engagement and a sophisticated viewer might not realize. But if you're trying to do a brand deal game where a marketer actually knows or a game, a high ticket offer game where like fake engagement doesn't matter, that's not going to help you.

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1:47:40The more you do, the more cash back you can earn. Plus, there's no monthly fee or minimum balance. Sign up now at Venmo.com slash college card. The Venmo MasterCard is issued by the Bancorp Bank NA. Select schools available. Venmo stash terms and exclusions apply at Venmo.me slash stash terms. Max$100 cash back per month. What are those like key signals to the algorithm, especially going into 2026? Because obviously with all of this, the more narrow and the better you feed the algorithm, just the more reach you're going to get in general. What are those key signals? Yeah, so it all goes back to audience matching, which is this fundamental principle.

1:48:14Like if there were the three core frameworks that I would die, the hills I would die on, it's content minutes, audience matching, and then probably like anti-views, we'll say, like the on target versus virality thing we just talked about. So on the audience matching piece, fundamentally the algorithms have one job. It's keep people on the platform watching because if they watch, they watch more ads, if they watch more ads, the platforms make more money. That's the only job of the algorithm. So how do you keep people on? You give them what they want to see. How do you give them what they want to see?

1:48:44You know exactly what type of content is coming from that channel so that you can bucket it accordingly to give it to people that want to watch it. So it's like, if I make my first video about tech, my second video about science, my third video about basketball, the algorithm is not really sure what my fourth video is going to be about. They don't know. It could be any of those three. It could be a fourth thing. Now they're transcribing it in real time. So you'd say, okay, well, who cares what the three previous ones were? they'll transcribe it and figure it out. But they've built a sample pool based on the people who've liked your stuff before, who've watched your stuff previously.

1:49:18So in that sample pool, a third of them like the basketball thing, a third of them like the science thing, a third of them like the tech thing. So when they send out your next video, the data coming back is weak. Like the people don't watch and engage with it to the level they would expect if the channel was focused and narrow on one topic. And so I can go back and explain that again. It's such a tough pendulum you're talking about now too because if you're playing the media game and you want views, you want to go wider from a topic perspective. You always want to be within one topic, but wider, I mean like within the topic.

1:49:47So if you make content about marketing, wider means you could do a paid marketing, you could do viral marketing, like different subtopics, but you always want to stay within marketing. You don't want to then go to like the NBA, right? Those are like two completely different things. So even if you're playing the media game, you want to be within one slice. You just want to be the most shockworthy, sensational, wide within that slice type of topics you want. That's how you get more views. If you want to be narrow to drive to a specific offer, you don't necessarily need that, right? You can be way closer.

1:50:19Does that make sense? Yeah. What about all those other different elements? Is it specifically transcribing the audio to understand and know the topic or is it formats from a visual perspective or is it audio only? Tough to know. I don't think the AI models are good enough to be able to ingest, especially for long form, like a full video and really break down like a specific type of cinematography and match that. I don't think they're sophisticated enough for that. The main thing is they're transcribing in real time and trying to basically build a context mapping of what the video is about. So in the video, if you say terminology, that's like more long tail keyword stuff that you say, it helps contextualize what the video is about.

1:51:00So you're basically, wow, it's like SEO, Like you're tagging words in the back end. The video is basically a long tail blog post, effectively. And you could say it's using the hashtags and the keywords. All that stuff it might be using, but that's like icing. The cake is the transcription. So what are you saying in the video? It's building a contextual map on that. Now what it does, because let me just double click on this because I kind of breezed over before. This is how the videos are actually, this is how the algorithm works. This is how they're sampling the videos. First, it builds a test sample pool.

1:51:34If you have some subscribers or followers, it'll be like some of your existing audience, some of your new audience. So let's just say 200 people. You post a video, the YouTube algo transcribes it, builds a topic map of what it's about, and it builds a 200 person sample pool. Some of subs, some of new, and it's trying to guess who would like this the most. Okay, so it blasts the video out to those people. Now on YouTube, are they clicking through the thumbnail to even watch it matters, but like on shorts, it doesn't matter. Based on that 200 person sample group, it's assessing, did they like and watch it more than usual, about the same as usual, or less than usual?

1:52:10If it's more than usual, they will build another sample group at one order of magnitude higher. So like instead of 200, it's 2000 people, but similar makeup, because now they know, oh shit, of the 200, those people liked it more than usual, we should go find more people like them. But if the signal comes back the same, or weaker, it's not going to boost it to cascadingly increase. Will it try another cohort of 200? Do they try and find it for you? Yeah, so if it's neutral, they may try another. If it's bad, they're going to throttle it pretty quick. So that's why like bad videos on YouTube or shorts get like 200 views total.

1:52:44The reason why is because that first sample group came back shitty. Like the data was bad and they're like, well, nobody wants to watch this. So like, let's not risk like getting, you know, turning people off the platform. And so knowing that what that should trigger in your mind is like, okay I need my existing followers to be really targeted on what i'm talking about so that when the Video samples them they like it and I need to be very consistent with the videos that I make the topically so that The same type of people like it over and over and over right so the algo can have like a consistent Audience demo to then build those concentric circles when you go broader The only way to get a ton of views is for the circle to get muddier and muddier right as it gets bigger Like if I make that storytelling video I made that got two million views The first group might have been my existing followers that just liked Me then the next group might have been people that liked storytelling Then the next group included like script writers and like cinematography.

1:53:41It started to get muddy But eventually it'll run out of people that like it and the video will throttle down That's how the algorithm actually works So if you make topics that are all over the place and you build a following that came from those all over the place topics, the sample data is going to be horrible on any video you post. And you're just going to be consistently getting shit signal back and it won't boost you. It's a lose-lose. You're not going to get the views that are playing the media game and you're going to be too wide to actually get people to convert a bucket three, four, five, the consumer B2B game.

1:54:09The best strategy is pick one topic and hammer that topic until retirement. Makes a lot of sense. What about from a content mix perspective? Like when you look at content, like an example, like when Roberto was on, he would try and have like an 80-20 or a 90-10 in relation to organic content versus paid. What's your system on from an output perspective if you're putting out like 10 different posts? Is it like, I'm going to do, you know, two on this micro topic, two on this micro topic, five paid, one. How do you look at your content output? For short form? Yeah, for short form. So most people that attack short form have like pillars or buckets, kind of like three to four groups.

1:54:46I think Oren talked about his specific pillars. That's typically what most people do. So for me on my tech channels, I'll have like science, sports tech, kind of like lifestyle tech, we'll say. So those are meant to be bangers. They're meant to be million plus views, meant to juice my numbers. So, you know, random company, Microsoft comes out with like a breakthrough on stem cells using an AI model. Let's break down what it is. Not educational at all. Just like tech related news meant for bangers. The second one is Gen AI tools. So like higgs field just released a new model. Here's what you can use it for And I totally agree that like if you're listening you're like those two have nothing to do with each other I agree i'm not very well optimized on my tech, which is why i'm I don't have millions of followers because I Did the opposite of what i'm describing I can only say what to do in hindsight Yeah, so like those those are the two main buckets and then the third is kind of like I like breaking down random thoughts on Stuff that most people wouldn't come up with so for example Disney announced that they're going to have like AI short form content on their IP.

1:55:51So you're going to see like Snow White alternate endings that people can make with like AI generate. Yes, kind of like an interesting thing. So that doesn't fit in any of those, either of those two buckets, but I'm like, I kind of want to like make a video explaining why I think they're doing this from a business strategy perspective. That makes me one of one, but it doesn't like fit. So if you look at that strategically and you were starting tech from scratch, you would never follow that model because they don't really align very well. News tech, Gen AI tools, like tactical tools, and then we'll call it business strategy meets tech.

1:56:25Those are kind of weird, right? But those are the three buckets that seem to work well for me and that I post and oscillate between. So by doing that though, one benefit is that I'll get brand deals from Abu Dhabi Racing. I'll get brand deals from F1. I'll get brand deals from Gen AI tools. Disney might even come. So like it does provide a broader surface area for brands to be like, hey, I've seen you make two of these in your last 100. We don't care that you don't specialize in that. We're interested in you just like doing it again. But I wouldn't suggest someone follow this like super disconnected pillar strategy.

1:56:59I think what Oren's doing is a lot more dialed within his like slice. Or different types of like topics and then he'll iterate every, you know, two, three months or a quarter and he'll layer on it. So I've tried to break into different segments, but those three are the ones that tend to be like, the ideas are the most interesting to me, they perform the best and the brands also want to pick. So it's like kind of like a good triangle. Yeah, and for people out there listening too, if and when you understand and know how to create content that demands attention, this F1 video, it may or may not make sense on your channel, but they may want to use it for their organic channels to get their views because they might have a different initiative than you and or use it for ads or for whitelisted or something.

1:57:37So the asset could go elsewhere. And I want to say like, What I just described with what i'm doing may be confusing to people because they might have listened to the principles and then heard my example and been like those aren't congruent I agree. My short form strategy is not optimized I didn't realize what to do until after I was too far down the pipe on that If you look at what I do on youtube, it is hyper precise on just Social media growth basically video content social media growth and the occasional youtube growth hyper-precise. I only talk about topics in that exact slice. And I can talk about the way I come up with topics for that, but very, very, very precise.

1:58:15And wouldn't you know, I'm the fast growing channel in that space. So this stuff really does work when you stay really narrow on one topic. You could argue like my tech channel should be at 800 ,000 million, one point, like I have tons of views on that, but the following is not that big because people follow when you have topic consistency and a Disney AI to Adobe to like random sports tech, they're not really related. So is the future different topics, different channels? Yeah. So if I had unlimited time, I would have 17 tech channels, one for robotics, one for Gen AI, one for news tech, one for science tech.

1:58:50I would break them out topically and just go hammer, like very, very, very narrow and just hammer volume. Someone just started out, they should just go super, super narrow on one channel. That's where you when because the way the way to think about term ownership like personal branding i think i talked about this in a youtube video like in the last couple weeks people in their brain only have enough room for two to three hundred names generally think of it like the dunbar's number but for the internet but as soon as you say a term you delete all those rows and you just think of the person that's associated with that term so when i say many chat you think of that guy gannon But I wouldn't think of gannon as like one of the 200 people that i'm is just like swirling around in my head He's associated to the term.

1:59:35So the way you get Notoriety and fandom quicker like cult category cult fandom is what I call it Attached to a term The terms that are easiest to attach to are the niche terms that nobody owns yet If I say business, who do you think of no one? Yeah, because it's too big. So it's like you want to find if you do AI robotic factory robotics. If you own that lane, well, there's less brands that will pay you, but the brands that are there will pay you a lot because you own that category. So it's way easier to start way more niche. Wow. Shout out to the people that own those big macro terms. Yeah, like Hormozy owns business, you could say, or like one of the people that owns business.

2:00:16And shockingly, the only person that potentially owned business before is like Gary Vee, maybe. He owns attention. I think attention is the big word for him. And so to say, it's like bidding on keywords on Google, right? To say you could go from zero to owning the keyword business as a personal brand in like five years is pretty insane. But Hormozzi did that. I want to talk, you talked a little bit about owning a word. I want to talk about owning your quote unquote audience or community. How are you moving people from your quote unquote least community, social, onto your own community like your newsletter and other platforms?

2:00:50What are some key strategies there? It's all lead magnets. lead magnets are like the i'm just trying to think of a metaphor it was getting real nerdy in my head i was like lead magnets are the hemoglobin that takes the oxygen we'll can that lead magnets are really the the most important like rails like if you think funnels it's all lead magnets right so i can walk through exactly what we do yeah effectively there's a few types of lead magnets and all a lead magnet is is getting someone's email in exchange for free value that's all it is So you've got the one-off pdf or doc. So if I say here's my storytelling framework By the way, I went through that really fast if you want a doc where it's written down the links below So that is a lead magnet where you're giving me your email for free and i'm giving you a doc that is like a template or Captures what I just said.

2:01:39So that's one that's the easiest one Number two would be like a three or five day free email series So it's like a doc, but it gets delivered via email and it gets delivered on three or five succeeding days So that could be like if you want to learn virality. I know there's a lot to learn So I don't want to just give you like a 20 page pdf I'll i'll tear it out for you over the next five days put your email in and i'll get it So we have one of those virality blueprint.com. That's like our Landing page that leads you to the five-day email series. That's a lead magnet Third one would be a free community That you're getting their email on the way in so you can be like hey, we have a free community There's a bunch of cool people in there.

2:02:15There's a bunch of free curriculum in there We're in there if you want to join the community. It's completely free. Give us your email That's pretty compelling because it's free and there's a lot of shit in there We have one of those called wavy world. So that would that would be the third one fourth one would be like A landing page or a sales page where you have like a wait list, right? Fifth one would be a form So like in the description to this video if you want our editors, we're gonna have a form in there you filled out I get your email. So There's a variety of different flavors. There's probably a few more but like those are the main ones that we use and the whole goal is can we use content to get you to email?

2:02:50Because if we can get you to email and you have a problem that I have an offer for, I will sell you on it. Because people open email at crazy rates and they buy from email and they trust email. It's like the email is the only place it's like not fully taken over by algorithms. You still like kind of control your own inbox, even though you have a bunch of spam from like random brands. We have 60 % open rate on our emails. Yeah, it's crazy. It's insane. So all you have to do, Like I shit you not, you can build a seven-figure business just doing content to a lead magnet that's ideally connected. You give them a lead magnet, you get their email, you put them in a drip, either an automated sequence that goes out as soon as you get it, or you send them once a week recurring.

2:03:31And eventually you ask for them to buy the thing you have to sell. If you just do that, you could probably do eight figures in revenue. Just that. Jesus. and you are organically and authentically integrating this in any and every which way you can into any content on my podcast, on your YouTube, on your Instagram, anywhere and everywhere. Is there like a specific cadence that you do that or is that just top of the mind? I've probably done four of them on this already. Like, cause I talked about the editors, talked about how crazy they are. And like, if you want the editors go below, like that is an ad, but we didn't have to pay for that ad.

2:04:04And it's, I call it a native embed. So this is, this is a, actually, yeah. When you asked what are some common things about YouTube that people get wrong? Here's a huge one that we didn't cover. Native embeds. When you make content, the goal is to hypnotize the viewer into forgetting that they're watching your content. Like you, you give, you lull them into a delusional state. Basically. That's how I look at it. Like on YouTube. That sounds devious. Yeah. Well, but yeah, it's only white hat. It's white hat. No black hat. But basically it's like. 20 minute video my goal is that you click I confirm the click I get you the first hit of dopamine I get you the second hit of dopamine and then i've lulled you into this hypnotic state where you keep watching because you like it and it's also helping you If you break the hypnosis For an ad That is the dumbest thing you can do.

2:04:57Oh So like if I have a video about storytelling and i'm like We'll be right back by the way if you want to buy this couch like that's the dumbest thing You bring someone back up to the surface and they're like, whoa, where am I? And they realize they're watching a video that they don't need to be watching They should be doing work and they leave so it putting, I call these non-native ads. Putting non-native ads in content is the dumbest way to make content. The easiest way is, or the best way is make the video and then natively integrate the thing that you need to say, like your own products or you're getting paid to say in a way that does not break the hypnosis.

2:05:33And the way to do that would be weave it into the conversation or set up the conversation so that the lead magnet is the answer. Is this a bad time to say that we're sponsored by many? and we're out to go to a ManyChat ad. No, but no, a perfect example would be, I talked about Gannon, right? So when I talk about that, you should have been like, and do you use ManyChat? And then we talk about ManyChat for four minutes and that's it, that's the ad. You know ManyChat is a sponsor. Yeah, I know. Yeah, by the way. You didn't know that. Or did you know that? No, I did from the last episode. Oh, did you?

2:05:58Yeah, yeah, yeah. I was talking last episode. But that's an example of like, if you break away to a new clothes, new scene, new shirt, because you're trying to like systematize it, that breaks the hypnosis. I'm at a point now where like very,

2:06:12They're not the authentically integrated, but they're actual ad reads, but I put them into the right part of the conversation. Yeah, yeah. Like the ManyChat ad read is going to go while we're talking about it. Yeah, which is the best thing you can do other than natively embedded. Exactly. Yeah. Yeah, no, I completely agree with that. Also, one point on that, if you see the AVD is like eight minutes, you should put the interrupting non-native ad after eight minutes. And like the brand should want you to put it before eight minutes, right? Because like eight minutes would be the time where the average person leaves.

2:06:40So if you don't want to break the hypnosis, before that point. So if you think about, if you have your own native embeds, you want to put those in as early as you can and then as often as you can without alienating the viewers. Any of your partnership sponsors. I would also argue too, if you're a partner or sponsor and you're in towards the end, obviously you're not getting the whole cohort of the viewers, but anybody that stays towards the end, it's that much more sticky. And I think the conversion rate at the end is high. Yeah. I think it's high at the end. I think it's, I mean, it's highest right at the beginning, but yeah, like the people that you get the click, they, for 10 seconds, they start the content.

2:07:18They're like, all right, these are our sponsors. Like that's the worst thing you can do. Now, if you've called fandom on podcasts, you can get away with it because people would just skip the ads, but still they want to listen. But if you're just trying to grow, that's the worst thing you can do. What we do say though, in the beginning and also guys do it now is make sure you subscribe to the channel. I think there's 83 % of people that listen that aren't subscribed. Make sure you guys subscribe back to the show. Last part on distribution and wrote before we get into the future of kind of content and attention, just tying it up.

2:07:43What do you think is the number one biggest hack on short form? The best hack is to look at your own content for winners. So if you were to prioritize where to study to get new ideas, the highest is shit you've made that has worked before, make it again. Now, if you don't have your own winners, you want to look at the best people in the space with as much, as many of those Lego bricks held constant as possible, look at what they've made and remake it. If you don't have those, you should be using sandcastles because we can give you those. That's really the hack. It's like, don't go out on an island and try to reinvent the wheel before you even know how to bike.

2:08:23Go and study the people that have already won and look at what won for them and remake your own version. If you just do that for the first 100 reps, you will close the gap on a lot of the unknowns and you'll do well along the way. Yeah, I think like from looking at those kind of seven Lego blocks from a quote unquote first mover advantage, I think you win on taking like six of the seven blocks are the winners throughout and then being first mover on one of those seven blocks. Which I think that's what we've done in a good way on a visual perspective. Let's transition over to the future of content and attention.

2:08:57I want to just start with what major shifts do you see coming just in content and distribution? I know we've talked about a couple of them. I don't know if you want to riff a little bit more on kind of these new narrow channels and breaking down your identity and the kind of sub identities. So AI content's coming like a wave, tidal wave, tsunami. It's coming. I think the more commoditized the content is, the faster it'll be replaced. So Twitter, for example, people are already building, they already have AI content machines that's pumping out text-based written content via AI. Interestingly, the counter to this is that, I tweeted about this, when people see that your content is made with AI, it's almost like a soft cancellation.

2:09:44Like the new cancellation is being caught by using AI. But the funny thing is everyone wants to use AI to go faster, but you can't get caught that you're using AI or else you'll get soft canceled. So it's hilarious, this hilarious dichotomy right now. But effectively, if you map content from easy to hard in terms of how to replicate, AI is gonna come like a wave across that entire spectrum. So the last thing to be replaced will be live streams like three-hour uncensored uncut riffs with two people AI will not be able to replace that very easily without you being able to tell Then long form is like the next best Etc.

2:10:17You walk all the way back until you get to twitter So go hard and go unique. That's really what it is. Yeah again It all goes back to which of the five games you're playing because if you're playing the media game You got to go broad big sensationalist capture as much attention as possible and siphon the dollars. Because in three years, that's dead. I wouldn't recommend starting with that game, to be honest. But like, if that's the game you want to play because you don't know what the offer is and you don't want to be an entrepreneur, that's the strategy. I'd argue it's two years too. I don't think three.

2:10:45Yeah, maybe two, maybe three. If you want to go the other route where you're trying to build a business that can endure this like AI wave, you want to go niche. You want to own a term as fast as possible. You want to go signature and one of one. What is one of one? What unique experiences, credibility, proof, or lived experiences do you have that you can storytell around, that you can make content infusing into that can't be replicated by a beginner? That's where I think you want to play. I think you want to get really good at a skill that is AI-proof. The issue is most skills are not AI-proof.

2:11:24So fundamentally, no matter where the AI ball lands, until humans are not the buyer, attention will always matter. The thing you sell them, the product will always matter. Like a human brain will still decide to buy stuff. At some point, maybe that won't be true in like a B2B perspective. It might just be agents buying from other agents. And in that world, all of the fundamentals about traffic and offers completely change. But like, let's assume that world is like five to 10 years out. I think for the next five to 10 years, you want to understand psychology and attention as much as possible. Every company is a marketing company.

2:12:02Every company is a content company. So that's where I would like invest all my time in understanding. And to have a moat, it's all the things we already said. Signature, one of one, hyper niche. Yeah. Dan Coe says it really good. He talks about future proof and he talks about understanding four things, marketing, sales, writing, and speaking. And I completely agree. And content and copywriting is a kind of like a big thing that can kind of drive all four of those. I'd love to know, like, how do you leverage AI just in your world, in your business, AI tools, anything and everything you use on the AI side?

2:12:35Yeah. Well, sandcastles.ai, that's my tool. I use that a lot. That's meant to be like a content workflow tool. So it's not necessary. It's called AI. The writing is AI, but the whole product is not ai so i use that a lot for content we could talk about that if you want i obviously use chat gbt claude gemini honestly i love gemini i think gemini is overtaking chat gbt in terms of like natural normal day-to-day llm activities wow just like searching never i don't use gemini oh gemini is cracked it's sick i've moved from chat gbt to claude yeah so claude claude and gemini are my two favorite chat gbt is like a distant third right now too agreeable chat gbt yeah too agreeable i think in general they're hurting we don't need to get into this but strategically they're going have a problem because they don't have a cash machine like the others.

2:13:20But I think Gemini and Claude are the best too. So I use those for daily tasks. And then on the Gen AI image and video side, I don't use it a ton. Certain spots we'll use for certain use cases. All my editors use it a lot and they have subscriptions. Higgsfield is my favorite for AI image and video. Basically, Higgs field it I hope Higgs field doesn't clip this but no free ads Higgs field is doing to AI video and image what Instagram filters did to photography so the way Instagram used filters to allow the average person to make their photos presentable usable creative feed Higgs field is doing the same thing by templatizing AI image and video creation in a way that's very intuitive so I really like Higgs field free pick is the other one that we work with a lot they have this cool like node-based editor called Spaces.

2:14:15So to give you a sense, maybe we can show this on the screen. Right now I've got my Gen AI guy building a workflow where we put in one line of a script or one image and it spits out like five to 10 AI generated videos that are all in an aesthetic that match our brand that could represent that line in different ways. And so at scale, my editors can just drop in the lines of my script and then get assets made all automatically. And it's like a, it's like a visual workflow, a node-based. And these are assets used for what, like B-roll? Yeah, B-roll in shorts. So just like, they might only be on the screen for one to two seconds, but like just to have more assets, if we can't find them from the brand is huge.

2:14:56So we're using that, but I don't use AI tools a ton, even though I am one of the like top AI guys. And I think the reason why is because when you have a really particular way you do stuff, especially on the writing front, the minute I can sense a quality loss, I won't.

2:15:37of total 5G unlimited three month plan or hire. External port in and ID verification. Available only in total wireless stores. Limit to four devices per account. Tradeoff quality for speed when it comes to writing and ideas. And so there just aren't that many, like AI is very bad at generating new thought. It's very good at compressing a shit ton of stuff down. So if you're making a YouTube video and you have a hundred page document, it could be amazing at turning that into an eight page script. But if you're like, what are the six best ways to do hooks and you're trying to come up with novel ideas, it's not good at generating novel ideas because it's trained on what already exists, right?

2:16:10I think compressing, combining, but not ideating. Combining is another really good one too, is I like taking random stuff, PDFs, videos, this, that, and then just kind of throwing it all together and just cleaning it up for me. The interesting thing is you would think someone like me who is willing to try anything, I'm obviously emotionless when it comes to like winning. You would think someone like me would just all day be in the trenches with AI tools trying to figure out like a better mousetrap. But even me, I don't enjoy a task that I know how to do well in 10 minutes. I don't enjoy taking an hour to do it worse.

2:16:47I don't enjoy that. And like - That's where the AI bunny rabbit comes in. The AI bunny rabbit is figuring it out. Exactly. And until he can get it to one or two minutes and not lose the quality. I think we're in this weird, like this weird inner in-between period where the tools exist to where people that spend all day on them can get marginal gain, but they're not good enough to where an average person, like let alone me who's deep on this stuff, can get 10X output with like the stuff I would need, content, writing, et cetera. So we're in this like weird middle ground where there is an arbitrage if you can spend time learning how to set up these systems.

2:17:21Yeah, but today it's not an overwhelming amount. What do you think is the next like major platform? Do you think anything new is going to pop up or just iterations off the current ones? I think we'll see a zag For human-only content against the zig of ai content. I made a video on my youtube channel breaking down like how I think ai content will play out And there's like four paths all paths lead to or like how the social platforms will treat ai content All paths lead to them allowing it For their interests So I think there will be a zag to that where there'll be like the etsy of human only Human verified whether it's like biometric or whatever content I don't necessarily, that doesn't mean that's going to be the popular platform because typically people like junk food.

2:18:06So like if the AI gets better than the humans, which it will, just from that math perspective, people will prefer to see personalized stuff. That's like amazing versus human made stuff. That's whatever. Maybe that's where the blockchain will come in and be super useful to really, really verify. Yeah. A hundred percent. So we'll have that for sure. That'll come. I think once we have AR as like a primary vehicle, so like the smart glasses, you'll have another native type social experience to that. Like it makes no sense to wear those glasses and scroll like this with it in your eye. That makes no sense to have a feed.

2:18:41So there'll be a reinvention of whatever content looks like in an AR world and then eventually like a VR 3D world. and I'm sure someone will come out with a new mousetrap but the reality is Instagram got caught flat-footed on TikTok and they won't get caught flat-footed again. So whoever innovates on anything that's even remotely popular the big boys will rip it. So I don't think we'll see another like ChatGPT or OpenAI tried to make Sora 2 like the feed of AI-generated content but there's actually and a lot of people are using it but there's a pretty violent community against the like AI slop niche.

2:19:23You see those in the comments. Yeah. So maybe, maybe Sora 2 becomes Sora 7 and that becomes amazing at like Netflix on demand type content. So I could see something there, but I don't think there's going to be a huge new thing that comes out of nowhere. That's not what I just mentioned. I guess the big question to put a pin on that is someone that's understands content marketing attention in a big, big way. how much longer do you think we have for this content distribution arbitrage where people can get from zero to a hundred thousand followers in three, four months? How much longer do we have until this is over?

2:19:57So there's, there's two questions there. There's how much longer do we have of being able to do it? And then how much longer do we have of it meaning anything? Because if, if today there are 50 ,000 people with over a million followers and tomorrow there's two million accounts because a lot of them are AI generated, then the value of having a million followers goes down, right? So I think we have three to five years, probably two years on the short form platforms, and then closer to five years on the longer form before AI content is indistinguishable, but actually so, and is accessible to enough people that are not experts to be able to actually flood the feeds.

2:20:38Rough guess. I mean, this is what I want to say. This era will close. Like the, the same, the same way people would probably thought in 2020, like the Zerp era where they're like, oh, I should have got it then. Cause like I had a two-year window and it closed this like free distribution at scale for free. I said free, free distribution at scale from let's say 2007 or eight to probably 2028 RIP 20 year window. It's never coming back ever again. That's ever. You had a 20-year window where you could make shit and have free amplification to infinity. And you could argue, okay, the 2008 to like 18 era, the tools were worse and like there were not for you feeds.

2:21:23So let's just say the for you era is this Gen 3 of social or whatever from 2020 to 2028, eight-year window. If you didn't eat during that window, you're never getting that back. And so what does that look like after 2028? Maybe it's pay to play which is basically just paid ads. Maybe there's a bedrock of ai generated free content that is so competitive and so data optimized that like You just can't cut through Via human and so the only way to cut through is that platforms will sell you a ten dollars per post option To cut a cut above it. That's probably that's one very legitimate path where we end up And I guarantee when people are paying 10 bucks a post They're going to be pissed that they didn't go harder during this era I'm like I couldn't be more pounding the table like you have about three years To just go ham and because the because of the supply demand dynamics and the way for you algorithms work You can you can do serious damage in three years.

2:22:24You could build a 50 million dollar business in three years I mean you've had many people on here that have basically done that So now's the time. Guys, we're going to give 15 seconds of silence to pop a video of the attention guru, the attention Yoda, Gary Vaynerchuk. Let's just watch him for 15 seconds because you just sounded exactly like him and he has so many fucking good things. All right, this last thing. What is the biggest difference between quote unquote telling stories and telling stories that convert for a business? Yeah, that's a great question. Well, conversion comes from trust. trust comes from proof and or demonstration of ability.

2:23:01So I would say that's the right question is not the difference between the storytelling. It's more the topic and then what you actually cover in like the meat of the video itself. Storytelling is just the way to preserve attention throughout. It's just like the connective tissue, which is still contrast, setting up stakes, making it relevant, like these things we can talk about. But the difference between conversion and not is just giving someone a hit of something that they would get if they bought the thing, right? So if you're selling like AG1, it's showing the transformation that some people get by getting it.

2:23:35If you're selling an agency service, it's demonstrating your ability to get the results that the person is paying for. Makes sense. Any type of kind of like tactical process or systems that you use to go from a raw idea to a finished script? Yeah. Any advice you can get to someone out there on storytelling and that? First thing is to try to figure out what's interesting about the topic. I call this the angle. So what is interesting, it's either shocking from an entertainment perspective or useful for an education perspective. So the angle needs to be one of those two, depending on the type of content you're making.

2:24:09What you want to do is think through what do most people believe that I disagree with, which is kind of goes back, it's like a full loop on what we said at the beginning around contrast. So what I try to do is say, there's a piece of the story, a fact, a take, some implication that I have, and I try to rank on a scale of zero to 100, I call it a shock score, how shocking would it be to reveal this thing? And the shock score is usually out of 100 people in a room, how many would have thought that previously, which is getting to the same idea of like common belief versus new reality. The whole deal with storytelling is figuring out what you can say that most people don't believe, but then they can believe pretty quick once you say it.

2:24:51That like aha moment, that is contrast and that's what gets people curious to keep listening. So if I say Prince Charming is walking in the woods, the common belief would be he's gonna keep walking. But if a dragon pops out of the woods, you weren't expecting that. So out of 100, and now everyone's seen Disney, so like maybe a few people would say that, but like agnostic of Disney, out of 100 people, how many would say a dragon's gonna pop out? Not many. So it's like, that's pretty shocking. Now there's new stakes, new information. So people's new reality becomes the prince and the dragon. So it's like, what do you think is gonna happen?

2:25:22Most people think they're gonna fight. Maybe this one I say, okay, they do fight. So I give them something they would believe. It's just zigzagging down the path of being like, what do most people believe? What do you believe that is not true that you can prove quickly? And then do that in succession. Talk a lot about contrast. What about conflict? How important is conflict in the story? Do you use that in all of your storytelling? Conflict is basically a form of contrast, right? So like conflicting beliefs would be like contrasting beliefs. I kind of think those are interchangeable. Usually conflict has to do with stories that have subjects, right?

2:25:54A lot of the stories I'm telling in content, maybe the subject is like Google, but there aren't like people. It's like hypothetical versus - Yeah, exactly. But it's still contrast. Makes sense. What about the payoff? How important is it to have the payoff at the end? What happens if you don't have the payoff? I think people don't like being bait and switched. And when you don't have a payoff, that's what it feels like. Because again, and this goes back, everything really ties together. It's all the same, really. But like, if you establish context on something and you bait them, they need some fulfillment of the bait.

2:26:24Could be different bait or the same bait, but they need bait to confirm. If you switch and you take the bait away and you're just like, yeah, and the story ended, they're not going to be very interested in that, right? People hate being bait and switched. So you need the payoff to kind of close the last loop. That's really what the payoff is. Need the bait, but not the bait and switch. All right, we're just going to quick strike a ton more questions before we close out. This has been amazing. This is dopamine on another level. nice hopefully valuable it definitely is i guess let's start with what's the single most important system or workflow change that has allowed you to go from kind of sporadic content to true content machine so on short form it was getting the content operator the idea guy to offload a lot of the because because ideas are a bottomless pit you could spend infinite time so getting that off the plate is critical editing is not a bottomless pit it's tight right so you want to get that off the plate, but like there's a fixed amount of hours on the YouTube side.

2:27:19It was starting with the A team from day one. Love that. Biggest learning lesson from interviewing Mark Zuckerberg. He's actually a dope guy. Like I think he got a lot of bad, a bad publicity, like during the Senate hearings and stuff, but like, he's actually sick. Like he's like, he's a cool guy. He's chill. He's really locked in. Like he can task switch like no one I've ever seen, but he's actually like a cool guy. He's got a lot of big problems. He's got to deal with. He can't be flawless. I I mean, he's running one of the biggest companies in the world. He's just a normal guy, right? Like that's the thing.

2:27:49What is the biggest regret in your professional life? Waiting too long to go into the entrepreneurial game. The entrepreneurial game. How old were you when you started? Well, I'd been launching, I built my first company when I was 20, but it failed. And then I've been launching stuff in my 20s, but I was half in, half out. My biggest regret is just not going balls to the wall sooner. I do think you need, and I think Sean from Ridge said this, you need to go into a real job to like get your teeth kicked in and actually build some skills. Like you need some ability. So I think it's not the right advice for someone who's 18 to just go into entrepreneurship without any skills or backing.

2:28:29But very quickly, once you're like, I have that dog in me, you want to go and go all in. Yeah, for me looking back and for my future kids, definitely not going to college, just developing the skills earlier and then being able to start on that entrepreneurial journey early. Because I feel like people go to college and then they develop the skills through like mid to late 20s and they start then. I'd rather just start that in high school so they can be entrepreneurs at 21. To build off that, it's basically, I didn't realize that it was all skills. It's all skills. And when you're in a job you hate, you try to resist learning skills because you're just trying to sneak around to keep getting paid.

2:29:06But you're just delaying the reality, which is you need skills if you want to win on your own. So you want to start that. And it's going to take five to seven years to actually build fundamentals. So you want to start that clock as soon as possible. What's the biggest learning lesson from interviewing Spotify founder, Daniel Ek? He was also super chill. I think the learning lesson, zooming out to like compare the two, because I've only interviewed those two and like no one else. Guys, light flex. Only the two interviews in this whole entire life. Spotify and Facebook. Yeah, it's kind of crazy.

2:29:38They're very different though. So I think the learning is that you can win big in a variety of different ways There's infinite ways to play the game infinite attributes that help Both of them seem very locked in and present on what they're doing That's the common. I mean, there's many commonalities, but that was one that being in the room with both of them physically They can lock in so quick like task switch, but then be like a hundred percent present. I think is a real skill Yeah, I feel like they're like there's very few people in my life where it's like a lot of it's 15 minute meetings sometimes I do 15 minute meetings but he's locked in from 330 to 345 and then 346 he's on to the next one definitely what's one question you wish people asked you about social media but don't I wish people came to me holistically and were like I have this business I have this these resources what is the strategy to win the game I will do anything to tell me what it is I wish more people came with like a more open mind to me solving it for them instead of closed mind, like I have this one singular problem.

2:30:39It's like, well, let's actually like zoom all the way out. That's not the right problem, right? People get very fixated on what they think the wrong, the issue is. So I wish people came to me with a more open mind sooner about, and just let me lay it out for them. Love that. If you had to go from zero to$1 million in a year, how would you do it today? First thing I would do is build a high ticket, high margin. So is$1 million revenue or profit? Let's say profit. Let's go profit. Yeah. Okay. First thing I would do is build a high, high ticket, high margin. If I have no skills, I'm going for a done for you offer.

2:31:12But if I have some skills, I'm doing like a done with you offer somewhere in the five to 10K range. And then I'm making super precise, high value educational content on YouTube. And I'll be at a million in a couple months. Love that. How do you use the comment strategy to drive discovery? Yeah, so comments are actually a super underrated way to get virality. Again, might not be after virality, but if you have the right people commenting, it actually can trigger on target virality. comments are just another surface for people to be entertained by whatever you're, you're making. So if you use the script effectively to drive a certain question that people can debate, you want like contrarian debate in the comments.

2:31:51You create these like little cyclones where people are fighting with each other in the comments that actually boosts engagement a lot. So that, that would be one way. The other way is use the comments to get like, to get people to trust you more by like respond, actually responding, taking the time to respond to everything. Yeah. You know what's so crazy too? It's so weird because in the Roberto Nixon episode, RPN, great episode, guys. The views on one of our shorts went absolutely bonkers, like out of nowhere. And it was because the CEO of Instagram, Masari, liked the asset. And apparently, I think certain people, certain likes are disproportionately given more push through the algorithm.

2:32:28I didn't know that. Did you know that? I call it super shares, but I'm assuming it happens with likes too. It's like a 500 ,000 followed account shares your video is going to be worth a thousand X what like a normal person would be I assume the same thing is true with likes he liked like two or three and they went absolutely bonkers it was crazy maybe he has the the super flip super switch in the back end he does he's got that a hundred X when he double taps alright when I ask you these last four questions I ask everybody favorite book or podcast then why oh that's a good one I actually don't read that many books I should read more but I prefer listening to stuff and I just don't like consuming other content to be honest.

2:33:05It muddies my thought but Favorite I love this pod. This is a great one. What else do I listen to? I think sweat equity with garcia and brian blum if you know that one. I do they're good Callum's my homie callum johnson I just you talk to him. I like him. Yeah, he's great. Yeah, so I listen to his sometimes charming charming accent Yeah, group chat sometimes i'll listen to if i'm really trying to like just disconnect They talk a lot about LA, which I can't relate to. So I always speed through those cards. I took a random trip on group chat, like six and a half. That was fun. Yeah, I heard you, yeah.

2:33:39Yeah, it was fun. That was when I heard that. And then I went to go DM you and you had DM me. That's when we connected. So that - Shout out D. Yeah, shout out D. I haven't talked to him for a minute. He actually just messaged me last night. I don't know what he said. The master connector. I listen to like a random Chris Williamson episode every now and then. But I usually go based on the guest, whatever I see on the YouTube feed. That goes back to that ICP game and about staying deep and narrow. He obviously has escape velocity. He's huge. I mean, he's having a lot of very, very different type of people.

2:34:06And obviously he's dominating. Once you get, once you transcend the algorithm, which I would say Diary of the CEO, Chris Williamson, Rogan, then you can, you have carte blanche. But I think it's harder and harder to get to that point. And only a few people have ever got to that point. Guys, if you're listening, it's been three hours, maybe two episodes of an hour and a half each. That means that you really fuck with this podcast. If so, please say in the comments, topics guests who do you want to hear from because we're in the midst of going through a lot of these cane exercises currently it's been a shot to the face understanding and knowing this entrepreneur or brand you want to get flowers to and why nice there's so many well I love George Heaton I love Rep episode went absolutely yeah it went crazy listen to that I'll have to meet him sometime I think like on the creator side there's a lot of my homies Brandon Wang if you've ever heard of this guy Brandino he's sick I really like creators yeah good taste I love I was about to say that I love creators with good taste like I think Alex Garcia the way he shifted his visuals is sick Oren's got great taste Roberto's the homie Roberto's like the best in tech by a mile he's so sick Rourke is another guy in the family I just had a crazy crazy conversation do you know that guy's story I don't want to interrupt you I don't I don't this guy's fucking story bro he was doing like live streaming and people were paying him like $30 chug this beer.

2:35:29People were like paying to like - He was like chewing ice? Well, it was, he had the craziest life of the craziest turnaround. Yeah. He's a great guy. Steve will do it into Rourke. Yeah, literally. It's a crazy, crazy arc. It's wild. I'm trying to think who else. I shout out a few with the pod as well. Yeah, those are the, I mean, there's so many more, but those are kind of like freshman XXL classes is kind of how I think of creators. There's a bunch of people like in my class. I think Roberto, Oren, Garcia, Riley Brown, Callum, Like these guys are, we all started around the same time and it's cool to see like everyone's winning, but they're all doing different stuff.

2:36:02Love it. Last question. I'm kind of going to adjust it a little bit. What does success look over here? Where's Kane going to be in, let's say five years? What does success look like? What does a successful Kane Callaway look like in five years? That's a tough question. Well, my original goal was to figure out how to do a million a month in profit. So that was like pick a mountaintop and then play the game to kind of figure out the mountain. So I climbed up about a little bit away come all the way down back up rebuild back up I think I have a path now that i'm pretty clear on to do it, but that's like not success That's just like the money goal I don't know.

2:36:36I think I want to be I want to be doing something. I obviously want to be doing something I care about I really like being good at stuff As most people do so I want to be doing something I like that i'm world-class at That has an impact in the business world. I love playing the game of business like the macro game So i'll be doing something in that sphere right now. I'm trying to be like The best in the world at attention. So whether it's short form video or long form video Like i'm trying to build the rail so that any business owner could come in one side And out the other comes dollars and the the the factory was attention and video basic content.

2:37:11So i'm trying to like Completely productize that whole process right now. So that's going to be my focus for the next few years Mostly because it's a fun game. It's very high impact and high leverage. But I think I have a few more seasons to me beyond that. So my initial goal is like build a machine that can build machines. And that's what a content factory really is. But at some point I'll have to shift and start building machines, right? So we'll see. Dude, I think you're well on your way. I had an amazing time, bro. Why don't you tell everybody where they can find you? All the socials, all the URLs go crazy.

2:37:45Awesome. So if you're interested in the social media marketing, YouTube stuff, which you probably are, Callaway marketing at callaway marketing is my youtube channel I have a newsletter called content.game I have a software tool for short form growth. It's I think it's the best best in the world today going to be the best in the world Compounding called sandcastles. So that's sandcastles.ai If you want my help on the short form side I have a program that I really do not push or advertise ever. This is the first time talking about it here Short form.academy is where you can find that i'll be launching the youtube equivalent which is basically like the world-class information with group calls and me helping you on both Shortform and YouTube.

2:38:25So shortform.academy and then the YouTube one is not out yet. So I don't have a URL for that, but just look in the description. I'm sure we'll put it in there. That's all the like marketing stuff I do. If you're interested in the tech stuff, at Callaway or at Kane Callaway on TikTok and Instagram, you can find me. Amazing. Guys, hope you enjoyed. Sweet. What's up guys? If you guys got this far in the episode, I would assume that you enjoyed it. If you got any value, it would mean the world if you hit the subscribe button, give it a like, post a comment, tell a friend. We could keep going bigger.

2:38:56Bigger guests, bigger locations, more value. See you in the next episode.