Roberto Nickson - Why 99% of Creators Will Be Replaced by AI (And How to Be the 1%)

21:39Guys, go watch the movie Ready Player One. You'll be freaked out. That's probably coming in 2035. What you just said was very, very high level. And you're saying stuff like, I know mid-journey, I know a lot of that stuff. Let's break that down way more for the audience. In its simplest terms, and feel free, this is how I see it, and then layer on top, is you can have different news can come out and you can have a program that can grab that news in real time. And then you're going to have, it could be like a Google Doc or a Word Doc where you can put all of these rules where it's going to funnel them through these rules.

22:12Maybe it delivers a script. And then that speaks to something that can create photos or videos. And then to take it a step further, there will be automation to put this on different social media channels. So it's basically, you have your rules, maybe a little bit of your secret sauce, your POV, but then this is happening in real time, puts it through the rule system, puts it through the image generation, video generation, word generation, and then boom, it goes on this, this, this, this, and this account. That shit's scary. In 2023, my main, we'll call it competition, because I guess everything is a competition for eyeballs and attention and it's finite.

22:45And so like all the contemporaries that were doing sort of the same content that I did, that was my competition. In 2025, I'm competing against bots and machines and robots. And I, dude, like the other day I made a Nano Banana video. And I think, and we could talk about it. It's because of the storytelling techniques that I have. It was on Instagram, at least the most shared and the most viewed video on Nano Banana. And everybody in the space made one. But I think the second and third most viewed videos on Nano Banana were bots. And so it's a person that doesn't exist. There's still the human element in the background because they're taking these clones and these AI clones.

23:20And then they're still like the human hands are editing it, but that's going to be automated away in one or two years as well. And so I'm like, yeah, in 2028, my main competition, if I'm not evolving and I'm still newscasting, I'm not going to be able to, it's just, it's impossible. Forget about it, you know? Guys, we're going to do a segment later. Definitely want to stick around for this as we're going to go through all of kind of, you know, storytelling is one thing you mentioned, copywriting. We're going to go through all of these and we're going to talk about the importance now and into the future.

23:45And we're going to kind of rank them. I'm really, really excited to go through that. I want to go back to the brand sponsorship side because again, not everybody has the ability to spend 30 or 40K on equipment and wait a year or two. So getting brand sponsorships is huge. I just want to dive even deeper into that. For people listening, I want you to get your first$500, $1 ,000,$5 ,000 deal. So what do you think is the biggest mistake that creators are making when they're negotiating for these deals? Guys, quick 60 second break. I am so excited to announce our first partnership. It is the perfect fit for me and what I believe in, and more importantly, you, the audience.

24:18I have personally spent tens of millions of dollars on meta ads. At one point, it made up 95 % of my entire marketing budget. That kind of platform dependency is a real risk. One algorithm shift, and your whole entire business can stall. This is why I partnered with Universal Ads, the CTV ad platform powered by the biggest names in TV built for any size business. In under five minutes, you can advertise across the best shows on NBC, Paramount, Roku, and more. You can reach up to 90 % of the households in the U.S. at social media CPMs, and the platform gives you full control. You can target by viewership, behavior, income, geography, custom audiences, and more, just like you guys are used to seeing on social.

24:58I'm giving out$500 in ad credits with my referral code to the first 50 people who fill out the form below. First come, first serve, it's going to go fast. And if you're spending over$300K a month on paid, I have something special for you. Everything's in the description below. Go diversify now and appreciate the support. Man, I probably made every single mistake in the book. So I probably know this. The first is that I would, I mean, negotiation 101, right? I would always start low because I didn't want to lose the deal and I didn't want to break the relationship. And there's so many layers to that.

25:29Number one is when you put out a number and it's kind of low, you can't go up from there, man. You're only going down from there. And number two, I realized and this was like very palpable to me But I realized the affinity that they had for me and the respect that they had for me a creator I think came down Because if you're not giving them an ass if dude if you're a creator and you have 15 000 followers and a brand comes to you and you're saying I want twenty five hundred dollars for a deal But if you say I want Twenty five thousand dollars for a deal even if they may not be ready to spend that with you They're automatically going to respect you more and think higher of you and in the future when there's more campaigns to roll out they're going to, again, the positioning, they're going to be like, this guy's exclusive, right?

26:10Like we want them on the campaign. You'll eventually get it. So the number one is, and again, it's unfair because I didn't like, I didn't have to like make rent every month, but the number one is never settle for anything lower than your worth. I'd almost say make a free video in the style that you want it instead of taking peanuts for a brand deal that might kind of, there may be some trust loss that happens within your audience at scale, if that makes sense. I would come back with you on that. There's one thing that I think a little bit differently on. I agree, free or anchor very high because I mean, 25K versus 2 ,500.

26:42I mean, you got to do 10 of those deals to equate to that. I do think it is worth it to potentially take lesser money for one deal. So you can get that one deal, that one logo, that one anchor. So then people feel more comfortable with like, oh, I've done this with X. But past there, I completely agree with what you're saying. No, no, I agree with that as well. I mean, the other thing is that I, you know, we were just kind of exiting, in my opinion, like this social, you know, like Gary Vee really like popularized this where it was just like output, volume, more, more, more, more, more, more, more.

27:15That works for him and it works for specific use cases. But if you're trying to supplement or build a career from brand deals, I actually think filler content and quantity for the sake of quantity is going to work against you. Because the way that a lot of these people are comparing and like deciding which creator to hire, they're really looking at your last 10. And they're looking at your last 10 viewership. The followers don't really matter anymore. They want to see engagement in your most recent set of videos and specifically in the ones with the paid partnership label on them. And so like there is still, unless you built a brand and you're known for your brand instead of like your performance, there is still like sort of this legacy group of people out there that make these buying decisions that will look for engagement specifically in your last 10.

27:58So another mistake that I made, I wanted to post daily, sometimes twice a day. So sometimes I just post like kind of shitty videos in order to meet that quota. And I think that worked against me. I think don't do filler, whatever content. Keep it premium, keep it high and respectable because the last 10 pieces of the content you put out are the ones that these brands are going to be looking at. The one thing that I would push back on that as well is what I found interesting is I completely agree with you. We're posting every day. It's so funny that you say that. And like, yeah, I have some that are like tutters getting like...

28:27No, by the way, I like the disagreements because I think this is where like... Yeah, it's, you know, some of them are dudders, you know, getting like 3 ,000 views. But then the craziest thing, I think I might have said it on a past podcast, is we deliver shorts to our guests and we evaluate them. Dude, the one that we gave, what did we give it? The sixth or seventh? It was ranked six or seven out of 10? Is the one that has gone gangbusters. 20 ,000 shares. Masari, the CEO of Instagram reposted it. So I do think you are at an advanced stage. I think in the beginning, and we've talked about a lot of this in the past, is get a lot of shots on net first to understand where you need to live.

29:05Because another thing that you say is you're super adamant about like, the formula is all about the format. And until you find that format, then you're just doing what I'm doing, which is kind of swinging until you find that format. Two things here, because I think this would be helpful for the audience. My first two years, again, my intention was not to make money. And so I understood that there was going to, like, I was finding my voice. And so my quantity that first year, 2023, if you go back and look at my Instagram, it was like two videos a day. So I agree with you, like, at the beginning, prioritize quantity just because you're going to get a little bit better every video.

29:38And over a long period of time, that starts compounding. So again, like, another thing we can talk about is I don't think creators should ever quit their jobs to go all in until they kind of start cracking it. because you want to have revenue coming in so you don't have to make decisions that are going to hurt you in the long term just to like make rent in the short term. Does that make sense? I'm sure there's a better way to word that. I completely agree with that. Yeah. And by the way, like you're optimizing also for something different. Like for you, Shots on Goal makes sense because you're trying to get viewership into the long form and like your money is going to be made in the long form product, right?

30:10Whereas my money is made in that short form product. And so again, like there's so much nuance creator to creator, depending on like what kind of business or what you're optimizing for. But for you, I would actually prioritize quantity at a high level of quality. But shots on goal for you make a lot of sense. So all of these shots on goal are basically backing into that the format is the formula. How would you recommend someone listening to find that formula? I think having a scalable, repeatable format for me is the difference between a hobbyist or maybe an artist versus more of a business person or a creator trying to turn this into like a lucrative business, right?

30:51And so the reason I say that, a highly repeatable format is so useful for so many reasons. Number one, scale and output, right? You don't have to like reinvent and like find a new creative like format or a new thing that you're going to make every single time. It's like, I'm just going to, my camera set up, my lighting is set up. I'm just going to do the same thing that I do every time. And also the audience starts knowing you for that. I think that's, this is so underrated, but keep going. Yeah, but that's the big thing because if you're compounding audience trust and affinity and like that's how you really scale a brand versus a creator, and again, like there's so much nuance, but versus a creator who may be like a photography creator, travel photography.

31:27Every single time, if you have to go travel to a place and figure out a concept, that becomes very, very difficult to scale. Versus if you're a photography creator who's doing that, you're traveling and doing your thing, but you also have a highly repeatable format where you're just telling stories. I mean, the talking head example, like look at Oren, look how many people are doing what Orin is doing now. I mean, that wins. It wins in every medium, in every industry, in every sector, because that photography creator who has to go and travel and make a specific piece of content for a hotelier or a luxury hotel brand, whatever it might be, go back home and then make three talking head videos or green screen videos about your experience doing that or what you did or how you created this unique visual or whatever it might be, right?

32:09I think that when people say the riches are in the niches, I not only agree the riches are, it's in a unique, repeatable format with a unique niche. If you just do those two things, like do green screen about one thing and you just find something that no one is in, you unequivocally will win. And the top 1 % of that vertical is going to pay you disproportionately more amount of money. You made one of the best examples is Oren. Yeah. Or in John, who you had in the pod. Everybody should study what he's doing. Great example of this. Another great example of this and why I really think the more hyper-specific the niche actually, the better.

32:46Whether you're going the brand deal route, whether you're going the info product route. When I shot another guy, his name is Nick Sarayev. I don't know if you've seen him. I have not, no. He never deviates away from the format. It's always talking head split screen. Sort of like the thing that I helped popularize back in like 2023. But it's really only about AI automation. So he's not talking about general tech. There's no like general tech umbrella. There's no general AI umbrella. It's like AI automation for every single video. And his CTA is to the school community that he has about AI automation.

33:13He's doing$400 ,000 a month because he's never deviated away from this format or the niche, right? High margins, guys. High margins. Incredibly high margins. Like, you know, he probably has a couple operators or whatever people in that course, but margins are probably 85, 90%. And again, if he started talking about, all right, today, instead of AI automation, I'm going to talk about image to video, or I'm going to talk about whatever else it might be. That's actually going to hurt his business. So his focus is so specific and that's why he's winning. To me, it's just another great example of the riches are in the niches.

33:45Yeah, I mean, I think, I mean, Caleb had an interesting take on kind of this split. I am non-emotional and want to win and play the game. I always say winning is more fun than fun. And to win in the algorithm, it is to stay narrow with the topic. Going off topic is the worst possible thing that you can do. With that being said, with everybody here listening, I'd love to hear in the comments the specific type of topics and guests that you guys want on. Always want to hear back. I want to move on a little bit because since you are dominating, I think you mentioned that you said 35 different brands this year.

34:18For somebody out there that starts getting going on getting brand sponsored deals, how do you balance your regular posts and brand sponsored posts? First of all, to the last point, I just wanted to end with brands love clarity. I think audiences love clarity as well. So if you're all over the place and you're talking about too many different things, the algorithm gets confused, the audience gets confused, brands get confused. So I'm definitely glad we had that conversation because that was another mistake I made in 23. I was all over the place. To answer your question, and I have so many thoughts here, and man, this is where mental health and creators get intertwined because when your income starts becoming tied to your performance, it can kind of fuck you up, right?

34:56Oh yeah. And so the way that I kind of reconcile this is for every brand deal that I make, I need to follow up with four organic high signal pieces of content because you have to respect the audience. If you don't, they're just going to churn over time, right? The real diminishing returns to brand deals, if you don't take like these appropriate measures. And for me, it's the 80-20 rule. So I try to average for every brand deal that I do. So if I'm doing 30 brand deals a year, I better have 150 high signal, useful videos that serve the audience that really respect their time. And so that's how I kind of reconcile this.

35:28And so I probably haven't been doing the best at that for the last few months. You got two little kids. You go, baby. But I really, I think every creator undervalues this, where there is real trust loss at scale if you're just plugging shit constantly. Well, I think it also, it must be said that those other four or five videos to the one, A, are giving value to the audience, but B, those are your biz dev, because what you said before, for free talking about random brands and then they reach out to you. So it kind of feeds the flywheel regardless. It keeps your chops really dialed. So I definitely think it serves.

36:00I have so much fun. Like, I love it. Dude, I saw some of your newer videos. Like, was that AI? Are you like going out in the open with like costumes and shit? We got to pop that up. He's in like caveman costumes and shit. I'm like, what's going on here? Can we talk about that real quick? Yeah, please. Because this kind of shook me to my core. Yeah. The reason this shook me to my core is because I go out for a brand called Remarkable, which I love. By the way, all the brands that I work with, I actually love. the brands that I use, you know, because that's another thing that creators need to understand.

36:27The audience can tell your passion for something. If you're just plugging something because you're getting paid, they can tell versus like, this guy actually loves this product. This is why he's working with them. So it was a product called Remarkable. It's like this paper tablet. And so like this concept that I thought of was the, you know, like the magic of analog and the experiences of the old world versus the new world and the modern efficiency, right, of digital. And so I went out, I spent like, I don't know, 3K, 3000 bucks buying these costumes that were like authentic from Etsy. And I bought like all the set design and decor and accessories.

36:58I probably only were like in the corner of the visual for like a millisecond. And I spent so much time, I rented like three different Airbnbs. Like I spent so much time and effort, real cameras, lights, lenses, you know, the whole thing, no AI. And the video did okay. The audience loved it, gained a lot of affinity. But after Nano Banana came out, I said, so many of those scenes I could have generated, nobody would have noticed nobody would have cared and I actually think the video would have performed way better not just because of the novelty but because of how much more compelling these visuals that I could generate when my imagination is the limit versus the physical world and I'm like that shook me because I'm I think I think traditional ad production is completely cooked I think unless you're documenting something I actually just think the art of like videography and cinematography is a little bit in trouble when you can just get the same output by sitting on your computer for 20 minutes.

37:52And I'm like, that shook me to the core as a creative at heart. Distribution, unique POV, storytelling, you don't have that. You are deeply, deeply cooked. I agree. Going back onto the brand side, I'd love to know, what are brands getting wrong about creators in 2025? There's still brands that actually value me and pay me because of my following. And I have these conversations. I'm like, sometimes I feel guilty because I'm like, they don't understand that the following doesn't automatically guarantee a specific viewership or performance. Everything has to recompete against the algorithm. So I think brands are getting that wrong still.

38:26Granted, even the least savvy marketers, I think are understanding the game a little bit better now. But I would say that is number one. And so everybody says followers don't matter, which I completely get the sentiment and I mostly agree with. When it comes to some of these high level brand deals, they still very much matter. yeah i mean i think that peeling off the layers and what you just said it's like it's that trust and like you're doing 80 20 like in a perfect world it's 96 4 because then that when it's when it's one of every 25 you know that you wholeheartedly agree in that you're probably getting a disproportionate more amount of money when you're doing less amount of slots for that i think a crazy thing to kind of go back on that just talking about how like you know production and stuff is dead is like, dude, I'm just thinking right now about like the messy commercial.

39:16Like we paid a lot of money, bro. We paid, we paid a lot of, like you just said, like$3 ,000. I'm thinking about the unit economics. Like we paid a lot of money for a guy just to say goal. And like all of that stuff is going to go to zero. So just like the profit margins in the world that you and I are in, I literally think are going to go to like high nineties. I agree. Yeah. I'm thinking, I mean, you know, my brother-in-law is a commercial director and he's been very successful. He's been directed commercial for Steph Curry and LeBron and all the biggest brands in the world. And he's kind of pivoting to AI in a sense where he's like, I mean, we have this conversation.

39:53Why is a brand going to pay? Let me phrase it this way. I was watching a Hyundai commercial came on TV the other day and I was looking at it. And again, this is something else that freaked me out because I'm like, I can make that same commercial right now, right now for$800 in AI credits. And it might take me 12 hours. These guys probably paid$1.5 million for the production. And then who knows? And I'm thinking there's no way, you know, like there's a legacy component. It'll take some time to catch up, but there's no way in five years, somebody is going to pay$1.5 million for an ad spot that some dude in his basement can make for$150 in credits, in AI credits.

40:31And I looked at that and I was like, wow, like creation, the barriers to creation are truly going to disappear. And the only thing that's going to remain is taste, creativity, understanding of culture, understanding of storytelling and brand and distribution. And so what's happening right now is so unprecedented. And again, I live in both worlds. I'm a traditional creator. I also love technology. But even I'm really freaked out. What's really, really interesting, what you said, and I'm just going to call a spade a spade here, guys. We've taken full advantage of this twice. You just said that Hyundai commercial, $1.2 million they would pay somebody and you could do it in 800, let's just say whatever, 5 ,000, 10 ,000 with your sweat, your time, et cetera.

41:14There's a lot of money to be made and selling that for 100K, 200K, 300K. Because I think those guys that are paying 1, 2, 1, 5, whatever it is, they are still archaic in nature and it's going to take a long time for that to taper down. So there is a arbitrage to pay, you know, a 10X overage on what it costs you and you can make really, really good money doing that. Two points to this. Yeah. If people really listen to this and take it to heart, they're going to get rich with AI. Another pause for the trailer. No, but one is really this arbitrage that you're talking about. And so everybody's like, oh, AI is going to kill creatives.

41:51I'm like, how the hell can AI kill creatives when creatives are the only ones that can get good results using it? Right? And so to this point, I've never seen so much demand for AI filmmakers, let's call them, or AI creativity. Incredible demand from like all the Fortune 500, every brand. And there's so little supply to satiate it. To the point where I have a buddy named PJ Asaturo. Probably a lot of people in this world know him because he's positioned, again, positioned himself as like the guy in this world. He was showing me his inbound. It's unbelievable. He can go and scale and hire 50 people he's never going to be able to get through.

42:25Like it's insane. And so if you're creative and you're worried about, damn, I'm a really skilled illustrator and my demand plummeted 90 % overnight. I empathize with those people. It's heartbreaking. But like the skills that you develop to be able to be so good at what you do, you could, I mean, you could be bitter and rejected forever. That's a strategy. There's still analog purists that hate digital photography. It's a strategy, but I'm telling you, there's those guys that look at people with digital cameras and they think they're just pressing a button. There are no talent hacks. I hate that.

43:02The same is going to exist in this new paradigm where there's going to be people who bitterly resisted forever and kind of like screw themselves out of the market. Or there's the creators that realize this shit is changing. Let me use my creativity to figure out how I can play a more lucrative game here. And I've seen this happen over and over and over. And I wish we could give like specific examples of ad spots that I love that were made 100 % with AI that I think are the future of this whole industry. Good transition. We're going to get into the fun part here, guys. So positioning, we talked about positioning, kind of set the stage.

43:35Let's get into the fun part, which is the actual execution of producing content, which for everybody listening, go check RPN on Instagram. This guy's out of his damn mind on this. Walk me through your actual workflow from idea to publish post. And I know that's kind of very macro and vague. We can keep diving in. But where do you start from an idea perspective? I'll give you to my bread and butter format, which is the split screen talking head narrative. I also have this new format that I'm messing around with, sort of an evolution of that, that I call cinematic editorials, which is really just like a sub stack essay that I write.

44:08And I turned it into this really compelling visual. It's like visual candy, man. It looks awesome. And everybody always comments like, this put me in a trance. So it's basically like a copy, a newsletter, and then you're using the words to then create and using these AI tools? 100%. So this is like my process for this. First of all, my studio at home, which is in a dusty garage, by the way, everybody thinks like this big immaculate studio like this. No, I have it dialed to the point where I walk in, I sit down, I press two buttons and everything's ready to go, right? And so like, that's very key for me.

44:40Again, speed is like, especially right now where I don't have a lot of, I have three hours a day of deep work. So I've got two little kids running around. Speed is of the essence. So I sit down, all the lights come on, camera's recording. I have my OBS. I'm feeding my audio into it. I have a teleprompter because I don't want to read line by line. I just want to read it all in one go. So I record that. I record all the lines. I bring it in. I'm editing with Premiere. And a lot of guys are using Resolve now. I have like everything is templatized and dialed. So like the audio treatment, I just have like one click.

45:09The visual treatment, which is generally the same LUT and the same coloring, etc. Again, one click. I sit down. I cut it all up. And then generally now, before it was like either B-roll that I created with blood, sweat, and tears in a camera or stock footage from whatever, wherever. Now I'm generally generating visuals that are in context to what I'm saying that are a lot more compelling. And so there are a lot of different workflows. My general workflow, it was mid-journey. Now it's Nano Banana. I first come up with a visual. So say I'm talking about like today Elon Musk announced like a$1 trillion pay package, right?

45:45So in the past, if I'm talking about that and giving my thoughts, I might just get some b-roll clip of elon Now i'm gonna i'm gonna generate an image of him in a pool of cash with grills on and like make it very cultural Culturally relevant and fun. I'm gonna do that nano banana and then i'm gonna animate it in vo3 or cling 2.1 And now you have like even crazier Camera controls So in cling 2.1 first of all, I can keyframe it so I can generate two visuals of elon I want the image. I want the video to start with him in the pool and I want the second image, him on a horse doing something crazy. So this is honing in on the two bookends of, I want to start with this, I want to end with this.

46:22And then you're using that as bridges to create the video. Yeah, so you can do this as many times as you want. So right now you can come up with two keyframes and have like these programs and you can direct it what you want to happen in between these two keyframes. But you can also, there's so much more control now. So I could be like, and again, if you're a traditional creative that understands how to tell stories, you're in such a good position here. because I could be like, all right, I want a wide shot. I want to push in right here. But then I want the camera to orbit my subject as he gets on the elephant or the horse.

46:50And then I want another shot that's macro, that's really tight. I want it to emulate an 85 millimeter lens. This is you just speaking to it via chat GBT. You're just talking. Everything is natural language, which is crazy. Which to me is like the coding language of the future, the creativity language of the future, just natural English. And these programs now, again, like before it was like, you just generate something and hope for the best. but now you have a lot more control and it's increasingly so. This is so crazy because what you're kind of, my mind is spinning right now. This is really about, it's going to come down to just creativity in general because everything is going to be like different templates.

47:27And this is all about like the inputs and the rules. If the inputs and rules are embedded, like formerly, like you were talking about like the one click setup, like bro, I am, Jake will make fun of me till the end. I'm an idiot, bro. Like if we're using with a program and like one thing changes, I have to like hit them on Slack and be like, yo, can you fix this type thing? So that's like general humans like don't have like a one, like it would take them years to do that. I couldn't do it. But now if it's all going to be set up and everything is going to become easier and easier, it's just like whatever the mind can imagine, you basically can create.

47:57Yes, which requires, again, to your point, real creativity. Because some lady that you bump into the grocery store would never be able to get the outputs that I can get. I would never be able to get the outputs that like a real creative filmmaker, traditional filmmaker will be able to get. And so again, that's why I said, it's like creatives hate AI because they think they're coming for them, but they're the ones that can get the absolute best results. And so, but I also get a lot of hate comments too, which I get, by the way, a lot of it is valid. Some of the copyright stuff, et cetera, all of that will be taken care of and the licensing.

48:30But the point that I really want to make here is that if you're a creator or a creative, I would recommend you to not bitterly resist AI and bitterly resist this new paradigm that's coming. It's just another way to tell a story or communicate a message. If you're going to do that in VFX software, if you're going to go out there with cameras, lights, and lenses, or if you're just going to generate it, I don't think it matters anymore, right? It's just the final output and the creativity behind that. Adapt or die. Adapt or die. Adapt or die. What are three simple tools that people can use for editing, sound, graphics?

49:04this is not paid either which is which is unfortunate which is very unfortunate so again why my brandos have been so lucrative this year I talk about things and I don't gatekeep anything where a lot of creators are like yo I want to make a video on this product I'm going to go hit them up and see if they'll pay me money otherwise I ain't making this no gatekeeping so three is tough because there's such a wide spectrum so make a ten let's go let's go with I genuinely everybody who I've showed Suno to their reactions are always so visceral. It's incredible. And again, as a fan of music and as a lover of music, I actually have two ways that I can go here, but you can generate whatever song you can imagine.

49:44And it's, dude, people are going to hate me for this, but it's like, it's just as good. It's 98 % of the way there as a real artist. I'm not talking about the Adels of the world, but like your average pop artist. Let's go deeper. So is this the same thesis of your giving? it's either, are you just giving a context via other songs you like and just say, yeah. Up until now, you've just been given a context. I want a world instrumental. I want a house song that sounds like this artist. These are the exact lyrics that I want. This is the cadence. This is the pacing. This is the BPM. You could like kind of go into the weeds and get like your output.

50:19Now you can actually do a track by track. So you can segment each track. So you can generate your drums. I want a snare to sound like this. I want it to blah, blah, blah. I want it like Timbaland 2004 style. I want it to be really snappy. I want it to be very dry. Okay, now I want my hi-hats to sound like this. I want them to match at this level. At the bridge, I want them to change. Like you have full control now, just as a regular artist would in Logic or Ableton or whatever that they're using. Throw one or two out more, I think. So Suno, number one. Number two, for good reason, VO3 is. VO3 changed the world.

50:51It's phenomenal. This just came out too recently. It came out maybe four months ago. So Google's VO3 changed everything. And I think it made the naysayers into, holy shit, I was wrong this whole time. It opened people's eyes to the idea that this is coming and it's coming fast. And like Google's VO4, whenever that comes out, is just going to change the world even more. For anybody here that's watching, I don't even know, I don't want to call you an idiot, but if you're a naysayer, like you basically aren't, this is coming unequivocally. With all of this stuff, an amazing book, the coming wave about AI, it's slow to come, but when it hits, then it comes fast.

51:26And this has been very, very slow. But now it's like, again, it's so crazy to think like any of these models, like we could look back the last 12 months and there's been like a couple inflection points. Like I remember on like DTC Twitter with like the image generation. Remember when that like took over the internet? Like these are happening every, let's just say right now they're every three months. And for everybody here listening, they're every three months now, but in 12 months, they're going to be every month. And then in 24 months, they're going to be every week. And then it's just, it's going to get so crazy.

51:53I mean, Nano Banana was the last kind of holy shit moment that the collective internet just came together and were like, like Google's new image generator. Before that, it was probably ChatGPT's image. You remember the Studio Ghibli craze where the entire internet lost their minds? But I remember having this visceral reaction with Dali 2, I think it was. When I first like entered this world, it was Discord only and I generated something with Dali 2. It was complete garbage, but my mind was blown. So let's go with Suno. Let's go with VO3. And then I guess the other one that I just think is so incredibly useful is Kling.

52:26It's a Chinese model. The model can do a lot of different things, but I use it for image to video. And it's magic, dude. So I could take a picture of you and then I could type in, I want Mark to get up. You know, the camera pans to the right, revealing a horse. Mark walks behind it and mounts on. And it'll follow the instructions to a T. and Kling 1.6, which was like six months ago, was okay. Kling 2.1 Master, which is the latest model out of China, it blew, it's just unbelievable the leaps that these models are taking. So in three years, to your point, it's going to be like perfection. All, all creative, you know, boundaries are going to be knocked down and it's just going to be limited to what you can imagine.

53:07It's nuts, man. Guys, for everybody listening, he just gave three. Sign up for the newsletter in the description. We're going to make that six. When we launch this episode, we're going to double up and give three more favorites. What's up, guys? It's Mark. Quick 15-second break. We're building a private community for operators, marketers, and creators. And in order to join that wait list, you have to sign up for the newsletter. The newsletter is going to give you alerts on all of our new content and my personal takeaways from each and every guest. Make sure you click the link at the top of the description to sign up.

53:32Thanks for watching. You know, I would say 90 % of my time is spent thinking. That is what being a creator is to me. and it just may be like my unique like skill sets or whatever. But when I have the idea, the scripting, the editing, the actual shooting, the coloring, that's peanuts. That'll take me 45 minutes. But the idea is so far and few in between. Having like an actually unique, compelling idea that's unique to you that the world would find very interesting. To me, that's the whole game now of being a creator. I completely agree with that. From an ideas perspective, like what's your system for capturing ideas?

54:11Do you have like, Oren, for example, was like very, very big on this crazy notion board. I have graduated, like I called a boomer for this. Like even like we now have like a shared Instagram, you know, folder that all of us flag things that we like. So how do you capture ideas? Before I answer that, I want to make like kind of an ironic point. I came from the world of product. I built iOS apps for like eight years. And I always had the thing was like ideas are worthless. Execution is the whole game. Now that's kind of been flipped around on its head, which I find funny. It's like ideas are the whole game.

54:38The execution part is easier and easier and easier with all these tools and whatever. That's interesting. We'll see how that pans out. But as far as my idea generation system, I live by my Twitter bookmarks. I love Twitter bookmarks. I read a lot. Less and less. I never scroll. My Instagram and TikTok behavior now is like, I don't use them. It's like Substack. It's Medium. It's like long-term Twitter essays. You know, there's incredible minds on Twitter like this guy named Signal, S-I-G-N-U-L-L. And it's just, to me, it's reading a lot. and walking a lot. And like that combination, it's hard to like describe.

55:16It's just some sort of like magic that happens. I don't know. But that combination is like where all my ideas generate from. So I'm like reading, I'm reading, I'm reading, and I'll go on a walk. All of my best ideas have come when I'm running like a 5K and listening to M83. Yo, for any creatives that need ideas, that combination, for whatever reason, that combination works. Go on a long run, an hour run, and listen to M83. Your best ideas are going to come. I'm way bigger on walks right now. And now I'm talking to myself from an audio perspective and I'm just firing off ideas. I don't want to bring the phone on the walk.

55:48That's a whole other different crazy thing for ADD people out there going no phone on the walk. The more you consume, the less the ideas actually come, which I find interesting. And so many people are like scrolling, scrolling, scrolling, trying to find ideas, trying to generate ideas. I don't know. Maybe I'm unique to this. Maybe you can speak on it a little more. I'd love to hear about your process. But I often find the opposite happens, where your brain gets more clogged and you have more of a writer's block or a creative block the more you consume. It's ironic that you say that because for me, how I prep for the episodes and I prepare for the episode till about 6.37 last night.

56:23And then I make sure I am off my phone and not consuming any random garbage in my brain until about an hour and a half before. And then I go back in to just clear my brain out. It's been absolutely huge for me. You know, I feel like macro level, high level, this conversation is going to be very frustrating to listen to because so much of what I do is instinctual. There's no way for me to like really describe it or articulate it. Right. And so I've always like noticed about myself, noticed that about myself, but it's only been recently that I've actually like really figured that out. It's like, and I think it's a difference.

57:00I'm not comparing myself to like an auteur, but like a tour level filmmaking versus like the modern data backed filmmaking, which like Netflix does, like everything has to follow a specific formula and we have to get this audience and demographic. And I've noticed that everything is instinctual and it's hard for me sometimes to like explicitly articulate why I do or think the way that I do. It's just like reps and years in the game. And so I hope that isn't too frustrating for people to listen to. Ironically enough, I would say the absolute opposite about you. I think you're one of the best, simplest community, like your skill and you're amazing at like disseminating this very, very high level AI stuff and doing 60 to 90 second videos where I can process.

57:39I appreciate that. I'm killing it with that. I want to keep diving more into how to produce content. Let's go into audio. You said audio is the emotional bloodstream of content. Why does it matter more than visuals? Two reasons come to mind. One is you can get away with a video with shitty visuals and immaculate audio. I think you can get away with that. I don't think the opposite is very rarely true. Where if like you have a video that looks great, but the audio is muffled or crappy, it's just very, very hard to consume. That's kind of more high level. But the more important like me to this is like visuals.

58:12Okay, this is what you're looking at but like audio tells you how to feel to the point where most of my best ideas start with audio. I'm like listening to a song or music that moves me so much, that moves me to like a story, something that happened in my life, something that I've been thinking about. If finally, like there's like a clarity moment where some convoluted messaging or topic or idea that I've been thinking about all just like comes to light is like through music. That's the punchline there, man. Music tells you how to feel about something. And, you know, ultimately when it, when it comes to like storytelling, what you're really trying to do is like evoke emotion out of the other person.

58:46I call it a cocktail of chemicals because you're trying to like elicit a cortisol response, endorphins, dopamine, right? And so like the way you do that, yes, sure through a lot of storytelling devices, but like to me, music is the most important way. And I don't know if you've seen like, have you seen horror films and they're dubbed with like silly, stupid clown, like, you know, like Britney Spears music on top of it. It's no longer scary. It changes the entire experience. And so if you're a creator, if you're short form, if you're a YouTube creator, please do not underrate or undervalue or under index the importance of music.

59:19Because I'm telling you, it is such a cheat code. If once you really understand music, sound design, and how to use it to your advantage to tell a story. So funny for like the, the e-com people out there listening, it's almost like audio is like direct response. It's like telling you what to do. Like it's, it's literally verbally guiding you as opposed to you kind of being subjective in nature, which is more like kind kind of like top of the funnel. That's an interesting way to look at it. You're really backing, you know, you talked about evoking emotion from your audience. You talk a lot about making your audience the hero.

59:50What does that mean like in practice for a creator? I think, and it always sounds harsh when I say it, but I actually think it's liberating. Nobody gives a shit about you or me or anybody else for that matter, right? They really only care about themselves. So the way that I position my content is like I have to serve the audience. if I'm telling a story, they have to see themselves in the story. Otherwise, it's not compelling to them. What do they care, right? And so a lot of creators make this mistake where they're like, yo, look at me. I'm on my, I went to my boat and then I did this. Now the lines can blur a little bit because that can be inspirational when you're just like flexing what you have or sharing about your life.

1:00:28But I always, when I'm telling a story and it doesn't have to be like a story in the pure sense of that word. There was a boy named Mark and he had, it could be just like nano banana video as an example, right? When I tell that story, the reason why it performed better than anybody else's is because of just basic storytelling devices. I introduce conflict really, really soon. So the people can see themselves in that conflict. That's why they keep watching. So if I'm doing a nano banana video, what's going to separate my video from other people that are like, holy shit, Google just not nano banana.

1:00:59This is what it's capable of. It has great character consistency. It's amazing. Mine i'm going to introduce conflict right away that people can see themselves in so i'm going to be like Nano banana by google just dropped and I think this is going to change So much for creators. I think this is going to be a huge paradigm shift that this industry does not see coming That's conflict Now people are sticking around because they want to see that they want to see the resolution Well shit. How should I be thinking about it? How should I prepare? What should I do? Where is this going? Oh my god, I need to know right So So that's kind of how I approach everything, man.

1:01:32It's like through the lens of basic storytelling principles. And I think, again, I'm going in different tangents here, but I want all creators to hyper-obsess over the story that they're telling. I mean, I do think you're one of the best in the world at short-form clips, period, talking about conflict. And then I would imagine at the end, there's some sort of resolution and or cliffhanger. If you want all the stuff that makes an algorithm happy, if you want the shares - Let's, yes. Yes. Tell us right now, what are the key elements of creating a world-class short form clip? Well, this is another thing that a lot of creators get wrong, is they focus only on the hook, right?

1:02:11We just got to get their attention and then we win. That is such a big part of the game, yes. But if you don't have the rest of it, you're going to get smoked. So yes, capturing attention, at the very, very, very basic level, you have to capture attention. Basically, everybody says in the first three seconds, I think it's the first one second. You got to capture their attention. Yes. But then you have to maintain that attention. And that's through the storytelling elements that we can discuss. But at the end, you have to, have to, have to reward that attention. Because if you reward their, if somebody watched you for 60 seconds and they feel satisfied, damn, I learned something new.

1:02:42I'm inspired. I was entertaining. They're going to share it to a friend. They're, they're going to save it. They're going to screenshot it, which I think they're just adding into the way that the algorithm works. They're going to comment. They're going to like, they're going to follow, right? And so like there's really six signals that make an algorithm happy and then retention. So we can call it seven. If you just like over sensationalize something, bring in a ton of conflict and then don't offer any resolution, you're not rewarding their attention. They're not going to reward you with the signals that make an algorithm happy.

1:03:09And so, I mean, that's at the very, very, we can get into like the weeds, but that's the very, very high level basics of what makes a good short form piece of content. Capture attention, maintain attention, reward attention. What are the key signals that makes an algorithm happy? I think it depends on the platform, of course. My bread and butter is Instagram. I love Instagram. It's just my favorite way of communicating. My style fits best for Instagram. Number one, I would say retention, probably still. Number two is a share. The reason why it is shared specifically for Instagram and another lesson for creators, you want to always lean into the identity of the platform.

1:03:48On Instagram, Maseri, who you mentioned, he's made it very clear. Instagram is a medium for friends to share with one another what they find interesting, right? And so you have to make your piece of content a unit of conversation because you need shares. You got to get retention and you got to get shares. I think those are the two most important. I would say save is probably the third most important signal, then a follow, then a comment, then a like. I think the like is probably the least respected or the least important on Instagram. I would say in that order. We got a new piece of sauce. It's September 2025.

1:04:19we got a big bump from the sauce. On Instagram now is retweets. It's probably been three, four weeks. And I think, I probably shouldn't say retweets, reposts. And I think what's really, really interesting about that is with anything, you're going to get disproportionate benefit if done correctly, if you're early to anything. You're early investing in Bitcoin early, early to a platform. This is a new function where an example is Masari, the CEO of Instagram. He retweeted our post about trial reels and where it gets really interesting about being early, there's only, we're the first one and there's only four on his page.

1:04:53So there's just - It's probably exploded. It is still exploding. It exploded. It's been exploding for months now. So retweets are such, there's just no, like I would say, I don't even know, probably 98 % of people on Instagram haven't even, I haven't even retweeted once yet. So the ability - Trying to crack a strategy there. There you go. So the ability to encourage and try and get people to retweet, which that is a very, very, that is something that we are going to 100 % do. This is a good... Repost, I initially wanted to do it just like repost everybody. Like I love showing love to creators.

1:05:25It's just like central to like not only who I am, but like my platform. But I think the way that I want to use repost is to like, whenever I see a 10 to 10 piece of content, which is rare, I want to repost that. And my repost, I want to be a curated collection of like the greatest, greatest pieces of content on IG, in my opinion, as a curator. So I think that's probably how I use repost. It's so funny that you say that because I think the next step is, it's like so weird. Like I've seen some people retweet and it just looks like this random concoction of stuff. I think the next layer to it is exactly what you said.

1:05:56Kind of like what they did for, I think it was called highlights, is they need to give you some sort of kind of macro context of what you're doing in the retweets. Good idea. Like the beginning has to say like, oh, like these are my favorite creators or whatever it is. Unless you just go and you're just like randomly. Dude, I would love that feature. Just like when you read, you know how you can retweet with a quote on Twitter? It should be that. So like I'm reposting this and then have like a little line. They have it, but it doesn't always pop up. I really think from like a UI UX, like they need to like really, I don't know, like a cover or something.

1:06:26Something. Yeah, because that's valuable real estate. Like I would love to know like your curated take on what are the best posts. Yeah, Maseri, if you're listening. He might be. All right, let's keep going. I'm having an amazing time right now. Okay, I want to bounce to the team and ops. You're running a seven figure business, 85 % profit margins. How do you keep a machine that lean? so i again have an advantage here and that's because i have 15 years in the game doing everything and anything i mean i've built ios apps i've built android apps websites i've designed i used to work my first job was at interscope working with like rock they're rock artists like keen and i've just done so much that my skill set is so wide and varied that i can edit as to me just as good as almost anybody my design chops and abilities almost as good as anybody my cadence and stuff on the microphone, just because I've had a career in the prior, as good as like, so I have like, just like such a wide variety of skills.

1:07:21I can start talking about skill stacking where I'm not like a 10 in any of them, except for maybe speed. I'm maybe like a seven to eight in like 10 of them. And so that allows me to be like a one man show because I don't have to outsource anything because I can do everything. Do you know what I mean? It's just like a unique advantage that I have. I mean, I think we're in the world and it's actually on the creator side and the business side, it's the same exact thing and it's going to further be accentuated through AI is you start off in the beginning, you're a generalist. And if you want to stay, I mean, you could still build a very, very big, highly profitable business, but you want to stay one, two, three people, generalists are going to win.

1:07:54If you want to scale past that, then you're just going to have to bring in outside specialists. Who are those specialists that you're working with? The agencies, consultants? Like what are the outside help that you're bringing up? So on the management side, man, I always give them a shout out because Jake and Doug are incredible. And I think they're going to own the entire world of tech content. I have I do have edit. It's funny, man Because i've i've gone to like three or four different agencies where I give them money and I lose that money because I don't use them Part of the reason why is my stuff is so time sensitive.

1:08:22So when something comes out i'm like do I wait for an editor? Do I wait like 18 hours for him to turn it over and it's an eight or do I do it in 30 minutes and it's a nine? And so there's it's just very very tough to for me to give up those reins also just because I love editing But I do have motion graphic artists and motion designers per project again that I bring in I've incorporated this more and more and more because it's something that AI can't do yet. And so if you're doing like some really crazy, you know, 3D or motion design with captioning or text or visuals or whatever it might be, it just gives you that edge that AI can't touch yet.

1:08:54So different things like that. But what I'd love to find is an ideas person, which sounds so vague in general. 10 years ago, I would have rolled my eyes at. Now it's like the most in demand. Can we just stop? Just stop right now. We keep talking about this. It's the whole game. So many people. Sahil, he has a small team, which by the way, they're dialed. It was the last episode. They are so dialed. Love that. Bro, he has an ideas person. And it's just like, it's so crazy because I am obviously running a medium-sized company. It's not a small company, Iconic. And then I'm obviously the host and I'm doing a lot of stuff.

1:09:28I'm doing the preparation, et cetera. We have a team, obviously. But like, we're now looping in. Like, Tyga is now going to be more on like the ideas side. Like, we need ideas in spades. Yes. 10 years ago was something everybody rolled their eyes at. Now it's like the most in demand. That is my number one. If I had to, okay, these are all the pieces that I need for me to scale next year. The ideas person is by far and away to me, number one. Really interesting. I want to riff back and forth with you on that. Like that ideas person, how do we evaluate that person? That's just so interesting. It's like, hey, I'm doing a podcast.

1:10:04I'm coming to a podcast with yourself. So something like, you know, Mr. Beast is a genius, but like the one, my one favorite thing from him that he said above all else is he's like, when I started hiring and finding talent, I was just looking to clone myself. I was like, and so like the reason he was able to surround himself with the best ideas team in the world is because he was the best ideas guy in the world. And so it almost, it was the same with software. When I was really good at hiring developers is because I had an understanding of it and I knew how, so if you know nothing about software, it's so easy to get fleeced by a developer who says, oh, this is going to take 40 hours.

1:10:41In reality, they spent an hour and a half and they went and played Call of Duty the rest of the 39 hours. So again, I'm digressing, but having an understanding of who you... Being good at the thing or having an understanding at least of the thing that you want to hire for is super important. You talked about cloning yourself. I mean, yeah, that's actually exactly what we're doing is in order to do so, you need to be very, very dialed on SOPs for people listening, scope of proposal, these kind of mini Bibles, kind of rubrics on do this, do that, do this. What type of SOPs or systems are you using that help you drive your whole entire business?

1:11:17Apple Notes, bro. That's my HQ. That's everything. It's so informal and disorganized, especially now. I would have called myself a bullshitter four years ago when I said I have three hours maybe of deep work per day. But then you have two kids under two and you realize you get about three hours of deep work per day. So my process right now is very disorganized. My management can attest to that. They're always asking me for stuff. I'm like, I forgot. I just, it's like, I have it in Apple notes and it's very convoluted. So if you ask me this again next year at this time, I'll have a much better answer for you, hopefully.

1:11:50But right now it's, I'm going to laugh at it. I don't have anything. It's funny you say that too, because when we talked before we started the episode, I was like, hey, I went crazy into your content. We're friends. We've been friends for a long time. I obviously follow you and consume your content. But like, you know, I'm missing posts here and there. And it was so crazy, man, because I've always looked at you as like a business person. Like, I think you're a smart business mind, but I was like, oh my God, I completely forgot. This guy's like an absolute creative ninja. And going off of what you just said is like, it's great that you understand and know business well.

1:12:20So then you understand and know who to hire on that side. With that being said, my thesis, like in the next five years for this podcast, what we're going to end up doing is I really think that there's this inflection point where there's on one side, there's creators. You're a hybrid, I would say, but there's the creators. And on the other side, there's these operators, entrepreneurs, business people. If you are a creator out there, get a manager and start talking to people that understand and know the business. I think, again, because you're just, I'm not going to say that you're not really, really good at business, but when I look at it, it's like, let's just say your major is in creative and your minor is in business.

1:12:56And for me on my side, I would say my major is in business and my minor is in creative. and those are the type of people that they need to join together, that's how you're going to build all these huge things. So this is the thing that I think most about when it comes to this entire game. And I mentioned it, the artist versus the entrepreneur, right? The creative versus the business person. And there's such a tension. And I actually made a video like exploring this. It was one of my favorite videos that I made, but it kind of flopped because I spent all the time on the meat of the video and like the hook was an afterthought.

1:13:24And so like nobody stuck around past the first two seconds. But what I came up with, it's like, when we think of artists, we think of like Cole or we think of Van Gogh or Picasso. I make the argument that the most important artist of the last hundred years was Steve Jobs. And so like, there's artistry in anything that you do. And so I remember getting to an argument with somebody on threads and we were talking about Puberty. I don't know if you know that account. Yeah, I know. My boy Kit runs it. And they were like, that account is just, it's just, it's distribution. It's gimmicky. And I'm like, no, no, no.

1:13:56There's a real art to what they do. and there's real artistry behind it and they enjoy it just like an, so there's no rules to art is what I figured out. And I'm trying to find the artistry in business, the artistry in scaling, the artistry in how I can take what I'm doing now and three exit year over year. And to me, it's like, you talk, you just positioned right now as like the business person, the operator. I've always done the same, but now I'm like, there's artistry in that. And like blending those two worlds, Pharrell had a great quote on this, by the way, but blending those two worlds is like the game that I'm obsessed with right now.

1:14:27and want to figure out how to play. Me too, man. I'm like, I can't even explain to you just like even preparing for these podcasts, just like how you were responsible for me learning about all this stuff because I just went down a huge, deep, deep rabbit hole. I want to go a bit further. It's funny. It's not going to be a long segment on team because it's him and everybody outsourced here. Let's talk about the tools. You talked about kind of creative tools. What are you using outside of Notes? Is it Notion? Is it Slack? What's your toolkit? Apple Notes is my entire HQ. If we're talking about creative tools, there's a wide variety here.

1:15:02Again, one of my advantages, we don't have to get into the story, but when I was 18, I smoked something that was laced and it sent me into 10. I basically lost 10 years of my life. It's not even an exaggeration. Those four or five years that I was not a functioning member of society, my reality was so shattered and I had such a deep and severe debilitating anxiety disorder that I just could not exist in the world. Like if I left my bedroom in my mom's basement, my entire body went numb. Anyways, because I couldn't leave that bedroom, I learned everything in like those five years. Every creative software, I learned how to code.

1:15:35I mean like everything, right? I was even messing around with 3D at the time. It was like Cinema 4D, I think was the name of the program. Now it's all about Blender. But like I learned everything, right? So I was like this practitioner. So now I'm still, again, like a seven at everything. I'm not like a pro at any one thing. So my toolkit is very, very wide depending on the piece of content that I'm going to make. In general, I'm in Photoshop, Figma, and Premiere. And those are like my tools of choice. I'll like use other tools like for specific things. I might bring in After Effects for, but like in general, I live my life, my creative life in Photoshop, Figma, Premiere.

1:16:11And now a little bit more so in these AI tools like Kling, like Mid Journey, like VO3, et cetera. What's interesting on that too is you and me are back at the 30s, 40. very, very soon. I always thought experience was so undervalued. I definitely think it's undervalued in business, 100%. I look at myself like even like a year ago, like what was I thinking? On the creative side, for the people out there listening, they were very, very lucky because what took you five years, again, status quo, forget AI, you would have got disproportionately better results because of that because you widened your toolkit.

1:16:47For everybody out there listening, What you did in five years, people could do in a fraction of that time. Six months. A fraction of that time. Six months. You're hearing from him. I mean, if I, again, I'm more focused on like the business side, but on the creative side, like, yeah, I would just go into a deep, deep hole. I'm just teaching myself any and all of these things on the AI side. I think you can change your entire life in six months. And I made a couple of videos on this. And actually, one guy, this is a guy named Serial. Shout out to Serial. Incredible AI creator. He built a SaaS called Enhancer.

1:17:17is doing like 150 grand a month in an MRR or whatever it might be. In six months, he went from nothing. And he made a story, which I really appreciated. He attributed it to my video about six months. He said, I watched this video. I locked in for six months. And all of a sudden I had 150 ,000 followers on Instagram and a SaaS doing 150K MRR. That's just testament to it. I think anybody, lock in for six months, be true to yourself. No video games, no Netflix, none of this bullshit. No scrolling TikTok forever. just focus on one in-demand, highly desirable skill. And I just feel you can't lose 10K a month minimum, minimum.

1:17:56Go hard, guys. We're talking about zero to 150. Let's talk about you. So you grew 400 ,000 followers on Instagram and TikTok in just 100 days. What's the formula for building on Instagram today? So the biggest difference from today, from even just like two, three years ago, especially from six years ago, Nothing that worked six years ago will work today. When I look at my audience, six years ago, I would look at, oh, these are people that I can reach that want more of what I have to say or what I'm doing. Now I look at an audience. These are people that I can reach if I make a really compelling and good piece of content that outperforms everybody else they're following, outperforms the content that everybody else that they're following posts in the last time since they visited Instagram.

1:18:43So it's like completely different now. So like if I have 600 ,000, 700 ,000, whatever, I have 650 on Instagram, I can only reach them if I make a good piece of content. So it's a little bit different. So what works on Instagram now, what I used to prioritize why I grew so fast two, three years ago, is because I just prioritized views again and followers. I just wanted more, more, more. And I realized it's sort of a losing strategy because you can't reach those people unless you make good content. So what we just talked about is what works on Instagram now. Algorithms worship storytelling. Just tell a good story.

1:19:14I don't care what the visuals are. Tell a good story, make the audio good, and make the audio help augment that story. And to me, you can't lose. So in short, I'm going to answer your question by just saying storytelling. That's what works on Instagram right now above everything else. So for somebody starting out and wanting to grow their social following, what format would you recommend? Shorts? Short form video, 100%. I wouldn't recommend anything else. Granted, it all depends on where your skills are, what you're trying to do. Again, it's very, very nuanced. But in general, I would probably 90 % of people who just want to start out short form.

1:19:50Dude, first of all, it's heavily geared for discovery. Like my mind gets blown every time I think. You can post anything you want to the internet and there's nine different platforms that is in their best interest to push it out to as many people as possible for free. You post something to the internet. In the next hour, you have like 300 new people that view it as a newbie creator. That to me, that's like, this will never exist again. In 10 years, this is not going to be possible anymore. Not 10 years. We're in the age of free attention. Like how everybody and their mamas aren't making short form video right now that have any economic ambition blows my mind, man.

1:20:23You know, what's really crazy about this is conventional wisdom, and I'm sure you would agree, is, you know, you could do photo, video, design graphics, words, all different types of content. And I'm always like, okay, video is the top of the pyramid because then you can disseminate that down to the words. It could be a newsletter. It could be the caption. you could do screen shares for photos, et cetera. Sahil was very, very interesting as he's like, my medium is words. He's got a huge newsletter. I think it's got a million subscribers. What's really, really interesting is before video was top because then you could disseminate it down.

1:20:57But now per what you said, now you can use words and then you can go upstream through these different programs to now make videos. So now it's democratized the whole entire situation where no matter what your skillset is, you could just find a way to get the most top of the funnel. Sahil's built an empire through words, but I would argue it's because of the personality behind the words. If he was anonymous, it wouldn't work, right? So Sahil is such a magnetic personality. He's a great looking guy. He's a good father. He's like, there's just so much going for him. The words have so much meaning to people because of who's creating these words, who's writing these words.

1:21:34You see what I'm saying? So he's a great use case because he went hard in short form video and he built a short form video audience. And I think that probably like, I don't know, 2x his business or whatever it might be because he cracked it so quickly. But yeah, to your point, it depends on the person. If you're a writer, don't worry about video. You got Substack, you got paid communities, you got, you have Twitter, it's, you know, LinkedIn. So it really just depends on who the creator is and what their objectives are. Looking ahead to 2026 and 2027, what shifts do you expect in social media and creators need to prepare for now?

1:22:05The big thing that everybody will talk about here is AI. You know, again, the infinite content machine is coming. It's going to get a little bit more potent and a little bit more compelling in 2026, a little bit more so in 2027. And I think 28, 29 is like when the floodgates really, really open. And I want to put it on record because I think like, and again, we need like the analytics from the platforms, but I think 1000x content output on these social platforms is perfectly possible. I almost think it's a guarantee, like 1 ,000x. Not 10x, not 100x. I think it's going to be 1 ,000x. And it's going to be fairly compelling content.

1:22:44Dude, even now, you're going to see on Instagram a completely AI-generated video with 17 million views and 1.6 million likes. People love this shit. People love brain rot. They just want their brain numbs. They just want to squirrel like zombies. Imagine that, 1 ,000x, how hard it is to compete as a human individual creator. Nobody's talking about this. I feel like everybody's underestimating it, and I'm freaked out by it. I also see it as an opportunity, but that's my big, big prediction of how these platforms are going to shift over the next three years. Just to further rift on that for the people listening as well too, I think what it is going to further make very, very clear, A, offline relationships, real human relationships, and B, the ability to cut through the noise and be able to galvanize your following and community to then actually still go offline and meet in person.

1:23:33the person right now that could say, hey, I'm going to a coffee shop in California, in LA, at this coffee shop at four o 'clock. The person that could get 15 people to show up, that person is going to be very, very, very valuable. I love that framing. Very, very valuable. Man, Colin and Samir. These guys, some of the best minds in the game. That's why they're doing in-person events now. They understand what's coming. And they had a very well - Packed out audience. Packed out audience, celebrities. I mean, the whole thing was incredible. But dude, I love that framing so much. I'm going to steal that.

1:24:03Cool, steal it. Throw in the newsletter, baby. Link out the episode. Let's get it. What is an untapped channel someone can build on right now? And why do you think it's a big opportunity? You know, I have like a relationship with the Beehive guys and that's what my newsletter is on, but I think it's Substack. I think it's, I mean, first of all, they have a war chest of cash. They just, I forget if they were acquired, if they raised a fortune, whatever it might be, but Substack, and man, I'm going to shout out Orton again. He kind of put me onto this, where he's reposting his videos and his content on Substack.

1:24:31And it's just like getting him, I forget what he said, like 50 subscribers to his newsletter every day by just taking an extra two minutes and posting there. And I think these kind of communities like Substack, I think are going to grow in potency over the next few years. These little sort of corner like pockets of the internet where it's high signal, very human. TikTok, Instagram, they have a real danger of becoming 2 % human and like 2 % signal, just like brain rot engines, because that's what people want. so interesting that you said something without saying it and I want to make it very very clear for people listening it's in your team we actually have she does way more than this I love you to death Nicole hopefully you're watching this Nicole she's a poster for by poster I mean actually posting on social media I talked about in the last episode with Oren for people that haven't watched that episode I'll give you a quick 10-20 seconds we went from on iconic posting five days a week.

1:25:28It was like one time. And then we went from one time to two times to three times. We didn't post in the week and we went one time to two times. We checked in Google Analytics, tons more traffic, back into the conversion, back into the AOV, a ton more money coming in. So for people out there listening, find a way. I mean, go on, upward, anything. Pay the little extra money if you can't do it to be posting on every single, just repurpose the same exact stuff on everything. I think I'm going to put on, I think we're going to do a sub stack. I like that. I think it'll keep me sharp on the writing too.

1:25:58We'll repurpose, but a little bit of writing. And it's a high level audience, right? It's just a very, here's the thing, man. There's an LTV, like a lifetime value of using a software term to an audience. And this is why I say like a VC with 10 ,000 followers on Twitter, but those 10 ,000 followers are like, you know, high level capital allocators and decision makers. That's worth more than a TikTok dancer with 10 million, you know? So Substack, I like because it's also high level. These are professionals. These are people reading ambitions. These are people reading books though. Correct, yeah.

1:26:27And then the other thing I would say, man, is like the whole game, I think over the last two years, and so many people are going to be late to crack this. I think a big opportunity for you and something that I desperately want to figure out is long form product, army of clippers underneath. I think that's the game right now on the internet. And I think for a pod, it's like you live or die by that right now. There's no reason why there shouldn't be, you know, 30 TikTok accounts and 20 Instagram accounts and 10 YouTube fan accounts of the show that are just like, you know, 15-year-olds in Europe, just clipping everything and putting it out to the world.

1:27:01Shots on goal. I mean, this is what the Andrew Tate model that he popularized. This is how he came to fame. And then the Theo Vons of the world and the Nelk boys of the world figured it out right afterwards, took this model. And now it's just like becoming a little bit more and more prevalent. But like, to me, I just think this has a lot more runway, a lot more legs. I think the next two or three years, long form product, army of clippers underneath. Guys, we've kept it 100 % organic. I think we've cemented kind of the structure, the value. We are most definitely going to start going crazy and just spreading our net.

1:27:29I wanted to wait until the quote unquote product, aka the podcast was where I wanted it to be. But yeah, it's time for us to just scale our reach. So I completely agree. And what's really, really interesting about that - And there's no risk because you're paying per view. So you're only paying when the clips perform, which I think is great. Yeah, you pay on a per CPM basis, but you can lock in the amount that you spend. And if it goes over that threshold, you can put a max on the amount paying out per clipper. So you could just say, hey, no matter what, I'm going to pay you 500 bucks. And even if it's$10 CPM and they get whatever, 500 ,000 views, if it gets 10 million, you don't pay them anymore.

1:28:06Yeah, I think it's going to be really, really scary. I spoke to a very, very big clipping farm and they had a very, very interesting take that I want to bring in here and share with you. And we can kind of riff on it is, formerly on the Shackleford episode, we talked about WAP and clipping a bit ago. And I was just like, hey man, someone with$43 billion in Saudi Arabia is just tomorrow, he could just flood the internet. He could literally flood the internet. I think Mr. Beast might be president just because he owns a distribution. He could do clipping, he can go crazy. But when I talked to this guy who's doing this at scale, I was introduced to him through Harnervor, actually.

1:28:43We'll see at Lighthouse after. He was like, you're right, but you're not fully right. It is a blend between two different things. One, do you have money? But two, is it actually valuable or entertaining? Because he told me, I don't want to say the name of the brand, but a very, very big, well-known company put a bounty out there for a lot of money, even with a good CPM, but none of the clippers wanted to clip it. So it has to be either valuable. You can't buy people because these people, again, I think that there's going to be a gazillion types of accounts, but a lot of these clippers, maybe they'll be doing one type of brand, talking to one type of ICP.

1:29:22They have five different accounts or channels. They're not going to dilute their channel with some random thing, no matter how much money. Because these accounts, it's like brands. You know what I'm saying? Like all these clippers are going to be like little mini brands. So to your point, a lot of the shows that are popping now, I love the TBPN guys. Awesome. And the first thing that they cracked was we have to make the show clippable. Yeah. That's it. It has to be the reason why Kai Sinat and iShowSpeed are where they are. They've never said it explicitly, but like, I mean, they're once in a generation talents and entertainers.

1:29:55But like, I think in the back of their minds, they understand everything that they do on camera needs to be clippable. And I just think like that is the framing that almost anybody doing a long form product, whether it be podcast, whether it be IRL streaming, whatever it might be. That's almost the framing that you need to operate under in the modern internet. I have like a little mini sops in my head of how to like frame clips and that's a muscle that's been trained 10 years and iconic yeah I mean like you know it takes time that's what people don't understand yeah it takes reps but to your point man and and it's funny because it's so hard to do and replicate that we can talk about it freely it's not like your secret sauce you have to protect right but the reason that this show is going to win and you're going to get all the biggest guests in the world to me you're incredible conversationalist the question the brand and the packaging, but it is that like instinctive understanding that you have of how to play that game.

1:30:46Reason why is because imagine the value that you're bringing to somebody come on the show. They know they're going to get 10 clips that all have viral potential. That are pretty. Super well packaged. That are pretty. That are pretty. That like the lighting is good. Oh my God. Like they don't have to worry about how they look or whatever it might be. Whereas sometimes you go on a show and it could be, it could be a big show. I'm not speaking like, I've done some shows that are like Like some in person, but some just on camera, Zoom shows, which I like less and less. I love doing the in-person stuff because of the context and body language and whatnot.

1:31:15But then what happens is then you get a collab request to such a shitty, like bite-sized video. And it's kind of tragic because the show is so good, but the packaging and the bite-sized distribution that they're putting out is almost embarrassing. And it's like, you don't even want to like, you don't even want to share it. You don't even want to show people. And that's actually happened to me and a few of Kate. And so for you, like, this is why every guest in the world is going to want to come on. because I'm going to get 10 pieces of content out of this that are all incredible, sign me up. Let me make this very, very clear.

1:31:44Guys, we are never cutting corners in this. We are staying alive. All this stuff is going to get crazier. It's going to get bigger. And it's way more than 10, by the way, too. Way, way more than 10. You're getting way more than 10 clips. And yeah, it's so crazy, man, because I actually am upfront about, because again, I had very little leverage, obviously, when we started. I feel like someone was like, oh, do you expect us to post? and I was like, I'm radically confident that when I'm going to deliver you, you're going to want to post, but do whatever you want. And that person posted a lot. And another layer on top of that is love him to death.

1:32:15I'm not going to even call him out. But like a guy took it into his own hands and reclipped it. And like... What? No. No, bro. No, no, no. We can't put that out there. Yeah, yeah, yeah. We can't put that out there. I know what you mean. You know what I'm saying? Because the reverse is true as well. Oh, the reverse is true as well. You need to be proud of what... Exactly. Yeah. Which is where clipping gets a little interesting. But again, that's... People can clip anyways without permission. So it's like, and it's not going to your account. It's going to the satellite accounts. But shit, then I'll have to get permission from you.

1:32:44What I planned on doing was like a carousel. And like every slide is like a different topic. For everybody here listening, you're going to be more and more. It's getting so much fun. Because like, again, we're friends, but like we're going to be talking, we have been talking and we will be talking more than we've talked in our whole entire life the next two weeks. So we're going to like collab creatively on like the rollout and go-to market. It's going to be... I love that. It's going to be crazy. Okay, we got two more sections. We got AI, which we need to talk about with you, specific questions, then the lightning round.

1:33:09What do you think is a small way a creator can start using AI today that will give them a big win? A small way. So I talk about AI a lot, but I don't really use it exclusively as like a replacement for me. I use it as a collaborator. So the way that any creator, I think, can improve their content significantly is to use AI as a collaborator. So don't go and ask Claude or GPT-5 to write you a script. It's going to be garbage. It's terrible. They can't do it. Guys, we know you use ChatGP too. We see that on LinkedIn. There's things that we know. But you can write a script and then piece by piece, you can say, hey, conversationally, you're my creative brainstorming partner.

1:33:49You're a badass Whedon and Kennedy, senior executive or designer there, whatever it might be. Or you're a top sub-stack essayist. Let's talk about this line in particular. Do you find it compelling? What are other ways that we can word it that may be a little bit more succinct, that would be more attractive to the specific audience? Okay, now give me some more ideas that'll be more attractive. This is like, and just go back and forth as me and you would. Like me and you were talking about a line. How can we improve that line? Let's go back and forth. You can do that with AI with pretty good success.

1:34:18But if you just ask it to do it for you, it's going to be completely, completely garbage. So my answer to this would be, use AI as a creative brainstorming partner and assistant. And you have to give it the context first and train it to be effective and useful. And there's like, I wish we could give them the prompts to do this. But that's what I would say. Use AI as a collaborator. And I think you can see a big, big improvement in your content. Just to further rift off this, I think obviously, as this open residency grows, there's certain things that I'm going to have to elevate and delegate. The one thing that I unequivocally will not outsource, I will have an assistant doing it, is the, let's just call it initial research.

1:34:56like I listened to a couple podcasts with you on it and a key thing you said it and I want to further riff on it and give people very very this is law for me is that first thing that I put in a google doc all my words all my thoughts it's so messy and it's all over the place but that first thing that we then mold must be me right you can't you can't be like oh what are the questions that I should ask this guy right no no this is what I am thinking and then yeah help me mold this better You said it much better than me. I completely agree. I want to keep firing away some AI stuff. So Dario Amati predicted 50 % of entry-level white-collar jobs could be wiped out by AI.

1:35:35Do you see that happening? And how should people adapt? 50 % of specific particular ones, maybe, right? But like other jobs will be created because of it. In general, I want to say like a lot of the AI doomerism is more annoying than like the AI ultra sensationalism because it's designed for clicks. I don't know the game some of these guys are playing. I don't know if, you know, Amade is trying to position Anthropic is like the ethical AI company. And so this is probably part of his larger branding. But I do think that, I mean, I don't know why like a entry-level legal associate, AI can do it just as well, right?

1:36:09Like this deep research into legalese and whatnot. And so, yeah, there's going to be a dramatic decline in demand for some of these white collar jobs. 50 % might sound a little, I don't know. I couldn't tell you. I'm not an economist, but perfectly possible. I completely agree. Any of that entry level stuff is absolutely completely done to layer on top of what - Which is hard because to get to the senior level, you got to go through the entry level. So like that's got to play out. I don't know how that plays out, but it'll be interesting to see. That's actually a really, really interesting take is the ascension in any job is like, yeah, it's like you're entering your entry level, you're mid, you're, wow.

1:36:47So more and more so, maybe companies will be hiring less so for the immediate impact that they can have and more so as a future gamble in a sense. So it'll be interesting, man. The job markets are going to shake up, like probably like we've never seen them shake up over the last, you know, since who knows, Great Depression, but it's going to be insane. And or the high level strategic lawyer does the unthinkable. He partners with Roberto Nixon and you have a two-man legal firm. That could be interesting. You know, Naval, which is interesting, he famously predicted this like 10 years ago that right now the size of these corporations are as big as they'll ever get.

1:37:21And more and more, they'll start shrinking into smaller, more leaner teams. And that's how the greater economy will go. Less companies and more individual practitioners. And I think we're starting to see that play out. So he was very prescient for that. Yeah. It's funny you say that because we don't need a big team and we could scale this thing infinitely. And it's just gonna, oh dude, I don't even want to get into that. Being valued at$20 billion is like 11 people. It's a whole new world. So going off what you just said, do you think the next superpower is a country or an intelligence? I said it in one of my scripts.

1:37:55I think it's an intelligence. I think that everything we do, I already think there's probably people vibe, like, you know, like vibe coding and like vibe marketing. I think there's vibe legislating happen 100 % right now. Maybe not to these like, you know, a 73-year-old senator from Kentucky, but I guarantee you his staffers are drafting legislation with the help of AI, right? This is why it's so important. I think AI is probably overrated in terms of the effect that it'll have on like creativity or the job market, etc. Probably underrated at the macro level, like geopolitical. Because eventually we will have an AI president, not like the actual machine be president, but the president run everything or his staffers run everything through a specific intelligence.

1:38:39So that's how I see it playing out, man. And I don't want to get into this conversation now because, but the thing that I'm most interested in is Peter Thiel's recent comments about AI basically like transmuting people's souls. Dude, that's a whole, that's a whole thing that it sounds crazy now, but in a hundred years, there's something to it. And I might do like a video on my thoughts here because they're very eccentric a little bit, but I actually think it's coming like in a century. I a hundred percent think it is not going to be a country. I think it's going to be a super intelligence, I think.

1:39:12Anthropic, Google face, one of these guys, they have the ability to take over the whole entire world. 100%. I think we're kind of already in the tech oligarchy. I think our politicians are the 20 guys at the top, the teals and the, you know, those guys. Last question on AI, and then we're going to get into lightning round. Looking ahead, what excites you most about AI's future for creativity, and what concerns you? What concerns me is just the sadness of it. I really do actually feel sad. Sometimes I'll get a hate comment, and I'll go to the account, and it's you know, it's an artist that has probably poured 15 years into developing their craft.

1:39:45And like overnight, the demand has plummeted 90%. And it's going to be a lot harder to make a living off of it, right? Granted, what I would tell that artist is to just retool and readapt. And you'll probably make an even better living using these tools, especially in the interim arbitrage opportunity. Or a voice actor, you know, it is sad to lose like that human element. I literally said that earlier when I paid that guy for the messy. But imagine, man, it's like, if we want to make a flyer, we're going to run it through chat GPT. Like the previous way to do it was to go on Fiverr, message 10 different people, negotiate, wait for the creative, approve it, deny it, message another guy.

1:40:20It's like, that world's just not going to exist anymore. And so to me, sadness is probably like the biggest, how'd you phrase it, downside or? Yeah. I'm saying like, what are you most scared about? What excites you and what concerns you? I think that concerns you. What excites you? I think the fact that we're all going to have like essentially a Jarvis in our pockets, on our eyewear. Me, never it's going to be implanted in our brain, but eventually people are going to start getting it implanted. So maybe not that part. But having a super intelligence available to you at all times in your pocket, I think is incredible, man.

1:40:52I think it's an unbelievable achievement from humanity. And that excites me more than, you know, everybody else might say it's scary. I think it's an incredible, incredible tool. The Neuralink thing I don't even want to go down that I made a whole video on that Bro I can't There's this whole movement Of people that are waiting To have kids Because they want The Neuralink I made a video On the Alexander Wang Oh yeah yeah But dude We grew up in this baseball era Where everybody's taking steroids And this is the analogy That I made If you didn't take steroids Somebody else was going to Take your contract So if you wanted to be Economically competitive You had to take steroids During that era I think it's Like when my daughter's Like 40 years old This like shakes me to my core This is what terrifies me about AI.

1:41:32We might be sitting in this room in 40 years talking about like a hiring decision. You're going to hire that guy? Oh, he's not chipped. He's not chipped. It's economically disadvantageous. Why would you hire that guy? This guy's got the world's knowledge available to him at any time in his brain. Like, of course you're going to go with that guy, right? And so like, it's going to be economically disadvantageous to not be chipped, I think, in like 35, 40 years. That's a terrifying prospect. And Alexander Wang, the point that he was making because of the brain's neuroplasticity and how that works, especially in your early formative years.

1:42:04The kids who are going to be, grow up with the chip and plant it from birth, they're going to be able to figure out how to use it in ways that somebody like you or I, like later in life getting chipped, will never be able to figure out. And this is why like the Peter Thiel thing was so fascinating to me. Solomon in the Bible said, there's nothing new under the sun. We've had how many hundred thousand years of humanity. We still have war. We still have the human instinct, the greed, the pride, all the shit that like bogs us down and makes like utopia or like, you know, parasitical life, not possible.

1:42:31What if a super intelligence could achieve that? Everybody has it implanted in their minds. And so our souls get transmuted. Dude, that was the whole thing that I was thinking about. But like, that's the shit that really terrifies me with AI is eventually we like, these chips will take over. And that's why I've made like a vow. I will never get chipped. But if my daughter does in 40 years, I'm going to be like, she might have to, to make money. I don't know, man. It's all, it's all crazy. This is wild timing. I'm going to need five-day offsite with my girl this weekend, and we're negotiating on timelines for a lot of things.

1:43:01One of them is going to be babies. I got to go a little deeper on when this neural link's going to happen. What's the timeline on that? All right, man, let's go into the lightning round. I'm just going to fire off a bunch of questions. Go as short or as long as you want to go. So you interviewed Mark Zuckerberg. What was the biggest takeaway? For me, it's funny because I always looked at, I was like, damn, man, I'm going to interview Mark Zuckerberg, second richest man, one of the most powerful men in the world. And I'm some dude in a dusty garage who makes videos for Instagram. He's not going to have time for me.

1:43:26He's not going to, you know, whatever. But it was funny because before and after the interview, and I met him in person too. And like, we had like kind of similar conversations before and after the interview, we were talking about UFC, just like chopping it up, like bro to bro. So down to earth. So like, and you know, he's got a lot of people around him. His schedule, his schedule is so packed that when I met him in person, it wasn't like 4.30 to 5. It was like 4.46 to like 5.01. Like that's the, like it's, you know, super dialed. And so his people were like, all right, we're done. We got to go.

1:43:54And I could tell like, it was funny. He was almost like disappointed he had to like get back to work because he had like this, he had like this moment of like, man, I'm just bro to bro right now. And like, that was really cool. We were just chopping it up about the UFC. And so he's just like a normal human. You know, we all think about him, like revere him as like some superhero or something. He's just like a normal dude. Likes to talk about the shit that we like to talk about. And having his people like, try to pry him to the next thing, I thought was pretty endearing that he had time for like, again, a dude in a garage.

1:44:23I love that because I feel like kind of what I talked about earlier like on my journey, like, again, for my thing, it's kind of creativity. Just allowing him to have that like outlet and just do those other things. He's at all the UFC events too and like he trains. He's the real deal. Clearly he should get deeper. And when I met him in person, we're doing ping pong in the Orion glasses and the same thing. He had Palmer Lucky in the next room waiting for him. Jesus. And so his team was like, we got to go, we got to go, stop now, stop now, we got to go. trying to keep him dialed, but I was beating him in Pong.

1:44:52And he's like, no, no, no, no, no, we got to go. I'm not going to lose to this guy. And so the fact that he's that competitive, that again, he needed to beat me in virtual Pong. I was like, yo, imagine him in day-to-day business. The guy's a killer. Love that. What's the most important variable in staying relevant on social media? To never stop experimenting, ever. Once you stop experimenting and you rely on one format or one thing that's popping off or working for you, you cooked. Bro, so many people from the 2015, 2017, 2019, whatever, Instagram, TikTok, YouTube era that were popping then that are dormant now, the common denominator between them all is that they stopped evolving as a creator, as an artist.

1:45:34They stopped experimenting. They found a format. They cracked it. They thought it was going to last forever. Everything diminishes and dies over time. Got to always stay on your toes. Same thing for business too, guys. We talk about it all the time, evolve or die. And for me, you know, people always kind of shit on quote unquote passion. I think a couple of things, A, to further go on top of that, like burnout is a real thing. And unless you're doing something you're passionate about, you're going to burn out too. And just making sure what I love what you're doing and you've seen better results with actually posting less is just making sure that you just don't do too much of the input.

1:46:08Can I make two super quick points? Yeah. Number one, you have to love it. If you don't love it, you're going to burn out 10 out of 10 times. Not 9 out of 10 times, guys. 10 out of 10 times you will burn out if you don't love it. If you're in it for just the money or whatever, I just think you're going to get smoked. And so money is a great outcome. It's a horrible intention. So don't do it for the money. You got to love it or you will just not be able to compete against some of the savages out here. And then two, regarding burnout, one of the reasons that I haven't burnt out, I don't think I ever can now, is because when you do it in service of others.

1:46:40Right now it's for my kids, man. I can't burn out. I got, you know, I got to, I got to make a good living for them. I do it for the audience. Create to serve is my foundational mantra. When you do it for yourself and just like the numbers and the money, the followers, the views, nothing goes up into the right forever. So generally when you plateau or stagnate or whatever, that's when burnout happens. But when you do it for others, it's like a certain strength that comes to you. And I feel like it's, you're almost like invulnerable to the burnout. So like those are my two macro points on burnout.

1:47:07You've seen the creator economy evolve a lot. What do you think is most misunderstood about it? How much work it is, man. How it's an actual thing. Less and less so now because it's now entrenched into the zeitgeist. But there was a time where creators and influencers were just looked at vanity, lazy people. But it's a real job. I think it really adds a lot of value to the world. So I actually look at it as a responsibility in a way. What's the best investment you ever made in yourself? Shit. The best investment I ever made in myself was that laced weed that I smoked when I was 18. It probably cost me $18 of swag with some PCP.

1:47:48Oh, God. That because it set me on the journey that I'm on today. Some people got mad that I curse. I don't try and curse, guys. Me neither, man. I don't try and curse. I even beat my cursing in my content now. I don't like it that much. Like examples like that. Like I'm keeping that. I think that's really very relevant. We need to keep that. We're all imperfect, man. What's the one thing you think every creator should stop doing immediately? Optimizing for views. Because I just think it's such a trap. It's such a trap. And I see so many creators that I know personally that I probably should say, but they might think I'm hating.

1:48:18I can just see that they're putting themselves into a corner that they might not be able to get out of. So stop optimizing for views. Start optimizing for respect and depth and affinity with the audience. Bars. All right, last five questions that I asked everybody. Favorite book or podcast and why? My favorite podcast is actually Up and, not Up and Smoke, All the Smoke. Matt Barnes and Steven Jackson. It's just because I'm such a big basketball fan and they're like the realists. They just say it how it is. You can tell it's not, they're not trying to be brand friendly or anything. So just because I am an NBA encyclopedia and a massive basketball fan, I want to say All the Smoke.

1:48:54Me too. And I think that they do a great job. I love that show as well too. I'm deep in all of those basketball shows. is I think they do the best of, A, they're super authentic and they have the social proof and they're actually real players. Is they mix value and entertainment so well. Like they're just messing around. Another one that I want to shout out that I've been into lately is The Pivot. Oh, it's great too. So, you know, like Fred Taylor and Ryan Clark and those guys. It's just because when you come to a podcast for the subject matter that you're interested in and you stay for the soul and the heart that they put into it, I think that's a magic sauce, man.

1:49:22I think Stephen Bartlett is where he is, where he is because like he gets like into the character and the emotions of the people that they're talking with. And I really respect that. Me as well too. Entrepreneur or brand that you want to give flowers to and why? Yeah, this might be like a little bit of a weird one, but Noel Diesel on Instagram. I think he might be the best creator in the world right now, dude. I don't know if it was Gary Vee who said this, but when you see an elephant, it's not that interesting. But when you see an elephant on a unicycle, it's very interesting. This guy's like an elephant on a unicycle and like a pink pasture of flowers.

1:49:51This guy combines the shit that you would never expect to be combined. And he's so masterful at it. and his audience is like cult following and so loyal. I think he's just so unique. And every time he posts, I have to consume it. I think it's so mesmerizing me. That is amazing. There's been so many of these that people have said and I've almost all of them outside of, I think, Adrian Purr. I had never heard of these people, so. Adrian's an animal too, man. Oh my God. But check out Noel Diesel. Noel Diesel. All right, man. I had an amazing time. Where can they find you? RPN on YouTube, TikTok, Instagram.

1:50:22I'm working on it on Twitter. Guys, I have known you. I don't even know now, five, six, seven years, a couple of things. A, I think your career arc and a very, very underrated skillset, which I think I understand and know what to do, is the ability to reinvent yourself. You've done that multiple times since I've met you, and you've done it at very, very high levels. So I just wanted to give you your flowers for that first and foremost. And I think second, I'm getting to that time right now too, is I have so much respect. And again, I come from the world of like hustle, hustle, hustle. I just have so much respect.

1:50:58And Sahil really changed my life. His book and that podcast of how you navigate your life, what you're doing now with your kids, prioritizing the right things, yet still dominating on the business side. So I'm happy that you came. I can't wait for the world to watch this. And this should be behind a paywall. I'm just going to leave it at that. Yeah, man. Well, dude, I appreciate you. Last thing I want to say is, yeah, I wake up every morning and I get to hang out with my family and my kids all day and make videos about the stuff that I'm genuinely interested in and make a good living doing so.

1:51:25I'm living a dream and I'm just so grateful for the time period that we live in, man. The internet is magic. And if I can do it, anybody can do it a hundred percent. I'm, you know, so I'm not that special. I just love this game. So if you love it, you can do it, man. Amazing. Like and subscribe. Adios. 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, bigger guests, bigger locations, more value. See you in the next episode.