In short
Revisits favorite lessons on building personal brands that earn trust and long-term sales, emphasizing “remarkable” differentiation, taking risks, clarity frameworks, and brand-world storytelling.
Guests (backgrounds)
Seth Godin (marketing/author; attention vs trust). Gary Vaynerchuk (“Gary Vee”; entrepreneurship and personal brand). Chris Do (creative entrepreneur/teacher; adman Paul Arden quote; “safe is risky”). Caleb Rouse (brand strategist; “four-step brand story framework”). Oren (world-building strategist; maps brands like TV shows). Daniel Priestley (UK creator/strategist; “7-11-4” content architecture). Erica Millett (brand/psychology; “enemy effect”).
Key claims
Attention without trust is worthless; vanity metrics don’t build substance. Be remarkable via unique point of view, not production value or copying. Long-form builds deeper trust and is harder to fake. Risk-taking (“risky is safe”) and continuous improvement matter. Use frameworks: reverse-engineer outcomes (Caleb), build a brand “world” (Oren), ensure 7 hours/11 interactions/4 platforms (Daniel), and unite audiences against an ideological enemy (Erica).
Notable examples
“T. shaped” uniqueness (plants/Legos). Brands with plot/enemy positioning (Brian Johnson vs death; Liquid Death vs thirst). Casey Neistat’s vlogs as world-building. Taylor Swift’s “cool girl” enemy framing. Kino Body’s contrarian fitness enemy.
Written by AI. May contain mistakes. Listen to the episode to check what was said.
Chapters
Tap a time to open that second in VOSeth Godin on Attention and Trust
0:45 to 6:15
Seth Godin emphasizes the importance of trust in personal branding, arguing that attention without trust is worthless.
“So this show has a lot of people watching and listening to it.”
Gary Vee's Unique Approach
6:15 to 11:22
Gary Vee discusses how to stand out by bringing personal interests into content creation.
“We flew all the way out to New York to make this one happen.”
Chris Doe on Risk and Innovation
11:22 to 13:40
Chris Doe explains the necessity of risk-taking in business and personal branding for genuine success.
“It's a line borrowed from Paul Arden's book, Whatever You Think, Think the Opposite.”
The Importance of Taking Risks
16:08 to 19:00
Understand why taking risks is essential for building a personal brand.
“If something is holding you back from going all in on something because you think it's risky or you're not sure if it's going to work out, like, fucking go for it.”
Four-Step Brand Story Framework
19:00 to 21:18
Discover the framework to help clarify your brand's journey and goals.
“Next up, we got Caleb Rouse and the four-step brand story framework.”
Finding Clarity in Your Journey
21:18 to 24:07
Learn how to navigate clarity and re-evaluate your goals over time.
“Man, getting clarity is like one of the most powerful things you can do when building a brand and just in life in general.”
Embracing Change and Pivots
24:07 to 28:00
Understand the significance of pivots in personal and professional growth.
“And more often than not, like your goals at 18 are going to be different than your goals and aspirations at 24 and at 30.”
Understanding Brand World Building
28:13 to 30:26
Discussion on the concept of brand world building and how brands create compelling narratives.
“So everyone thinks like brand content, like almost linear.”
Case Studies in Brand World Building
30:26 to 32:43
Exploring examples like Casey Neistat and Cadence to illustrate effective brand narratives.
“The easiest way that I like to think about this is Casey Neistat's vlogs.”
Building a Visual and Thematic Brand Identity
32:43 to 35:06
Discussion on the importance of visual elements in brand identity and content creation.
“And so somebody can go into a convenience store and spend$2.50 and buy a ticket into the world of Cadence and feel like they are also this high performance athlete.”
Show all 17 chapters
The Importance of Long-Form Content
35:06 to 39:06
Explaining the value of long-form content in building a personal brand compared to short-form content.
“Next up, we got Daniel P all the way from the UK.”
Maximizing Content for Brand Exposure
39:06 to 42:00
Strategies for repurposing content across various platforms to maximize audience engagement.
“that you can repurpose a long-form piece of content.”
The Value of Long-Form Content
42:00 to 43:12
Learn why long-form content can be more beneficial for personal branding.
“And so that's why long form eats so much more because you're chipping away at those 11 hours a lot easier and a lot sooner.”
Understanding the Enemy Effect
43:12 to 46:05
Discover how uniting your audience against a common enemy can enhance connection.
“One strategy that I really love is called the enemy effect, which is uniting your audience against an ideological enemy.”
Creating a Unique Brand Identity
46:05 to 50:09
Explore how to define your brand's enemy for clearer audience engagement.
“Like, how does that person come up with their enemy?”
Effective Marketing Strategies
50:09 to 53:59
Learn how to market your product effectively by addressing audience needs.
“And to round us out, we got the internet daddy himself, Sabri Subi.”
Introduction to Personal Branding Discussion
56:01 to 56:11
The hosts set the stage for a discussion about personal branding.
“You want to talk about personal brand content?”
Transcript
Automatic transcript. May contain errors.0:00Over the past four years, we've sat down with some of the biggest creators and forward-facing founders in the world. Through our conversations, we've unpacked countless insights on what it really takes to build a personal brand. The kind of brand where your audience is obsessed with you, ready to support you in anything that you do. In this episode, we're going to revisit some of our favorite moments that completely changed the way we think about showing up online. Let's kick things off with our good friend, Seth Godin. So attention has always been critically important, and it has a best friend named Trust.
0:27And it is possible to get attention without trust, but it's not worth anything. It is possible to get trust without a lot of attention. That's worth a ton. So you're measuring the wrong thing. And the idea of remarkable doesn't mean a gimmick. It doesn't mean a hustle. It means worth making a remark about. So this show has a lot of people watching and listening to it. Did they find out about it because you called them up at home and said, you got to watch my show? I don't think so. Most of the people who are listening have never met the two of you. They heard about it from someone who else who heard about it, who told them about it.
1:09And people spread the idea, not because it's a cataclysm and a joke. They spread the idea because it will make them look good if they introduce their friends to what you're doing. What Seth actually doesn't know is I've personally called up every single person who has subscribed to our channel and watched the podcast and said, hey, you should check us out. This is grill and marketing its finest. Oh, yeah. You got to be remarkable, though. You got to be. You got to be good enough for people to be able to go and say, hey, check this out. The reason why I'm watching this new show, Apple TV Pluribus.
1:39You know why? Because my best buddy, Kai, called me and said, you have to check this out. Not because I saw a billboard, not because I saw it in a magazine, because someone went out of their way to tell me about this thing and said, you need to go listen to this. Another thing that Seth brought up is how important trust is. And attention, we're all kind of after attention. We all want the views. We want the followers, of course. Want our business to get views. Of course. Business to get attention. But if you don't have trust, if you're not relatable enough or you're not remarkable enough to build trust with your audience, going viral and getting all of these views doesn't mean anything.
2:17Specifically for the people that are listening to this episode, we're building a personal brand so that we can build a business behind it. And the way that you build a business is you got to get sales. And the way that you get someone to buy something from you is that you're remarkable or they trust you. Ideally, both. If you have a really great product and you build that trust with your audience, they're going to be like begging you to buy whatever it is you are offering to sell. but you have to build trust and the way to do that is to be relatable and you shouldn't be going after or chasing the uh the vanity metrics of the views and the followers you really want trust we see this all the time with the accounts that maybe like popping a thousand balloons and they're nice maybe that account gets some ad sense right but i i don't know who it is yes i think they're super interchangeable it doesn't matter whereas a youtuber that gets 10 000 views for their clothing brand and they're showing you the behind the scenes of what it's like and you really fall in love with this person their vision and why they're building this thing that person's brand has the potential to see so much more success over the long term because you have so much trust built up and i'd argue too it's the same reason why if i saw someone out in public and they're a youtuber and i consume their content or like i have went to an event for a youtuber before because i got a lot of value from seeing their episode i was like wow this workout it literally changed my life.
3:42It completely changed and gave me confidence. And I've turned into a new person because this random person doesn't know who I am's YouTube video. You need to be thinking about long form content. Totally. Tell you that right now. It's going to just going to help everything out that you're doing. If you're focused on Instagram right now, I would literally switch it over to YouTube or somewhere that our podcast somewhere that they can actually someone somewhere that a community member can hang out with you for a longer period of time. There's also so many people online making videos about like how to go viral.
4:11And it's like, yo, use these three hooks and go viral. And everybody wants the views, of course, like you want attention. But just following those gimmicks and those hacks and the tactics of like how to growth hack, you're not actually going to build anything of substance. Like it's just kind of empty views. We're really after like a true hardcore audience. our podcast isn't even close to the biggest in the world we're not the smallest we're not the biggest but like we get some incredible messages from people about how much they fuck with our show because of like how real we are and like we ask great questions we conduct a great interview the guests have a good time when they come on and then we have the ppd where it's like yo come hang out with us and i think that's where we build the trust you know what i'm saying it's like we bring ourselves into the content.
5:05But like, if you're just in it for trying to get views or trying to go viral, you're never actually going to build anything of substance. You have to just also try to get a little bit better. Every time you do the thing, we talked to Seth about that briefly, like after the show ended, it's like every time we do a pod, every time he writes a book, every time someone puts out a YouTube video or a short form piece of content, you should be able to look at it and be like, what can I do to make this a little bit better? Could I make my intro a little bit better? Could I film it from this angle? Should I add a little bit of lighting?
5:31If you always are doing that and always trying to think about how can I get one little bit percent better, at the end of the year, you'll be dramatically better than where you started. I also want to harp on when you hear the word like remarkable, it doesn't always have to be production value. You don't need a better camera or a new lens or more lights or a whole team to quote unquote be remarkable. You just have to have a unique point of view and you just have to be remarkable in the way that like you show up and who you are online. And you can't be remarkable by copying what everybody else is doing.
6:12Shout out to Seth, our most viewed episode ever. Next up, we got Gary Vee. We flew all the way out to New York to make this one happen. This is about bringing yourself into the content. Roll the clip. Guys, do you understand that you could double your podcast audience if you guys made a video about burgers? People don't believe that when I say that. Go deeper on that. I will. By you throwing off speed pitches, that 20%, that gives you the opportunity to get a whole new world. If you guys just literally told a frat story of a keg stand, that's the video that might get 3 million views, and they'd be like, who are these guys?
6:45Oh, shit, this podcast? Oh, I do that. People are not giving themselves a chance to be discovered. People want sales. People want depth. People have philosophies of, like, I want to be on brand. I want to be consistent. Ideologies. It's not how the game works. You got to let him go deeper, man. Pause. Whoa. Okay. Hey, you got to bring in the stuff that you're interested in into your content. Okay. You're a T. We've talked about this many times on the pod. Okay. You're a T. You got the one thing that you're deep in, business, plants, education, filmmaking, whatever the thing is. And then it's the other stuff up here on the T that makes you unique.
7:20There's thousands of people, millions of people in your respective niche, tons of people doing the exact same thing. How are you going to stand out? Gary Vee is one of his most viral clips of all time. It's him talking about how he loves blueberries and like they're the best ever. It's like one of his most viral clips ever. And you guys know what I'm talking about. If you're a fan of Gary Vee, if you've seen his content. Yeah. I mean, Gary does this extremely well. You think about Gary obviously has VaynerMedia. And he talks a lot about entrepreneurship, personal brand marketing. But when you think of Gary Vee, you think about the New York Jets.
7:53You think about garage sailing, other shit. Playing cards. playing cards. And so why has Gary been able to cut through the noise and really stand out? Like there are other founders who are talking about, you know, things that he talks about, but he, like Seth said, he's like so remarkable because he's kind of going against the grain. He's not afraid to cuss, but he's bringing himself into the content and really showing you like a 360 degree view of like who he is and there's no lack of information on the internet like people can search on chat gpt google youtube and learn anything they want and so if that's the case and if there's creators there's endless amount of creators out there creating content regardless of what niche you're in.
8:49So if that's the case, how do you stand out? Well, it's by having a different point of view and bringing yourself into the content. For example, you like plants. I like plants. I like Legos, right? So if someone's also into plants or also into Legos and they see us talking about something that they've heard somebody else talk about, but then they also see that you're into plants or that I'm into Legos or fitness, working out, food, whatever it may be, they might say, hey, I've heard this before, but I like the way that Brayden or Costas said it. I also really fuck with the fact that Brayden likes plants or Costas likes Legos.
9:28So I'm going to rock with Brayden and Costas versus some other person. And so if you can think about that, like what you said, it's the T. It's like whatever your niche is, whatever your focus is, if you're providing value of sorts, You know, if you're building the personal brand around a certain topic or niche, when the idea of like you are the niche, it's like you're talking about, you know, a specific thing. You're providing value within like a specific sector, but you're also bringing in all your hobbies and interests also into your content because that makes it relatable. That makes it you.
10:03And that's going to make you stand out. People are afraid to do this because they're the views dip, the likes dip, vanity metrics dip. If you talk about something a little bit, it's like a little bit to the right. Yeah. Right. They're like, ah, I don't know. That's just not my brand. Like whatever. I'd argue that those views are more important overall in the whole cumulative situation than just the ones of you talking about your business stuff or your podcast stuff, your camera stuff, whatever the thing is. I bet you every single person listening to this podcast can think of a creator. They can think of two creators and they're going to pick one creator where they're just like, okay, they're talking about something similar to this creator, but I like this creator because they're unique.
10:45They they're talking about something that is niche that they're interested in that I'm also interested in. So I'm a rock with this creator more. It's an easy one. Easy one to think about for this is like fitness creators. There's a bazillion fitness creators. Some of them are way more funny than others. Some of them are science based. Some of them are nutrition based. Some of them have, you know, a degree in kinesiology and they can help you with this specific thing. That's how you got to think about the stuff that you're doing. If you're a real estate agent, think about what you can do to be different than all the other real estate agents.
11:12Shout out to G. This episode really did help us this year. It literally helped us double the show. So if you're from that episode and that's how you found us, thank you so much for tuning in. Next up, we got Chris Doe. Safe is risky. Risky is safe. Roll that clip. It's a line borrowed from Paul Arden's book, Whatever You Think, Think the Opposite. He's a legendary ad man and his chapter is safe is risky. Risky is safe. When you do what everyone else is doing, you get what everyone else is getting and if you're not already in position one two or three you're pretty much dead there's a general rule of thumb that the person in the first place in any industry or market is three times bigger than number two number two is three times bigger than number three so basically you can't be first second or third you're screwed i i almost feel like if you can't be first you're screwed and so if you just do all what everyone else is doing it's not going to work out unless you're number one.
12:03And then now why is risky safe is because, well, if you're doomed to do something, at least do something on your own terms to try an idea that might break through the noise, that might be an innovative business model. It's just better that you pursue that. So this is why taking some risk is the safest thing that you can do. The moment I walked in and quit my job was the moment I feel like I was finally like giving myself a hundred percent chance of doing this thing doing the pod doing my company blue stripe i'm like i gotta burn the boats i actually have to do this if i stay here like i could do this for the next 10 years 100 get a paycheck it's safe it's super wicked safe i'm sports isn't going away from ai i'm gonna be able to hang out here yeah 401k call a day if i really want to see how big we can take this thing i have to quit my job and that was the most liberating feeling walking out of that the building on the last day i'm like damn you gotta get to get over to go now you get to actually like you get to play like do you want to play show them what you can do hearing chris talk about this i can't help but to think of if you're not first you're last ricky bobby ricky bobby there's uh there's an incredible jim rone quote though he said everything's risky and if if you look at it from that perspective right i like that if everything is risky and you're thinking about well if i don't take the risk if i don't bet on myself like how is that risky well you risk not seeing your full potential.
13:24You risk not betting on yourself. You get one life. We're all going to fucking die. Like, why not bet on yourself? The worst that happens is that it doesn't work out and you go get another job or you just go back to where you were before you fucking took the risk. And it's all good. You can move back to your hometown. You can leave. Dude, you can go back to your mom's basement. Yeah. No problem at all. You can start over. You can start over at 30. You could redo it. You could get divorced and restart your life. Doesn't matter. Dude, I had a dream last night that was so fucking realistic that I thought that was going to happen because I had a really realistic dream that my fiance called off the engagement and I was like, holy shit, I got to start over.
14:08This is fucking crazy. But you could. You could do it. You could. If you wanted to. Could have done it. Biggest of the year. This episode? No, the art list sale that's going on right now. That's right. It's a toppling in the description. Do you want to know how much it is? It's actually crazy. I would love to. Okay, it's 20 % off the annual plan. So that's like music, the stock footage, all that good stuff. Sound effects, AI voiceover. There's so many things I can't remember them all. And 40 % off the AI products. And I just tested out my newest video that's on the pod account. First four clips are all created with AI.
14:37Those looked... It's pretty ridiculous. Look, I don't want to gas them up too much, but it looked fucking amazing. So when I can think of a use case for this, you're in a pinch, all right? Maybe you need one extra clip of B-roll or your editor is doing podcast clips and he needs some like money flying through the air. Something. You can literally go in, prompt the engine. I was using Bayo 3 and it just, boom, pops it up. Takes a few minutes and it's ready to rock and roll. This episode is all of our favorite moments about how to build a personal brand. Correct. When you're building a personal brand, you're making content online.
15:11Yes. You need banger music. You need banger music and you need good B-roll. You need some B-roll. and let's say you're in a pit. Dude, maybe you live in a place where it rains all the time. Oh, yeah. Eugene, Oregon. Went to school there. Bummer. Maybe you live in Canada right now. Yeah. I know it's raining a lot over there. You're in the UK. Gloomy skies. You want that warm, warm sunset feel. This would be the place to do it. It would be. Okay, and it's so, so easy. They've supported our show for many, many years. They are the goats. I trust them with so much of what we're doing. They have a vision.
15:41They are amazing. It's the top thing in the description. You're never going to get a better sale than you're getting right now. Seriously, they don't do this. It's literally the window is open. Don't be the rock that texts me and says, oh, could you call? No, we're not gonna be able to call them. This is it. Go check it out. Lock the heck in. If you've been thinking about getting Artlist, now's the time to do it. I've used every, I've used so many music licensing platforms. They have the best music on the internet. Hands down. Don't make the mistake. Go check it out. Go lock it in. Okay, go. Everything is risky.
16:09And I think that
16:14not taking the risk just is going to lead to resentment and whether it is you're around a certain group of friends who maybe don't support that they think your contents cringe your parents don't believe that it's like a real career whatever it may be like it's only delusional until it works and then when it works people are like holy shit like of course it worked like you look at Mr. Beast right this motherfucker is was so delude like had so much delusional confidence that he's like I'm gonna be a YouTuber I'm gonna make it work I'm gonna go I'm gonna play it I'm not gonna play it safe and I'm gonna take the risk and I'm gonna do it and like you just put in so much work that it becomes uh inevitable that you're successful and so if you're listening to this and you're like I'd like to think that the people listening to this know that they should create a personal brand, create content, they're risk takers, they're dreamers.
17:10Doers. They're doers. If something is holding you back from going all in on something because you think it's risky or you're not sure if it's going to work out, like, fucking go for it. We're living proof that, like, we're four years into this. We took the risk of starting a podcast when it's too saturated of a market. We had no network. like the fact that we have been able to get people like Christo, Gary, Seth, other creators on is unbelievable. Like take the risk, take the first step and you figure it out along the way and you take messy action. Like the fastest way to guarantee that you don't have success is by like not taking the bet and taking the risk on yourself.
17:57Bang, dude. Anything else that you want to say you want to hype the people up? Also on the topic of safe is risky and risky is safe. If you play it safe in your content and you do what everybody else is doing and you don't try to differentiate yourself and you're kind of writing your scripts out and you're sounding like everybody else or your content just looks like everybody else because you're thinking to yourself, well, it worked for them. So if I just copy them and I kind of play it safe, I don't ever have like my own point of view. I say what everybody else is saying. the best you'll ever be is number two and you won't stand out if you think about all the most successful creators they have a different point of view they didn't play it safe they dress different they look different their content feels different if you don't have something that differentiates yourself and you don't take the risk to be different you're you're never going to stand out and the best you'll ever be is number two congratulations ai's coming for your ass hey if you do what you've always done, you're going to get what you've always got.
18:59Okay. Be different. Shout out to Christo. Next up, we got Caleb Rouse and the four-step brand story framework. Roll the clip. So the first place I want anybody to start always is the brand journey framework. And it's four simple questions and it's going to sound ridiculously simple. And that's a good thing. That's good. Yeah. That's what we want here. Like we don't want complexity for complexity sake. So the first question is going to start at the end and we're going to reverse engineer our way back to today. So the first question is, what's the outcome that I desire? What do I want to have happen?
19:27Why am I doing this? The next question is, in order for that outcome to happen, what would I need to be known for? The third question is, in order to be known for that thing, what would I have to do? To be known for things, we got to do shit, right? And then the final question takes us to today. In order to do the things, to be known for the thing, to get the outcome I want, what do I need to learn? If for example, you are wanting to speak on stages to audiences of young women who are building their businesses, you probably need to be known as someone who has maybe potentially as a woman built a big business, probably even helped other people build big businesses.
20:08So then what would you have to do? You'd have to build the businesses and help other people. But then that chunks down to today, which is you're going to have to learn a fuckload of different things. You're gonna have to learn product, marketing, sales, HR, finance, all these different elements that ladder up to it. And so I think it gives you a clear picture of where you start today. And some people, you know, they haven't started, so they should do this from the beginning. If you have started and you feel like you don't know where you're going, this is what I would, I would literally stop everything and do this exercise right now, because it gives you the path of what actions I should take to get me closer to that outcome.
20:45The four-step brand Story Framework. We've done this. It's so freaking helpful. If you feel like you're kind of like on a boat and you're out in the middle of the ocean, you don't have that clarity. The personal brand Kickstarter is free 99. It's our top link in the description. Go check that out and then keep going with this episode. We've done this. The pod's done this. It's actually so helpful. And you're just you're reverse engineering where you want to go. Yeah, that's all you're doing with this. And it makes it so simple to finally have the sail on your boat. Many of you are out in the middle of the ocean in the Atlantic right now and you just have no sail and you're just, it's just an abyss.
21:18I want you to be locked in. I want you to be going straight. Man, getting clarity is like one of the most powerful things you can do when building a brand and just in life in general. I don't know about you, but I can think to a handful of times where I felt lost. I wasn't sure what I wanted to do, what path I wanted to go down. I've never felt lost. Yeah, right. And just had the map of life just handed to you. But I can point to a few times where you're not sure you're feeling lost. And the future feels uncertain. And it's a really scary place to be. And then you kind of do some soul searching, you maybe journal a little bit, maybe do the four step brand story framework.
22:05and you get that clarity and then once you get clarity and you're like oh I know exactly where I need to be everything else that is gonna detract from you achieving your goals or everything that doesn't align with where you want to go because you have clarity it's so much easier to say no and once you get clarity the path actually becomes so much more fucking clear of like okay if this is where I want to go I love that he's like you got to start at the end and work your way back figure out what it is you want out of your content your personal brand whatever however you want to show up online whatever it is you want to get out of all of this where do you want to go where's the end goal okay great then figure out if I need to if I want to go there the steps to like get there they almost kind of just like unveil themselves things fall into place they go no shit Okay, great.
23:02You want to run a marathon? Probably got to run your first one-mile run. Then you're going to run two, then you're going to run three, and you're going to get all the way up until you do 26.2. Running is a great example. If you tell yourself, I want to start running. Cool. Okay, cool. There's not really a plan there. But if you're like, I want to run a marathon, there's a clear path and a training schedule that you need to follow to be able to achieve that goal. It's the same thing. If you're listening to this podcast, you're probably making content already or you have a desire to do so and you want to build a personal brand or a business for yourself, once you have clarity on the end goal of like where you want to get to, the steps that you need to take on a day-to-day, week-to-week, month-to-month basis becomes so much more clear and you can get rid of all the distractions and all the bullshit.
23:47In high school, we wanted to start a clothing brand. Literally just, we looked it up. What do we need? We need to think of a logo. We need to do this. Okay, we need to find somewhere to print it. We printed it. We magically had shirts and we had a brand and we started selling the shirts. Fuck yeah. that's how that's how it's not that simple dude or i mean it's not that hard yeah just brick by brick you want to start a podcast you need a mic you could do it on your iphone you could film it you need somewhere to upload it for free youtube you then need to figure out how to get it to audio so you google it then you put it on another application and then it sends the rss feed to spotify and all those other platforms bada bing bada boom you magically you have a show and what's What I also want to touch on is that you can have clarity multiple times in your life.
24:33And more often than not, like your goals at 18 are going to be different than your goals and aspirations at 24 and at 30. And even though they might be similar, like your interests might change. And let's say you have clarity. Let's say you're younger listening to this and you're 22. you just graduated college and you know you're like okay I have clarity I want to do this I want to build this I want to build a personal brand around this and then you do it for three to four years and your interest change or you're like this doesn't really serve me anymore like I did it I'm kind of over it I don't want to do it anymore it's okay to like reposition yourself or then ask yourself these questions again and get more clarity I remember it's so funny we've done this multiple times we've done it multiple times and i remember specifically dude uh when i first started touring and doing concert photography i remember showering at 505 and i had this thought of like holy fuck i made it like this is like everything that i've been looking for like i have this clarity like i'm a fucking touring concert photographer and this is great and then a fucking year later I was like fuck this I don't want to do it anymore and I was searching for that clarity after I stopped but I remember like before touring I was searching for clarity on like what do I want to do all right great I want to make money with my camera and like be a successful photographer videographer creator I got that and then what I thought I wanted I turns out like I I enjoyed it, but then it turns out I didn't want to do it anymore.
26:17And I bet you probably had a similar feeling when you started working with the Lakers. You're like, I fucking have this awesome job. I wanted to be a full-time videographer, creator, and I have it with the Lakers. And then you were there for five years. I toured for two. And you get to a point where you're like, this doesn't serve me anymore. And then you get to a point where you're like, I'm kind of searching for clarity again. And so I just want to point that out of like we've gone through multiple times in our life where we've had clarity and then we've been searching for it. And if you're in a time of having clarity, amazing.
26:53Fucking go at it 100%. If you haven't found that clarity, you're looking for that clarity, ask yourself these questions. Go through the brand story framework or like ask yourself what you really do want. Like what could you see yourself doing for the foreseeable future? and find out like also the quickest way to get clarity or a great way to get clarity is also by finding out what you don't want you might not know what it is you want but by trying different things you're like okay i know i don't want that i know i don't want that maybe that gets you more on the path of clarity of what you actually do want dude pivots are chill pivots are so chill you ever watch friends no oh no i can't can't there's this there's this really funny scene where they're trying to bring...
27:39That's kind of like an older person thing, I feel like. Oh, shut up, dude. No, but they're bringing a chair, or they're bringing a couch up a really windy and small staircase. And Ross, one of the characters, is like, you got to pivot. You got to pivot. And he's like, pivot, pivot. And anytime I think of a pivot, I think of that. Shout out to Caleb. Another episode over 100 ,000 on YouTube. Shout out. Next guest, Kate. My girlfriend was telling me, we should have this person on the show. And I'm like, the episode's already out. So that's great. This is Oren. This is talking about world building.
Read the full transcript
28:10It's an amazing concept. Roll that clip. So everyone thinks like brand content, like almost linear. Like I'm going to see, I have an Instagram account. I have a TikTok account. What do I actually say on that? When you look at a world, it's like your brand is really a TV show. And this is like an exercise I do, like at brands and done it online. Or it's like, cool, let's actually map out your brand world. And so from a TV show perspective, who are my characters? Like who are the people appearing on screen? Like Dershut says, male creator, female creator, multiple regional creators, and the CEO as characters.
28:37They appear in the content. They're there in person on events. They're on the website. They're models and whatever. Those are all people that are part of the brand's story, right? And you'll see brands come up with this later. Like a brand I really like is called Kosas. It's like a skincare makeup brand. My girlfriend does a brand with them every month. She loves those guys. But their founder became a creator as an extension. She wasn't an influencer to start, but then became one because they knew that that's an important part of like the story was to have someone that is aspirational or relatable or whatever the core thing is to be able to then tell that story.
29:05That's a character of the brand. in the same way an influencer is, right? Your characters extend out. But then you add that to, okay, where's our brand like located? Like, is there a set? Where do we film content? Do we have an office? What's part of this? Our storefronts, our pop-up experiences. That's like the world they interact with physically and people either see online or interact with in the real world. And then there's the like, put it on a timeline, like events of, hey, we have releases, we have campaigns, we have collaboration. And you get those things up top and then you add in plot, which is basically, okay, what are we announcing?
29:32Do we actually have, do we have beef? You know, I always like to call out like Brian Johnson. brand strategy that positions himself against death. And so it's like he has an enemy and the enemy is a huge part of that content. Right. And so I think like even like liquid death, they're positioning against thirst, quote unquote, but really that's a counterculture positioning. But you kind of add those plot lines, like what is the thing we should interact with? What are events that we can create? What are things we can tap into in monoculture? It's a Super Bowl, whatever. And this big cascading thing of influencers and our team members and locations and all that is the brand world.
30:00So anytime anyone interacts with it, it's like, does that experience tell your brand story the way you want. And the bigger the world goes, the more people interact with it. When you think about your content, sometimes this could be done as a priority. This could be done secondary. You don't even think about it. It just ends up happening. You don't need the fanciest car, the fanciest house to build a world. It could be like your little tiny, teeny, tiny one bedroom apartment in New York City. And that's the world that you're building. And the city is a part of this character in your show. The easiest way that I like to think about this is Casey Neistat's vlogs.
30:29It's a very easy way to conceptualize like this concept, right? So New York city was a character in the show. The studio was a character. The boosted board was a character. They don't have to be real things. They could be inanimate things. You could literally name things in your studio. IE. This is like the five Oh five studio. You now know what it looks like. You've been here before our apartment. We'd show you everything in our apartment when we were there, when we lived at five Oh five, right? The OG five Oh five apartment building. You knew what it looked like. You knew that our living room would get transitioned into this studio and what our rooms look like you had an idea of like this world and we lived in Los Angeles we had a rooftop view and you could see all that stuff use that concept and bring it into the things that you do whether it's your friends that are appearing in the videos whether it's like the couches that you sit on or the cushions whatever the backdrop all that stuff builds into this world brands do this really well like you think about Nike they build a world using all these different athletes and like the different events that their athletes go into the marathons the Super Bowl, the World Series, all of those things play into their world that they get to activate on.
31:32So it doesn't have to be, you have the fanciest car, you have the nicest house. It could be, yo, I live in a rural area and I work on a farm and I'm building a clothing brand. That could be the world that you're building. And that's probably way more interesting to a majority of the country. 100%. This episode hasn't come out, but we had Ross McKay on, who's built Cadence or is building Cadence. And I think they've done a phenomenal job. storytelling and world building i feel like go hand in hand yes a little tomato tomato a little tomato tomato but the world that they've built around cadence is like one of high performance athletes and regardless of wherever you are in the world if you're training and you're drinking a cadence you feel like you're part of that world because it's inexpensive luxury like he was telling us.
32:22And when you consume the product or you use the product, it's almost a ticket into the world that they've built. So he's done a great job of building this world of like, you know, really sick fits and running swag and high performance athletes. And it's a luxury product that doesn't cost that much. And so somebody can go into a convenience store and spend$2.50 and buy a ticket into the world of Cadence and feel like they are also this high performance athlete. And if you can think about that, whether you're a creator or a founder building a brand, what is, what are the things that you can bring into your company, into the content and build out the world so that it's not like you're just another t-shirt brand.
33:09It's like, what is the world that someone's entering when they put on your t-shirt or they drink your drink or they use your product? I walked into Solomon. They opened a new store on Melrose. And I'll tell you what, it looks a lot different than like a Nike store. It's more like outdoors, hiking. Some of those shoes are being used for, right? It's like a trail runner. So they have like rocks hanging from the ceiling. Nike feels very like high tech. If you've been to the one that they closed in New York, it's like very high tech. It has all this crazy stuff on the walls. And it's just a very different look and feel.
33:38But their worlds are super different. Nike's not meant for like trail running, right? They might have a trail runner shoe, but that's not what they're known for. where Solomon, like all the artistry was like someone running by trees and it was like a slow shutter effect and it's just super different. So notice that when you go into these stores, because the brands do it really well and it's something that you can take and put it into your content. Something else that Oren talked about a little bit later on in this episode or at some point in the episode was maxing. So we were joking around about like looks maxing, but he talked about inspo maxing.
34:07And I think this is also important. I think back to when I was a kid, I wasn't one that like really decorated my space or my room. I didn't really have like many posters on my wall. You're a blank room kid. Yeah, kind of weird. But I think that like look around your space, look around your home, look around your room, wherever it is that you create content. When we think about world building, it's like what do you have up on your walls? Like what art are you interested in? Are you bringing that kind of stuff into your content? Are you thinking about what your backdrop looks like? Are you thinking about the things in the background of your content?
34:46Are you conscious of the world that you're building? And if you don't have a really cool design spot, it's okay. Maybe just throw a couple posters up or like think about the mise-en-scene, like what is in the frame in which you're filming to help build out that world. I love it, dude. Shout out to Oren. Next up, we got Daniel P all the way from the UK. Daniel Priestley in the 505 studio talking about the 7-11-4 framework. Roll the clip. The way we fall in love with brands, the way we fall in love with people, the way we connect and feel positive is through 7-11-4. So 7-11-4 is I've spent seven hours, 11 interactions or four platforms with this person.
35:27I feel like I know them. I feel like I get who they are. So if you take someone famous and you say, well, like for example, if you saw Justin Bieber walking down the street, you would go, it's Justin Bieber. Now, it's not because you know him. It's because over the course of your life, there's been at least 11 interactions where he's been named and you've seen his name, his face, and something about him. So your brain has actually stored Justin Bieber in your head somewhere. And it's like, yeah, that's a familiar face, a familiar person, not because you know them, but because you've been exposed to them so that exposure has led to you having a place in your head called justin bieber there's a set of neurons in your brain that is reserved for justin bieber believe it or not so that was a 7-11-4 process when a celebrity dies um you know david bowie or prince or something like that and you go oh damn like that sucks not because you knew them but because 7-11-4 right Right.
36:25So it's the same that every brand needs to do. Every brand, if they want a relationship at scale with more people, they need to have seven hours of content, 11 interactions ready to go, four locations. They need to be strategic about their 7-11-4 strategy. So you've got to publish enough stuff. When I'm working with startup entrepreneurs or scale up businesses, one of the things that we look at is just purely and simply, do you have 7-11-4 architecture in place like are you 7-11-4 ready and a simple question is if i spent if i blocked out tomorrow from nine o 'clock till five o 'clock could i fill the entire day with good stuff about you and your brand right and for scalable brands the answer is of course like easy and for businesses that are failing or struggling it's like oh not really like there's some old stuff but you'd have to go looking for it and like it wouldn't be easy and all that sort of stuff moral of the story you got to get onto a long form platform.
37:18If you're a creator who's just sticking on short form, I would pop over to YouTube. I'd pop over, I'd make a podcast. I would make longer form pieces of content. Or you just got to show up more. You got to show up a lot more if you're an Instagram creator. You got to be going all the time. TikTok, very consistently making those one minute videos so people can spend more time with you. I would argue, I would argue that anyone would take 10 ,000 on YouTube over 60 to 100 ,000 on Instagram. Like that 10 ,000 on YouTube holds weight. It's so much more difficult to win on a long form platform. And it's also a lot harder to hide your BS.
37:58Like you're going to find out who this person really is from a long form piece of content. You can't just hide behind like cuts and fancy music and editing effects. It's just not really that possible. long form also allows you to take I guess not the sawdust but long form also allows you to repurpose for short form and so you think about okay you got short form we got TikTok Instagram YouTube shorts then you got YouTube the fucking head honcho creme de la creme long form so that's two platforms maybe three I would also think about newsletter is like another platform. Yeah. It could, it's like between short form and long form depending on how much you want to write.
38:43But like, that's another place. If you like writing, you can turn your content into, like if you do a talking head style video, take that and you can also flesh that idea out more, put it into a newsletter or turn that into tweets or post on LinkedIn.
39:03If you think about, like there's so many ways that you can repurpose a long-form piece of content. If you take this podcast, for example, we could have the long-form piece of content. We could also have, which we want to start doing, is like taking segments, whether it's like three-minute clips to 10-minute clips. Okay, you have a clips channel. That's another, like more interactions with somebody. Then you have the short-form clips from this. Then we can take what we talked about in the episodes, turn it into a newsletter. You could, in theory, turn it into tweets. and then you could also make a post on LinkedIn.
39:38And you could also take the short form clips and make it a carousel and like repurpose the same thing in a different way on the same platform. And so when you start playing that game of like, how many different ways can I repurpose a long form piece of content? The game becomes a lot easier because all of a sudden you're not having to come up with so many different unique pieces of content. It's like you're really squeezing the juice out of everything that you can when it comes to your long form piece of content. Without a doubt. But I think the biggest takeaway is like the people that have the strongest personal brands are people that you feel like you're spending a lot of time with.
40:20You're seeing them on multiple platforms too. But we've talked about this. I'd rather you guys be on YouTube or I'd rather you be on the long form one and go crazy on that than be on like four average ones. You're like, oh, I'm okay on Instagram. I'm pretty sure I'm mid on TikTok. I do a YouTube video once every month, like go crazy on the long form. And then eventually as you make more money, you can add on the short forms. It's like so much easier to do that later. 11 hours is a lot of time. Long time, brother. Okay. Let's just say you're making 30 to 60 second reels if you're just on Instagram, if you're just hitting one, you don't have to hit four platforms, but I think you should be good.
41:02Think about trying to hit the 11 hours, right? I don't even know how many. God, it's a lot of reels, brother. Okay. Let me see if I can do this. You're not going to let's just say it's 30. Let's just say you're making 30 second reels. So that'd be two. So 120 for an hour. What's 120 times 11, 132. Okay. So you'd have to make You like that math? You'd have to make 132 pieces of short-form content that's 30 seconds long to be equivalent to 11 or maybe even less podcast episodes. Because let's say on average our episodes are like… Two hours. Two hours. Hour 40, whatever. Let's just say an hour and a half.
41:43Okay. Or no, let's do two hours to make it easy. Yeah, yeah. So to hit 11 hours, we'd have to put out six episodes compared to 132 pieces of short form, 30 second vertical content. Confirm his math down there, but yeah, that's crazy. It's insane. And so that's why long form eats so much more because you're chipping away at those 11 hours a lot easier and a lot sooner. I'll tell you what, I've never went to an in-person thing for someone from Instagram. Maybe you guys have, but I'd assume a lot of you are going from like a YouTube creator who you've been like, oh, they're going to be here. Like, I'm going to go there.
42:24Like, I've been to multiple people's in-person events, typically from YouTube. And we're not saying that you can't build an incredible personal brand on short form, but I would argue that the people that you love, if you're listening to this, the creators that you love are more, are probably the ones that are doing some sort of long-form content. And look, I understand that long-form takes a lot more work. and if you don't have the time yourself to be able to do it, it gets expensive to hire somebody who can film and edit for you. But if you can find a way to tackle some sort of long form content, it's gonna provide so much more ROI in terms of like the depth you have and the relationship you have with your audience.
43:09Shout out to Daniel, go listen to that episode. Next up, we got Erica Millett on the enemy effect. Roll the clip. One strategy that I really love is called the enemy effect, which is uniting your audience against an ideological enemy. And what this does is it creates an in-group and an out-group. Again, it speaks to belonging. If you can make people feel like it's us versus them. I know this sounds very negative, but it isn't only used in negative ways. For example, someone who does use it, I guess, in negative ways is like Andrew Tate. He speaks about the matrix. that's his enemy so he says it's us versus the matrix and we have to do x y and z that's an example of from my perspective and rotate using it in a negative way but a positive way could be someone like taylor swift her enemy is the cool girl and you know this speaks to the feeling of being left out and othered and anyone who feels like they've never been in the cool group this unites those people together and makes them feel like they have a place to finally belong.
44:16So the first one is the enemy effect. It is crazily effective at making people connect with you. If you can explain to them that it's us versus the enemy, then that's a connection straight away. The enemy effect is really interesting because you can apply it to anything. If you're a fitness creator, if you're in real estate, you could have something where you're like, let's use a real estate person. For example, this is easy for me. Your enemy would be renting a home. You'd be like, I want people to buy a home because you're selling people homes. That'd be your thing. Right. And you'd be educating people on why I don't know this.
44:47I don't own a home, why it's more beneficial for you to own a long term home over time and the different ways and the things to be thinking about when you're trying to buy your first property. Or if you're like trying to sell long term rentals, that'd be like your thing and your enemy. If you're in fitness, maybe your enemy could be strict diets. Be like, I actually don't think you need a strict diet. I think you can eat what for the most part, whatever you want. If you track your calories and you work out four times a week. Way more accessible for people. Do you remember an OG fitness guy named Kino Body?
45:18Yeah. You think about him and if you're listening to this, I'd be curious to know if you guys know who Kino Body is, but he kind of was the first person who was like, you don't need to eat breakfast and you can eat chocolate at night and you only need to work out like three times a day. And so three times a week or three times a week. And so his enemy was like all the conventional things that people in the fitness industry were telling you and people at the time. And so because he took a contrarian approach and his enemy was something that like more people could probably relate to, he was crushing on programs and digital products and the enemy effect.
46:04Man, this episode dude was one of my favorites because Erica has such a unique way of teaching personal brand and like really showcasing like what it takes and the psychology behind how to create like a really dedicated cult-like audience but the enemy effect really opened my eyes to like okay who am I against and I also asked her in the episode I was like well what if you're somebody of authority. You know what I'm saying? Like, how does that person come up with their enemy? She's like, the enemy just has to be bigger than you. So she gave the example of Trump being like, Trump is this like very successful businessman, but his enemy is the mainstream woke media.
46:48And the media in Trump has made that like much grander than who he is. And if you can think about like regardless of whatever niche you're in who are you against because then it makes the it gives you clarity on like who are you actually serving if we're against this how can i make content so that everybody becomes part of my mission and vision to be against that person as well she also explains uh she gives the example of taylor swift and like taylor swift's enemy is the cool girl and so a lot of people who love taylor swift's music are like we're also against to Google and she's a fucking cult like audience.
47:28Even you'll notice it now too. And a lot of creators that you guys know and love were like brands that you know and love, they all stand for something. And they kind of like, it makes like a moat, right? So if you're, are you on this side of the motor, you outside of the motor, you do not agree with this or do you agree with this? And it makes it a lot easier, I think to kind of write down on a piece of paper, like what am, what do I, what am I against? What do I stand against? What do I not believe in? most high likelihood people listening this pod, you're like, we talked about this earlier. You're a dreamer, you're a doer, you're trying to live outside of the norm, normal, like normal life.
48:01You're like trying to strive for something bigger and better for yourself. Maybe you want to eventually move to a big city. Maybe that's something like in your, in your goal. So people that don't agree with that will listen to this and be like, I hate these guys. These guys suck. Congratulations. We don't care about that group. We don't need that group. We have our group and we're replicating the group that enjoys hanging out with us. That's another thing too, to think about like with your enemy effect you're gonna ruffle some feathers like people aren't gonna agree with you sabri subhi does this all the time but he does like he does it intentionally and people that do this they're typically being intentional about it yeah they're like i honestly want to piss people off with this take because i know that it's gonna make people upset and that's gonna share my brand more like he had a video today that someone was crying about his thing people that drink black coffee or don't drink black coffee or pansies yeah yeah yeah this group like shared he goes dude shout out to these guys they're playing the game baby i think about um our podcast and one of our enemies with this podcast who's our enemy is people who take business too fucking seriously and so that's why me and brayden we want this show to be somewhere you can come and get a lot of fucking game about personal brand marketing building a business great everything else that we've seen on the internet comes from such a like serious point of view these guys are wearing suits they're wearing suits dude we're not suit guys and so we love cracking jokes we love making it not super serious we want our guests to have a good time we want y 'all to have a good time and have this be a place where you can come hang out get some game but also fucking enjoy listening into the boys just like shoot some shit we're not afraid to cuss like when i think of 505's enemy it's somebody who doesn't want more for themselves and is like okay with being like complacent and like potentially working a nine to five and like going down the traditional route because that's not us and then also like fuck the business people who are way too serious and have a stick up their ass because it's just not the, it's just no fun.
50:05Dude, make business fun. Make business fun. Shout out to Erica, an amazing episode. And to round us out, we got the internet daddy himself, Sabri Subi. Roll the clip. This is the biggest sin that I see all businesses commit, right? They think about what is convenient for me to sell. What would I like to buy? They don't start with what is the market absolutely starving for, right? So say for instance, with my programs, the thing that I know that all everybody wants is they want to know a repeatable, predictable way to generate high quality leads on autopilot that come into their business and buy with the least amount of friction possible.
50:43That's what everybody wants, right? So that's exactly what it is that I sell because that's what the market is starving for. But then once you get involved in the program, then you figure out all the other things that it is that you need, right? We talk about mindset. We talk about your health. We talk about systems, operations. We talk about all of these other things that need to be in place. But if I spoke about that on the front end, no one is like going to come and buy it because you need to sell what is sexy, what people want. Everybody wants to be rich, nobody wants to get rich. And so they want easy button solutions.
51:21They want, you know, six pack abs with doing the least amount of work. So you would be stupid if you tried to sell them, hey, you're going to be working out for five hours a day. Like you need to sell what it is that they want and then give them what it is that they need. And you're going to have to be tough if you're going to be stupid. So if you're going to go down the road of like, oh no, I want to sell everybody what it is that they need, those people have a very hard life. We speak to business owners all day long that are on the verge of bankruptcy. They're really, really hurting. They don't have a system in place to get customers.
51:57And they've been trying to sell people vegetables, right? When people want the brownies, to sell them the brownies, bro, and then just give them what they need. And it's not like, it's kind of like a Trojan horse tactic, but it's in a positive way. because if you have the best product in the marketplace, then it is your moral obligation to get that into as many hands of the people as possible. And so you wanna think about if somebody buys a product or service of one of my competitors, then I am doing them a disservice because I know those other products aren't as good as mine because I bought them all, I've studied them all and none of them are as good as mine.
52:35So if you know that yours is the best, then you need to make it the most enticing. And then once you've gotten them on board, then you provide them the education of like, these are all the things that you need to do to get this outcome. He brings up a really interesting note in the pod about how he was selling something that people weren't looking for. And I think many people out there might be in a business right now and you're trying to sell something. You're like, God, people just aren't buying this thing. Maybe the market doesn't want it. Maybe you created something that may be a little bit too early or a little bit too late.
53:08Someone's already filled that gap in the market or they don't even know that that's something that's for them. And like there's so many different ways throughout history that we've seen this be played where like Erica brought this up to Betty Crocker made a cake mix. Yeah. And it was too easy to make. So people didn't feel a part of the cake, but they're like add an egg. And then the sales took off. Right. It wasn't that people weren't ready for a cake mix. People like, yeah, I'm down to make a cake mix way quicker. but it was the way that it was marketed and the way that people were creating it.
53:36It wasn't actually making people feel a part of the cake. They had to change something, change a little bit of their marketing and say that little tiny phrase changed their entirety of their sales forever. You might have something that is a great product, but you're just marketing it the wrong way. You have to market it in a way that is going to relate to your audience and your target consumer. Like what you're actually selling might be quote unquote different than the way that you market it. But if you were to just go at marketing your product at complete face value, it might not be interesting, right?
54:16And so he talks about marketing your product or creating a product that the audience is like starving for, but then you actually give them what they need. And so, for example, like the six-pack shortcuts, right? People are starving to get a six-pack in a very short amount of time. We didn't want a guide on a diet. Exactly. We didn't want that. We wanted a six-pack. So if he was to have promoted like the boring stuff, like you got to eat healthy and you got to – That was on the other side of the payment, dude. Yeah, it's on the other side. It's like you market it as something that like really hits home with the pain point that your target audience is having.
55:03And you market it around that. And so you market your product as something that they're absolutely starving for. And then you give them what they want. But you're going to give them what they want regardless. You just have to market it in a way where they're like, holy shit, this is exactly what I need because this is exactly what's going to solve the problem. That episode was so gold and it just not, not tons of people have seen it. So you guys need to go down there and go click the Sabri Subi episode. This has been so fun. I hope that you guys got a ton of value out of the last four years of information that we've been able to compile.
55:38I'm curious. Please leave a comment as to which episode or episodes have been your personal favorites. Give me like top three. It'd be helpful. I feel like it's very difficult to pick one. So I'd love to hear your top three episodes. By the time you're listening to this, we're in Hong Kong. We're on a flight right now as we're speaking. We're going to interview Ali Abdaal. We're going to interview Jeff Su. It's going to be an amazing week of pods. And content. And content. Oh, dude. You guys thought we were playing? No. We're just getting started. You want to talk about personal brand content?
56:08We're talking about practice? This is day one, ladies and gentlemen. Thank you all so much for tuning in to this episode of the 505 Podcast. If you're still here, please hit the subscribe button. Drop us a comment. Leave us a like. And we'll see you guys all next week. Peace.
From the publisher
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