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

The reality of being able to win this and then a million people seeing that for free is fucking insane. Ruthless system driven content machine. Categories that matter. Videos and creators are winning. World class and improve on the ones that aren't restating. And post. This Lego brick framework is the sauce to content. In this episode, Callaway breaks down his systems for how he scales. content and YouTube to become one of the biggest voices in marketing today.

You pick your game and you're willing to die on the field. What are the biggest lessons?

Damn, so many lessons. I think volume, volume negates everything. And I think Hormosy says that a lot. It's like volume negates luck. But that's the truth, is. The the strategy is not actually the sauce. Like the strategy is commoditized once you know it. Like we'll go through in this episode the entire strategy. The sauce is

Can you make one rep and then on the second rep iterate off the first one? And the distance of that iteration is really where all the sauce is. And so As a creator, like when you get started, you think. All I have to do is figure it out and then I'm good. But like the figuring it out, the strategy is nothing, right? It's just doing it a shit ton of times and improving at increasing rates as much as you can is really the sauce. And so

You don't really realize that until you make 10 to 20 to 30 reps and you're like, I should be good by now and I still suck. Like you don't realize it until then. That's when you have to be able to do that.

fork in the road. A lot of people quit at that point'cause they're they realize they look up and they're like, Oh my God, this is gonna take five hundred reps for me to get anywhere close to where I thought I need to be. Most people quit at that point. So it's about the positioning and the strategy and then ultimately finding What is the system that I could increase the velocity? System, but also it's like, how can I look at a made rep?

and break it down into pieces and then understand where my execution of those pieces was lacking compared to excellence in my niche or in my category. And then actually applying the learning to the next rep. It's a very, it's a very hard skill. Like being able to look at a piece of content and say, that looks cool, that's one thing. That's like taste, we'll say. But actually looking at your own piece and saying, Oh

The hook on this piece was a little bit too slow and the visual just didn't grab me. And I know that because when I look at the winner from someone else, it did grab me. Being able to identify A versus B and seeing the differences and then apply that change.

That's where all the gold is. That's why it's actually really helpful to work with someone that knows what they're doing because they can help spot those things if you don't know what they are and then tell you what to do. Right. If you're When you're alone and there's so many unknown unknowns, if your brain doesn't work to compare things A versus B, it's very hard to improve.

Uh let's get into it. So for any type of content to actually work, you have to stop and decide to watch. That starts with the hook. So what goes into a good hook?

Yeah. So hooks and we're talking short form. There's really three pieces. This kind of became popularized when I said it in this one video that went crazy. You've got the visual hook, which is what's shown on the screen. You've got the text hook, which is the text shown on the screen. Could be captions, but also I call it title text. It's like bigger text that's not captions. And then you have the spoken hook, which is what's actually said. Those three things.

Have to align as much as possible. There's like a few principles that you want, and we'll break down like of those pieces. But the number one is like if your visual hook is not showing something. That you're also saying in text.

saying verbally, you've got a huge problem. Because people hear a thing and they see a thing and it doesn't match in their brain. They get confused and then they churn. Confusion leads to churn, right? So the opposite of confusion is comprehension. So you need those to really be aligned. Now let's break down each of those pieces, right? When a video comes on the feed, the very first thing that happens is

The visuals act like a stun gun. Now, people may not be able to comprehend exactly what the visuals mean. in that first second, but they know it's different from what they normally see. So they pause for a second. So the first job of the visuals is to stun you, right? Contrast. Exactly. People see the visuals before they can read words or hear what you say, right? Speed of light is faster than speed of sound. So you see it.

and see something before you start reading text. So that has to like jump out. Now we can talk about things that you can do. One is like a visual set. Like the reason why your clips do better than most podcast clips is because this scene, this set jumps out as different than the typical like you can picture like that, those those wooden slats with the tree in the corner that like every podcast has.

That doesn't jump out anymore because people have seen that over and over. So if that comes up and they see faces they don't recognize, they bounce because they tr they clock it as like not interesting. Yours stands out, which freezes them for a second. So that's like step one is just getting them. People call it a thumb stopper, like just getting the scroll to stop. The next piece is really critical.

You have to set the context in the first sentence, meaning What is this clip or what is this short or what is this video actually going to be about? You can't the way the brain processes information is top-down. So it starts with broad context, then you can explain the how, then you can give examples. And then at the very bottom, you can extract out a learning. That's like how the brain learns. So if you drop me in the middle of a funnel.

of of that funnel and you don't give me context. Like if you just say Jumped was crazy. Like what does that even mean? Like who jumped? How was the jump crazy? What were they jumping over? Like there's so much context that's missing. That leads to confusion. Confusion is the opposite of comprehension. When people are confused, they bounce. So the next th like this is the second thing. We're kind of going through the the pieces. Once you stop the scroll visually,

you have to add context on what's going on. Now you can add context with all three of those pieces. The visuals can show a thing. You could have an arrow pointing to a thing and then visually people are starting to understand. You could say the words that map to what you're seeing, you could also write that in text. But like context is critical. Then comes the contrast, right? So once I'm contextually aimed

towards what you're talking about. The the way you really get somebody curious, which is what drives attention, is contrast. All contrast is, is the difference between what they expect to see or hear versus what you actually show them. So if I have a video And like this clip, for example, like this is real meta, but like let's go through the example. How do we use this clip to go? How do we engineer virality out of this clip?

The first thing you need to show is you asking the question, what makes a good hook? That's the context. If you don't have that, we're cooked, right? And you'll probably have tech. above like the zoom out shot of me and you, you'll have text above that says what makes for a good hook. Right. So that's aligned and clear. As compressed as possible. Exactly. Speed to value is maximum. And and throughout this I'll just say like a bunch of terms and we can define them. But

Speed to value is like how fast you can actually get to value or tease value. You want that compressed as much as you can. So that's that's kind of context. Now, how do we add contrast to this? If I said most people think the way to do hooks is this, but actually the real sauce, the real framework has nothing to do with what you've been taught. It's this. That's contrast. You can clip that for the intro also, that'd be good. But basically I was like, it's getting too serious. But basically

You wanna lean somebody towards what they think to be true and then reveal something that is the opposite of what they think. That will hold them and they'll get curious as to why the thing they believed was wrong. Right. So Typically people say like butt or their, you know, butt is the contrasting word. But like if I just lean you towards everybody thinks hooks are actually this one thing.

The truth is, if you really look at the data, they're this other thing. Just me saying those two sentences make you kind of lean in. You're like, All right, what's he about to say? That's contrast. And so all great hooks have those three things, right? Visual stop, context, and contrast. And on the contrast side, I mean there's

a bunch of different ways that you can do it. You could just be contrarian in nature. You could just say something absolutely wild, get them looped in, and you open up that loop and then they just stay in for the rest of the time. Yeah. So there's two ways to create contrast. There's implied and then there's direct. So We'll start with direct. Direct contrast would be kind of like the example that I just said, which is

Most people think X. I'm gonna tell you Y. So I I I lay out the common belief. Most people think X. Implied would be just asking a question or making a crazy contrarian statement without actually laying out the common belief. So it could be like.

Cars are driving backwards on the road and nobody knows why. That's like kind of like a contrarian statement. But the problem with that is it requires the viewer to complete the puzzle and come up with what they thought should have been true. Like cars are actually going straight. They have to like think of that. So it's actually easier to establish more violent contrast if you say the common belief and then Contrast to the Because that gives the initial context.

Exactly. It it basically like imagine there's a spectrum of minus one hundred to one hundred and you're starting at zero. If you don't actually lay the common belief, they're starting at zero and they go to minus one hundred at the most contrarian take, that's only a net difference of a hundred. If I lean you this way to a hundred and then I flip you to minus one hundred, that's a distance of two hundred. What about on the the text and the spoken side? Is there any principles or kind of

key rules that you do in those two buckets. Yeah. So on this let's start with spoken. Fewest possible words. Active voice instead of passive voice. So like the dog jumped instead of the jump was made by the dog. So it's like fewer words, more direct.

More clear, like more clarity. Is it always fewer words? Because I'm all about respecting the audience's time and we aggressively shave down the podcast, even though some of them are two, three hours. Yeah. Do you just think it's you should always err on the side of just respecting the audience's time? So you should always err on respecting their time, but the most important thing is clarity and comprehension. If you need more words to make it more clear, you add more words.

But typically people add fluff that's unnecessary to like it's it's not adding additional clarity. So you need to cut it. So KPI is clarity and however many words you need to do to get that clarity. The KPI is abs absorption rate. That's the most important thing in content. And this is why I think a lot of my content does so well on YouTube, because I can distill shit down to like a a level where you can absorb a hundred percent of it. So if I say eight words.

Do you understand all eight? You can put them together in your brain and be like, yes, I'm a hundred percent sure this only means one thing and I know exactly what it means. That would be a hundred percent absorption. The problem is when people start cutting words, like if you actually had a sentence of 10 words and you cut some.

At some point the absorption goes below a hundred because like you're missing a key word to add that clarity. So number one thing is absorption rate and clarity. And you can get there faster by cutting fluff, but sometimes you have to add a couple extra words to like make it clear.

Interesting. What about on the text side? And if you g giggle it more clarity, what do you mean by actually text? Are you talking about the copy in the short? Are you talking about text on screen? Are you talking about graphic overlays? Are you talking about kind of the

Closed caption type stuff over. Well, that's a perfect example. So like the absorption rate of that point that I made was not a hundred percent, right? Cause I left it open where you weren't sure. So I should have done a better job. Like that's a perfect example of why absorption is so important because you then have to ask another question.

So the I'm talking about the text on the video, like overlaid on the video. There's two really two types of text, the captions, which is the exact words that's being spoken. Oscillating every word or two words, right? They're Closed captions effectively, but like you style them. I see the little C C logo. Yeah, but then there's title text, which is like

big words that are it they don't have to be big, but words that are not necessarily being said word for word. So if we made a clip, hopefully we can get a hero clip about like the best principles of hooks. The title text might be like Stop making your hooks like this or Three ways to 10X your hooks, right? I'm not saying, I mean, I just said it, but I'm not I'm not gonna be saying that in the clip. That's gonna be up at the top or at the bottom.

The words I'm actually saying you might have as smaller captions. And that's context and that's curiosity gap. Those are those two kind of big things. Yeah, because typically what happens is people will see the video, they'll look at the visual, they'll try to understand what the visual means. If you have an arrow or a circle on the visual, their attention will go right to it.

But then they're trying to corroborate that their assumption of what that visual means is correct. A way to help them corroborate that is by showing them text that confirms what it is. So if I say like If I show on screen a robot that has like tendons, and then I say, This is the first robot ever to have tendons like a human, and then I write in text.

Artificial robot has human tendons that's perfectly aligned. And then when you see the robot, you can see the text and confirm that your assumption was correct. That is like a click in your brain that you're like, cool, I'm on track, high absorption. Now I'm locked in and want to hear the next sentence. And you should be under the assumption that through the visual, the text, the spoken

It's very hard to make kind of one work isolated. They all they all work in conjunction. You wanna use them. They have to be aligned. They have to all be aligned. Yeah. So you don't have to use you don't have to have the title text on the screen if you don't want to, but that's just one less vehicle.

That the person can use to get higher absorption. Right. So that means your words that you say have to be really dialed. The visual has to be really dialed because you're not giving them an additional surface to kind of like triangulate their assumption. Something that we've done that I think a lot of people miss.

they wildly underestimate is quote unquote thumbnails or covers for short form. Yes. Or if somebody likes one thing from your page and they want to go binge and look at all of them. Give them context. Yeah, yeah. Just like you're saying to increase the absorption rate and let them know what they're clicking into. Yeah.

If I were to boil it down, this is the most important framework in all of content. It's called content minutes. So in order to get someone to trust you and ultimately buy, they need to watch a certain amount of minutes of your content. It's pretty obvious. Imagine every minute was one block. And so like if you were to map out, okay, to get somebody to convert on an email lead magnet, maybe it takes four blocks watching.

To get somebody to buy a ninety-seven dollar product, it takes twelve blocks. To get somebody to buy a ten thousand dollar product, it takes four hundred blocks. Let's just say. And the only way the blocks count is if someone actually watches it. What you really need when someone discovers you for the first time is high bingeability. You want them to go down the rabbit hole and consume a lot of your pieces at the same time to stack blocks quickly.

Because if if it only takes eight blocks to buy the$97 product, if I can create a chain reaction to get them to watch eight in one session, they'll buy. So it's like, What can I do to increase bingeability? Well, one thing is you can make a series. It's like this is day two of 10, this is day three of 10, because they'll want to go back. Another thing is you can just design the thumbnail covers.

So that you're giving clarity as to what the different videos are. So when they watch one from you, hit your profile and they scroll down, they actually have context into what else they might be interested in. So it's like we can go into the content minutes thing, but that that is like a critical Piece. And it also explains why short versus long, which I'm sure we'll talk about later. Guys, we're gonna get into it. That is why YouTube.

Is the chosen one. There you go. That long form YouTube, you get a lot of that time under attention. Exactly. So e the average YouTube video, if it's like a twenty five minute video, The AVD is like, let's say eight, nine, 10 minutes. So you're getting 10 blocks every rep instead of a short that's 60 seconds. And some the average time is 30 seconds, you're getting half a block every rep. So it takes 20 shorts. of someone actually watching to get to one long form equivalent in trust accrual.

So versus YouTube too, where it's very intent based too. They actively chose to do it versus getting fed in the algo. We'll get into that. One more thing on the on the Instagram thumbnails. This is another like super hidden thing people don't realize.

The virality comes from shares, right? So like the a viral K factor is just a hundred people see it. Of the hundred, three share it. Of those three, that hits five people. One of those five shares it, et cetera. That's how the loop works. Shares mostly come from intra DM. Like in Instagram, you share to your group chat or you share it out to a text group. When that video gets shared in the DM,

The video is sitting there with the thumbnail cover showing. It's not looping. So when someone opens the DM, all they see to get them to click is the thumbnail. Now If you're sending it to a homie, they're probably gonna click anyway because it's like validated by you. But wouldn't it be nice if you could increase that, if you had five people in a group chat, you had three click instead of two. And the way to get that to happen is to design the thumbnail cover to be better.

Well, you know what's so crazy is my wife sometimes she'll go she'll binge and she'll send me like five or six like funny memes. Yeah. And if I'm like really busy I'll click like one or two of them. I won't click all of them, and I'll literally go thumbnail. Yeah. And if you if people don't know, that is actually crazy. I did not use that. That's some random, random sauce.

We're actually reoptimizing the next couple of days. Uh I call them thumbnail, but I mean they're covers on Instagram just to give context of the different types of series and such. Yeah, yeah. To button up on the hook side, anything on the visuals, any like big key principles or rules or things you've learned. Specifically in relation to visuals and hooks. Yeah. High motion, high color, high contrast are like the three attributes. So podcast clips are notoriously tough to get to go viral. Why?

Because if it's just us here, there's not a lot of motion. You could have high color, like these are gonna be colored sick and like the background be whatever. You'll have high contrast, meaning it it differentiates from the feed and like If you were to compare to black and white, it's contrasting well, but there's no motion. So you can add motion with like a subtle push-in, or you can like add a

Over the colour. Lens flare or something. Yeah. You can add artificial motion, but the best visuals have a lot of motion baked in. Why is this? If you think about like pure psychology, deer in the woods. Head down eating some grass off the ground. When they sense motion out of the corner of their eye, they pick their head up and look.

The brain is optimized to look for motion, like look for changes in motion. So if you're scrolling through the feed and a lot of people, like let's say you're on TikTok and a lot of people are just like in their bedroom or in their car, they're holding the phone, there's just not that much motion. If the next video has motion,

immediately it will lock you onto it. That'll s that'll be that thumb stopper. So the visuals, just from like a principle perspective, high motion, high color, high contrast. The next thing would be like What looks interesting, right? Now if it's it's gonna be you on the screen.

You're either hot or you're not. If you're hot, that's more interesting than not. So like that is you should play into that. If someone's like super attractive, you should definitely play into that. But if you're not, if it's not like human driven and you're using the B-roll visuals, like what I use in my tech videos. I need to pick interesting looking shit. Like it needs to have high motion, high color, high contrast and be interesting looking. And I think everyone

Interesting is kind of like a mushy word. Like it's how do you define that? Everyone knows what interesting is, right? When you see something, you're like, damn, that that's pretty interesting, right? So you so you you wanna optimize for that. We're actually doing that just based on like a taste perspective. We weren't doing it based on strategy and kind of

the stuff that you're backing into. And now that I'm thinking about it, there's a lot of motion in your videos. A lot of things. It's probably a little too much uh for but but like my niche with the tech and AI shorts. is pretty well optimized for like different niches are different levels of maturity in terms of like the players actually know what to do. Tech and AI is pretty mature. So like you gotta be very dialed. The vi visuals have to be very tight. Now if you're like Dentistry for

I don't know, like for just dentistry in general. The bar is low. The bar is low. So so if you have a little motion or like you have a overhead shot on a fo on a grainy phone of like somebody doing a root canal, that might still pop because there's just not that much else that's beating that relative to the to the benchmark. Yeah, I definitely want to dissect

a piece of short form content and I, you know, just go through all the different kind of key steps and levers that you need to pull to win at the highest level. But I want to back up a bit. You texted me, I don't know, forty five minutes ago. This new concept about the five content games. I just want you to

go through that to kind of lay like a macro framework before we dive into each just so people have context. And what should they should be doing based on what their business is. Yeah. So most people will go to a guru or whatever and they'll be like, What should my content strategy be? And most of these gurus

don't have the sophistication to be like, well, it depends what your business is, it depends what the offer is. There's these different buckets, these different games, right? So I want to like lay out every single person watching this is watching it because they're trying to get better with content, either long form or short form. We're going to cover both.

You need to pick which of these five games we talk about that fits you best and then adapt the strategies. And maybe as we go, I can like break them down. So the first game is. We'll call or the first two games we'll call the media game. So one of them is entertainment, so entertainment media. The second one is education, so education media.

The media games full purpose is to maximize views at all costs because you're monetizing via like CPM, so like ad YouTube AdSense or like the TikTok creator fund or brand deal.

And brand deals pay based on views, right? So entertainment media would be like Mr. Beast, streamers, anyone who's like just trying to entertain at like the highest possible volume, highest possible audience size. Education media would be like The and the difference between education and entertainment is just education videos, you can watch them and then tactically apply something to fix a problem.

anything else is entertainment. So technically like my tech and AI videos would be like entertainment media. You would think they're education because they're like tech, but actually most of my videos you can't walk away and like apply something. I'm more just telling you about something so that you have the information. That's a nuance, it doesn't matter. But first game is entertainment media, second game is education media.

Those games need a shit ton of views to play. So like there's a certain strategy around ideas, around niching, around how you actually execute the videos to get a ton of views. Okay. So those those are the first two. The second two are about consumer products. If you have a consumer product at the bottom of the funnel, number three, like the third one would be, you know, the first of the consumer products is if you have a commoditized consumer product. And what I mean by this is like.

You don't need to educate the viewer on how the product works. So like clothing or you sell couches or you sell hats. Like every person can look at a couch and be like, that's a couch. So you don't have to educate them on how it works. However, you need to get them aware. So there's a strategy there. Less context.

Yeah, exactly. You don't need any context. You could just show the couch and be like, this is a sick couch, or like just have a cool person sitting on the couch and be like, Yeah, I fuck with that couch. Like that is clear. So we can talk about the strategy, but like there's a strategy for that. Then bucket four is like consumer products that do require education. So this could be like

A G one. A G one is just a green powder in a box. If you see that, you don't really know what that is. Like that could be matcha, that could be greens powder, which is what it is. Like you don't know. So the the Viewer needs some amount of education to close the gap. Now, they don't need a shit ton of education. You can give it to them pretty quick, but that's a different content strategy. So that's bucket four. Bucket five is like everything B2B. So that's like,

You're selling business services, coaching, info products, B2B SaaS, everything where lots of education is required. Right. So those are like the five content games. You pick based on the business model, right? Because everyone's making content because they're trying to make money. Like, let's just be honest. You pick whichever business model you want to play. MediaMedia

consumer product, consumer product, or B2B product. And we can we'll break that we'll use that framework to explain the differences and the nuances of like how to play short form, how to play YouTube, et cetera.

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Taxes and fees extra, speeds me slow. After fifty gigabytes per month, when network is busy, see terms. I think something really key to point out there is on those first two buckets of media talking about the entertainment and education. First off, blending both, I think you get

an asymmetric outcome from that if you can actually educate and also entertain and then also be very, very careful there in playing that C PM game. You want to also be playing the brand game. I talked about this with Samir, Colin and Samir about If you feed a very narrow ICP and you really audience match correctly, then you can charge a premium.

Yeah. For that. And I think that that should be the goal of anybody in content. You don't want it to be just a direct CPM game. You want to be like, hey, I can charge more money. because I'm positioned in the marketplace as such. Yeah, I think the in general You'll make way more money playing the products, services, offers game than you will the media game. A. B within the media game agreed, you can make way more if the audience value is higher. C three, whatever whichever I said.

That media game is Arbing to zero. That game's going to zero. Like AI content will run that media game over. And we can probably get into that later, but like The reason why all the mainstream YouTuber like there was a tweet that went viral the other day. Most people watching this will have seen it where the the guy was like, I'm I have m seven million views a month and I still live in my mom's basement. That guy is an entertain entertainment YouTuber.

Now he's not only making five grand a month. Like he's probably making thirty, forty, fifty, but he has a big team. And so he's netting five or whatever. The point is like, The media game is a dumb game to start in 2025, 2026. It's just not the right game to play. It's a losing game. Mr. Beast.

is one of the winners of that game. Netflix is playing that game. The NFL is playing that game. You will lose to Mr. Beast, Netflix, and the NFL. And so my proposition to most people and like where where I specialize is Do you need a personal brand to accrue trust to sell something? That would be like bucket five. And then strategies within buckets three and four, you have consumer products.

And you can you can build like these UGC swarms or like these other strategies that we can talk about. But I'm like not that interested in the entertainment game. My tech and AI is that and that's where I started and I'm realizing that like, oh shit.

That's a losing game. So like that we can talk about that, but that's For for more clarity though, you can start in the media game, i.e. media entertainment or media education, build a personal brand, build a trust, and then you flow into bucket three, four, five and you actually

Yeah. Sell a consumer property. Yeah. So the most common so so the and this is a framework that I think we should talk about. All business just boils down to is traffic, funnels, offers. That's it. It's just three things.

So you either start with an offer where you know what you want to sell and then you got to go get traffic to funnel to that offer. Or you start, you don't know what you want to sell, which is very common, and you start with traffic and you're just like, I want to figure out content and I'll figure out the offer later. That's that's the path I took.

What most people end up doing is they either pick the entertainment bucket or education. If they have no skills, they're gonna be in entertainment. If they do have skills, they sometimes niche down into education, but usually they end up in entertainment. And they start making content and they get addicted to the views game. And so they try to rev the views as high as possible. To do that, you broaden the aperture, you expand the TAM of the ideas, and you become less.

Focused on one audience avatar. What happens then is you're like, okay, I'm making 5, 10, 15, 30, 50K a month, whatever. Like, you know, varying degrees, but you realize there's a cap and you realize that is gonna decay over time as the competition in the niche rises and as AI content comes out. So you're like, I need to build an offer, service, or product. that I can sell to this, that I own, that I can sell to my audience. And you start doing that, and one of three things happen.

A, before you even build the offer service product, you start asking the audience what they want and you realize they're all over the place because you have a super broad audience because that's what was required to get a lot of views.

Or you just pick a slice and you build it. But when you go to push, because you assume I have a huge audience, I can push people to it, not that many take it because there's not that many people in the audience that actually want that that offer. And so What ends up happening is you're like, shit, I don't have the ability to sell.

through the audience I already have, what do I do? And one of two things can happen at that point. You either stick and just keep playing the media game, which is what a lot of people do, or you have to rebuild a second audience from scratch.

narrow using the offer that you that you want to sell. And that's exactly what happened to me. That's why I know it so well. Yeah. I mean for us, for people out there listening, we're almost at this point we'll probably be on episode twenty is just like We may be serving too many audience. We might we might have too much variety of the guests on this show. And once you have a massive audience, you have escape velocity, you're Joe Rogan, you can talk.

to MMA fighters, comedians, scientists, and Donald Trump. Yeah. But if you wanna Win in the beginning, I do think you gotta go narrow with the ICP. But that's the thing is Joe Rogan's playing the media game. So he's accepted. But it's a barbell though. It's once you get escape velocity, then you can play that.

game because there's just so much money to be made on just the CPMs. Yeah. And and even even at the beginning is like if you wanna if you wanna be a face, you wanna be famous, you wanna be like a an influencer, you wanna be like a creator.

you can play the media game. It's a harder road. I think we also need to give context for out there for the people listening. I definitely do think that there's two sides of the coin listening. There's the creators and then the business side. I mean, there is a I mean you can have a a one or two, three person team doing a million dollars and a million and a half dollars and we've had RPN on we're just talking about like

If you want to make I don't know, there's obviously allies, but if you want to make five million dollars a year in profit, ten million dollars a year in profit. Like people that are playing the the media game, th there's Not that many people that are making well on the seven figures doing that. Right. And that's and that's I wanna demystify that piece of it, right? Because I think a lot of people think being a creator

When when I say being a creator, I mean the media side. Because really if you're the other side, you're an entrepreneur using content. There are like two two sides. People think if you're a creator, you're just like rich, you're flush with cash. It's actually very hard to break into seven figures as a creator. Like only the top one percent or point oh one percent in the niche can do it. But just to just to give context, like

I never wanted to be famous. I'd never wanted to be a creator. I'd never wanted to be an influencer. I'm a savage entrepreneur that has identified organic content as the cheat code lever to fuel businesses. So that's why I I started figuring out how does content work. It the byproduct, unfortunately, was that. I grew like audience and people kind of know me, but like that was never my intention. So I I do think there's two buckets and and again, like

We said the five different business games, there's two buckets here. You if you wanna be a creator and you wanna have influence and you wanna be like at the parties and you wanna be plugged in and tapped in, the media game is the best way to do it because you get the highest views, the most exposure and it feels like You're w you're you're in that world, right? The other world is like

entrepreneurs in the trenches that don't actually want to be known, right? These are two different buckets. Like the approach is different. And so That's I I think it's important for people to like self-select into what they want.

Right. And then build the strategy accordingly. I think another big thing to note too is on the former, when you're playing that CPM and view game, it becomes very, very difficult on the the sponsor and partnership side because you're so wide that you don't have these narrow products and services to sell into an audience. It's a very

you have twenty different types of people listening to your podcast. Yeah. And that's that's actually a good a good thing for people to think about is like the reason the brands are paying you is because they want to get a return on the spend. They think your audience avatar matches their buyer profile, which is why they're taking a bet.

The wider your content ranges, the wider your audience ranges, the less confident they are that that bet will pay off and the less they'll pay you to do it. So it's like, in a way, going wider is antithetical to dollars.

Not in a way, the way. Like that is that is the truth. So it's like the wider you go, the harder it is to be like specifically valuable for a certain slice, which is kind of counterintuitive. But then it's also an ego game. You're gonna get less views. The more narrow you go, the less views you get. Like then the slower. the game is. Yeah. It's so funny too, because for people out there listening, we'll have c context obviously in the trailer. Not only Kane was a former rapper.

We're gonna pop up right here. His rap album is actually really, really good. Kind of like a a logic. You sound like logic? Yeah, a little bit. But also you're in management consulting and hobbyist rapper. I think hobbyist rapper, not not a pro. I think it's good, bro. Yeah. We're gonna show so we're we're popping up. We might we might stop.

And just play it and play a song. I think it was good. Yeah. I wasn't going to glaze you either. When you sent it to me, I was like, yo, I was with my girl. I was like, Nice yeah. I was like this is questionable but always it was good. Yeah, it always but yeah.

It makes sense to me that you're formerly like a management consultant. Like going through your content, like there's just no way that you can know the stuff that you know without obviously having a a business background. Yeah. And to tie a bow on that, I just I feel like

the future. I'd obviously put myself in the same bucket as you. It's like, yeah, I'm a content creator, but I'm an entrepreneur and operator by trade. I just see how this is going to play exactly into my future. I think that is going to be the future. I think that there's for

entrepreneurs and operators out there. It is a hard game, it's a content creation game, but there is asymmetric benefit. And I think there is so few people in the arena. There is so few people in the arena. I mean we talked about like how many creators can come on here and really have a business conversation. It It's it's it's shocking how much white space exists. Like if you're

If you're a young kid and you're ambitious and you have a little bit of this like analytical slant, dude, the game is wide open. Like the cost of building is coming to zero. The cost of attention is coming to zero.

And you can use data and like a science based approach to outengineer anyone else who is playing the content game like by f gut feel. Dude, it is like It's open season. It it it is so open in every niche. It just doesn't appear that way from the outside because you see so much volume of shit. I'm telling you, it's wide open in every lane.

I'm with you on that, man. Let's dive into how people get that awareness. Let's go a little bit into kind of like formats, visuals, and editing a bit. First off, anything anything you want to close on on that those five content games. But the the one other thing I wanted to say, which is will be a framework to like the short form stuff. Everything I look at, I try to break into Lego bricks. This is like how I my whole

worldview works is like see a thing that doesn't make sense or feels complex, break it down to the studs into like atomic units, figure out the options that you can use for those atomic units. Those become Legos, stack those Legos into a stack.

And then you can make whatever you need to make. So for short form, there are seven Lego brick categories that matter. And I'm sure we'll get into this and for YouTube. And I want to contextualize this now because we're going to talk about other categories within short form, which is helpful to have this framework. The seven Lego bricks for short form are topic, angle. Hook structure. And within the hook structure, those three things we already talked about, visual, spoken, text hook.

Story structure, which is the way the story is actually laid out. You could also call this like video type. So you could have like a case study, a breakdown, a listicle, a storytelling, narrative, whatever. Number five is visual format. How are the visuals actually laid out on the screen? Are you doing split screen, full screen? Are you doing the little circle thing? Are you in the world? Are you doing a vlog POV? There's a bunch of those.

Six is key visuals. So what act what visuals are you actually using in the visual format? A roll, B roll, graphics, whatever. And then seven is audio. So and audio is music and sound effects. Those are the seven like categories of things, elements that make up a short form video. So all you have to do is figure out what videos and creators are winning in your category, explode their best videos into those seven pieces.

Hold as many constant as you think are world class and improve on the ones that aren't. Restack into your own new Lego formation and post. That's like this Lego brick framework is the the sauce, the content. Guys, get at your pen and pet. Stop right now and get at your pen and pet. Are you dropping just bombs? If you're driving. You are dropping pull over right now. You're dropping bombs right now. But that but that is really important to think of the world that way, I think.

I would also say too, a a good way to look at that is when you look at those seven buckets and you look in kind of the cohort that you're playing in. Think about contrast too. What can you do that's radically different than the other people in there? And you dissect each one of those seven. What can you do completely different? So to to give to give uh explicit context and direction to people. If you're a beginner.

The reason you're struggling is because there's so many unknown unknowns. You're there's a hundred things that you can't do and there's another hundred that you don't know what to do. The easiest way to reduce the sphere of unknowns is to hold constant a bunch of them for what's already working in your space. So when people say like just copy what other people are doing, what they really mean is

Of the seven buckets, topic and angle are probably gonna change for every video. But like hook structure, story structure, visual format, you can hold those constant and replicate what's already working. Now Some people say copy. I don't really think you should copy, but use like, oh, I see the split screen with the motion from the left to right is catching my eye. I'm gonna do that for my visual execution, but I'm gonna switch the topic.

This is why the beginners should do this. Now as you get better and you close the gap on some of those unknown unknowns, then you can be like, oh, I'm gonna invent a new visual format that people don't have. The problem is beginners try to invent new shit because they're like, I can't.

replicate what's already there. I don't think that's the right way to approach it. When you're a beginner, close down the things you need to learn until you learn the fundamentals. Copy what's already working. Once you get better, then go back to the things you were copying and you're like, can I do this in a new way that no one's ever done? Or can I borrow from this industry and remix it originally for my own space? That's how to think about like stair-stepping based on your skill level.

What about from uh when I look at these seven, what about like formats? Like what short form formats do you think perform the best? So when when you say formats, do you mean the story structure, like the type of the video, like case study breakdown listical, like the way the information is presented, or do you mean visual formats, the way it's laid out? You can chop it down however you want under those kind of seven buckets. What what is working right now in short form?

If somebody is watching this in January of twenty twenty six. Yeah. So You can get any format to work in any in most niches. I won't say every format in every niche. The hottest thing right now is narrative driven visual storytelling. That's like by far the hottest. So Chloe Shu is a really good example. Maybe you could you guys can play this up. Is like she had this like thirty lessons in thirty days by age thirty.

And basically most of those videos were her taking an individual story from her life or her experience, using like cool shots and visuals to make it I whatever I call it visual storytelling. But a lot of the narrative was like, I experienced this problem. Here's what I tried to do to solve it. Didn't work. Here's what I did do to solve it. If you have a similar problem, here you go. It's less like

You should be doing these three things. It's more like I did this thing, take it or leave it. That's very popular right now, this like personal narrative-driven storytelling. And I think the reason why, Orin may have mentioned this, I don't, I don't know where I heard this, but. You go through the seasons of formats where like certain formats work and it really It really matches with like the maturity of the platform. So initially when Instagram Reels came out in 2022, TikTok in 2020.

the like lower effort, more transactional formats worked because there's no supply. So like you could say, here's the five best AI tools for doing this, list, symbolistical. Or You could say that. Let me break down how to like flip your camera setting to get this shot and this very like transactional information tutorial. Information-based tutorials.

Those became saturated because like the market sees a opportunity and fills it. So then the next season after that was kind of like these case study breakdowns, we'll say. So it was like this person achieved this result in this way. Let me explain how. Still like a how to, but adding more original context that you couldn't

The first one is like a reporter, right? Like a newscaster. Exactly. Exactly. The first one's very transactional. Anyone like you could argue AI could probably come up with five tips for whatever. If not now, they're coming up with it very, very certainly. Right.

So there was that season. Then there was like this case and I'm talking mostly educational content. Obviously, entertainment's a different bucket. You had these like case study breakdowns. What's happened over the last five to eight months, unfortunately l not largely due to me, but partially due to me is

I open sourced the playbook for how to do these like transactional formats on my YouTube channel. And a lot of people did it. And so the supply really increased. Like between Orin and Alex Garcia and me and like, A few others on YouTube, the C of volume increased on all these transactional. formats like guys no gatekeeping here. No gatekeeping. Yeah, the gates are open. Like basically When when we explain the hook things or the the how to make a hook are these three components.

People actually take that and then use it and then oh shit, their hooks get better. It's like it there's a lot of people doing well now because of the last six to twelve months of education. So now the re to close the loop on this, the reason why personal narrative-driven storytelling is working now is because it's more one of one. It's like there is less of a formula. Like you could break down the storytelling formulas for

the hero arc or like the A versus B or like I tried this and failed and that like there's a few common storytelling patterns, but the actual lived experiences are more one of one. Like Chloe Shu worked, I think, at Deloitte for a few years and then struggled with her own stuff. Like she can turn that into a single one of one experience. It's hard to harder to copy those. So that's why that's invogue.

What what is the I think that is staying in vogue. You're gonna say what's happening next. I think that's gonna stay in vogue forever. Yeah. Because that is that one unique piece of sauce that no one can no one can copy. What's happened in your life? Well, by definition, one of ones will stay one of ones, right? Until you could copy them. So and you won't be able to because they're lived experiences. So I agree. Like that will always be a mainstay format.

It's a lot harder to execute than people think to like write an individual story structure that maps to storytelling, visually tell it well. The way she does it is pretty cool. Like she shoots in the world, but even if you didn't do that, the motion graphics required to like keep the Attention is pretty tough. So it's just getting harder and harder and harder to cut through with the base shit. Like you need, you need more unique. individualized format.

It's so funny because I did watch one of your YouTube videos and I do know who Chloe is. And we're actually doing our quote unquote like off site to really map out what next year looks like for the next three, four days. And one of my like ideas and things I'm thinking about is like

forty under forty, like forty lessons I learned before I was forty, and kind of interweaving in obviously lessons through open residency, my own personal lessons. And then from an aesthetic perspective, matching this aesthetic. So we get kind of like a compound effect of

what's going on here and then my own unique take. Nice. Yeah. There's a guy, uh Marshall Haas, do you know who this is? Marketing Master was going to introduce him to him. He just sold his company. It was somewhere maybe. Yeah. Yeah. It was the the staffing staffing c overseas staffing company. Yep. And he sold it. I think he sold I don't know if he owned the whole thing, but he sold for thirty, forty, fifty million.

He's making videos now and he's not like a creator per se. He's like he's more in this entrepreneur bucket, but he's making these personal narrative driven stories, but only he can make them, right? He's like, these are my these are the eight cars I bought after I sold my company. I have like the the 911, the G Wagon, like That's more one of one. Like only so many people can make that video. And so even if the editing sauce is a little bit less crazy.

those work better because you don't see that shit every day. And that's that's the thing is if you're making stuff that is commoditized to where 50 other people could also make it. It won't cut through unless you're the best out of the 50 at executing, and/or you have an existing personal brand, which most people don't if they're starting. Right. So for example, like,

I'm gonna take over marketing short form in 2026. Like right now I have zero presence. Like my YouTube is top of the charts, but I I have no short form presence for marketing intentionally because I'm building things out. When I take that over. it'll be as if I don't really have a personal brand in short form for marketing. So I'm gonna have to put these principles to use and be like, okay, what ideas or topics do I have differentiated knowledge on that other people don't?

It'll be tough since I've given all that knowledge away and everyone now has it. Or what formats or personal stories or experiences can I tell to cut through? So people be able to follow that in real time, like at Callaway Marketing on Instagram. Right now it's like a zero channel, but that's a perfect example. It's like even I who have a pretty deep personal brand on one platform, I've it's non-existent in that vector on another platform. And so I'm gonna have to figure out how to cut through.

I'm doing for the forty for forty, just so you know too. There's not many people that got a DM from Rick Ross and then pulled up to Atlanta with a a couple of his team members in his house so we could show that video telling that story. A lot of crazy, crazy stories have happened with the ten years with iconic and obviously before is definitely gonna do it. You probably have the footage for it, right? We have all of the footage. Yeah, that's that's the scene.

Three and a half hours in Rick Ross's house, Evander Holyfield's old estate. It's an hysterical story. Dude, I have a zillion of those stories. I'm doing it. I'll be uh A case study for your uh there you go. For for your format. In relation to that too, another big thing that I've seen, and this is actually how my wife popped off, was when you do those.

is the 30 for 30, the forty for forty is actually numbering them. It increases kind of that kind of like binge ability when you number them because then if you number them and then going back to kind of that thumbnail and someone sees the eighth one and they see

on your Instagram, two, three, four, five that's how you get people to get that again, time under attention as well too. Yeah, exactly. Numbering them. Yeah, I think the the human brain is basically like a puzzle machine. So if you say There's a puzzle in front of me like

You need ten pieces. Here's eight. Number nine and ten. I'm like holding in here. Everyone's like, I want number nine and ten. Like give me it so I can complete the puzzle. So it's like if you create a series of ten days of this or solve this problem in seven days, and you're like, here's day four.

I'm gonna wanna go back and see day one, two, three if I like day four. So it's like it's it's almost like forcing the connective tissue to drive the bench ability. Now, the the con of doing it numbered is that. If you commit to daily and then you don't want to do it daily, you'll burn out and you won't finish and then it will not meet the promise that you set to the audience. Yeah, exactly. Guys, if you're starting a podcast and you don't have five stacks.

And you're on on the treadmill. Yeah. That's a big, big mistake. But that's but that's it's a huge hack to I think to do this series. Especially so Chloe Chloe basically combined The numbered series, the personal narrative-driven storytelling. She executed it super well. And and like there's a few other like visual pieces that she did to pop off. When you stack those together, it cuts through significantly.

A good kind of tie in and question actually directly in relation to something like this is I guess the downfall of stacking is you lose out on kind of that like A B split testing and the learnings that you would get from video one, two, three, four, five. Yeah. You're saying you're saying batching? Yeah. So like how do you use like A B testing and outlier analysis to like find these these breakout forms?

Yeah. And that's to that point, I don't batch. And specifically because yeah, when you batch, you lengthen the iteration cycle. Kane says he disagrees. Okay, continue. Well you

So you're I'll I'll talk about it. I got a good baseline, bro. I got a good baseline. I could rip like five. I think that's a good thing. Well, the reason the you can batch if you know what you're doing, because then it's like you don't need the iterative learnings as much. Like the iteration distance is much shorter. But when you're when you're a beginner, the best way to do it is Make a rep, struggle, post that rep, see that it sucks, because the data will be horrible.

Look at that rep, use the Lego framework that I just went through and be like, okay, the topic's number one. Okay. Is this topic relevant to the audience that I want to build? Yes or no? Is this topic interesting? Have I framed it? Like there's like these checklists you can go through. You want to then iterate

Think about what you need to change. Focus on a couple things. One, if you know, one thing is best. But like if you can do multiple in one, that's great. Make rep number two. Do it again. You need to in iteratively improve. If you if you batch five in a row. You don't get that data back until number five is done. You've made mistakes from the same mistake from number one, two, three, because you didn't get any learning. So it's like,

A beginner should definitely go one at a time. Once you know what you're doing, you need to build a system, right? So you can get to volume and that's what everybody wants. They try to shift to volume before they have the fundamentals and they know what to look for. So that's I'm gonna say something that's gonna blow your mind for people out there listening. I think it's gonna give a lot of people a lot of reassurance. I've been following you a long time.

I remember not thinking you were that good in the beginning. Your enunciation, your sp in the beginning, years and years of. Yeah. I was horrible. That's crazy to think. I remember in the beginning I was like, this guy's not that good. I was like and then I started seeing you get better and better. For people out there listening, like you gotta just start and yeah, for beginners definitely one by one and it's everybody is ass in the beginning. Everybody because because

Of the unknown unknowns. Like there's a hundred things you know you need to do that you suck at, and there's a hundred things you don't yet know you need to do. And so you definitely suck at those. Imagine there's two hundred things. Everyone at the beginning, nobody born is like, yeah, I'm mute doing three hooks. Like no baby is like I'm doing three hooks. You don't have that knowledge. So like you gotta c systematically close those gaps.

The people that are good are the ones that can close multiple gaps in one shot, that are egoless about the learning and that don't stop. That's all you have to do because eventually those gaps are closed and then you have one video rip and then you have a chain reaction where From there, all of your reps get better, incrementally better. So yeah, if you scroll all the way back to my shit, it sucks. Like

I'm super monotone. Well, I still am, but I'm super monotone. The the pacing is slow. The topics are not that interesting. I don't even look like I want to be there because I probably didn't. Like everything sucks, like objectively about those pieces. But If you just have an urge to want to get better and then you are emotionless about the fact that it sucks in the beginning, you'll get better. Guys, you should probably binge my channel, but you might want to avoid a couple of those early ones.

I started off a little slump. Episode one with D is good. I thought it was good, yeah. And then the next couple I was like a little I didn't respect the audience's time and I just wish I could just go back and just edit a little bit. A little more just in the beginning. Like no one cares about my caloric deficit and how many grams of protein I have.

This is what I would do. If you really think the episode stands on its head, take that, cut the cut the stuff you would have cut, re-upload it just as like a you know, you can call it like from the vault or no no one's really gonna remember, and then just delete like first delete the original one so that'cause what you have to do is And I know this because that this happened to me. If you have an old channel, like let's just say with videos that are that you want to repost.

YouTube's copyright system effectively has a memory of the video. So you got to delete that video to like sever the memory. And then when you re-upload it, it's like a fresh video. So what I would do is just take those old ones.

delete them from the channel, wait three days, at least. You can schedule whatever you want, but at least three days. Chop all the stuff you want, re-upload them as a new episode, let it rip. You can retitle it, repackage it. There's no reason not to do that if if you're

bummed about unless you want like the historical archive in order, but I don't think there'd be a reason to have that. We're just gonna leave that out. And maybe maybe I'll do another episode with those people. Yeah. I guess we're talking about there is editing. Specifically in short form, what do you think is the most common kind of editing mistake? That people make. Yeah.

So editing is like my personally my worst thing. I never wanted to be an editor, so I have a bunch of editors, I've trained them up. So everything I say is like framework and fundamentals and like I've brute forced it for the first few hundred videos myself but If you want to really, really become a master of editing, there's probably other people on YouTube to study. The biggest mistakes are

Misalignment with the visuals, which you talked about already. You're using the wrong visuals at the wrong time that are not matching with the words. The pacing is off, either too fast or too slow. So a good test for this is like the eyes close test. Whenever you make video content, after you have it like ready, you should close your eyes and listen to it.

Don't watch with the visuals. Listen. If you're bored, it's too slow. Like the chopping is too slow. So that it it that's an editing thing, right? The pacing, the how fast or slow you chop the actual sentences. That's a huge mistake. I think sometimes people do it way too fast, where when you close your eyes and you listen to it.

You're like, holy shit, I c there's no way I could absorb this. You got to add a little breathing room. Some people do it too slow, where you close your eyes, you're like, damn, it's so boring.

You gotta chop it down a little tighter. So that's that's one like small thing. People are gonna think this is on one point five, this uh Yeah, I kinda I talk pretty pretty pretty fast. My my mom says we gotta slow it down a bit, but no no, we're we're we're gonna keep the pace. I'm trying to think what else from the editing perspective. I think just like visual selection is really important. At the end of the day, it's like.

You gotta think what is the best possible way to visualize this sentence? Sometimes it's no visual. Sometimes it's just you on the screen. And that's fine. But if there is a visual that will help add more absorption, add more clarity, add more comprehension.

You want to use that visual. And if you use the wrong visuals at the wrong times, it confuses. And effectively comprehension is just a decaying graph. So when you first hit the video, it starts at a hundred percent. Every word, pixel, That's the same thing.

Comprehension can only go down. I can say the same or go down. So at some point, that comprehension hits a level where the per the viewer is so confused that they bounce. That's that's why people churn, right? They don't churn because they're clear on what's happening and they're interested. They churn because they're unclear.

Andor uninterested. And so as that comprehension is decaying, that's when they that's when they leave. So you have to figure out How do I make sure the visuals, especially in the first five, ten seconds, are really, really tight with what I'm saying? So that comprehension stays high. If they leave but they're clear on what the video is about, well, that's fine. That wasn't for them.

Right. Even a good video is going to have a smooth line going down. Yeah, yeah. You just don't want that like asymmetric hockey stick where it just they fall off a cliff because then you know you can look at kind of each piece of it. Exactly. You can look at the retention chart and see where the biggest it's going to look like this.

But you can see where there was like abnormally high bounce. And usually that bounce is because they didn't understand what you're saying or the visuals didn't align with the words you were saying. And so they didn't understand the visuals. Let's talk about people bouncing and that retention, looking at short form. That first block, that I don't know, let's call it two and a half seconds is that hook.

If you're looking at, let's just call it, I don't know, let's make it easy. A 60 second video, the first two and a half seconds is a hook. What are those like blocks that you look when you're analyzing from a retention perspective? How could someone look at a block that that's short?

So there's there's definitely a bunch of metrics. I don't actually look at the retention charts or anything. I just go pure intuition. So like when Effectively when I watch it, I go one sentence at a time and I ask myself Am I clear on what this sentence is and what I should be taking away from it?

one sentence at a time. If I'm not clear, then there's gonna be drop off. So I don't actually I don't actually go data video. I go video and just let it live. But that's because that's obviously because I've baked that into my brain. So for people who don't have that like muscle yet. I think the the the stat on YouTube shorts, which is the thing that really shows the retention the best, is after the first three seconds, you want the

I think you want the viewer retention to be at like seventy percent. If it's above seventy percent viewers held in the first three seconds. You're gonna have a banger. If it's below 70%, if it's like below 50, you have a huge problem. But the problem is like, what do people actually do with that? This is why I don't like analytics. Cause if you look at it and you're like,

Oh, that was bel it was forty nine percent. It's like, okay, yeah, I should make the hook better. It's like, yeah, no shit. You should have made the hook better from the beginning. It's like data is confirmatory. It's a lagging indicator. The the leading indicator is like just follow the principles that I'm saying when you're actually making the video. And if you can't intuitively tell

That's the beauty of content is you can watch it and be like, is this clear to me or not? If it's not, it's not gonna be clear to them because you've watched it 10 times. Right. So it's like I don't actually use data as much as people think because I think the d you people can get obsessed with the data and it it it distracts them from what they actually need to do, which is like make the make the video better.

Pragmatic. I just always picture you as like a data scientist. So that's actually very, very surprising to hear, but it makes a lot of sense just going sentence by sentence. One framework on that too, I'll say. I don't think I've talked about this anywhere. The easiest way for short form to like v validate the story. You write the first line. The first line should open a question in the viewer's head based on whatever it is. So if the if the first line, which is context usually, is like

Google just came out with Gemini 3 and it's a crazy AI model. The question that should pop in someone's head from that is what can it do? Right. If when I read that first line, I'm not sure what the question should be, or there's multiple questions at like about equivalent strength, you have a problem. You need to make it more clear. So it's one question. Now, whatever that question is, answer that question in the next line. That next line.

We'll pop another question. Answer that question the next line. If you just do that all the way through, your story is perfect. So, like Google just dropped Gemini 3. It's a crazy model. The question is, what can it do? It's crazy because it can do da da da. Next question is how do I use it? If you want to use it, go to this. The next question is how much does it cost? And if you go here, you can actually get a discount. Like

It's just logical thinking, one question at a time. That's the easiest way to audit whether you're kind of like the the story flow makes sense. From a compression perspective too, I'm just gonna keep using sixty seconds. I'm always under the notion, obviously. Within sixty seconds, how many open loops, closed loops can you do? Well, broadly you can do like three story loops or like sections really. So it's kind of like the intro piece that opens that first holy shit, what is this?

There's the, for me, it's like the how it works or kind of breaking the breakdown. And then there's the implication. But that's that's more like story structure. I'm talking specifically sentence by sentence. It's just like when a when a viewer watches the video. What's really happening in their brain is that they're guessing what they think will come next. And then you're either telling them or you're telling them something else. Like to to add contrast.

Zigzag is happening in their brain the whole way down. So if I say something andor show them this robot has muscles that look like humans. Paid off. Sell up, paid off. Sell up, paid it off. How are they doing that? Why are they doing that? Where are they doing that? It's like that's the question of a viewer would have. Like if you were having a conversation with that story, you would ask it those questions one line at a time.

Yeah, dude, it's so crazy because me and Jake were talking last night at dinner about I'm not I listen to like a couple podcasts, but I'm starting to kind of consume more, especially in kind of other niches to get more like ideas and concepts and structures and such. And like, dude, I just I can't watch podcasts that just like they open it up and then they don't close it for like I was like sixteen minutes into a podcast. I'm like, yo.

What are we doing here, bro? Yeah. I can't do that. The easiest way to get the I gotta go on 1.5 X speed. Yeah. You know what I mean? That's what this is this is this this is the speed that I'm at, bro. Yeah. This is this is high octane for sure. So like I I have this framework. that I don't know if I've said it or not, but it's basically like it's like the two dopamine hit framework. If you can get somebody to two hits a dopamine before they churn, you've got them locked.

If you can only get them to one, you might have them. If you get them to zero, they're bouncing. And so what is that what is a hit of dopamine? For an educational piece of content, it's like tell me something I can actually use that when I implement will solve a problem for me. So in this episode, you

And I was talking all over the place. Yeah. It's a dopamine casino in here. Hope hopefully hopefully I was kind of all over the place when I was doing the hook thing, but hopefully when people watch that, in the first minute or two, there's at least one nugget that they heard that they can be like, oh shit.

That's valuable. Now the thing I said I mean, I think that they got nuggets on the I think they got nuggets, bro. I'm pretty confident. Like the thing I said about the Instagram thumbnail and the DMs, that's a guaranteed dopamine hitter. Like nobody knows that. So when you hear that, you're like, oh shit, I could use that. Boom, dopamine released. That we'll say that's number two. Hopefully they got one before that. At that point,

You've got them locked in because they've heard two things that they didn't know that they can actually use. And they're like, I have to keep listening to this because there could be 20 more things. You're giving you're not giving yourself enough credit here. There was way more dopamine hits than that. That was like the rand that was actually a random dopamine hit for me. I'm sure that you felt that'cause I'm like, damn, I'm going through that right now.

I woke up to six memes this morning and I was like, oh, I'm gonna pick TI lamptime for two. So that's crazy. Guys, quick break. This episode is sponsored by Universal Ads, a division of Comcast. I've spent tens of millions of dollars on meta-ads. At one point, it was 95% of my marketing spend.

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On some more dopamine hits. Um, you have tons and tons and tons of content set up. What's your tactical process? for planning, let's just say a month's worth of social content. Yeah. And this is this is somewhere I need to get better. I don't really plan in advance, right? So I'm I'm operating in like a just in time scenario, which is not ideal for my life, but that's because I'm I'm spread a little thin. But

For the tech and AI content, basically I try to get to four to five pieces a week. Sometimes it's three. I've got brand deals on coming in on one side. I've got organics on the other side. And maybe we can just talk about my operation like my team would be helpful. So I have two editors that are dedicated to tech and I've got what I'll call like an ideas guy.

So this is a guy that I hired. He's a he's technically called an EA plus. Hold on one second. On those two editors, are those in house? Are they agency? Are they sourced on a per video perspective? They're full time dedicated to me from an agency. From the Philippines, they're both cracked, like absolute. Shout out to the Philippines. We back baby. So if anybody wants to get the editors that I use we're putting that link below. Yeah, we can put the link below. So I've got two of them.

Each one of them can make a video a day or like a day and a half, depending on like how long it is or how crazy the visuals are, how it's rigorous systems and templates that you've embedded in these guys' brains. Yeah. So what I do is like because I'm not an editing savant, I'm like

And they are. I basically tell them, yo, if we ever have an off day where I just like can't get to a video, I want you to spend the whole day building templates and systems for the other one so that you guys can go faster. So it's like I've embedded speed into the system for them when they're not editing. When they are editing, they're like

trying stuff out or whatever. I've also given them virtual credit cards so they can sign up to any AI tool they want to generate the visuals faster. So I'm like trying to get them to be both editors but also like proactively systematizing. It's worked semi good, but like

It helps a little bit. I have the same exact system. I have a team in the Philippines and they are I just yesterday approved some new Adobe program for them. Yeah. I love that. They're correct. Yeah. So I've got those two and then the so if you think about the workflow for short form, it's idea, research. Scripting, recording, editing, posting. That like six piece loop, you just loop it.

That's what I just described solves the editing, obviously. The recording is going to be me. You could use an AI Avatar, but it doesn't save that much time. So the recording is me.

So this idea research scripting piece is really where the s the time saving sauce is, but it's the hardest part to automate away. Editing is pretty I don't want to say commoditize, but like it's pretty clear. You get an editor, you hand them the footage, they edit the footage based on a style. Like you can solve that pretty quick. The hard part is that first part. So I've got an ideas guy. I call it a content operator. He's also overseas, but I basically cloned my brain into him. So like

Effectively what I realized is as an entrepreneur, you're just in the cloning business. That's I'm just trying to clone myself as much as possible into people and then they can become me and they can do the things to a level that's like close to me. So I I spent like three to six months cloning myself into this guy. So like What is a good idea? How to look for ideas? How to how to filter out

good versus great ideas, how to go develop those ideas. What are the core pieces to that make for good ideas in my niche? What is this a hundred eighty page Google Doc? What is this? Uh a lot of it was like live calls I find is good and looms. So the way we have it set up is like he

He goes and scans what I call idea pipes. So it could be like other creators in the niche, Twitter, Reddit, YouTube, newsletters, what for me it's like those are the pieces, but there are different pipes for different niches. He is Trying to find good ideas. What are things that are interesting? And we're talking about for tech and AI. What are things that are interesting that I could make a video about?

He then creates a short list and develops those ideas. And by develops I mean he goes and finds visuals from either the company or Twitter or like we have live examples or whatever. He's finding he's curating what he thinks is interesting, what he thinks the angle could be for the video and what the visuals are. And this is just a Google doc. Each idea is a tab. He puts it into, he drops that stuff in each tab.

Then once or twice a week we have a a pitch call where he pitches the ideas to me like a showrunner would in Hollywood. And he's basically like, all right, I have this idea. I found this. It's time sensitive. So if you want to make it, we got to make it in the next 24 hours. Here's why I think it's good. Here's what I think we could do with it. Here are the cons for why we wouldn't make it. What do you think? Now, now I'm sitting there and I'm just like,

No, it's too sm too small. Or visual's not good enough. Or, oh yeah, that's a winner. And if we I filter out the shitty ones, I take the winners and we have a short list. That saves me so much time. Like I don't have to go scrolling. Now I'm like one step delayed in knowing the news, but that's a trade-off I'm willing to make because I don't want to be like scrolling all day. So I've outsourced all of that like idea.

process, which is huge. Dopamine's hitting right now. Just keep keep going. Yeah. Dopamine's hitting. Yeah, this is this is a this is dopamine's hitting right now. This is a systematized sauce for sure. So we we do that. Then when it comes time to make a video, the next piece would be if I could train the scripting sauce into him.

We haven't fully got there yet, but we're doing that now. I also have sand castles, which we haven't even talked about, which is my software for trying to automate this. It's good, but not as good as me off the dome yet. So it's great for people that are beginners like level one to five, one to six. If you're a nine or ten, the scripting is not good enough on any AI platform to like place you is what I found.

So usually I will sit down, I will pull the idea from the list, and I'll write the script in 20 minutes, then I'll shoot it. hand it to the editor and then it comes back usually done. So that like that system is what I'm doing.

And I'm trying to bucket it like we said before. For the first three hundred reps, I was going one at a time because I wanted to get learning up. Now I'm trying to bucket it where I do two or three at a time. Eventually maybe we'll do five to ten at a time. But that's kind of the the flow I have right now. How long have you had this ideas person? I had never heard of a quote unquote ideas person until the Sahel Bloom episode. He told me about it. Yeah, I've always actually thought about

The curation and the taste is what makes this this. And I can't source that out, but I actually love this concept. How long have you had this type of guy? I've had him for like six months, I think. So it took three months to I mean, to to install my brain into someone is

Very hard. Like you can hear. Like I'm a I'm a psycho. Like like I'm so deep in the weeds on this stuff that to g to for anyone who doesn't want to be this deep could never do it. And then for someone who wants to be this deep, I'm like pulling you into it. Like the nuance that I go like the details crazy. So it took a lot of time just to like

First I first he's he's raw, then it's like you gotta aim him, then you gotta get him moving in the direction you want, then you gotta get him on the nuances, then you gotta have him do it and review him doing it. So it takes like three to four months to clone yourself in this way. But it's paying dividends because he's legit as good at finding ideas as I am and he has like the systematization to do it.

Guys, I'm hiring for this position. Email below. Yeah, I call it I call it a content operator. Content operator. It's the person that op is like the quarterback of your first half of the process, right? This person is not gonna edit for you.

And ideally you can get them to where they find the ideas and write the scripts all in one and just hand you the script. That's that's the dream, which we're we're getting we're gonna get there soon. But yeah, if you the way to find this person, the cheap way is to go offshore and bring somebody up to speed, but it's very hard. The other way is like to find someone like you have with Jake or someone else who's like been doing this type of thing, but like doesn't want to do it alone and is like

It's hard to find s a unicorn, right? This goes back to and I talk about it in the Mark Manson episode or he talks about it is like Everyone has their own sauce and you don't want to hire yourself out of that sauce. I think if you can duplicate yourself, this is

a no brainer that you don't want someone internally on your team. You want to find someone net and new that's passionate about the topics and the podcast and you as a personal brand. Yeah. You just tell them everything and they do all the legwork. The other thing I have which I hired very recently is And this is pretty much unique to the AI space, but There's kind of two categories of things I cover. There's like news, and then there's the Gen AI tools, like Higgs Field drops some new model.

I have a guy on my team now that's dedicated to playing with the tools all day. And when we have a Gen AI video, he just I'm like, yo, make something sick. And then he the Understanding all the nuances. Yeah. Because so basically what what what I realized is There's just not enough time to go down every rabbit hole. So you you need You need a rabbit like for each hole. And like I can only do a couple. And I'm and the more projects you take on, the less.

rabbit holes you can go down. Some people love, and and I do love going down the rabbit hole. Like I love scrolling Twitter for three hours and like seeing interesting shit, but it's just not productive. Right. It's so crazy you said that too, because we'll have we're just now starting to kind of bring on more partners and sponsors and like someone will come, you know, that reach out. It'll be interesting. And like I have to go down that rabbit hole to see.

The use cases. I have to test it. I need to champion it, or else I'm not gonna obviously make a partner or sponsor. And then even for the ad reads. is what are those overlays and B rolls in conjunction with the product. This person could just do all that. Exactly. But basically the curriculum that I've made for short form and now YouTube is essentially a manual for upskilling these people. Like it's also

the playbook for anyone to actually use. But like if you think about it from the other direction, in theory, I could hire any content operator raw, give them my curriculum, and they come out. 90% upskilled without me having to do anything because I spent all the time to like codify the process. So that's that's one of the things we did with my guy. I had just made the curriculum for short form and really it was like skinned for my style.

So he ran through it. He watched every single video. He watched everything I had on YouTube. And I was like, spend two weeks and go all the way down. Like I want you to watch every single video. I want you to take notes as as what I would expect someone to do, like who's interested in this.

And he comes back and he's like using terminology that like is mine just by default. He knows all the weird nuance. Yeah. So I was like it worked. Like it it worked. Now you you gotta iterate that person because like I said, the strategy is the easy part.

the iterative the iterative looping is the hard part. So he has to go, we got to go through hundreds of ideas. And I have to yes, no, yes, no, yes, no. So he can learn what I actually think. But like that's how you clone yourself. Bam. So two editors, the content operator, the bunny going down the AI rabbit hole. That's on the short form side, yeah. Anybody else? No, unshort form.

Rakugo, shout out Rakugo. Hey, us too. Yeah. They've done it. Yeah, there you go. They bring the deals in, obviously. So that helps with like the admin on the email side. the whole operation for short form today. Uh I want to I guess that's a good shift. Let's get into to YouTube. Why are you so bullish on YouTube? Well, a lot of it is the content minutes thing. So it's like

If you want people to buy, they need to trust. If you want them to trust, they need to watch a lot of stuff that's valuable. And if you want them to trust as quickly as possible, you need them to watch as much stuff as quickly as possible that's valuable. YouTube allows me to compress. The value

I guess I wouldn't even say compress. It allows me to give more value per rep. So it's like if I make a short and it's the best it could possibly be, and people watch 45 seconds, I'm I'm really transferring like one idea. If somebody really likes my YouTube, I can transfer like 10 ideas in one video and get them to watch 10 minutes worth. And they can also see.

It's cut fast, but it's you can see my mannerisms. You can see you can start to like understand me and like me. And there's a lot of like X factor that comes with longer form. And so for the combination of just the math. that I need you to watch more minutes and the psychology, I need you to like seeing the way I think and explain stuff, YouTube's the perfect medium to get trust accruing quickly. I also think it's a longer rope too. Like if someone is nineteen minutes into our podcast.

I have a ninety second window where I can probably you know, not be as compressed in in the conversation and they're they're not gonna churn. Yeah. But I mean, people are gonna churn on short form in fucking two and a half seconds. Yeah. So it gives you more rope and kind of bobbing and weaving in there. The other thing is you kind of have to understand The w have you ever custom built a player in Madden?

I have not, no. So like if you play a s a s any sports video games and you wanna custom build a new player, there's like attributes and they give you like a hundred points and it's like split the attributes across like speed, jumping, agility, whatever. Every person is like that in real life. There are these different attributes and some people have a lot of XP in one and low in another. So you kind of have to understand like where your strengths are.

I'm like off the charts at explaining shit. I'm not that good at editing creatively. So it's like short form rewards editing creatively disproportionately than long form. Long form rewards explaining disproportionately than short form. So it's my unique abilities are rewarded at a compounding rate on YouTube. It's just like better for me to explain stuff.

to get people to understand me. So I prefer that. And people prefer that as well. If you're not good at explaining stuff and you're really good at like the editing sauce, short form might be better because it accentuates your unique ability. We talked about audience matching kind of before. If you're looking specifically for YouTube, I want you just to further go down that rabbit hole. What do you think wins on YouTube? What type of content wins now and will age well? Which game are you playing?

Oh yeah. Give like we're in the Caleb episode right now. It's all about the positioning and what's the end game. Yeah. And m mostly just'cause if you're gonna do work, you wanna make sure you're walking down the right path so you don't have to come back and restart. So If you have an offer or a product, you should be able to pick which game pretty quick.

If you don't and you just want to like accrue a personal brand in a category, I think the high value niche-based educational content where you have proof and credibility is the best positioning you can go after. So for me, I mean so just take me as an example. When I started, I had no skills. I mean, like I was a management consultant, but basically no skills. I had no skills, no proof.

And no offers and no audience and nothing. Context, what year was this? This was like twenty, twenty two and a half years ago probably. Yeah. Jesus. But I had like lived as a professional for eight years. So I at least could like talk and like write emails. Like I had some skills, but no no like actual real entrepreneurial skills, no audience, no offer, nothing. How old are you? I'm thirty two right now.

Forbes thirty under thirty is tripping. We were talking about this. I d I didn't know if you had the if you had the slot to make it. They tripping. I wasted my twenties selling my time to a c uh corporation. But basically And this is where a lot of people are, I think, listening. You have no skills, no audience, no offer, nothing.

So the question is like, what should you do? Right. The first thing is not make content. The first thing is go get skills. Like actually get a valuable skill that people will pay for. Develop that skill. That to me, the best skills right now are. Content related. So it's like, can you generate attention? So it's it's almost like a self-fulfilling loop, but like the best place to start is to get a skill where you can actually generate attention on demand. That could be organic.

It could be paid, although that's not really on demand, but you pay for it. It could be written. So there's different formats, but like you need to build a skill. You could also build skills in product. You could build skills in sales, right? There's like these core buckets that matter for business.

But at the end of the day, like I said, business is just traffic, funnels, offers. So you need a skill in one of those three. Offers is building building offers, you just read Hormozy's book, Problem Solved. Building a product is very tough. So that's like Either physical or digital. That's that's a whole set of skills. Funnels, pretty transactional. You can learn funnels pretty quickly, although there are people that have made a ton of money as like a specialist.

Like at your your many chat guy, he's doing really well. He's like carved out a niche within funnels. Awesome. Or traffic. So you gotta pick one of those three buckets and build hard skills. What does build hard skills mean? Do the thing and get the result that you would want to charge people to help them do. So what I did at the beginning is I was like,

Offers is not as valuable as traffic, because you could have traffic and monetize without an offer, but you can't have an offer and monetize without traffic. So it's like traffic is the most important. valuable thing in this next era for business. So I was like, I'm gonna go become a weapon of traffic. Like that's that's what I'm gonna learn. The best way to learn content is to make it. And so you want to grow your own channel.

on something. Now this is where it gets like hard because you can't really grow a content channel on how to grow content without having done content. It's like a self fulfilling loop. People need to listen to that one. Yeah. People shouldn't be giving content advice when they haven't actually mastered content. And the way to master content is not to make content advice from scratch. It's to like pick a different niche and learn how to do content in that niche.

So I picked tech and AI because that's what I'm interested in and I knew the brand deals would be lucrative, but that's where I started. You have to build a skill first. So this whole question was like what what niche should someone pick basically or where should someone start on YouTube?

You if you're gonna do educational and you're gonna build an offer at some point, you need to have a skill. That skill either has to be the products, like I'm the best protein bar manufacturer in the world. Okay, so now you can make the protein bar and go on YouTube if that's the right play. Or You need to learn traffic. One of the two. So that it's it starts there. Now, assuming you have a skill, you're like a really great tax accountant, you're amazing at B2B sales, whatever. The best way

to monetize that skill is with an owned offer, either and there's many, services agency, info products, coaching, consulting. There's a variety of different models. Build a personal brand around that expertise using high value content on YouTube. What is high value? Non-obvious, tactically implementable. If I'm a tax accountant, And I know a bunch of shit and it's vaulted in my brain.

Can you say that shit in a video so that when I as a business owner who would pay you for services hear it, I can actually make a change in my business and save money, like get the result. If true, if that's true. I will trust you and eventually ascend down the funnel if I'm like the right type of customer for you. It is that simple. I think we're going hyper niche, hyper educational, hyper value driven.

the non-value entertainment stuff will arm to zero. There will be AI content that is more personalized, like AI Netflix shows that are more personalized to me than

something that a random person that doesn't know how to make content could make on YouTube. So it's like you're gonna lose that game. So that that's a long winded answer. But so it's a race being an attention expert just backed into building trust. It's all just about right now is about building Distribution and trust.

That's what it all backs into. Exactly. You want you want one-to-one trust at scale as fast as you can get it. And the way to get it faster is to have higher value density in your content and value, like I mentioned, is non-obvious tactically implementable things that can get someone the results. Let's dive more into YouTube. You say YouTube is a packaging game more than a content game. Yeah. I agree.

In a big way. Why do you think that it's it's that? Well it's just like like blogs is like a headline game versus like the actual body, right? You need to get the click so that people actually get into the world and if they don't click in The video might as well have been a black screen. And that's that's mostly like everything in the world I view is either math or psychology. Everything. And so

That's purely just math. It's like you don't have enough eyes on the vid you won't you wanna have eyes on the video if they don't click in. Right. So it's like you just you have to focus earlier in the funnel, which is the packaging. So YouTube is generous enough to put your shit in front of people for free, awesome. But if they don't click, it's worth nothing. You know, so that's why Mr. Beast and Mr. Beast figured this out pretty early. He was like, yo, it has

It's not that it has nothing to do with the video. The video obviously matters, but he's like, if we don't overinvest in the packaging and get people to the video, all that money on the video that we spent is worth nothing. So that's why you have to have a solution. If you're gonna play YouTube, you have to have a solution for packaging, titles, thumbnails, the actual idea itself kind of wraps in there and the the intro confirming that click. We can talk about that, but

The di the core difference between short form and long form, short form, the viewer doesn't have a choice. The feed puts it up. You don't need to do packaging. The hook is the package, but that's also part of the video. It's way easier to win on short form because your shit just gets served automatically.

Long form is a completely different game. What percent of your time looking at the let's just call it idea pre production all the way down to the click of the button distribution? What percent of the time do you focus on prepackaging? I don't spend any time personally because I I hired the other guy. So my thing When you were doing it yourself though, pre-six months ago. I I started with the team from day one. I wow. And I and I here's how I looked at it. YouTube is like a professional sport.

Short form was like fledgling. It's getting to be professional, but it's still like winnable by anyone. So I thought if I'm gonna play a professional sport and I don't have the professional skills, I need to go pay for them from experts. So I gotta go get money somewhere else to fund the YouTube team so that I can have the A players from day one. Cause I identified The packaging is critical. And what is the packaging?

Coming up with the idea for the video, but most importantly, titling and thumbnailing that video so that it gets a click. There are savages that know everything about YouTube and everything about packaging that are out there selling agency services. I was like,

I'm paying them immediately. That are not that costly. Yeah, they're not. Three K a month. And and basic and I can walk through what they do and we can put it in the description if you guys want the same people I use. But basically my YouTube team from day one was the ideas team, the strategy team, which does the packaging, my thumbnail designer who just executes well, he comes up with the designs as well, but like they work in tandem. And then my editor.

So all I do on YouTube personally is write the script. And record it. That's it. Chronic migraine is fifteen or more headache days a month, each lasting four hours or more. Botox, onabotulinum toxin A, prevents headaches in adults with chronic migraine before they start. It's not for those with fourteen or fewer headache days a month. It prevents on average eight to nine headache days a month versus six to seven for placebo.

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What do you think is the most common mistake that people make when they're doing that title thumbnail? Outside of just not doing it? Well, what the most common one is they do it at the end. So like w we'll have just said it's the most important thing and then they'll be like skip and then and then they'll make a video, they'll spend like twenty hours'cause really the editing takes the longest time, but it's the it's it's the least important thing I would say.

So we'll spend all that time. They're burnt. They're like, oh my God, it's to three days to make this video. Like I don't even know if it's good. And they just do the packaging at the end. Like they're they're just, oh yeah, I'll throw some. Like that is the worst thing you can do. The reason they say make the title thumbnail first. is both because you have to confirm the click in the first couple of seconds, but also

You want to put the most effort when you're the freshest on the most important thing, right? So that the biggest problem is they just do it out of order. That's number one. Now that's obviously not tactics that people want, but that's the truth. You should do it first. If you're designing the thumbnail yourself and you're titling the video yourself, You need to get that solved. before you waste your time on anything else. Because if you can't solve that, the video is basically a dust.

What's good though is formally you could only A B split test thumbnails, you can ask A B split test titles. That does give you a little bit more malleability. I do think they should be done beforehand. But I think understanding and knowing the macro identity and like a rough idea of what it is and then knowing how you're going to open and make sure it reflects that.

I would argue that we're moving into a world where that works as well too. Ideally you have it all done, but as long as you have a good, good idea of where you're gonna and what are the key words you're gonna use, I think that's enough. What we do is the titles are done. But we don't have the thumbnails done before I make the video, but that's because I know I have a guy that can execute it.

Fresh. So I make the script, I record it, and then I hand the finished script to my thumbnail guy and my editor at the same time separately. They edit it. He does the thumbnails. It comes together. But the only reason I do the thumbnails after is because mostly from a systems perspective and because I know this guy is a pro. If you don't, if you're doing it and you're not a pro, you shouldn't wait till the end. Right. So that's that's how I kind of do it. The biggest thing is that

People don't trigger what I call a desire loop in the title. So if you think about how the psychology actually works when someone's on YouTube, you're scrolling, scrolling, scrolling, scrolling, your eye catches a thumbnail. You don't know what it says yet, but you like f lock in. That's this like first awareness angle. The next thing is you read the title. People look, they look right below and they're like, what is the title? And they're trying to find keywords that

trigger awareness around what I call a desire loop. So it's like you either need to s you want to solve a pain or you're feeling FOMO about missing out on having solved that pain or there's like a benefit or desire that you have. Right. So I was looking at the one you did with Orin. It was like, this is the most valuable marketing conversation you'll hear in 2025. Right. It was something like that. Yep.

FOMO. Got a lesson. A marketer seeing that is foaming at the mouth because they're afraid they're FOMOing that they're gonna they're gonna miss some nugget, right? So you create a desire loop. There's a d they have the desire to need to know that information. The thumbnail then, after they see that title, they go back to the thumbnail. That thumbnail needs to complement and amplify that desire. It doesn't need to

Repeat the words because it's just another canvas for you to increase that desire. So if you would have said on the thumbnail, Marketing conversation, it does nothing because you already said it's a most valuable marketing conversation. What you said in the thumbnail is.

I figured out the cheat code or like I solved the cheat code, which ratchets up that desire even more. Cause now I'm like, damn, this guy must know it. I have to click. So if you're a marketer or a business owner who wants to solve marketing, you're gonna click on this.

Guys is the dopamine, more cheat codes. In short, thumbnail, title, thumbnail, intro. They look at the thumbnail first and the title. Yeah. Reaffirm and then they go in. Yeah. And so that's how that's how it goes. The most important thing to understand about YouTube is like The thumbnail title's job is to get the click. Okay. Once you get the click, their job is done.

The intro's job is to confirm the expectation, that d confirm that desire loop immediately. So if if you say this is the greating mark greatest marketing conversation of all time and you and I click. I better be hearing in the first five seconds something about marketing to validate that you're not bait and switching me. Right. So the intro's job is to confirm that and then get you to the first main dopamine hit in the body.

Once you get to that first dopamine hit, it should come within like thirty to sixty seconds, hopefully. People will have forgotten what was on the title thumbnail. Like the title and thumbnail does not, it's like discarded. It's like a rocket. You blast the rocket up the booster. Well, shout out to Elon, but like before that, the booster was just falling in the in the ocean, discarded. His job is just to get the rocket up there.

Same thing with the packaging. The packaging's job is just to get you to the intro. The intro's job is just to confirm the click and get you to the dopamine hit. That dopamine hit hit is meant to. Tease you?

that there's value here you should keep watching. But at the dopamine hit, the title and thumbnail is being forgotten. Like I guarantee if you're watching this right now, you forgot what the title was and what the thumbnail said. I guarantee it. And that's because we're, I mean, we're probably an hour and a half in, but like Your brain

It's like a jurable. You can't you're caching the information like every fifteen seconds. Like you it's only could process so much at once in in your brain. Yeah, I would say too, you said something there about uh bait and switch. Like we've had that issue before where Like the good stuff. This is when we weren't doing it beforehand. Like the good stuff came forty five minutes in and we're like

Fuck, we want to make it the title and thumbnail, but then they're gonna think we're just reorder it. Bait and switching them. This was early in the game where we didn't even realize that you can you can cut and nut and reorder. The thing is, you you want click bait. You don't want bait and switch.

Right. You want to bait and then give. That's like the whole people are like, oh, it's too clickbait. He's like, no, you want clickbait. I'm trying to bait a click. But when when they click, I want to give them the bait. I don't want to switch. Right? That's the whole that's the whole nuance. That's a good way to put it. When you're looking in YouTube Studio, what are those big metrics that you're evaluating?

So again, with the metrics, I try not to go too deep on the metrics because it's it's the same like logic around the inputs. But overall, there's really two ways to approach YouTube. There's from a business perspective, like I want dollars out, and there's from the media perspective, like I want views. If you're playing the business game, you don't actually care about views. You care about on target views. Really you care about dollars per view. If you can make a metric that says,

I got five thousand views on this video and it generated fifty thousand dollars. That's ten dollars per view. This video had 300 views, but it generated$300,000. That's$1,000 per view. I should make more of the one that got the most dollars, right? If you're a business owner, that's how you should actually look at it. The metrics in YouTube are not built.

for that, right? The metrics in YouTube are built for the media side because they want more views cause they monetize off ad revenue. So If you're looking in YouTube Studio, typically you look at the one of ten ranking because you're trying to see like relative performance.

But that only matters if you care, if you're playing the media game and you want more views. So the reality is you're only it's only as good as the tools you have. And so for me, like and for everyone, you only have YouTube Studio. So when I look

I'm basically looking at CTR click through rate, which is how many what percent of people that my thumbnail was being shown to are clicking. But that's a noisy metric. Like you could have that be high in the video do low do worse. You could have it be low in the video do high. It's not clean. And I'm also looking at the one of ten relative ranking. And and roughly like here's how I broke I'm breaking down my like analytics process. If the video is a

Again, for the media game. If the video is a uh one, two, or three of ten, I'm letting it go. Right. Cause it's it's like outperforming the relative ranking. What I'm trying to do is study what I did in that one so I can replicate it again.

It there's a lot of variables that go into a YouTube video, like hundreds of things. So it's tough to like isolate one change and be like, that was the reason this one did better. Typically It's conflating factors, so it's kind of hard to like extract that learning, but that's that's like the the one path. If it's a four, five, six, four.

Four, five, six out of ten, like ranking wise. So the the only thing I look at in YouTube Studio is the one of ten ranking. And the and the one of ten ranking is just like, what rank out of your last 10 videos is this one relative to views? But it's a very, like I said, it's for all the caveats, it's a crude metric. So if it's a one out of 10, that's the best. If it's a 10 out of 10, that's the worst.

One, two, and three out of ten signals that it's outperforming relative to the field that of my own videos. So it's the best apples to apples metric you can you can get for your own channel. If it's a four, five, or six out of ten, it's kind of like middle of the pack.

I'll I'll again still leave it, but I'll try to figure out was there something different? Usually if it's a four, five, six relative to a one, two, three, it's just the idea TAM was smaller. Right. So if I made a video about storytelling, that's a big Tam versus a video about Systematizing your short form content engine, that's kind of a small TAM. So it's like if I see that small that six out of 10, I can't really hold myself. like in too much contempt like like negatively because

It was a smaller idea. So like it's gonna get less views. So that's why that metric is kind of weak. I think most people wanna know what happens if you see a seven, eight, nine, or ten out of ten. Like you see a low performer. Typically what I do is There's only one thing you can change in real time. It's the title thumbnail. You can always switch the title thumbnail. So if it's seven, seven, eight, nine, or ten, I'll ask my ideas guy like, yo, this. is not performing well.

Do you think we should switch the title to this? Like usually I'll come to him with like a guess for why it's not performing well and he'll say yes or no and we'll repackage it. Or we just let it go and we try to say like what didn't work this time. Let's take that for next time. It's so hard to get conclusive evidence for anything. I mean, if you do like a thumbnail test and you do three different thumbnails and like one of them is like

I've seen as high as like forty five percent compared to the other ones and it's still not enough conclusive evidence. It's gotta be almost over fifty percent. Yeah.'Cause they're like with all other things consistent. So what you should do is once once one of the three is breaking out.

set that one as the winner and ideally you make two more that are closer to that one to to test all three. Another dopamine hit. Love that doing that. I think another big thing, and I mentioned it in the Caleb episode, is Forget if you're playing the media game, one of those first two buckets, but if you're playing the consumer game or the B2B SaaS game. Soft skills, offline stuff, understanding and knowing, an example. For certain episodes, I get texts from certain people.

And the intellect of that human that texts me saying they got a lot of value out of the episode. I mean, I've gotten one text from people. And I'm like, wow, this person got value from this episode. Like you have to take that into account. Yeah. On their bucket three, four, five. And th those things don't show up on the stat sheet, right? So it's like,

The problem with analytics is there's so many conflating variables on the analytics side, and there's so many conflating inputs that drive those variables that really the best way to improve and I and I I don't say this in a way to be annoying. You want to find somebody that knows what they're doing that can objectively look at the inputs and be like, This, this, and this were not good. Look at this, this and this as a better example and improve that way. Like you

It's not, it's not that you have to have a coach, but like you need, that's what Mr. Beast had. He had like three or four homies that were all about the same skill level. One of them would make a video and the other three would look at it and be like, nah, like these things are off.

and you have objective feedback at somebody at your level or one level above, that's what you need because there's too much variability in the things that could change. There's 20 variables that drive the performance. Nobody is gonna be able to look on their own with emotion and be like,

Yeah, that was definitely like the hook was too they're not they're not gonna be able to take emotion out of it. So you need somebody that actually knows what they're doing to give you that feedback. That's the best way to improve, period. I have a very strong stance on this specifically to YouTube. I think you a hundred percent do need a coach and an expert. And I mean, again, we were, I don't know, two, three, four episodes in. We paid money for very high level people. Fuck. I want a page.

four times the amount of money that I paid for that. So I definitely think that you can get from a I mean, even listening to podcasts like this. Like you could really get to Top ten percent in the world and understanding and knowing YouTube, if you just put in the time up front. Yeah, a hundred percent. I want to close up on YouTube and move on to the next topic. I just the last thing is I really want to touch on what are those like biggest kind of expectation mistakes that founders make when

They're going onto YouTube. Like what what do people fundamentally misunderstand about the platform? So many. Well, first first of all, if you're a bus if you're playing the business bucket, you're not a YouTuber. You're an entrepreneur that's using YouTube as an effective free traffic source.

So because of that, you want to look at YouTube just like you look at all other marketing channels, which is iteratively testing with data. Like you would not go into paid ads and put one ad out there and be like,

Oh man, it didn't work and like give up. You wouldn't. You'd be like, I'm gonna put a hundred out there and see what performs and double down. Like that's that's you would think of it with a science based approach. YouTube's the exact same way. It's just people are more emotional about it because each rep takes longer.

And and really because they s I guess they're romanticized by the idea of being a YouTuber potentially, but you really want to look at YouTube like a series of iterative experiments. You have to go through the process of making a video.

Sucking, learning what didn't work, making a second video, et cetera. Just like I did with short form, you have to do the same thing with YouTube. The the shitty part about YouTube is that every rep takes five days instead of one or seven days, right? If you're posting once a week. So it's like, The growth is just slower. The iterative learning loop is slower. So the expectations are

A, you don't need as many views as you think. You'd rather have on-target views that convert to dollars. So that's great. Like you don't need a hundred thousand views. You could you could do that. A couple thousand views is huge. You don't need a ton of views. You're gonna it's gonna take way longer than you think. Do not start YouTube unless you expect to put three to five years into it.

Like I I've built this whole program that'll come out in the next month or so where I'm really trying to operationalize the playbook for YouTube for business owners because it's really not out there. A lot of the teachers are all like entertainment focused.

My goal is that if you go through that in 12 months, you can have a machine that's driving meaningful lead gen. But that doesn't mean in 12 months you're gonna be a celebrity. That doesn't mean in 12 months you're gonna have 100,000 views every single video. Like, It just takes so much more work than people think, so many more reps than people think. So that's the biggest.

The biggest expectation mismatch. is really the entire expectation of what how fast people expect it to go. It's so slow. Yeah, I mean uh the two other huge things to touch on there too is one is it's evergreen.

It lives forever. Yeah. People can go back and binge their lives forever. Especially like the links in the description live forever. And then secondly, it's long form usually for the most part. And you can disseminate that down to short form and cross pollinate and all the other platforms.

So it's like the the best of the best is you get all this content, you can just chop it up into other stuff. You can even chop the videos into words and newsletter, et cetera, et cetera. Yeah. The way I think of it is like, Every video is a sales agent. If if your content is aligned with your offer, every video is a sales agent working 24-7 for you that at any moment can reactivate, get juiced for free to all of the buyers. Which is insane.

Shorts are not really that way. Shorts are a little bit more short term, obviously. Like it's in the name. They only last for the sh the half-life on shorts is 72 hours, maybe five days. And then if if you really share one on a different feed, you might be able to get a second life. YouTube's evergreen unless you make news based content that's time sensitive. So I mean, I can't emphasize how powerful YouTube is as an engine.

Depending on the game you're playing, of course, as the caveat. Yep. It's so powerful. Yeah, and I think another interesting thing with YouTube is to tie a bow on that too, is you have the ability to repackage after the fact and title and thumbnails. So you actually can revive right stuff. I mean, there's stories of videos that were left for dead and nine months later they change the title and packaging and it goes crazy.

So you have way more at bats, technically. Yep. All right. So let's shift a little bit towards distribution and growth. We obviously have a massive following across a ton of different platforms. I guess let's just start with what do you think is the biggest myth about virality? I think the biggest myth is That you need virality. I don't think you do. I think

this this this idea of like on target views versus total views is kind of the fundamental thesis that I believe. And I I didn't always believe that'cause when I started Doing the tech and AI. Which is fundamentally a media play. I needed more views. Like the more views, the more money. So like that'cause that was the media.'cause that's a media play, right? So brand deals.

Brands will look at your last 10 videos and based on an average of the views and the engagement and then your following, they use those three metrics to judge how much they'll offer for a deal. And you can obviously negotiate it up, but like that's Your the ban that you can charge is based on that. So fundamentally if you're playing the media game.

You have to have more views, which means you're going for virality, which means you're broadening the ideas, you're broadening the TAM, you're making them more sensationalist, more shocking. There's a bunch of like tactics you can do to get more views. But the myth is that Like that's not actually where the money comes from. In the media game, yes, but there's a cap on how much you can charge for brand deals. Like in varies niche to niche, but

The most th the these huge mega celebrity people that have seven million followers, they're not actually getting that much for brand deals because their audiences are so wide, the brands now know they're not worth it. But like The real truth is that dollar per view or on target views that convert to the offer is where all the money is. That's where all the actual fandom, like category level fandom comes from is depth in a narrower slice.

So that kind of applies to like myths around virality and positioning and strategy, but I fundamentally believe that to be true. for sure on long form and on short form, you could make the argument both ways because of the way short form works. So you could you could win short form playing the views game and you could win playing the the niche game, but YouTube for sure

You don't want broad virality. So subscribers and followers basically mean nothing to you. It's just a proxy to people that are uneducated for how much they should they should trust you. This is how the psychology works. Someone sees a video on a short form feed and they're like they either judge this is good or bad to them. Then they look to the right and they see the metrics. the likes and the comments and the shares.

are the saves. If those metrics are above a minimum credibility line and that line oscillates, there's no like perfect number, they will trust you more. But if it's below a line, they'll be like something's off here. This should I liked it, but no one else did. Cause like the group thing kicks in. They'll then click to your profile.

And if your followers are below the minimum credibility follower number, they will not trust you. They won't follow you. It sucks. But like that's the case. I completely agree. If it's above, they will. So followers matters.

If you're doing brand deals, it's one of the three attributes they they price on. So it really matters if you're doing brand deals. And if you're not, it does matter in a binary state whether or not someone trusts you. But the difference between 180,000 followers and 365,000 followers is nothing. That doesn't matter at all.

So I only want an incremental follower or subscriber if it's on target to the offers that I'm selling. Yeah. I think there's like a minimum amount of followers you need to have on each platform to be like quote unquote real. I think Twitter. It's a couple thousand. I think Instagram over ten thousand year real probably the next leverage, probably a hundred. I feel like with YouTube it's probably ten thousand subs.

So I think just racing to get to that minimum level where people can look at you and be like, okay, this person is doing something, and the same goes for engagement. And the blue check used to be a proxy for that, even harder really than the number of followers, but now that's gone gone because you can pay for it.

Yeah, the engagement stuff too is sometimes absolutely criminal. Like you see people with massive followings and they have no engagement. It's just like And the thing is, an unsophisticated viewer would not know the difference. And so if you're selling a commodity product

You can pay for followers and not have the engagement and a sophisticated viewer might not realize. But if you're trying to do a brand deal game where a marketer actually knows, or a game, a high-ticket offer game where like fake engagement doesn't matter, that's not gonna help you. What are those like key signals to the algorithm, especially going into 2026? Cause obviously with all of this.

the more narrow and the better you feed the algorithm, just the more reach you're gonna get in general. What are those key signals? Yeah, so it all goes back to audience matching, which is this fundamental principle. Like if there's if there were the three core frameworks that I would die the hills I would die on, it's content minutes, audience matching, and then probably like anti-views, we'll say, like the on target versus.

vir virality thing we just talked about. So on the audience matching piece. Fundamentally, the algorithms have one job. It's keep people on the platform watching. Because if they watch, they watch more ads. If they watch more ads, the platforms make more money. That's the only job of the algorithm.

So how do you keep people on? You give them what they want to see. How do you give them what they want to see? You know exactly what type of content is coming from that channel so that you can bucket it accordingly to give it to people that want to watch it. So it's like if I make My first video about tech. My second video about science, my third video about basketball. The algorithm is not really sure what my fourth video is gonna be.

going to be about. They don't know. It could be any of those three. It could be a fourth thing. Now they're transcribing it in real time. So you'd say, okay, well, who cares what the three previous ones were? They'll transcribe it and figure it out. But they've built a sample pool based on the people who've liked your stuff before, who've watched your stuff previously. So in that sample pool,

A third of them watch like the basketball thing, a third of them like the science thing, a third of them like the tech thing. So when they send out your next video, the data coming back is weak. Like the people don't watch and engage with it to the level they would expect if the channel was focused and narrow on one topic.

And so and we can I can go back and explain that again. Now too, because if you're playing the media game and you want views, you wanna go wider from a topic perspective. But you always say you always wanna be within one topic. But wider I mean like within the topic. So if if you make content about marketing,

You could do a uh paid marketing, you could do viral marketing, you like like different subtopics, but you always wanna stay within marketing. You don't wanna then go to like the MBA, right? Those are like two completely different things. So even if you're playing the media game, you wanna be within one slice. You just wanna be the most shockworthy, sensational

wide within that slice type of topics you want. That's how you get more views. If you want to be narrow to drive to a specific offer, you don't necessarily need that, right? You can be Way closer. Does that make sense or what about all those other different elements? Is it specifically transcribing the audio to understand and know the the topic or is it formats from a a visual perspective or is it audio only?

Tough to know. I don't I don't think the AI models are good enough to be able to ingest a full especially for long form, like a full video and really break down like a specific type of cinematography and and match that.

I don't think they're sophisticated enough for that. The main thing is they're transcribing in real time and trying to under get basically build a context mapping of what the video is about. So in the video, if you say terminology, that's like more long tail keyword stuff that you say. It helps. contextualize what the video's about. So you're basically

Wow, it's like SEO, like you're tagging words in the back end. The video the video is basically a long tail blog blog post, effectively. And so it's you and you could say it's using the hashtags and the keywords, that all that stuff it might be using, but that's like icing. The cake is the transcription.

So what are you saying in the video? It's building a contextual map on that. Now what it does, because let me just double click on this because I kind of breezed over before. This is how the videos are actually, this is how the algorithm works. This is how they're sampling the videos. First. It builds a test sample pool. If you have some subscribers or followers, it'll be like some of your existing audience, some of your new audience. So let's just say 200 people. You post a video.

The YouTube algo transcribes it, builds a topic map of what it's about, and it builds a 200-person sample pool. Some of subs, some of new. And it's trying to guess who would like this the most. Okay. So it blasts the video out to those people. Now on YouTube, are they clicking through the thumbnail to even watch it? Matters. But like on shorts, it doesn't matter.

Based on that 200 person sample group, it's assessing did they like and watch it more than usual, about the same as usual, or less than usual? If it's more than usual, they will build another sample group at one order of magnitude higher. So like instead of 200, it's 2,000 people, but similar makeup because now they know, oh shit, of the 200, those people liked it more than usual. We should go find more people like them.

But if the signal comes back the same or weaker, it's not going to boost it to Cascadingly, will it try another will it try another cohort of 200 to try and find it for you? So if it's neutral, they may try another. If it's bad, they're gonna throttle it pretty quick. So that's why like bad videos on YouTube or short.

get like two hundred views total. The reason why is because that first sample group came back shitty. Like the data was bad and they're like, well, nobody wants to watch this. So like let's not risk lu like getting, you know, turning people off the platform. And so knowing that What that should trigger in your mind is like, okay.

I need my existing followers to be really targeted on what I'm talking about so that when the video samples them, they like it. And I need to be very consistent with the videos that I make the topically so that the same type of people like it over and over and over. Right. So the algo can have like a consistent audience demo to then build those concentric circuits.

When you go broader, the only way to get a ton of views is for the circle to get muddier and muddier, right? As it gets bigger. Like if I make that storytelling video I made that got two million views, the first group might have been my existing followers that just like

Then the next group might have been people that liked storytelling. Then the next group included like script writers and like cinematizers. It started to get muddy, but eventually it'll run out of people that like it and the video will throttle down. That's how the algorithm actually works. So if you make topics that are all over the place and you build a following that came from those all over the place topics. The sample data is going to be horrible on any video you post.

And you're just gonna be consistently getting shit signal back and it won't boost you. It's a lose lose. You're not gonna get the views of playing the media game and you're gonna be too wide to actually get people to convert a bucket three, four, five, the consumer B B to B game. The best strategy is pick one topic. And hammer that topic until retirement.

Makes a lot of sense. What about from a a content mix perspective? Like when you look at content, like an example, like when Roberto was on, he would try and have like an eighty twenty or a ninety ten in relation to organic content versus paid. What's your system?

on from an output perspective, if you're putting out like 10 different posts, is it like I'm gonna do, you know, two on this micro topic, two on this micro topic, five paid, one how do you look at your content output? For short form? Yeah, for short form. So most people that attack short form have like pillars or buckets, kind of like three to four groups. I think Oren talked about his specific pillars. That's typically what most people do. So for me on my tech channels, I'll have like

Science, sports tech, kind of like lifestyle tech, we'll say. So those are meant to be bangers. They're meant to be million plus views, meant to juice my numbers. So, you know, random company, Microsoft comes out with like a breakthrough on stem cells using an AI model. Let's break down what it is. Not educational at all, just like tech related news meant for bangers.

The second one is Gen AI tools. So like Higgs Field just released a new model. Here's what you can use it for. And I totally agree that like if you're listening, you're like those two have nothing to do with each other. I agree. I'm not very well optimized on my tech, which is why I'm I don't have millions of followers because I

Did the opposite of what I'm describing. I can only say what to do in hindsight. Yeah. So, like those, those are the two main buckets. And then the third is kind of like, I like breaking down random thoughts on stuff that most people wouldn't come up with. So for example Disney. announced that they're gonna have like AI short form content on their IP. So you're gonna see like

snow white alternate endings that people can make with like AI generated. Yes, kind of like an interesting thing. So that doesn't fit in any of those either of those two buckets, but I'm like, I kind of want to like make a video explaining why I think they're doing this from a business strategy perspective. That makes me one of one, but It doesn't like fit. So if you look at that strategically, and you were starting tech from scratch, you would never follow that model because it's very

It's it's it they don't really align very well. News tech, gen AI tools, like tactical tools, and then like we'll call it business strategy meets tech, like those are kind of weird, right? But those are the three buckets that seem to work well for me and that I post and oscillate between. So by doing that though, one benefit is that I'll get brand deals from

Abu Dhabi Racing, I'll get brand deals from F1, I'll get brand deals from Gen AI Tools, Disney might even come. So like it does provide a broader surface area for brands to be like, hey, I've seen you make two of these in your last a hundred. We don't care that you don't specialize in that. We're interested in you just like doing it again. But I wouldn't suggest someone follow this like

super disconnected pillar strategy. I think what Orin's doing is a lot more dialed within his like four different types of like topics and then he'll iterate every, you know, two, three months or quarter and he'll layer on it. So I've I've tried to break into different

segments, but those three are the ones that tend to be like the ideas are the most interesting to me. They perform the best and the brands also want to pay. So it's like kind of like a good triangle. Yeah. And for people out there listening to if and when you understand and know how to create.

content that demands attention, this F one video, it may or may not make sense on your channel, but they may want to use it for their organic channels to get their views because they might have a different initiative than you and or use it for ads or for whitelisting or something. Yeah. So the asset could go elsewhere. And I want to say like

what I'm doing may be confusing to people because they might have listened to the principles and then heard my example and been like, those aren't congruent. I agree. My short form strategy is not optimized. I didn't realize what to do until after I was too far down the pipe on that. If you look at what I do on YouTube, it is hyper precise on just

social media growth basically video content, social media growth and the occasional YouTube growth. Hyper precise. I only talk about topics in that exact slice. And I can talk about the way I come up with topics for that, but Very, very, very precise and wouldn't you know on the fast growing channel in that space. So this stuff really does work when you stay really narrow on one topic.

You could argue like my tech channel should be at 800,000, million, one point, like I have tons of views on that, but the following is not that big because people follow when you have topic consistency and a Disney AI to Adobe, to like random sports tech, they're not really related. So is the future different topics, different channels? Yeah. So if I had if I had unlimited time, I would have

17 tech channels, one for robotics, one for Gen AI, one for news tech, one for science tech. I would break them out topically and just go ham like very, very, very narrow and just hammer volume. Someone just starting out, they should just go super, super narrow on one channel and that's where you win. Because the way the way to think about term ownership, like personal branding. I think I talked about this in a YouTube video like in the last couple of weeks.

People in their brain only have enough room for two to three hundred names generally. Think of it like the Dunbars number, but for the internet. But as soon as you say a term.

You delete all those rows and you just think of the person that's associated with that term. So when I say many chat, you think of that guy, Ganon. Yeah. But I wouldn't think of Ganon as like one of the 200 people that I'm is just like swirling around in my head. He's associated to the term. So the way you get notoriety and fandom quicker, like cult category cult fandom is what I call it, attached to a term.

The terms that are easiest to attach to are the niche terms that nobody owns yet. If I say business, who do you think of? No one. Yeah, because it's too big. So it's like you want to find i if if you do AI robotic factory robotics. If you own that lane. Well, there's less brands that will pay you, but the brands that are there will pay you a lot because you own that category. So it's way easier to start way more niche. Wow. Shout out to the people that

Own those big macro terms. Yeah, like hormosey owns business, you could say, or like one of the people that owns business. And shockingly, the only person that potentially owned business before is like Gary Vee, maybe. He owns attention. I think attention is the big word for him. To say it's like bidding on keywords and on Google, right? Like to say you could go from zero to owning the keyword business as a personal brand in like five years is pretty insane.

But that's Hormosy did that. I want to talk uh you talked a little bit about owning a word. I want to talk about owning your quote unquote audience or community. How are you moving people from your quote unquote least community, social onto your own community like your newsletter and other platforms. Yeah. What are some key strategies there? It's all lead magnets. Lead magnets are like the

I was trying to think of a metaphor and I it was getting real nerdy in my head. I was like, lead magnets are the hemoglobin that takes the oxygen as we'll we'll can that. Lead magnets are are really the The most important, like rails. Like if you think funnels, it's all lead magnets, right? So I can walk through exactly what we do. Yeah. Effectively, there's a few types of lead magnets. And and all a lead magnet is is Getting someone's email in exchange for free value. That's all it is.

So you've got the one-off PDF or doc. So if I say, here's my storytelling framework, by the way, I went through that really fast. If you want a doc where it's written down, the link's below. So that is a lead magnet where you're giving me your email for free and I'm giving you a doc that is like a template or

Captures what I just said. So there that's one. That's the easiest one. Number two would be like a three or five day free email series. So it's like a doc, but it gets delivered via email and it gets delivered on three or five succeeding days.

So that could be like if you want to learn virality, I know there's a lot to learn. So I don't want to just give you like a twenty page PDF. I'll I'll tier it out for you over the next five days. Put your email in and I'll get it. So we have one of those, viralityblueprint.com. That's like our landing page that leads you to the five-day email series. That's a lead magnet. Third one would be a free community.

That you're getting their email on the way in. So you can be like, hey, we have a free community. There's a bunch of cool people in there. There's a bunch of free curriculum in there. We're in there. If you want to join the community, it's completely free. Give us your email. That's pretty compelling because it's free and there's a lot of shit in there. We have one of those. It's called Wavy World. So that would that would be the third one.

Fourth one would be like a landing page or a sales page where you have like a wait list. Right. Fifth one would be a form. So like in the description to this video, if you want our editors, we're gonna have a form in there. You filled out, I get your email. So There's a variety of different flavors. There's probably a few more, but like those are the main ones that we use. And the whole goal is Can we use content?

To get you to email. Because if we can get you to email and you have a problem that I have an offer for, I will sell you. Because people open email at crazy rates and they buy from email and they trust email. It's like the email's the only place it's like not.

fully taken over by algorithms, you still like kind of control your own inbox, even though you have a bunch of spam from like random brands. We have 60% open rate on our emails. Yeah, it's crazy. It's insane. So all you have to do, like like I shit you not, you can build a seven figure business just doing content to a lead magnet that's ideally connected.

You give them a lead magnet, you hit their email, you put them in a drip, either an automated sequence that goes out as soon as you get it, or you send them once a week recurring. And eventually you ask for them to buy the thing you have to sell. If you just do that, you could probably do eight figures in revenue. Just that. Jesus. And you are organically and authentically integrating this in any and every which way you can into any content on my podcast.

Yeah. On your YouTube, on your Instagram, anywhere and everywhere. Is there like a specific cadence that you do that or is that just top of the mind? I've probably done four of them on this already. Like like cause I talked about the editors, talked about how crazy they're on. Like if you want the editors, go below. Like that is an ad, but we didn't have to pay for that.

And it's I call it a native embed. So this is this is a actually, yeah, when you asked what are some common things about YouTube that people get wrong, here's a huge one that we didn't cover, native embeds. When you make content. The goal is to hypnotize the viewer into forgetting that they're watching your content. Like you, you give you lull them into a

delusional state, basically. That's how I look at it. Like on YouTube. That sounds devious. Yeah. Well, but uh you yeah, it's white it's only white hat. It's white hat. No black hat. But basically it's like 20 minute video. My goal is that you click, I confirm the click, I get you the first hit of dopamine, I get you the second hit of dopamine, and then I've lulled you into this hypnotic state where you keep watching because you like it and it's also helping you. If you break the hypnosis.

For an ad. That is the dumbest thing you can do. So, like if I have a video about storytelling and I'm like, We'll be right back. By the way, if you want to buy this couch, like that's the dumbest thing. You bring someone back up to the surface and they're like, Whoa, whoa, where am I? And they realize they're watching a video that they don't need to be d watching. They should be doing work and they leave. So it

Putting n I call these non-native ads. Putting non-native ads in content is the dumbest way to make content. The easiest way is to or the best way is to Make the video! And then natively integrate the thing that you need to say, like your own products or you're getting paid to say in a way that does not break the hypnosis. And the way to do that would be weave it into the conversation or set up the conversation so that the lead magnet is the answer.

Is this a bad time to say that we're sponsored by ManyChat? We're about to go to a ManyChat ad? No, but no, but a perfect example would be I talked about Ganon, right? So when I talk about that,

You should have been like, and do you use MoneyChat? And then we talk about Money Chat for four minutes and we and that's it. That's the ad. You know ManyChat is a sponsor. Yeah, I know. Yeah, by the way. And you didn't know that. Or did you? I did from the last episode. Oh, did you? Yeah, yeah. I saw from the last episode. But but that's an example of like

if you break away to a new clothes, new scene, new shirt because you're trying to like systematize it, yeah. That breaks the hypnosis. I'm at a point now where like very, very sh as strategic as we can get to

authentically integrated, but they're actual ad reads, but I put them into the right part of the conversation. Yeah, yeah. Like the many chat ad read is going to go while we're talking about it. Which is the best thing you can do other than natively embed. Exactly. Yeah. Yeah. No, I completely agree with that. Also one point on that. If you see the AVD is like eight minutes, you should put the interrupting non-native ad after eight minutes.

And like the brand should want you to put it before eight minutes. Right. Cause like eight minutes would be the time where the average person leaves. So if you don't want to break the hypnosis before that point. So if you i if you think about if you have your own native embeds. You wanna put those in as early as you can and then as often as you can without alienating

Any of your any of your partnership and sponsors. I would also argue too, if you're a partner or a sponsor and you're in towards the end, obviously you're not getting the whole cohort of the viewers, but anybody that stays towards the end, it's that much more sticky. And I think the conversion rate at the end. I mean it's highest right at the beginning, but Yeah, like the people that you get the click.

They for ten seconds they start the content, they're like, All right, these are our sponsors. Like that's the worst thing you can do. Now, if you've caught fandom on podcasts, you can get away with it because people will just skip the ads but still they want to listen. But if you're just trying to grow,

That's the worst thing you can do. What we do say though in the beginning, and also guys do it now, is make sure you subscribe to the channel. I think there's 83% of people that listen that aren't subscribed. Make sure you guys subscribe back to the show. Last part on distribution and growth before we get into the future of kind of content and attention, just tying it up. What do you think is the number one biggest hack on short form? The best hack is to look at your own content.

for winners. So if you were to prioritize where to study to get new ideas, the highest is Shit, you've made that has worked before, make it again. Now, if you don't have your own winners, you want to look at the best people in the space with as much. As many of those Lego bricks held constant as possible, look at what they've made and remake it. If you don't have those,

You should be using sand castles because we can give you those. That's really the hack. Is like don't go out on an island and try to reinvent the wheel before you even know how to bite. Go and study the people that have already won and look at what

one for them and remake your own version. If you just do that for the first hundred reps, you will close the gap on a lot of the unknowns and you'll do well along the way. Yeah, I think like from a looking at those kind of seven Lego blocks from a quote unquote first mover advantage. I think you win on taking like a

Six of the seven blocks are the winners throughout and then being first mover on one of those seven blocks. Exactly. Exactly. Which I think that's what we've done uh in a good way on a a a visual perspective. Let's transition over a kind to the future of content and attention. I wanna just start with

What major shifts do you see coming just in content and distribution? I know we've talked about a couple of them. I don't know if you want to riff a little bit more on kind of these new narrow channels and breaking down your identity into kind of sub-identities. So AI contents come in like a wave.

Tidal wave, tsunami, it's coming. I think the more commoditized the content is, the faster it'll be replaced. So Twitter, for example, people are already building they already have AI content machines that's pumping out Text-based written content via AI. Interestingly, the counter to this is that. I tweeted about this. When when people see that your content is made with AI. They it's almost like a soft cancellation. Like the new cancellation is being caught.

by using AI. But the funny thing is everyone wants to use AI to go faster, but you can't get caught that you're using AI or else you'll get soft canceled. So it's this it's hilarious, this hilarious uh dichotomy right now. But effectively if you map content from easy to hard in terms of how to replicate, AI is gonna come like a wave across that entire spectrum. So the last thing to be replaced will be live streams like.

Three-hour uncensored, uncut rifts with two people. AI will not be able to replace that very easily without you being able to tell. Then long form is like the next best. Et cetera. You walk all the way back until you get to Twitter. So

Go hard and go unique. That's really what it is. Yeah. Again, it it it all goes back to which of the five games you're playing. Because if you're playing the media game, you got to go broad, big, sensationalist, capture as much attention as possible and siphon the dollars. Because in three years, that's dead. I wouldn't recommend starting with that game, to be honest. But like if that's the game you want to play because you don't know what the offer is and you don't want to be an entrepreneur.

That's the strategy. I'd argue it's two years, too. I don't think three years. Yeah, maybe two, maybe three. Yep. If you if you want to go the other route where you're trying to build a business that can endure this like AI wave, you want to go niche?

You want to own a term as fast as possible. You want to go signature and one of one. What what is one of one? What unique experiences, credibility, proof, or or like lived? Yeah, lived experiences do you have that you can storytell around, that you can make content infusing into that can't be replicated by a beginner. That's where I think you wanna play. I think you wanna you wanna get really good at a skill that is AI proof.

The issue is most skills are not AI proof. So fundamentally, no matter where the AI ball lands. Until humans are not the buyer, attention will always matter. The thing you sell them, the product, will always matter. Like a human brain will still decide to buy stuff. At some point, maybe that won't be true in like a B2B perspective. It might just be agents buying from other agents. And in that world,

all of the fundamentals about traffic and offers completely change. But like let's assume that world is like five to ten years out. I think for the next five to ten years, you want to understand psychology and attention as much as possible. Every company is a marketing company. Every company is a content company. So that's where I would like invest all my time in understanding and to have a moat. It's all the things we already said. Signature one of one hyperniche.

Yeah. Dan Coase does it really good. He tal call talks it about future proof and he talks about understanding four things marketing, sales, writing, and speaking. And I completely agree. And content and copywriting is a kind of like a A big thing that can kind of drive all four of those. I'd love to know, like, how do you leverage AI just in your world, in your business?

AI tools, anything and everything that you use on the AI side. Yeah. Well, sandcastles dot AI, that's my tool. I use that a lot. That's meant to be like a content workflow tool. So it's not necess i it's called AI. The writing is AI, but not the the whole product is not AI. So I use that a lot for content. We could talk about that if you want.

I obviously use Chat GPT, Claude, Gemini. Honestly, I love Gemini. I think Gemini is overtaking Chat GPT in terms of like natural normal day to day LLM activities. Wow. Just like I don't use Gemini. Oh, Gemini 3 is cracked. It's sick.

I've moved from Chat GPT to Claude. Yeah. So Claude Claude and Gemini are my two favorite. Chat GPT is like a distant third right now. Too agreeable Chat GPT. Yeah, too agreeable. And I I I think in general they're hurtin' s we don't need to get into this, but strategically

They're gonna have a problem because they don't have a cache cash machine like the others. But I think Gemini and Claude are the best two. So I use those for like daily tasks. And then on the gen AI image and video side, I don't use it a ton. Certain spots we'll use for like certain use cases. All my editors use it a lot and they have subscriptions. Higgs field is my favorite for AI image and video. Basically Higgs field it's

I hope Higgsfield doesn't clip this, but no free ads. Higgsfield is doing to AI video and image what Instagram filters did to photography. So the way Instagram used filters to allow the average person to make their photos presentable, usable, create a feed.

Higgsfield is doing the same thing by templatizing AI image and video creation in a way that's very intuitive. So I really like Higgsfield. Free Pick is the other one that we work with a lot. They have this cool like node-based editor called Spaces. So to give you a sense, maybe we can show this on the screen. Right now I've got my my Gen AI guy building a workflow where we put in one line of a script or one image.

And it spits out like five to ten AI generated videos that are all in an aesthetic that match our brand that could represent that line in different ways. And so at scale, my editors can just drop in the lines of my script.

and then get assets made all automatically. And it's like a it's like a visual workflow, a node-based These are assets used for what? Like B-roll? Yeah, B-roll in in shorts. So just like they might only be on the screen for one to two seconds, but like just to have more assets.

if we can't find them from the brand is huge. So we're using that, but I don't use AI tools a ton, even though I am one of the like top AI guys. And I think the the reason why is because When you have a really particular way you do stuff, especially on the writing front. The minute I can sense a quality loss. I won't

trade off quality for speed when it comes to writing and ideas. And so there just aren't that many like AI is very bad at generating new thought. It's very good at compressing a shit ton of stuff down. So

If you're making a YouTube video and you have a hundred page document, it could be amazing at turning that into an eight page script. But if you're like, what are the six best ways to do hooks and you're trying to come up with novel ideas, it's not good at generating novel ideas because it's trained on what already exists.

Right. I think compressing, combining, but not ideating. Combining is another really good one too, is I like taking random stuff, PDFs, videos, this, that, and then just kind of throwing it all together and just cleaning it up for me. The interesting thing is

You would think someone like me who is willing to try anything, I'm a I'm obviously emotionless when it comes to like winning. You would think someone like me would just all day be in the trenches with AI tools trying to figure out like a better mousetrap. But even me, I don't enjoy A task that I know how to do well in ten minutes, I don't enjoy taking an hour to do it worse. I don't enjoy that. And like

That's where the AI bunny rabbit comes in. The AI bunny rabbit is figuring it out. Exactly. And until he can get it to one or two minutes and not lose the quality. I think we're in this weird, like, This weird inner in-between period where the tools exist to where people that spend all day on them can get marginal gain. But they're not good enough to where an average person, like let alone m me who's deep on this stuff.

can get ten X output with like the stuff I would need, content, writing, et cetera. So we're in this like weird middle ground where there there is an arbitrage if you can spend time learning how to set up these systems. Yeah, but today It's not an overwhelming amount. What do you think is the next like major platform? Do you think anything new is gonna pop up or just iterations off the current ones? I think we'll see a zag.

for human only content against the zig of AI content. I made a video on my YouTube channel breaking down like how I think AI content will play out. And there's like four paths. All paths lead to or like how the social platforms will treat AI content. All paths lead to them allowing it. for their interests. So I think there will be a zag to that where there'll be like the Etsy of human only, human verified, whether it's like biometric or whatever, content.

I don't necessarily that doesn't mean that's gonna be the popular platform because Typically people like junk food. So like if the AI gets better than the humans, which it will, just from m math perspective, people will prefer to see personalized stuff that's like amazing versus human-made stuff that's

What maybe that's where the blockchain will come in and be super useful potentially there to really, really verify. Yeah, a hundred percent. So th they'll we'll have that for sure. That'll come. I think once we have AR as like a primary vehicle. So like the smart glasses, you'll have another native type social experience to that. Like it makes no sense to wear those glasses and scroll like this.

w with it in your eye, that makes no sense to have a feed. So there'll be a reinvention of whatever content looks like in a AR world and then eventually like a VR three D world. Um And I'm sure I'm sure someone will come out with a new mousetrap, but the reality is these Instagram got caught flat footed on TikTok and they won't get caught flat footed again. So whoever innovates on anything that's even remotely popular, the big boys will Rip it.

So I d I don't think we'll see another like ChatGPT or OpenAI tried to make Sora to like the feed of AI generated content. But there's actually a and a lot of people using it, but there's a pretty violent community against the like AI slop. niche. You see those in the comments. Yeah. So maybe maybe Sora two becomes Sora seven and that becomes amazing at like jet like Netflix on demand type content. So I could see something there, but I don't think there's gonna be

a huge new thing that comes out of nowhere that's not what I just mentioned. I guess the big question to put a pin on that is someone that's understands content marketing attention in a big, big way. How much longer do you think we have for this?

content distribution arbitrage where people can get from zero to a hundred thousand followers in three, four months. How much longer do we have until this is over? So there's th there's two questions there. There's how much longer do we have of being able to do it and then how much longer do we have of it meaning anything?

Cause if if today there are fifty thousand people with over a million followers and tomorrow there's two million accounts because a lot of them are AI generated, then the value of having a million followers goes down, right? I think we have three to five years, probably two years on the short form platforms and then closer to five years on the longer form before

AI content is indistinguishable but actually so and is accessible to enough people that are not experts to be able to actually flood the feeds. Rough guess. I mean the This is what I wanted to say. This era will close. Like the the same the same way people would probably thought in 2020, like the ZERP era, where they're like, oh, I should have got it then because like I had a two-year window and it closed. This like

free distribution at scale for free. Or I said free. Free distribution at scale from let's say two thousand and seven or eight to probably 2028 RIP, 20 year window. You had never coming back. It's never ever again. That's ever. You had a twenty-year window where you could make shit.

and have free amplification to infinity. And you could argue, okay, the 2008 to like 18 era, the tools were worse and like there were not four U feeds. So let's just say the four U era is this Gen three of social or whatever from twenty twenty to twenty twenty-eight, eight-year window. If you didn't eat during that window. You're never getting that back. And so what does that look like after 2028?

Maybe it's pay to play, which is basically just paid ads. Maybe there's a bedrock of AI-generated free content that is so competitive and so data optimized that like, You just can't cut through via human. And so the only way to cut through is that platforms will sell you a$10 per post option to cut up cut above it. That's probably that's one very legitimate path where we end up.

And I guarantee when people are paying 10 bucks a post, they're gonna be pissed that they didn't go harder during this era. I'm I'm like I couldn't be more pounding the table. Like you have about three years. to just go ham. And because the f because of the supply demand dynamics and the way 4U algorithms work.

You can you can do serious damage in three years. You could build a fifty million dollar business in three years. I mean, you've had many people on here that have basically done that. So now's the time. Guys, we're gonna give 15 seconds of silence to pop up a video of the attention. Guru,The Attention Yoda,Gary Vaynerchuk

Watch him for 15 seconds because you just sounded exactly like him. And he has so many fucking good things. All right. This last thing. What is the biggest difference between quote unquote telling stories and telling stories that convert for a business? Yeah, that's a great question. Well, conversion comes from Trust. Trust comes from proof and or demonstration of ability. So

I would say that's the the right question is not the difference between the storytelling. It's more the topic and then what you actually cover in like the meat of the video itself. Storytelling is just the way to preserve attention throughout. It's just like the connective tissue, which is still contrast, setting up stakes, making it relevant, like these things we can talk about.

But the difference between conversion and not is just giving someone a hit of something that they would get if they bought the thing. Right. So if you're selling like AG one, it's showing the transformation that someone people get by getting it. If you're selling an agency service, it's demonstrating your ability to get the results that the person is paying for.

Makes sense. Any type of kind of like tactical process or systems that you use to go from a raw idea to a finished script? Yeah. Any advice you can give to someone out there on storytelling and that? First thing is to try to figure out what's interesting about

the topic. And I call this the angle. So what what is interesting? It's either shocking from an enter entertainment perspective or useful for an education perspective. So the angle needs to be one of those two, depending on the type of content you're making. What you want to do is think through what do most people believe that I disagree with, which is kind of goes back to it's like a full loop on what we said at the beginning around contrast. So what I try to do is say there's a piece.

Of the story, a fact, a take, some implication that I have. And I try to rank on a scale of zero to a hundred. I call it a shock score. How shocking would it be to reveal this thing? And the shock score is usually out of a hundred people in a room, how many would have thought that previously, which is getting to the same idea of like common belief versus new reality.

The whole deal with storytelling is figuring out what you can say that most people don't believe, but then they can believe pretty quick once you say it. That like aha moment, that is contrast and that's what gets people curious to keep listening. So if I say, Prince Charming is walking in the woods. The common belief would be he's gonna keep walking. But if a dragon pops out of the woods

You weren't expecting that. So out of a hundred pe and now we've everyone's seen Disney. So like maybe a few people would say that, but like agnostic of Disney, out of a hundred people, How many would say a dragon's gonna pop out? Not many. So it's like that's pretty shocking. Now there's new stakes, new information. So people's new reality becomes the prince and the dragon. So it's like, what do you think is gonna happen? Most people think they're gonna fight.

Maybe this one I say, okay, they do fight. So I I give them something they would believe. It's just zigzagging down the path of being like, what do most people believe? What do you believe that is not true that you can prove quickly and then do that in succession? Talk a lot about contrast. What about conflict? How important is conflict in the story? Do you use that in all of your storytelling? Conflict is basically a form of contrast, right? So

like conflicting beliefs would be like contrasting beliefs. I I kind of think those are interchangeable. Usually conflict has to do with stories that have subjects, right? A lot of the stories I'm telling in content. Maybe the subject is like Google, but there aren't like people. It's like hypothetical versus Exactly. But it's still contrast. Makes sense. What about the payoff? How important is it to have the payoff at the end? What happens if you don't have the payoff?

I think people don't like being bait and switched. And when you don't have a payoff, that's what it feels like because Again and then this goes back everything really ties together, it's all the same, really. But like If you establish context on something and you bait them, they need some fulfillment of the bait. It could be different bait or the same bait, but they need bait to confirm. If you switch and you take the bait away and you're just like, Yeah, and the story ended.

They're not going to be very interested in that, right? People hate being bait and switched. So you need the payoff to kind of close the last loop. That's really what the payoff. Need the bait, but not the bait and switch. All right. We're just gonna quick strike a ton more questions before we close out. This has been Amazing. This is dopamine on another level. Nice. Hopefully valuable. It definitely is. I guess let's start with uh what's the single most important system or workflow change?

That has allowed you to go from kind of sporadic content to true content machine. So on short form, it was getting the content operator, the idea guy, to offload a lot of the because because ideas are a bottomless pit. You could spend infinite time. So getting that off the plate is critical. Editing is not a bottomless pit. It's tight, right? So you want to get that off the plate, but like there's a fixed amount of hours. On the YouTube side, it was starting with the A team from day one.

Love that. Biggest learning lesson from interviewing Mark Zuckerberg. He's actually a dope guy. Like I think he he got a lot of bad uh bad publicity like during the Senate hearings and stuff. But like he's actually sick. Like he's a he's a cool guy. He's chill. He's really locked in. Like he can

task switch like no one I've ever seen, but he's actually like a cool guy. Sure he's got a lot of big problems he's got to deal with. He can't be flawless. I mean running one of the biggest companies in the world. He's just a normal guy, right? Like that's the thing. What is the biggest regret in your professional life? Uh waiting too long to Go into the entrepreneurial game. The entrepreneurial game. How old were you when you started?

Well, I'd been launching I I built my first company when I was twenty, but it failed. And then I've been launching stuff in my twenties, but I was half in, half out. So like my biggest regret is just not going balls to the wall sooner. I do think you need, and I think Sean from Ridge said this. You need to go into a real job to like get your teeth kicked in and actually build some skills. Like you need some ability.

So I think it's i it's not the right advice for someone who's eighteen to just go into entrepreneurship without any skills or backing. But very quickly, once you're like I have that dog in me, you want to go and and go all in. Yeah, for me looking back and for my future kids, definitely not going to college, just developing the skills.

earlier and then being able to start on that entrepreneurial journey early.'Cause I feel like people go to college and then then they develop the skills through like mid to late twenties and they start then. Yeah. I'd rather just start that in high school so they can be entrepreneurs at Twenty one. I didn't realize that it it was all skills. It's all skills. And

When you're in a job you hate, you try to resist learning skills because you're just trying to sneak around to keep getting paid, but you're just delaying the reality, which is you need skills if you want to win on your own. So you want to start that and it's going to take five to seven years to actually build fundamentals. So you want to start that clock as soon as possible. What's the biggest learning lesson from interviewing Spotify founder Daniel Eck? He was also super chill. I think

The learning lesson zooming out to like compare the two, because I have only interviewed those two and like no one else. Guys, Light Flex. Only done two interviews in his whole entire life. Yeah, those I never wanted to do. Yeah, it's kinda crazy. They're very different though. So I think the learning is that you can win big. In a variety of different ways. There's infinite ways to play the game, infinite attributes that help.

Both of them seem very locked in and present on what they're doing. That's the common I mean, there's many commonalities, but that was one that being in the room with both of them physically. They can lock in so quick, like task switch, but then be like a hundred percent present, I think is a real skill. Yeah. I feel like they're like,

There's very few people in my life where it's like a lot of it's 15 minute meetings. Sometimes I do 15 minute meetings, but he's locked in from 330 to 345 and then 346, he's on to the next exactly. Definitely. Yep. What's one question you wish people asked you about social media, but don't? I wish people came to me holistically and were like, I have this business, I have this these resources.

What is the strategy to win the game? I will do anything to tell me what it is. I wish more people came with with like a more open mind to me solving it for them instead of Closed mind, like I have this one singular problem. It's like, well, let's actually like zoom all the way out. That's not the right problem, right? People get very fixated on what they think the wrong the issue is. So I wish people came to me with a more open mind sooner about and just let me lay it out for them.

Love that. If you had to go from zero to one million dollars in a year, how would you do it today? First thing I would do is build a high ticket, high margin. So it's one million dollars revenue or profit? Let's say profit. Let's go profit. Yeah. Okay. First thing I would do is build a high high ticket, high margin.

If I have no skills, I'm going for a done for you offer. But if I have some skills, I'm doing like a done with you offer, somewhere in the five to 10K range. And then I'm making super precise high value educational content on YouTube. And I'll be at a million in a couple of months. Love that. How do you use the comment strategy to drive discovery?

Yeah, so comments are actually a super underrated way to get virality. Again, might not be after virality, but if you have the right people commenting, it actually can trigger on target virality. comments are just another surface for people to be entertained by whatever you're you're making. So if you use the script effectively to drive a certain

question that people can debate. You want like contrarian debate in the comments. You create these like little cyclones where people are fighting with each other in the comments. That actually boosts engagement a lot. So that that would be one way. The other way is use the comments to get

Like to get people to trust you more by like respond actually responding, taking the time to respond to everything. You know what's so crazy too? It's so weird because in the Roberto Nixon episode, RPN great episode, guys. The views on one of our shorts went absolutely bonkers, like out of nowhere. And it was because the CEO of Instagram, Masari, liked

The asset. Nice. And apparently, I think certain people, certain likes are disproportionately given more pushed through the algorithm. I didn't know that. Did you know that? I I call it super shares, but I'm assuming it happens with likes too. Is like A five hundred thousand followed account. shares your video is gonna be worth a thousand X, what like a normal person would be.

I assume the same thing is true with likes. Maybe he has the the super flip super switch in the back end where he just like let's just choose. When I ask you these last four questions, I ask everybody. Favorite book or podcast and why? Oh, that's a good one. I actually don't read that many books. I should read more, but

I prefer listening to stuff and I just don't like consuming other content to be honest. It muddies my thought. But favorite I love this pod. This is a great one. What else do I listen to? I think sweat equity with Garcia and Brian Blum, if you know that one. I do. They're good. Smart guys. Callum's my homie, Callum Johnson.

I know you talk to him. I like him. Yeah, he's great guy. Yeah. So I listen to his sometimes. Charming charming accent too. Yeah. Group chat sometimes I'll listen to if I'm really trying to like Just uh disconnect. They talk a lot about LA, which I can't relate to, so I always speed through the whole thing. I took a I took a a random trip on group chat like

Six and I that was fun. Yeah. I s I heard you. Yeah. Yeah, it was fun. That was when I heard that, and then I went to go DM you and you had DM me. That's that's when that's when we connected. So that shout out D. Yeah, shout out D. I haven't talked to him for a minute. He actually just messaged me last night. I don't know what that's I listen to like a random Chris Williamson episode every now and then but

I d I really I I usually go based on the guest, whatever I see on the YouTube. That goes back to that ICP game and about staying deep and narrow. He obviously has escape velocity. He's huge. I mean he's he's having on very, very different type of people. Yeah. Obviously he's dominating. Once once you get once you transcend the algorithm, which I would say diary CEO, Chris Williamson, Rogan, then you can you have carte blanche.

But it I I think it's harder and harder to get to that point. And only a few people have ever got to that point. Guys, if you're listening, it's been three hours, maybe two episodes of an hour and a half each. That means that you really fuck with this podcast. If so, please say in the comments.

Topics, guests. Who do you want to hear from? Cause we're in the midst of going through a lot of these uh cane exercises currently. It's been a shot to the face understanding and knowing this. Yeah. Entrepreneur or brand you want to give flowers to and watch? Nice. There's so many. Well, I love George Heaton. I I love rep episode went absolutely crazy. Yeah, it went crazy. Listen to that. I'll have to meet him sometime. Uh I think like on the creator side, there's a lot of my homies.

Brandon Wang, have you never heard of this guy, Brandino? He's sick. I really like creators. Yeah, good taste. I love I was about to say that. I love creators with good taste. Like I think Alex Garcia, the way he shifted his visuals is sick. Orange got great taste. Roberto's the homie. Roberto's like the b best in tech by a mile. He's so sick. Rourke is another guy in the film. I just had a crazy, crazy conversation.

You know that guy's story? By the way, I want to interrupt. I don't, I don't. This guy's fucking story, bro. He was doing like live streaming and people were paying him like thirty dollars

Chug this beer. People were like paying to like It was like shoeing ice. Well it was he had the craziest life of the craziest turnaround. Yeah. He's a great guy. Steve will do it into Rourke. Yeah, literally. It's it's it's a crazy, crazy eye. It's wild. I'm trying to think who else. I shot out a few with the pod as well. Yeah, those are those are the I mean there's so many more but those are kinda it's like

Freshman double XL classes is kind of how I think of creators. There's a a bunch of people like in my class, I think Roberto Orin Garcia. Riley Brown, Callum, like these guys are we all started around the same time and we're all it's cool to see like everyone's winning, but they're all doing different stuff. Love it. Last question. I'm kind of gonna adjust it a little bit.

What does success look over here? Where where's Kane gonna be in, let's say, five years? What does success look like? What does a successful Kane Calorie look like in five years? That's a tough question. Well, the origin my original goal was to figure out how to do a million a month in profit. So that was like pick a mountaintop.

And then play the game to kind of figure out the mountain. So I climbed up, got a little bit away, come all the way down, back up, rebuild, back up. I think I have a path now that I'm pretty clear on to do it. But that's like not success. That's just like the money goal. I don't know. I think I wanna be I wanna be doing something I obviously want to be doing something I care about. I really like being good at stuff.

As most people do. So I want to be doing something I like that I'm world class at that has an impact in the business world. I love playing the game of business, like the macro game. So I'll be doing something in that sphere. Right now I'm trying to be like the best in the world at attention. So whether it's short form video or long form video, like I'm trying to build the rails so that any business owner could come in one side and out the other comes dollar.

And the the m the factory was attention and video, basic content. So I'm trying to like completely productize that whole process right now. So that's gonna be my focus for the next few years. Mostly'cause it's a fun game, it's very high impact and And high yeah, high leverage. But I think there's a f I have a few more seasons to me beyond that. So my initial goal is like build a machine that can build machines. And that's what a content factory really is.

But at some point I'll have to shift and start building machines, right? So we'll see. Dude, I think you're well on your way. I had an amazing time, bro. Why don't you tell everybody where they can find you? All the socials, all the URLs go crazy. Awesome. So if you're interested in the social media marketing YouTube stuff, which you probably are, Callaway Marketing at Callaway Marketing is my YouTube channel.

I have a newsletter called content.game. I have a software tool for short form growth. It's I think it's best best in the world today, going to be the best in the world compounding called sandcastles. So that's sandcastles.ai. If you want my help on the short form side, I have a program that I really do not push or advertise ever. This is the first time I'm talking about it here. Shortform.academy is where you can find that. I'll be launching the YouTube equivalent, which is basically like

the world class information with group calls and me helping you on both short form and YouTube. So short form.academy and then the YouTube one is not out yet. So we'll I don't have a URL for that, but just look in the description. I'm sure we'll put it in there. That's all the like marketing stuff I do. If you're interested in the tech stuff at Callaway or at Kane Callaway on TikTok and Instagram, you can find me. Amazing. Guys, hope you enjoyed. Sweet.

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