Darren Lee - CEO and Founder of Voics | Building Your Influence With Podcasts

Most guys talk a big game in their under-front-end, advertising their staff, but a fulfillment and success is not there. Darren Lee, after working with Fortune 500 companies and building a successful career in FinTech, Darren took a leap into the world of podcasting. His show Kick Off Sessions didn't just make it to Episode 3, it saw to over 35 million views and 200 episodes, landing in the top 5% of podcast globally. And most people in our space don't care but the customer. So you give people what they want so you can give them what they need. If you know how the game is played over here, you should be zigging when everyone else is eigen. Customers will actually stay with you, even if you don't get that greater results if your experience is high. How could I possibly tell you how you should create your thumbnails and your design, your production, if I'm not doing it for myself? Best case study can only be yourself. Doing things like that creates a different experience. But here's the real story. How did Darren turn his passion into a platform for growth? In this episode, we explore his journey from launching Kick Off Sessions to scaling his podcasting success and how he's helping others transform their shows into powerful tools for influence and revenue. Most people are not truly interested in what they're talking about. They're not even interested in the guest. They're taking it as a selfish pursuit, solve your own problems, actually turns out that's incredibly valuable to somebody else. Sometimes you have to pay your water to make the change. Any hired beliefs like that, then you truly don't see yourself doing forever. What are you doing right now? If you've ever wondered what it takes to build a scalable personal brand through podcasting, this is the conversation for you. A lot of young guys say they're doing. They're not actually doing it. Welcome to success story. I'm your host, Scott Clary. The success story podcast is part of the HubSpot podcast network. I'm also a big user of HubSpot products. They've supported the show for over three years now. And for all entrepreneurs out there, I need you to go back to a time and place when building businesses as tough as it is, can be sometimes a little bit fun. When you're marketing, it should be fun. But marketing is not so fun anymore because it's very time consuming. It's very difficult. And it feels like there's just a lot of friction. Content was simpler to make. Leads were easier to capture. And we weren't all spread so thin. As marketers, as entrepreneurs, the bottom line is that marketing used to be fun. It's not so fun anymore. But with HubSpots newly launched to marketing and content hubs, I've been using it myself. It brings a little bit of fun and creativity back into marketing for your business. They're going to generate better content. They're going to generate more leads and next level results, which really make marketing fun again. So with tools like Content Remix, you can turn existing assets into all new pieces with just one click. Lead scoring helps you shine a light on the leads that are most likely to purchase and analytic suites they built out will help you with reports, KPIs, and just a gold mine of AI powered insights. It's quick to get your results. It's easy to use. It connects all your teams and your data. So put the fun back into your marketing funnel with HubSpot. Visit HubSpot.com to get started for free. There, and I'm excited you're here. I'm very, very excited. It's going to be a lot of fun. So we're going to take this in a whole bunch of different places and directions. But just to start it off, to like sort of set the frame, you've interviewed a lot of really interesting people. So it's going to be like a, maybe like, have you thinking one to kick it off? What are some things that people have said on your podcast that have basically changed your life? What are some of those like, you ask them on a question and they drop some wisdom and you're like, oh shit. That's such a good question, man. I think it's a smaller moment that people don't realize. You know, it's not at the big gas, not the famous gas and so on. So one guest in particular is guy called Ned Phillips. Madam Singapore became very close. He's pretty much like a father to me. He made me realize that it was less to do at like being super experienced, having all the years experience waiting to become successful, to be successful. His approach was just more, it's just the action. Most guys were not taking any sort of action, especially younger people. He was able to make me realize that almost anything was possible once we actually said what we were going to do, right? Because these guys were experiencing sales. They were around for many years and he was looking down and lost kids. He's in his mid 50s, 60s, going on to 60 soon. And the only gap between where he was and where I was was actually doing the work. You know, and this is what a lot of young guys say they're doing but they're not actually doing it. Why do you think that? So I agree with you, but it's hard to unpack as to why people aren't doing the work. Because it seems like everybody is like, seems like everybody online is hustling at least. But what do you mean by not doing the work? So there's a big difference between marketing, sales, and then what happens in the back end. So this is the big thing in the online space, especially where I'm situated in. It's the fact that most guys talk a big game and they're under front end advertising their stuff, they're good on marketing, they're good on their funnels, but the fulfillment and actually creating a great product business, like you've done, and success is not there. So taking that lesson from him in particular, all the things, the real boring stuff about building great products, great offers, great businesses is focused on the person. But most people in our space don't care, but customer. So interesting. I actually have such an issue. I love, I love it, Russell Brunson's built. And I love, I really do. I think he's an incredible entrepreneur, not joking. But what he's built is he's created the ability to market and sell for people that are not technical. Of course. And you can spin up landing pages and funnels overnight. And that is a blessing and a curse for entrepreneurs. As is all technology, I mean, when Tobias Luke built Shopify and then he enabled drop shipping, I mean, then you get a whole bunch of entrepreneurs and I don't have to worry. It's like unsophisticated people are now able to build businesses. And that's again, blessing and a curse. And with all technology that allows less sophisticated people to build even more incredible businesses. But I do find that with that unlocking of access to entrepreneurship, you get a lot of bullshit and with drop shipping, you drop shipping, shitty products from overseas. And if you are good at sales and you are good at marketing, it's very hard to differentiate for the average consumer. What's good and what's not. And then I see a lot of coaches and people creating online courses and all that. This is a whole dude. This is an entire rabbit hole. I actually think half the reason why I was so adverse to you don't really know my whole story. But when the business was acquired about four years ago, I didn't build a course or I didn't do consulting or I didn't do anything. And I think the main reason was I was so scared of putting out like a half-ass product. And I was so scared of like letting people down. But it's so funny because I actually had like real-world lived experience in building businesses. But for me, there was like a lot of imposter syndrome there. And I didn't want to be perceived in the sense like I had this. It was like such a negative adverse reaction that clicked funnels. Coming from like a sass world. It was like, what is this? What is this garbage? So it looks, it looks scammy. Like even looking at a click funnel's website for me was just looking like, this is garbage compared to what an actual business funnel should look like. And I just didn't want to, I didn't want to build something in that space. But I mean so many people do and so many people are good entrepreneurs. But like to your point, a lot of people don't focus on great products. Which is ultimately in my mind what differentiates good entrepreneur versus scammy sales and marketing. So how do we fix like, I mean, there's no fix. I mean, fix is like an ethics question at the end of the day. But for entrepreneurs listening, what should they focus on so that they don't have chargebacks, churn, lose customers, flash in the pan success? This is something that I'm incredibly, incredibly conscious of. Because similar to yourself, I've come from a software background. Yeah, you were, it's Accenture. I was at Revolut, I was at Fintech company, right? And I was focused on product that, so for context, I was working in trading, trading product, customer experience, real detail UX UI. So I come from the lens of delighting a customer, creating basically an experience for customer and keeping them sticky, right? Whether you're selling services or products, we want people to come back and stick with us, right? That's where a retainer works all well. And that's why we're trying to keep clients for as many years as possible, because we just have a good experience, a good relationship. The first thing I usually focus on is, can you actually solve what you say you're going to solve for that specific customer? So service or even product is very important. How much people went to work with you and went to buy your product at the enterprise level? That maybe they weren't best suited for the enterprise level. Yeah, they could have paid you $5,000 a month, but maybe the $99 a month would have been better. So it's almost like creating the solution that just fits that customer profile specifically. And that way there's no resentment, there's no grudge, okay? And this customer will appreciate that you have that well-situated for them. So let's give an example for us. We're doing full done for you management of podcasts. There's some people who just don't fit that well. Let me give you a pro, let me give an example. Our service might be like, say, $5,000 a month. There's some guys who are getting started as an entrepreneur that can't afford it. They shouldn't do it. They shouldn't be taking it to credit card to do it, but most people will sell it to them. That's the problem. Most people will take the cash, spend one or two months, get a horrible feedback, the customer will churn, their business will dip, right? Whereas what I've been trying to situate on is like, who can we actually serve and solve problems for? Because then you don't have imposter syndrome, then you're actually living in alignment with what you can serve and what you can do. And you can build a better experience. So let's just say in that example, something that I've learned myself is that not everyone can afford a service. Some guys can, some big entrepreneurs, your tech companies can. What else could we do? Could we serve those same clients who came into the ecosystem differently? Could we do some consulting? Could we do some coaching? Could we do some self-paced education? Could we build an education platform? That's cheaper. And the amount of people that you can surprise and delight in that experience is huge. Those prospects become customers, those customers become raving fans and those raving fans, bills your brand. Yeah, right? That's what actually builds a brand. We have some people that started with us with $249. And then they've maybe ascended into different products. They've gone into consulting. They've paid for some of our done-for-you services. But they just enjoy being in the ecosystem. We have client success managers. We have myself that comes in and gives a lot of help and value in coaching. We have a production team that run with them. Compare that, okay? That's just one example. To the quick cash, go through my funnel, buy your product, no customer success, and it's up to you and there's no refunds as well. That creates such a bad atmosphere, right? And I'm speaking with one of my mentors at the moment about this. We're going back and forth. So this guy, Layton, 50s as well, we are helping him build a business. So we do a grow partner style work as well. We're real coming and we'll build offers and businesses. Bear in mind, clickfunnels created the word offer, right? So we would basically build that in conjunction. But what's been very important here is the fact that because my alignment is much more geared towards long-term, infinite game and so on and so forth, we can be a bit more delicate with the language, the tonality, the speech, how it's portrayed, right? Because as a result, you bring in a different customer. Now, everyone knows from the image. I increase the lifetime value, which is exactly the LTV of a customer that I don't think people focus on. And I would actually as we're having this conversation, it's interesting, I just had a thought. And then I wanted to keep going. But it seems like all the tools that have come out to support entrepreneurs, predominantly the flashiest tools have focused on solving the sales and marketing problem. Absolutely. And I actually, maybe I was a little bit harsh in my assumption that entrepreneurs just want to focus on sales and marketing. Maybe it's because the tools that support up and coming entrepreneurs are just focused on sales and marketing. I do not know how good Shopify or ClickFunnels does of educating entrepreneurs that use their platform on how to benchmark what customer success is or a CSAT score or a net promoter score. Or like, you know these words because it comes from this world. Or what good, what even good product is, or good service, or good delivery, or turn or any of the things that actually really help an entrepreneur understand if the customer is delighted at the end of the day. So you give people what they want so you can give them what they need, right? When we were building a lot of our products or actually like stand on products, I would hop on calls. Remember specifically, you're building out a coaching offer. I did 50 calls in a week. I got on a call with someone who I knew had problems with their podcast. And I would say, what are you struggling with right now? They would say, design, thumbnails, production, copywriting, I would write all of it down. And they would say, can we solve it? I would say, yes, we can solve it. Because I was giving them what they want. So I would build around their problems and then had this crystal clear, very simple framework that people could use that would actually solve their problems. Compare that to putting a square picture a circle hole, creating something that nobody wants. And then you're selling someone the dream like the dream outcome, right? And the dream outcome then is not achieved as a result. So I think there's much more of an elegant way you can go about doing this. And effectively, you're everyone rolls from the image that your business is a reflection of you. But people don't realize that your customers are also a reflection of you. And this is something I've been so conscious of lately that when I look at people that I've worked with or other businesses, I can click quickly see around their ecosystem what they're like as an entrepreneur. Because you can see their customers are they emotional. Are they, you know, jumping off the handle? Is there issues? Is there mistakes? Is there bugs in the software? Because these guys have come in and started playing a finite game to an infinite game and they're solving the wrong problem effectively. So I think these things don't look like problems in the short term. Sorry. When you're building this in the short term, it looks like, oh, it's fine. We're just rolling out a product, MVP, all that stuff. But it's a long tail effect. And that's why I think it's funny when you look at new entrepreneurs because the first 12 months is driven off ego and then 18 months in there is the realization how difficult it is. And 24 months in you realize that you know absolutely nothing. Like absolutely nothing. But that's the growth opportunity right there. And it's even internally, right? That's when you've developed more, you know, we've been sitting down talking for the past couple of minutes. And you know, I can see that you're like a humble guy, you know, you've sold the company because you've gone through it and realized that I still know nothing. And that's the way I approach it. And just to complete the circle on this, in the kind of online space, why I have a little bit of an issue where it is the fact that I don't understand how someone can make so much money and make more money and become more egotistical. If anything, me is the running the way I approach it is the opposite. The more that we've had success, I realize that damn, there's so much more that we don't know. But I think the logic behind this is the fact that no one, the common knowledge is that people don't buy from someone who doesn't have conviction. So if you don't have conviction that you're going to be able to solve the problem or you know best or you've the best funnel, then why would someone not buy from you? I think that's wrong because of the fact that that only works to someone who's actually insecure, who's trying to buy from you because they don't know, they don't know themselves. But if I could say like, look, this is what we work on. So we've helped. This is the world we've created. This is the opportunity. This is how we can help you. Someone who is well grounded will say, okay, this makes sense for me. And this is playing infinite game versus a finite game. I think that's the concern that entrepreneurs have when they put something out, and then they see their competitors being flashy and promising the world. And they kind of, like when you play in a space, you know who's real and you know who's full of shit quite quickly. But you get frustrated because you lose customers. So I kind of want you to give entrepreneurs maybe some very simple or tactical tips. When you are launching a great product and you know it's a great product and you feel like you're being outmatched on the sales and marketing front. By somebody else, shitty your product. But they know how to really say the right things or just show up in a way that maybe a product focus person doesn't understand how to show up. What is the, how do you compete? So that you don't devolve to these shitty sort of gotcha sales and marketing tactics that we're sort of talking about that creates this shitty customer experience where customers are buying, they have remorse, they want to refund, they're not getting it. You know that that's the average customer that goes through your competitors' funnels dealing with. So what do you do? I think if you know how the game is played over here, you should be zicking when everyone else is zicking. You imagine that a few times. I've seen your content, what does that mean? So if everyone is like running the same level funnel, the same level landing page is the same level offers, and you're familiar with that, it's good just to completely avoid it and do something completely new. So if they're running their specific landing page, don't have a landing page. If they're doing loads of sales calls, have no sales calls, have a different approach to it, right? There's different ways we can slice and dice it so that you are not becoming into that crowd. The biggest problem with this I find is that a lot of guys are trying to fit in their running agencies, they're running consulting, they're running coaching, they're running SMA. But it's like a shitty copy of the other person. It's a rendition, right? Yeah, that's why people try to always imitate others online, whereas the category of one will actually just have his own principle and process to this. So let me just show you how I walked through this process. So when we built the agency in the beginning, there was a very common way to build agencies, but I didn't go through those programs. I didn't go through that process at all. I just intuitively worked off these customers have a specific problem. I can get to them this way through outbound, through outreach. Outreach doesn't really work. Maybe I could do something different. Maybe I could send them loom videos. Maybe I could show up their door. Maybe I could do something unique. I was basically utilizing my own intuition as to how to solve the same problem. Now, we still have a good product. We still have a good way to do it, but you don't need to follow everyone else's voice, giving you another example. I was early on writing on LinkedIn. Around 2020, 2021, I would honestly say one of the first people in the entrepreneur community to be writing on LinkedIn. It was from Justin Welch, where I learned from. He was like first. And I remember quickly, I quickly learned that like, okay, this is really sparking. When everyone said that was a bad idea, when everyone said it was cringey, and it was walk, and you should be on Twitter and on Instagram, I was still writing on LinkedIn. I still have a small audience, but I have a very engaged audience that people would like to trust me. They see a lot of social proof, and they come inbound. Most people that want to work with us come from that. It's a unique mechanism. I have a unique way of doing the same thing as everyone else. So developing that in a kind of unique identifier is completely unique, right? Even our example, when everyone's running ads, we're recording podcasts, right? Some guys have just ads businesses. We're doing something that's unscalable. I've had mentors telling me in the past that, you know, maybe you're recording too much podcasts, but the intangible benefits of what we're doing today is you can't measure it, right? It's a unique way to do it. But at the same time, we're putting in a seven hours of trust that people can develop with us to work with us. They see that there's a unique way to work with us in front of it. And the backend, then, to have that unique mechanism as well, I think it's down to the team, right? I've been very focused on building a winning team and excellent team, a team of people that get it, like it and trust it. And I think my one mechanism for building a team is that people must want it, they must get it, and they have the capacity to do it. So this is from traction, ideally. The idea of an interaction is that you want people who are truly about it. So the guys that work that I've been hiring, you know, not everyone works out for sure, but ideally they love podcasting. They're about it. They really truly love it, that they're willing to upload the podcast at two o'clock in the morning, hate the client call it five o'clock in the morning, make the adjustments that majority of people won't do. And that's what becomes a category of one, right? And it's also having a unique experience, and I'll keep going back to this point, but how we've been doing this in the beginning is that customers will actually stay with you, even if you don't get that greater results, if your experience is high, let me give you an example. We work with some companies and certain niches that are a little bit drier, okay? It could be real estate, multi-family, HR, payroll. Are they sexy industries? No, no, they're not. But we create an experience for our clients that makes them feel special. We do reporting, we do a lot of nice reporting, elegant reporting, we do a lot of coaching, a lot of personalization. We make them feel which they are special to us, and they help us, and we help them. And I think that's a unique experience that most people, the scaler bros will tell you not to do, because it's not scalable. My friend, I literally will travel across the world to a workshop with someone who's not even a client, who's just a prospect, because I love it, I'm about it, and I'm willing to show them in person. I've literally sat in the office rooms for hours, for free, because I'm willing to do the unscalable stuff that builds scale into your business, you know? I think that's actually a really smart idea, because doing the stuff that doesn't scale is the actually, in my opinion, the only competitive advantage that you have against somebody that's a $100 million dollar public trade company. Have you heard about Brian Chesky on that? I know, I know Brian Chesky, but I don't know his thoughts on, I know that the scalable, or doing the unscalable, that's a Paul Graham. So Paul Chesky has this thing about, he's a specific word for it, but it's about being in the detail. So he would be in the UX UI meetings about some random button on the customer success page, and he would be there changing the color of the buttons for a two and a half hours and a entire team. And like, this is the reason why Airbnb is a size of it is, he's like obsessed with the tiny details, and I think we go back to, you know, what truly creates like a unique product, unique business, is being in that detail, right? Being that obsessed. Exactly, but being in the detail though, right? Because Eric Sue talks about this personality test you can do. I think it's called you personality or something, personality you, and it will give you a good idea of like where you are, what type of leader you are, what type of entrepreneur you are. But if you have a low attention of detail, this doesn't mean you just leave it, it means that you actively work on those things. Like an example, for myself, as like a leader in our company, I actually have a low level of empathy, but I've recognized it, and I've been working on it, I work on my relationship, I've hired guys who have high empathy, low logic, so that these guys bring in a much better culture. Now, you need to have that awareness of yourself. Now, we're not a nine-figure business, but we're a seven-figure business, and we're doing well as a service, seven-figure business. At the same time, it's not just me, and it's not just sales that will get to the next level. It cracks, it breaks, there's so many issues. That I think we all can spend more time looking at, to try and improve, right? We can all start taking much more of an inward look at ourselves, at our company, at our clients, and think, am I building the right ship, or am I building something that's completely not an alignment with who I am and who I want to be? I think that's, and I think that, I mean, one more point, just to reiterate how important it is, surrounding yourself with people that also championed that vision, and those ideals, I think is actually incredibly important, because then you start to create this board of advisors, or this group within your company, that forces you to act in the right way, and to be the right kind of entrepreneur. Those guys are going to war with you. Yeah, so you don't want to let them down. That's a thing. So as a solo printer, it's very easy to make shitty decisions, but all of a sudden, when you have to justify it, these incredible A players that you've hired, that are high value, high moral, high ethics, high focus on customer, all of these types of, these personality traits that makes for a good person, when you do have the opportunity to make that shitty decision, you're not going to make it anymore, because you surrounded yourself with all these incredible people, which I think is just like a safety mechanism to make sure that all your decisions are aligned towards the right target. I love that, man. I think as well that a lot of guys, you know, they have their idea with their business, they have the product that they have, but they don't really think about these small nuances, but this is what builds culture, right? Well, you're a company, the people that you have, these are people that you'll go to war with effectively, and even some of our team members are quite young, but if you're in early stages, and you can't afford huge A players, you can find guys that you can develop and give them so much of your own experiences, and I think a lot of people that have worked with us, they like it because I'll give them one to one attention, will have calls and so on and so forth, and I'll teach them about where they want to go to and put them on a career trajectory. So I think there's different ways to slice and slice it as a leader you want to hire people that are great, whether you can afford it or not, and then offer them your own consulting and advisory, but then at the same time, if you're young and you're trying to get into the space, I think there's nothing wrong with being an employee, right? If you want to partner with someone and work with someone, so be it. There's a lot of merit to doing that, especially smaller companies, a given example, like we have a lot of young guys who will become great entrepreneurs, but in the early stages, they love learning how all the parts of our business work together, and now that we've developed into more products, more services, they're excited about it. They get up and they want to go for it. We are now doing much more things and they are doing much more things. So there's much more advantages than just showing up and getting a job done. Well, I actually think the best people to hire, I've thought about this a lot. The best people to hire are people that would be entrepreneurs in any other circumstance, just for whatever reason right now, it's not in their stars, it's not their risk profile, whatever it is. But they could be that entrepreneur, it's just, this is not the time for them to do that. So for whatever reason, that's an opportunity for somebody who is taking the risk, build their own company, is an entrepreneur. So find a way to find those people, and then also to your point, you have to know where they want to go, so that they don't just flake on you like in two, three years, because if they want to go do the wrong thing, that's fine, but you should be aligned and moving towards that target together. I like that, man. Last point I'll say on this is, you know, sometimes people don't know where they want to go, but you also want to enable them. So if you've ever read leaders eat last, talk about circular safety. So I've got 180 with this with my own kind of leadership style, which was before I thought I was about getting work done and working hard and all this stuff, now it's about putting people in their best seat and allowing them to almost develop their own career with you. So I give an example, my CEO, who was recently promoted, young guy came from Goldman Sachs, knew his stuff, really knew everything, and for him, he didn't really know where he wanted to go. So I wanted to help him see that, and he wanted to have a better career with us. So it's about creating that space, allowing him to do his best work, and allowing him to develop as an individual too, right? And maybe in a couple of years' time, he'd want to go build something, and that would be great. Versus this short term mindset, that unfortunately a lot of our businesses are best off, right? I love it. And also, you know, actually one more, this is, this was actually meant to be a very quick question. No, I love this, though, you guys are passionate about it. And I think that's important. And I think that, and it shows, by the way, it really does show, which is, it's good vibes isn't entrepreneur when you are passionate about this particular topic. But the last thing I think you'll know it is, and maybe you have a thought on this, is when you have people that are focused on, like, turning and burning through customers, you'll notice it with their own employees as well. There's going to be like this culture of high pressure, close the deal, get them to mortgage their house, if they can't make the payment. And it's just going to be a shitty culture all around. It's going to be a shitty culture internally and externally. So I think that it's, I mean, it's just, if you find yourself in those organizations, maybe that's not a good fit for you, I don't know. But the point is, I see that it's not just external facing. It's never like, oh, we turn and burn through customers, we have like a 1% retention, and simultaneously, we have like the best balance and we have the happiest workforce. It always seems to be this systemic problem, top down usually, with how they just look at performance and money and revenue, and they're optimizing for the wrong KPIs. Oh, it's, and the thing is, that kind of called, you don't need to have that kind of culture to be a successful entrepreneur. In fact, I would argue that to be a successful, however you want to define that, usually it's by, okay, so since you want to be able to stay in the market for a long enough period of time, right? Excuse me, and most people, most people that want to stay in the market for a long enough period of time, that churn and burn internally and externally is not a great way to build a company. It is building a company that will go to bad for you at any time of the day, not saying that that's the expectation that should be the, the fact that you don't want your whole team waking up at five in the morning. The point is, you want somebody who will go to bad for the customer if there is a massive outage or something hits the shit his defend at five in the morning. And then when you have a team like that, you're also gonna have customers that are gonna stick around for the long term. And it'll actually be easier to build a business. You can build a business both ways, but it'll be much easier to build a business when your customers stick around for the long term. Your employees stick around for the long term. They're not burnt out. They don't feel like, again, they're doing things that like, fuck with their moral compass every single day when they go into the office. I don't need a sustainable way to build a business. And I think that's really the, for entrepreneurs, you have to figure out exactly what kind of business you want to build day one. And then never delineate from that. And then don't, if things aren't working, there's a solution and the solution is to not be a shitty entrepreneur. It's a problem has to be solved, but to emulate people that seem to be moving faster or seem to be doing things in a less than ideal or ethical way is not the way to do it. That's my two cents. A great one, I agreed. I know I have, listen, I pulled like, so it's so funny. So I went on, I went on your threads. I, you know what I wish? Dude, so many people have mentioned my threads, but I love your threads. It's actually very good. A lot of good ideas that I went on your threads. And I was looking at all the different, like, sort of the ideas that like hit home with people. Because I mean, that's a great litmus test for whether or not it's good content. But one of the things that you mentioned is actually, I think it was one of like the highest liked posts on your Twitter. So you flew 16,300 nine kilometers to interview Justin Welch. And this can sort of bleed into a conversation about podcasting and what good content is. But why did you do that? Why was it necessary to fly so damn far to interview Justin Welch? And I mean, you've flown and you've traveled for other guests too. But for somebody who's just starting to create content or just starting the podcast, you're like, well, fine, fine. That's the case, I'm never going to start. So how do you figure out what type of commitment or type of travel is actually worth it versus can you emulate great results virtually, et cetera? The problem is everyone was getting so used to my content. It's not unique. It's not novel. It's not different. Everyone looks the same. Everyone's in a studio. It's black. It's all the same. And as a result, why would I want to do something that's the same? To get the result to no one else has to do things no one else is willing to do. And I got caught in this continuous loop of recording online, recording Dubai, maybe show up with Singapore, saying the same questions, doing the same stuff. And it was just like, everything was the same. I wanted to do this because it's a creative pursuit. And for me, learning those skills and trying different things puts me at some of my comfort zone. It's a 101 growth. Anyway, it's doing things at your comfort zone. I've always enjoyed traveling to industry people anyway, because it's like I'm putting them in their best seat. And I thought, well, if I could do something that no one else has quite literally ever done, and if I can keep repeating that model, I'll create a new standard and a new way to do it. I think the high quality, insane production was obviously pioneered by Chris Williamson. I think for money ways, I've kind of pioneered the fact of doing these crazy trips. Like I've literally recorded 15 podcasts in the past 10 days all across America, dude. Like literally all across America. And we just got good at repeating the process. But the reason being is because it created a whole new experience. I think for guests, they feel much more respected but recording their hometown or pretty close to it. It creates a better relationship. And also it stops you from being still. Like everything runs down, man. Your hooks runs down, your headlamps runs down, we're so used to going back inside the mean curve. And I think why did I become an entrepreneur is because I was so sick of doing the standard stuff and a tech job or whatnot. So why not do the stuff that no one else is willing to do? And I think as well, it's allowed me to create a new standard for myself. Because how could I possibly tell you how you should create your automobiles in your design, your production, if I'm not doing it for myself? And I think the best case study can only be yourself. And I've always tried to focus on doing that. So I started out quite small when I lived in Singapore recording in studios in Singapore. And I would fall in love. Is it when you first started your show? I started off my show in actually Ireland originally. And that was all remote. That was all putting together on my iPhone and all this kind of stuff, which we can go into details too. But when I moved to Singapore, that's when I started getting to the studio. As you can see, I'm very interested in equipment and whatnot. So I fell in love with that process. But I didn't have the guests in Singapore. I had good guests, but not great guests. And then I flew to Dubai and I started creating a standard for going places and setting up and doing a week of recording. And then lo and behold, the market adjusts. Everyone starts doing it. Everyone says that they created this. So I was like, OK, that's that. Could I do something that's even more crazier? Could I fly from Bali all across the world to New York? Could I set up, get a studio built and record with Saho, Loom, Justin Welch, Ireland More, all in the space of our two days? And we did it. And it looked fantastic. And it created such a stronger relationship with the audience and even with the guests. So I think that's the stuff that, again, it's zicking whenever I'm so zicking, right? You've created a beautiful experience here. It's in your home. It's very personal. That's just unique. I have never done, I never really. It is, it's very unique. Maybe it's common in the US, but especially where I'm from, which is much more transient, you know, people are going to come in and travel and stuff. It's less common, especially less common in Asia. So I think doing things like that creates a different experience. A big shout out to HubSpot and the HubSpot podcast network for sponsoring success story. If you enjoy success story, you're going to enjoy a ton of podcasts brought to you by the HubSpot podcast network, including Hustle and Flowchart hosted by Joey Fier. The Hustle and Flowchart podcast with Joey is all about how to build a business. So it gives you the freedom and fuel for your life. You're going to join Joey as you discuss his systems, mindset tweaks, reframes, and strategies for entrepreneurs and really anyone to enjoy the process of being in business and having fun. This isn't for entrepreneurs looking to build a billion dollar business. It's for somebody who wants to build a lifestyle, somebody who is looking to build systems that work. Listen to Hustle and Flowchart wherever you get your podcasts. I think that what I'm trying to pull out is for an up and coming creator, how do you decide when it's time to start investing in that kind of production? Good question. So I think in the beginning, it's just about going zero to one with your ideas. So whether that's on Zoom, which I still don't recommend, but whether it's recording online, right? Just something simple, something simple to go zero to one is always important because you need reps, right? My first 10 podcasts were at home with a HP laptop and my iPhone camera. That was zero to one. Yeah, that was zero to one. Now, I was getting frustrated in that process because I knew, as you can tell, I can speak, right? I'm just an Irish speaker and we talk all the time, right? So I can talk all day. But I got frustrated because I knew I liked this, but I knew I wasn't good at this. So it's a very important delta there, right? Which is like, I like it. I can see myself doing this, but I'm not good at it yet. That variance creates. I see you didn't have an ego right out of the gate. Dude, I know a lot of people that do. I still look at my episodes and I just think that like, I just saw much areas of improvement, right? But especially in the beginning, the delta was so big. You know, someone could have looked at it and said, I shouldn't be doing it. I'm a loser, X, Y, and Z, all those kind of excuses. But now what's happening is we have this new environment whereby you can record on stream here online. You can record a very good setup. Your laptop camera in Mac is as good as like your iPhone. Anyway, you can also use your iPhone. So I think you should utilize what you have around you. In all aspects of life, whether you're building software, content, you utilize resources you have, right? So if you don't have a lot of money, which I didn't have, I was just using that basic setup. I think my entire podcast per episode could have cost me $50 less. It was like, it was like your stream yard cost, your Zoom cost or what? Yeah, and I was editing the episodes, you know, just pretty much pulling down in case I messed up, just publish. Those reps are super, super valuable because you can't skip the shit phase. You have to go through the shit phase, right? And there's no one that skips that. Whether you want to, you know, manufacture it and gloss it up in a studio and stuff, you're still missing the point and you're still missing this. I've seen a lot of guys who've transitioned from YouTubers into podcasts and the feedback that I've got is the fact that a lot of these guys don't know the nuances of recording. They have the videos, they have the camera, but they don't have the skills. The patients are speaking, they're listening, active listening, interaction, all these small nuances of what a conversation is, they still don't have the reps to be put in. So you don't need to do that. You definitely don't need to do that. It's only until you have a systematic process, a strategy that aligns your podcast, content pillars that aligns your values to your product, your service, all that strategy taken care of, and then you may have an idea of growing the podcast. You might be exploring with clips and thumbnails and designers and you're writing content for LinkedIn, maybe Twitter, or maybe Instagram. And if you're not getting success, then it's time to, okay, maybe set things up. That in my first recommendation always is people is that if the content is dialed in, your strategy is right. So let's say you started off with a sales-american podcast, your background was in SaaS, your product, you knew what was going on in the front end. And if you're still not growing and the podcast strategy is set up, then you can step into a studio, drop the $50, drop the $100 for an hour, and just elevate that up. I just spoke with someone this morning who's coming to work with us soon, and they already have all the bells and whistles. And they already just need to fix the strategy. So my kind of model for this is like, especially if you're not seeing progress, is there's only three different variables. The strategy, you grow, and you've monetization, but it's actually an equation. You strategy plus growth is monetization. As part of every equation, if you don't have one variable, it doesn't equate, right? So I see a lot of people who start out like me, no idea what to do, no idea what to do. So the strategy is all over the place. Doesn't matter what you want to draw on it, any clips doesn't matter, honestly doesn't matter. So we need to kind of take it back to the basics, really dial that in, doesn't matter what your camera looks like, dial in your strategy, and only when that is really dialed in, you can think about growing it. You know, you can think about growing it, because you think about it, all these clips in short form and even content writing, that wasn't really around when we got into the game in 2020-2021. It was always based on the quality of the content. So I think even though a lot of these additional stuff is valuable, it can often be a distraction. Because at the end of the day, if you're a video is very good, and the content is very good, it's going to find the right people. You're going to get your toes and true fans, maybe we'll take you 12 months, 18 months, but that process isn't place, right, because you did it, I did it, took me a much longer. Yeah, it's interesting, right? Well, I think that, I mean, what you've basically just said is the way that you build a business, is the same way that you build a podcast. It's product first. It's product first. Talk as market fit, is what I call it. Talk as market fit. I love that. So nerdy. Talk as market fit. No, it's when you focus on the wrong thing, when you focus on the bells and the whistles, and you have a shit product, or a shit podcast, or you don't feel comfortable interviewing, or whatever it is, you're just going to attract people to something that's a little bit below par, below standard, and then they're not going to be sticky, because there's going to be a better version out there. Some of the best shows in the world, like you mentioned, yeah, now they have high production value, but if you go back to before they invest at X thousands of dollars per interview, I don't even know what Chris Williamson does. I'm sure it's quite expensive, because he has like full production value, right? A production done for every single one of his interviews now. And he does like some remote on site, where he like has a videographer come in, and there's like this beautiful lighting, and it's shot in 4K, and like it's just phenomenal, the background's phenomenal. Before he did all that, if you listen, he improved himself dramatically as an interviewer, and a conversationalist. So much before he did any of that. And it was only when it's funny, if you actually go back and listen to his first episodes, he was kind of just like a bro shooting the shit. So him as a person has evolved over his journey, right? And you can go episode zero, episode 50, episode 100, you can hear how he evolves as a person. So he's probably doing it consciously at some point, probably for part of his journey, he was doing it very subconsciously, but now he's consciously trying to ask better questions, do better research. And now he feels comfortable investing in all this high production value, and I'm sure there's a whole marketing campaign and routine behind what he does, but it wasn't like he invested in that first. And I think that sort of the one thing I always like to really drive home with entrepreneurs, podcasters, creatives, whatever, is like find a way to make what you're doing very sustainable, so that you can sustain doing it for an unreason, this is a hermosy, unquote, where if you do it for an unreasonable amount of time, then it's really unreasonable for you to not be successful at it. But if you over index on spending thousands of dollars on cameras and studios, and you're putting out 50 pieces of social per day, that's not sustainable. For most people that is not sustainable. So that means you're going to burn out, you're going to give up, because you aren't focusing on the fundamentals first. And I think that what we're talking about really is just like focusing on the fundamentals. And I guess that is really, that's a really good, a really good idea to dive into. What do you think stops so many people from being great conversation lists, asking great questions, being active listeners? It seems like these are all just things that you should do to communicate properly anyways. But when I listen to most podcasts, it feels so forced, it feels like question answer. And I'm going deep, I like this. Yeah, I mean, these are not the podcasts that we listen to, because I'm listening to Chris Williamson, I'm listening to Steven Bartlett with the idea of a CEO where he's making people cry every day, listening to Joe Rogan, who's an incredible conversationalist. Alex Friedman has his own strangely robotic style of interviewing, but they've all found ways to pull out incredible insights from people. So what makes a good podcast or conversationalist communicator? Excellent question. I think most people are not truly interested in what they're talking about. And they're not even interested in the guest. They're taking it as a selfish pursuit. They're starting a podcast for themselves, for their business, but they're not really focused on who they're interviewing and why they're trying to get that insight. So it's almost like they're asking the basic questions, getting basic answers, and they're not taking that extra step to truly fall in love with their guests, details, their story, their journey, their research, and find a unique angle. So Rick Rubin says that listening is not trying to think of something to say next. And it's also not trying to think of something intelligent to say it's truly listening to what someone is saying, and then judging your next words based off aggregating that information, synthesizing it, and then learning what to say next, okay? So you have an idea where to use conversation, but if I was to say something, X, Y, and Z, you would say, okay, let's go ABC from here, because you're truly listening to that. And dude, I'm reviewing these podcasts. I'm seeing all these podcasts. This is exactly what we're focused on is that we may have a hypothesis like a product for how something should turn out, but the end result will be totally different if you allow that process, the actual listening process, engaging to be very much more natural and organic. The whole reason why we're here is because this is a natural conversation. If it wasn't, we'd have an automated bot on 11 labs that would run a conversation for us. But people that are listening are here because they're here for the story, not for the product. They're here for your insights. What are you gonna ask me? How am I gonna interact with these questions? That's what creates something that's unique, right? And if we look at the traditional stories of podcasts, they're logical, they're just telling me what happened when you were 16 until you become a multiple person. Which I hate. I hate those. But you know what you can do. Even when people bring me on their show, they're like, I want to do origin story. I'm like, I don't want to do origin story. Exactly. I'm tired of order to do the story. Well, that's the whole point that Russell runs an approach, right? You should be sort of secure origin story after telling us so much. So the way that you can kind of flip that is a finally unique edge within the story, right? So let's say, for example, you sold your software. I don't want to know. I don't need to know all the details you went through with the letter of intent, the buyer, getting the payout and what you did with it. What I'd like to find out is the feeling you had when you saw the bank balance change as positive, as a negative, everyone says negative. How did you not make you feel? Because you pick a moment in time and that's effectively what good conversations is that we drill into a specific moment of time. Let me give an example. Just be taking notes for this. Oh, man, trust me, man. So when you're, this is from story worthy by Matthew Dix. Matthew Dix is someone I always recommend checking out. He's a great guy for your show as well. He's based in Connecticut. He says that when your groundwater comes back from vacation and she says, oh, we went here and then we went here and then we went here, you're bored to death, okay? You're bored to death. They ate at this restaurant. They went to this beach and so on. But if they said that, they sat at a restaurant and in that restaurant, some guy was choking and then the waiter came over and the waiter was 160 pound. But the guy that was choking was 280 pound and the waiter brought her back to life. That's an interesting story, right? You're super, you feel in the moment. You feel like you're in the Italian restaurant. But most guys cannot tell that story elegantly. So someone like Dorogen, he's a great listener. He allows the guest to elaborate on his ideas but he'll drill into a specific moment in time. I think this is where we move from this monologue, this, this, this, to a much more of an engaging story, right? And this is kind of the problem with B2B stuff. B2B stuff is very vanilla, it's very dry, it's corporate tone. But you have to remember that corporations are trying to be more human and you're trying to be more in a corporations. We're just chilling here. I'm just wearing like a shirt that I got my company printed on. It's like $20 and we're just chilling. You know what I mean? We're just like having fun, we're engaging. It's much more natural. That's what gets people involved in the story. But do you not think that? So yes, agreed. But I'm curious why if there was no cameras rolling, that seems to be people's default setting. Will you just describe, seem to be a pretty default setting for most people? Why when I turn on cameras, it's like they go into this performative mode. And they, and it's, it's, it's so frustrating because you probably feel this is a podcaster. You will finish the podcast. And then you'll turn off the cameras. And then all of a sudden they turn to this different person. And they're like actually somebody who I actually would want to talk to. Yet for the last hour and a half, you were the most boring ever. And I know that that content was subpar. So, good point. So as an interviewer, yes, makes tons of sense. I can, I can, by the way, it's ironic that you say that because like you won't see this on camera. How many notes are right down? But I write down probably like three or four pages of notes per guest. I probably look at this like once. Like I, for the past six years, I have never really looked at the notes that I write down and yet every single time I do it, I write down like four sections, like 10 questions per section is a whole intro here. You learned them in two to two. It could be, I think it's more prep. So like I understand all the different, you know, vectors of your life and what you've accomplished and all the different things that you could talk on, but very rarely do I, and actually the less that I look at this, I consider that a better podcast. Oh, man, I was so much to say on this. So, okay, go ahead. So, wait, wait, what was I just asking you? I was asking, okay. So as a, anyway, talk about that first, but then I want you to help me understand as a guest, why do I freeze out? It all connects. It all connects, right? So the research you do is not the time you spend in front of a laptop, looking at the notes. It's not an exam, right? When you write down on your notes, it's not like an examiner comes in. An examiner doesn't know what the words you didn't write on your exam paper, okay? They just see what you've written there. It's the same with your notes. When you've done a bit of prep yesterday, and maybe a day before this in the podcast, though that preparation actually starts to feed into your subconscious. So you have some conscious books up here. When you're sleeping, you're recovering, you're resting, you're learning the different nuances. So I would advise you to actually show up without notes. The reason being is because I used to show up with lots of notes, and it would get people to freeze up. It was like an interrogation. I was like an FBI officer, right? It was just pointless. When I was creating a reality TV show that was just not natural. And I had fallen into that trap, which is happy to admit, and I've revert to that. And the reason being is because guests feel under pressure, they feel like they're there to get caught out. They feel like they're, it's not a natural conversation. If you show up with this. If you show up with your notes, if you're a bit more robotic and so on, the way that I've kind of reutilized it now is that we hit record. Usually I'm working in a studio with a team. I tell them deliberately just to run the cameras continuously, run the audio continuously. We sit down, we talk as if we're already been talking, and we set the scene beforehand. I will always record somewhere, if it's in person, with a studio that has like a bench or something beforehand. I'll always invite the guests to go sit down here, we'll talk with some random stuff. As you can tell, like my interests outside of podcasting are like dogs, the gym. That's basically my interests. I love sharing these kind of random stupid stories. Living all over the world. Yeah, literally, just like random stuff, right? And I just tried to be the person. I try to be the host that I'd want to be interviewed when I'm a guest and then vice versa, right? So then we sit down, the only difference is that we've popped in a few lights and the camera. So I want to try to put them into their best seat. It's kind of like back to employees, right? Putting people into their best seats that they feel natural and relaxed. There's different ways to ramp conversations. You've done it in a very good way today, which you pick like a moment in time. I used to come in very hard over the top. I now lead with much more of a Joe Rogan style, which is what just kind of roll into the conversation. Okay, what's up? Yeah, no, not even that. I would just have the cameras running and we're already talking with something and then like a slowly trying to do like a Chris Williamson kind of open where I have an idea that I lead with. You can cut into that though. This is what's interesting. When the cameras are running, they can just run and your team can stare at the moment in time whenever. You can't revert that. The reason being is because even today, like I'll be honest, as you're clicking on the cameras, you just get slightly anxious. I don't know why because you just say something stupid, right? So it's every second in time, I'll give you an example. If you're in school, when you're think back to when you're in school, and let's say you've introduced yourself, if you're the first person at the table, you say, oh, I'm dying late, I'm from Ireland and so on. But if you're the tenth person, you start getting so anxious, right? Because every single person is going around and that's the feeling of when people come on as guests and they tense up. So we need to almost like get them to be much more relaxed that it's much more natural, but that's 100% on the host. It's like the host brings in the experience, has to make them feel much more relaxed, and then they'll slowly start to evolve. The second set of that as well is I focus way less on logic in terms of tell me what happened, tell me the story, tell me this and much more focus on the emotion and the feeling. Because true the feeling, you'll tell the story, but the story is going to be told from a different angle. Instead of I did this, it's I thought this. And when someone can open up, that's when we start having a much more bigger dialogue, and to complete the circle is where I would add in my own story. You know, I'll add a lot of ideas of us getting married, got married quite young, about my experience building businesses, horrific failures I've had in businesses, and when I start sharing those things back and forth, people are like, this guy's actually a human, he's not a human. You get that unless you tap into emotion. Exactly, right? So it's less based off logic. And that's when we kind of run up these longer conversations because the idea is that regardless, we're going to be able to give the actionable voice anyway. It actually will inherently come. But if you just wanted the logic, you'd Google the answer. You're here for the story, for the emotion. And true that vessel, you become pulling out the stories and the lessons and so on to foreign insights. Well, I've thought about this a lot. I thought about like, why do people listen to one podcast versus the other? And it's interesting in that whole perspective, it's shifted as I've built this show, is at the beginning, I tried to get the best guests on, like the biggest names, then you realize very quickly that actually doesn't do anything for your show. What do you think that is? Why do I think that is? Because that guest is on 20 other shows. And the reason why you have opinions, I see. No, no, no, it's a good idea. But that's a good point. I feel like the guest is on 20 other shows. And the reason why people come is for the host. Ah, that's such a good point, so. And this is actually why I've started thinking about doing more solo stuff. Because I'm like, okay, so people like me, people that listen to success story, are listening to my point of view, my perspective, the way I ask questions, how I engage with my guests. And then at the end of the day, if they like me, why not double down on that? Because that's really the only unique identifier. Like, yeah, maybe, okay, you get a nice little background, like people like look at you as like semi professional because you have a nice YouTube channel. It's the optics. Yeah. So why do they stay? I know exactly. I know, yeah, so you're correct, 100% correct. And what you're correct is, you know, you're familiar with Imangadze? Yeah, of course. So Jack Hopkins, who I'm good friends with, Imang and Voys Jack at the beginning of his journey and Jack grew incredibly fast. He's a huge YouTuber. And the whole idea was that people attached to his story and his unique approach. So people come for him no matter what he's doing. Fitness, boxing, business, dating. The people came for his perspective on it. And I met Jack in Bali, but a year ago now, and he sat down with me and my channel was much smaller at the time. And he was like, you need to get out of the frame. It's first time I met the guy. He's like, you need to get out of the frame of this guest. So Justin Waller is on this podcast. You need to get into the frame of what is down Lee going to ask Justin Waller. People need to start thinking about you from that lens. Because now it's not just another podcast with this guest. So changing that angle and changing our frame is so important. And the way we do that is by getting the reps in, getting the receipts, you build businesses, I build businesses too. I can have a unique response to a guest's insight, right? And I think I call this like the treat the one ratio, which is for every three questions I ask, let's say like short to sink, I'll add one bit of insight. I could be 90 to two minutes long. And that level of business. I like it. I love how formalized you are with this process. Because we need to have a ratio. I feel like I'm just shooting from the hip now. I'm humble of bringing a podcast around my show. No, no, no, I think you're doing this intuitively, right? It's just the fact that we need to put them back and put the guests in a position whereby they can speak and elaborate on their ideas. But we also have to get into the point where it's not interrogation. If I can switch it from being an interrogation to actually adding a lot of value, every three or four questions, then the guests can take a break, you can have a sip of coffee, you can chill, and then it creates much more of a dialogue, right? And I've been on shows, even on shows too, where it's just like question, question, question. That leads to the audience journey because there's no unique, it's not about what's staring my ass, right? People are not there for that. So the more that I've kind of developed myself, we can talk about the development side. So now I have to ask about your emotions, all the times you fail. But you mentioned Chris Williamson's development. So I actually have some insight on this. Yes, of course, he developed individually. He gave up alcohol, he tried different stuff. Before he even moved to the US, he had that process running, okay? He was doing different stuff. He was in all the life hacks and the health hacks and all this. But he was also getting coaching on his speech. And he was going to a speech therapist that was helping him ask better questions, have a better connection between his mind and his mouth, all this kind of stuff that he was working on in the dark, which he only revealed about a year and a half ago on Mike Tarsan's podcast. So by doing that, that just uplifts him as an individual and people want to be interviewed as a result. And I remember Mike Tarsan asking him on a podcast, how are you getting such some of these guests? And he would say they listened to the show and they liked the show. And now four and a half years later, people who I've interviewed once, now actually listened to my show on a weekly basis. Dude, so many of these guys could be huge, like huge businesses and they're coming in to look for actual answers for me. And it's a crazy phenomenon. It's crazy change. Am I more accomplished in these guys? Nope, have another more experience? Nope. But they're here for the story, the connection and also to see someone who's working hard, right? Because I think in a world of like mediocrity, someone who's obsessed. People... It stands out. You would like to get that going. Literally, how your channel stood out when I was like looking at, when I was, when I just first discovered you, and I'm like, should you have water? Oh yeah, okay, cool. When you, yeah, when I first discovered you, your channel stood out and I'm like, I mean, like you don't have millions of subs, but I'm like, there's like zero doubt. I would not bet against you. It's the best way to put it. Have you seen that post-Spoisson whole bloom? Yes, yeah. Oh, dude, that is the best thing ever. It's like never, ever bet against someone who's obsessed. Yeah. And dude, that's actually been the thesis behind, that quote has been the thesis behind nearly everything that I've done. I just tell. Yeah. Which is, you physically, you know, there's a thing in the markets which is like, you don't lose the trade unless you sell, right? I genuinely take that approach to everything I do even in business, right? Because we've had horrific things happen and so on and so forth. But... Well, you're an agency. Exactly. You're an agency business, they're taught. Exactly, but at the end of the day, you know, the longer you stay in the market, the more mature you become, the more mature you come on the podcast. I've had a few podcasts here, pull out, I've paid the money and whatever. It doesn't work out. You know, these things happen. What do you mean? Like I've booked studios in the past and guests have pulled out an error before. Oh, they've just like bailed on you. Yeah, exactly, right? But when you're younger and you're more mature, you have much more of an emotional reaction that you're like, oh, this happens and that happens. Whereas I've flown places before a podcast have pulled out complete waste of time as a result. Oh, my God, lose it. But I'm just like, I'm like, dude, this is the game we play in the, and the risks we play, right? It's just paired of the kind of evolution. Yeah. Is that if you're playing at a higher level in the game content business stuff, these are going to go wrong. Of course things are going to go wrong. And that's a level of maturity. So I think when you look at my approach or I look at your approach, I'm like, this dude is about it and he's just all in on it. That's right. Well, you know what's so fun? So I want to learn about things that haven't worked out in your business because there's probably been millions. But you asked me like, what do you, I came up with what you said before we started recording. Like, what do you do now? Or like, what's your phone? And I'm like, it's like kind of like this. Or you said like, what else do you do? And I mean, I've tried a few things, but at the end of the day, like if things are working, it's kind of triple down on it. Like it's very rare to get something that's working. Yeah. It's like, it's very hard to get product market fit for anything you're doing. So when things are working, in my opinion, like, don't fuck with it. Because I've tried to launch businesses since the exit. Like I've been tried to do other stuff, trust me, I've tried to do a lot. I tried to, I didn't even mention this. You had tried to launch private equity firm. Didn't work. I tried to do a CPG company, which is like the sub one company. Didn't work. Try to do a mastermind. Didn't really work. I've tried to do a lot of stuff, tried to invest in startups, lost like 100% of my money. So I've tried to do stuff. And I think that's what people listen. Regardless of how much money I've made in my life, it doesn't automatically, it's so funny. Just because you make money doesn't mean you're good at anything else. So it doesn't mean you're good at investing or good at starting a next, like you can be, you can, you can take your learnings and run with it. But there still is a massive learning curve. There's gonna be tons of failure. And halo effect. Yeah, exactly. So just because I was good at one thing at one point in time, doesn't mean that anything else that I try is ever gonna be good again. Like I have to go through the reps. This podcast has been six years in the making. So yeah, now I have like a couple of nice cameras, whatever, it's like it's, but it's still six years that I put into this thing. So again, I sort of live by my own rules where I got to stick with different unreasonable amount of time until I'm good at it. And the reason why I like this versus building an individual business is because this is building one of the four kinds of leverage. I'm building leverage, right? So then when you have, when you have massive leverage, then I could launch it again and again and again. And then I don't have to, or I don't even have to launch it. I'm gonna take equity positions, things that are already working. Because now I'm not company's media leverage. That's such a good point. So I don't even have to play, find zero to one product market fit. I can say you have a consumer product, you have a B2B product, you have a B2C product, you have a SaaS product, I'm gonna take two to five percent of your company for X million impressions and I'm gonna be your marketing for the next X years. Well, that's why all these influencer-style businesses are the best sister in the beginning. Now, difficult to sustain, we can talk about that too. A lot of those guys are flashing the pans because they don't have the operations, they don't have the good right partner and so on and so forth. But of course, the world is built around influence and authority. And it's something that I'm so incredibly, incredibly big on because of the fact that influence is not millions and millions of people. It can just be your toes and true fans. And that can get you to your first million, your first 10 million. So for us, I had small levels of leverage with my podcast and how it spun off into the agency was people like this would say, what do you do with the camera and how do you run these conversations and how do you get the guess and how does it benefit your business and we have a podcast, could you have a look at it? So I did all my work for free in the beginning and then I was like, okay, can you come in and help us produce it? Can you help us grow it? It was all natural and organic. And that was a leverage piece. I had a lot of leverage in there. So I went to my first five, 10, 20 clients, just naturally and organic to the point that when you run into the challenges of growing and scaling an agency, which there is a lot. Agencies are tough, dude. But especially to go to build an agency to age figures is literally like, it's so difficult to do. So there's other ways to supplement it, which is kind of how we're doing it now. To the point that when we did launch a coaching offer for an education business, it was so highly leveraged anyway. We delivered from us, was that it was easy? We had the prospects, we had the people, we had people that were engaged, we had people that wanted to turn into advocates and true fans and evangelists. They built the brand because I had stayed so narrowly focused in the podcast space. So yes, we talked about audience and content growth and so on and sales within the podcast space for our offers, but it's always been to do a podcast, you know? That's where it's interesting even chatting with someone like yourself who has more experience than me is the fact that you don't need to be, the best way to example is you don't need to be a 10 out of 10 to coach someone who's a one out of 10. If you're trying to learn golf, you don't learn golf from Tiger Woods. You learn from someone who's a true or a four out of one out of 10 in your local golf course. Well, I could say that learning from somebody who's a three or four out of 10s actually a better person to learn. Exactly. Because they just experienced where you're at. Exactly. So does the empathy. So there's no, they're not out of touch. Exactly. And then you can ascend to that ladder, go to become a tree out of 10 and learn from someone who's on a tour seven out of 10. And then it's only Tiger Woods who's coaching the nine out of 10 that can become the 10 out of 10. So this is where we try to, we kind of move into, okay, helping people what we've experienced with. So you could help a lot of SaaS founders, dude, because you've been there in Donut. Maybe you don't want to do it, but there's an opportunity there for you because you've been true to struggles. So it's interesting. It's a different way to frame how you can help people, how you can serve people and get to the next level. But yes, there's been a ton of issues, a ton of failures. I can even give you some details into some things I was doing when I was younger. Yeah, go for it. Because I think like, again, this, the whole audience, they're all entrepreneurial, if not entrepreneurs. So building an agency is not easy. But I've had conversations about it before. I mean, I spoken to Eric about it a lot because he does it at scale. But if you ever talk to Eric, like his first versions of, I think it's single grain. Single grain. They were just shit. Like they were horrible. And he thought he knew what he was doing. He did not. And it was very tough. I mean, Eric's another really smart guy to listen to and learn from. But just to show the evolution of a person, because I actually want to learn about the stakes you've made. I want to learn about how you grow as a human, as an individual. But to show you how far somebody can come, and this is more just a comment on people that have been in homeostasis in maybe a nine to five for like the past 10 years. And they're scared of entrepreneurship. So Eric started off. I think he acquired it, single grain, yeah. And then it flopped basically, because he thought he was like God's gift of marketing. And it was not happening. He eventually figured it out. Now Eric is so good at what he does, that he arbitrages marketing agencies, buying them in Europe at a certain multiple, and then selling them in the US for a better multiple. So he literally arbitrages private equities through marketing agencies. That's how good he's gotten at the marketing agency game. And like the past, it has to be under 15 years. 16 years? So, or 16 years. It's been a while since I had that interview with him. But yeah, it's just wild. Like how you can evolve to think that at the beginning, you couldn't even manage one. And now he makes money off buying and selling. I actually asked him about that too, about the buying and selling process. Because it's such a difficult game, right? He knows all too well about it. It's very difficult. Just give me a bit of insight. Like so, like people kind of look at Vox as a whole and they think like, okay, just like got lucky, you know, because there's probably a lot of other. Why don't people say that? Because I don't, I don't think that. So a lot of the guys that run these production houses are a lot older. They've been in film. They've been in the video game. They've been in the audio game, specifically. They're audio engineers. They've run big companies in the US. They've worked in Hollywood. They've worked in New York on video production, and so on. I didn't do any of that, right? So a lot of these guys have like, Is that what that tweet came from when you said, you're like the biggest fraud? Yeah, effectively, right? There's a lot of the bigger agencies. It goes with 40, 50 employees who, by the way, I guarantee you're probably doing more revenue than I'm, because a lot of them are dwindling down, right? Because these agencies are not in the mood. They can't move pretty well. A lot of these guys have a lot of background pedigree and they've worked on shoots, motion shoots, and so on and so forth, whereas we just, I just realized that that was a super unscalable to do in-person stuff. The focus on post-production was a lot faster and easier, right? So that's what people kind of look at that concept. However, I've been in the game for a lot longer than just a couple of years, right? So I started out when I was like 16, 17, dude, and I was running parodies back then. So I was running, this was the old days of attention, marketing, and getting in the door. So you're... You're going to miss Christmas games. You're going to Irish people, right? What do they do? They parodies all the time. I was running mystery tours. Have you ever heard of this? No. Well, I mean, there's like a ghost tour? Oh, no, you're going to love this. I have no idea. It's where you book a double-decker boss and you sell tickets for the boss, and then you drive people around until you end up in like a bear or a nightclub, and basically everyone just gets pissed in a boss, effectively, right? So you sell tickets for the boss. I was like 17 years old doing that, and I was running this all around Ireland. So I was like, what's the drinking age in Ireland? 18. Oh, good. All right. New like 17, 18. So I did that initially, and I was like, right, what's the concept? People need something. They want something. It's high desirable. It's like fun. It's entertainment. We'd run things on like Facebook and software. Just like a post on Facebook. That worked. Then I said I was running bigger events. So I was running proper club events at that point then. That was really good, but it was like, it wasn't a reliable way to build a business and to maintain a business. And it was kind of shady, and you're like, oh, I do whatever you want to be doing this, but I was doing like 18, 19. And then I was really into the scene of music. I sold really into like house and technical music all was for the past 10 years. However, what I noticed was when I was living in London, fashion in London around clubbing is huge, huge, huge, huge. So I was really at the early stages. This is 2016, 2017 of 90s clothing being brought, being like a resurgence. So I saw urban outfitters. I saw a few other vintage brands. And I thought, huh, I used to go to all these raves and people used to spend so much money on their clothes at two or three hundred dollars on their outfits. Why not just be the person that sells rave clothes to rave kits? So I would buy all these boxes from the set of Italy, like the highest quality vintage clothing you can imagine. Like all the stone island, Nike, Adidas from the 80s, 70s, and I'd house them all in my bedroom. So I had these huge boxes in my bedroom. I'd sell everything to Shopify, direct to consumer from the website. That's awesome. And it was flying out the door. Like I couldn't keep going. I was going to say that it seems like a really, outside of being like a business that could have cash flow issues. Oh, because that seems like a super expensive business to start. So I'd buy the, I'd buy the boxes. You'll find it's interesting. So the way vintage clothing works is that you get different grades, A, B, C, depending on quality. So you get a box, not knowing what's in it. It's like a lucky dip box, right? And then you get this stuff on a Friday and you just sell it for the next rave, for the next parody and so on. So I had a lot of like stock, okay? And this would cost me a couple of thousand dollars of box and I was buying them every week. At that point, we were making a lot of revenue but we're spending it all on stock management, right? I'm getting the stock in, running ads and so on and so forth. Bear in mind, I was modeling all the clothes to myself. Oh my God. Everything myself was modeled from, from my balcony, dude. Oh my God. From my balcony. So this was running quite well. I was running, I was working in a vest and bagging at the time. And during this, I was making more money in a week than I'd make in a month, working as an intern as an investment bag. So I was obviously detaching from reality with what was possible and so on. Until revenue or profit? Revenue. Revenue. Okay. We hit, of course, cash flow problems. Basically, just couldn't acquire customers as fast as how much we were spending, how much money we were having. So that was my first, like, real internal explosion of running a business. And that was all done in person, in stock and everything because I realized that when you're shipping a four pound or five pound stone island jacket, winter jacket, it's going to cost that a money, right? So massive failure, but a huge idea in terms of, again, attention, what do people want, solving pain for problems? Yeah. And one of those effectively selling was status. Everything that I've been doing has been selling status. It's been, it's a parodies. It's another thread that I wrote down. Everything has to do with status, right? So whether it's a parody, whether it's a rave, whether it's clothes, everything went back to status. So I've been doing this for quite some time at this point and realized that I had no authority, I had no influence while I was paying for attention, paying for businesses. But I still didn't know my lesson. So then when I moved to, when I was in a censure, I was trying to like get my money back together, trying to sort out different things. I was living in Dublin and I just came back from traveling and I'd spent so long, again, perting in Asia, that I realized that if you lose your passport, you're screwed, okay? So I was trying to build a digital passport app, super VC backed. I was standing inside Dublin airport, interviewing people, going through the terminals. I looked like an airport, like a risk effect. Did you raise for this? This was a plan. So I'd walk around asking people what they use in a passport app and it was really well validated. People really wanted to use it. Huge legal issues, huge regulation issues. I was gonna say that seems like a lot of a a key product to overcome, but. Did all the wire framing, did all the prototyping, myself bearing mine in my kitchen, I did everything myself, everything myself. Went to get funding because I was nobody. I didn't have authority and influence. I couldn't get funding. So this is when I realized, okay, I'd done all this stuff for money years, made money, lost money, made no money, lost more money and so on and so forth. And that was a time that I shouldn't be trying to build. I should be trying to listen and learn. And that's when I found that a podcast space, which was much more like patience game, playing the long game, getting the insights. Everything that I do now has come from the 200 to the lessons. Every single thing that I've learned has come from the 250 episodes I've recorded because they were the things that I needed at that point in time, whether it's mindset, practical business, logic, fitness, health, whatever. That was what I needed at the point in time and that's what I'm utilizing now. And that's what I'm even doing now. Interviews I have now are often solving my own problems because the problems from me are not unique they're for everybody else. But I just think it's an interesting observation because when I had made all those massive mess ups, yeah, I wasn't journaling the mistakes and all this kind of stuff, but it's at a subconscious level I was learning what was wrong. So that if you think about it, we'll kick off sessions, which became books accompany. When people come to interact, they have the social proof, they know what's happening. There's a trust, there's the authority, there's the influence, everything that I had lacked was there. It was primed. So all I had to do was just high conversations. People and I said, this is what we do. This is what we do it. And it was just like, it was just so natural, so natural, so easy. Even to this day, when we get on calls to people, like any case study you need is just to start with me. That's always the best case study, right? So all the gaps that I had in my youth trying to figure it out, have all kind of compounded to this point in time, which is when things come much more organically and naturally. I have a question on that. That's so interesting. Why you chose to start a podcast after you did a super product heavy business, and you tried to do adventure back business. Because I have a reason as to why I started a podcast, I never thought it was gonna be for the money. Same. I thought it will make money, and at some point in the future, I can productize it. But when I started this, I was building a company. So it wasn't like, for me, it was a very safe bet. I already have money coming in. Like I don't need to worry about money for the podcast. But you killed the potential adventure back passport business. You started a podcast first. And was there like, I mean, because like I just try and think of the mindset of a creator who starts a podcast, what are the reasons for doing it? It's such a good point. So for me, it was much more, I wanted to listen and learn. So I knew I had to gap. I couldn't be paying for it. So this was like an education tool for you. Everything, everything's been educational. Every you weren't concerned about money to bridge that gap? No, not at all. Because I was working in trading at the time. You're still working at the time. So I was working in trading at the time. And it was just purely educational. And I was able to find my way out of that system, where out of that process, learn what I needed to learn. Interview people that would be thousands of dollars to consult with, right? And get that access to information. It was only as I launched when I realized that it was a mess with YouTube over here, audio over here, back then the whole thing was a mess up. But I thought initially maybe we could build a product. I would try to initially build a SaaS product to house everything together. So video, audio and everything. That was one thing I tried to build. Second thing I tried to build was a, another kind of notion variation, which I'm still actually considering to the state, by the way, just basically I'll wait to aggregate everything. So that's what I was thinking initially, because I knew it was a mess. It was just a complete mess. Your workflow was just the podcasting. Podcast industry, it's just sort of fragmented. It's so fragmented in contrast to posting on Instagram, posting on Twitter, posting on YouTube. It's all over the place, which is why there's such a high failure rate, right? Such a high failure rate in podcasting because it's so complicated. There's so much miniature, smaller things. Again, to keep it sustainable, to do 100 reps. If you can't do 100 reps, don't do the first rep, right? So I quickly kind of saw that, and then it just broke it into helping consulting. The reason why we have an agency is very interesting is because when people would ask me for help on their podcast, I could tell them what to do, but if I couldn't do it for them, it would make no sense, right? Because they didn't have the skills, the gap between where they were and where they are, it's the skill, it's the Delta. So if they're not designers, if they're not editors, if they're not copy-raters, they can't write it. So it was like, that might just give it to me. I'll just do it for you. So we started very humble from that beginning, and then it was only until I could get better employees, better writers, better designers, better editors, when the agency said, are running async. I said, the higher people who are much further on me, does that make sense? So again, you solve your own problems. I literally solved the problems that I had run in the podcast, that became valuable to other people. And again, it's a classic grant to knowledge because I thought it was easy when we got up and running, actually turns out that's incredibly valuable to somebody else. And this is actually the problem. So so many of my friends, as I'm sure yours too, I've asked like, how do I start? I've sent SOPs, my exact process, every single tool I use, for free. I mean, some of them are really close friends. Just send it to them, zero podcasts have been created. You want to tell you what happens? Yeah, yeah, yeah. I know exactly what it is. These are smart people too. These are not idiots. These are people that have built and sold companies in eight figures, some of nine figures, like very smart entrepreneurs. Sometimes you have to pay your wallet to make the change though. Sometimes you have to pair it with your money mentally to be like, I'm going to go work on this. Because if you're thinking of it and you're getting great advice from a good friend like yourself, they're not willing to make that change until they actually put the cash down. And these guys are multimillionaires, right? But it's still the same principle in practice. And then the other aspect then is it's a gap. What we do looks easy, right? This is a yeah, record, upload. But these small micro things that are happening in there, that's what all adds up. And especially if you're in your turkeys or forties, which again is kind of the entrepreneurs that we work with. They have kids, they have businesses, they have a wife, they have all this other stuff. So it's like, yes, can you do it? 100%, 100%. But will you actually do it? That's the question, right? And whether this is an interesting observation. So when we had the done for you approach for so long, it was like, yeah, here it is. If you want us to do it, okay, if you don't want us to do it, okay. But now you have to meet people where they are in their journey. We go back to customer experience. Some people want to get started. They want to learn, feel more in control. So we teach them some people want to do it themselves. We give them resources. Some people want to done for them. And often people will figure out the process, how it's done with you and then allow you to do it for them, right? So that's kind of so interesting. It's an ascension model, right? And that's not intentional. It's just a way to be able to serve different people. So that people who complain that they don't want to do it anymore, you have an option for them, right? So that's where I would say like we're less an agency more immediate company. There's just so much stuff in the ecosystem, right? And it's like, we have like lots of stuff going on. There's so many different pieces to a podcast. You have an issue articulating the value of building leverage because I would assume if I was selling this as a service, I would have, I have had not, because I don't sell it, but I have a hard time getting somebody to buy in the concept of doing this for six years. And I'm like, what has it done for you? And I told you how much money this makes. Six years in business, that's kind of a shit amount of money for any objective business. Six years in business, you should be making probably over $10 million. Answer is maybe five and 10 if it's like a, if you're struggling, but most businesses after five, six years, if you're still doing them, you figure out some samples of product market fit, you can repeatedly drive, you know, you figure out your customer acquisition costs. You can, you can build a system that allows you to have mid to high seven figures in revenue. Go, go, go, go, but for podcasts, again, you are playing the infinite game. The money that comes from advertisers for this show is small. It's very small compared to what I could be making building a business. But if I execute my playbook, and I do what I sort of mentioned earlier on this show where I may be a small equity positions or whatever it is, and then also the stages that I get on and the people that I get to speak to and the relationships that I build and the opportunities that come from all the adjacent items, like I can't put a value on that, which is why I'm going to do this till the day that I die. I don't really care about the money that comes in from advertisers. But that's a very hard value product to articulate to somebody who wants to start this. Now I think there's better ways to do it, and you probably, or different ways to do it, you could productize immediately. If I had a high ticket product and you were my ICP, my customer profile, I could be selling, I could be building rapport with you, and on the background of this podcast, I could be selling you a product or service. I could be including you as my content marketing if I'm doing like B2B or any kind of business. So there's a whole bunch of different ways to do it, but what do you think is the best way to look at, should I start a podcast? If someone's going to ask you that question, what's your answer? It has to be complimenting the business in the back end. Otherwise, you're not going to justify putting in the time or the cash. So I'm just crazy. Yeah, you're building an ecosystem of this is your brand. You get me. And any product that you want to build in the back end is based off of this, you get me. So that's the broader play. You don't need to have the product in the back end right now, but it's almost having that brand. So you take me example. I didn't have that two years, three years. Very similar, actually, the way we started this. Similar journey, right? But it's building brand equity. And brand equity is intangible, and it's also very difficult to quantify, right? But people who play an infinite game understand the value of brand, understand the value of building a longer term connection with your audience and your customers, without looking for direct response. The whole idea of direct response marketing, the funnels, Russell Brunson, all that kind of approach is that you're looking for one penny in, two pennies back out. Whereas what we're doing here is much more of a longevity play that we could build this offer to get a ten years time. Who knows, right? But it all starts and just meeting each other today and seeing what happens. But it's understanding that that's a lever. So the question I get asked by some clients is what's it offer, okay? And we try to quantify what it is an offer and we try to see which metric are we optimizing for. So let's say if it is a specific company, could be a real estate company, we could be optimizing for leads, right? So are optimizing for leads? Yes, do we have a mechanism to get leads to engage with us? No, how would we do that? Build a few lead magnets and so on to four. That's one side, right? Which we would build. The second side of it then could be, let's say, just brand awareness. You wear the company like the future by Christo. He's looking for broader brand awareness with his podcast. People will come in and work with his courses and his tutorials and workshops as a result. Two different ways to do it. So it's almost unifying what that metric is on the backend initially. It could be just views and what in one aspect or it could be sales, right? Because if you have a product stack that's conducive towards that, you can create podcasts and sell products on the backend, true it. It can all be done, everything works, but all this is just a vessel on the front end. You can write tweets, make sure it's, you can stick your head up to this window and scream until customers come in. They're all vessels to get attention, but it's understanding what attention is, what is it, the driver that we're trying to optimize for, and then just doing it, right? I think the reason why people maybe feedback that you're getting is like, oh, I don't know what's it all for, is because they don't think about that initially. And that's when they record the seven podcasts to spend 20 hours a week working on it, have no idea what they're doing, and then think damn, this is too much, right? Whereas we have a specific client at the moment, which the woman is an individual, and that's kind of solar pranora businesses doing really well, a couple of million a year in revenue. And when we launched a podcast, she was so surprised because all of her clients were listening, all of her prospects were listening, her audience are LinkedIn were listening, so it's like how do you quantify that? Well, those customers now see you in a different light from just helping them with the business, they're paired up the broader ecosystem. And dude, you'll be very, very surprised. Like, I would say a lot of my clients end up listening to our podcast because people who actually pay for services and products, they want to get more, so they're more interested in the whole ecosystem. And as you can probably tell from this conversation, that's a huge area that I'm really focused on is building a strong brand, providing a lot of free content, and then having a lot of very solid products on the backend that advanced that mission, you know? And it just depends on where you are in your stage of your life. So if you are someone who's a busy entrepreneur or you sold a company and you're in your turdies and forties and you've a lot of other commitments, well, then you work with someone, right? You get what you've set up, you work with a few VAs, a few EAs, like why are you suffering in silence, right? You know, that defeats the purpose of leverage. Does that make sense? Yeah, it does make a lot of sense. The way we kind of situated with someone that, let's say who's engaged with us is that, one, get your time back, Dan Martell 101, right? Get your time back, go back to what you want to do, go back to focusing on the business, and two, build a strong brand that can actually increase your revenue, right? The way we increase your revenue is going to be different. If you're someone like yourself, it's sponsorships, people who pay guests, we can all buy that too, orders the business operations, leads, sales, and so on and so forth. I would bet that if somebody's having a hard time quantifying the value of a podcast, I think for somebody who does have a business, if you've started a podcast, I would make a very strong bet that if you looked at when you start that podcast, and you compare that to the sales velocity, how long it takes somebody to first discover your company to come through from very top of funnel cold, all the way through to close, I would assume that your sales velocity decreases, because you have this vehicle that is the most high-trust, building medium possible, in my opinion. So I think that it'll be very hard to track a direct conversion, but I think you look for other customer behaviors that sort of signal that without a podcast, they're consuming content, they're going to your website, they're going to your social, they'll eventually speak to a sales rep. I would assume that with a podcast, by the time they get to a sales rep, they're much more likely to close quicker. You could track that. Definitely track that. It's almost like a referral from your content, right? Because yeah, because I think that if you look at the average customer, they're gonna do 70 to 80% of the research before they buy, before they even talk to somebody, talking about enterprise B to B, or just higher ticket items. Okay, so let's say they're coming in and interacting with you and touching base. What's the alternative? I always say to people, if you're not creating content, what's the alternative? You're paying for attention, you're paying for everything. So you have this opportunity whereby you pay with your time, or you create a system, or you hire a team, and you run content for you for your business, or you pay for business. You only have two options. So it's like, oh yeah, it could spend more time doing X, Y, and Z. You still need customers. You still need marketing. I think it's very funny too when people say, I wanna take a break, right? I wanna take a break. I'm like, a break to do what? Because your business still runs, right? What do you need a break? Well, that's a signal that they don't understand the value. Exactly, but I mean, take a break in general, itself. Or whether it's running their business, their content, their offer, their sales, we wanna slow things down internally. What else are you going to do? You're running a business. It's like you sign up for this. It's almost like if people are not working. That could be a much bigger problem. 100% expectations are not properly set when you started this thing. And you just realize that you made yourself a very, you built yourself a very high-paying job. 100% as opposed to a business. And then that's more indicative of, you gotta build systems and processes and hire people and scale yourself. So you're not just working under 20 hours a week. But it's interesting, right? Because most people don't think like that. It's something that we realize as entrepreneurs too that yes, there's obviously sacrifices and so on, if you're made. But if you're not gonna do the work, then why are you doing it in general? And it's something that you need to be realized with, your sales process, your ecosystem, or even the companies you wanna work for. If guys are complaining that they're not gonna go the extra mile or get back to you on a Saturday with an email, they shouldn't be entrepreneurs. They should not. Which is why most people I feel like have a really incorrect version in their heads about entrepreneurship is. Dude, I literally swear, swear on my life. I spent 16 hours yesterday building a landing page, preparing for four podcasts. And then at 10 o'clock last night, I was like, we got this podcast in the morning and I said, preparing for the 10 last night. I swear, I swear on my life. I know. Yesterday morning, I had to write all my news letters because I was behind on everything because of recording podcasts. I used you right on a Saturday, edit on a Sunday, I couldn't, I had to write yesterday, and I had to go into everything else. And it's like, what's the alternative? I stopped producing my news letter and I stopped getting sales. It's like, there's no alternative. Exactly. But when you are in entrepreneur mode, like this is why you do have to find a way to systematize as quickly as possible. Because if you don't, you're gonna add more stuff on, it's all gonna fall on you. But I mean, this is entrepreneurship. Yesterday, we're recording in 4K now. I have to figure how to transport and send 4K footage to all over the world, right? Which is a pain in the ass. I know. And I went through like five different file sharing services. It took me like six hours in the afternoon. I did that lots more. I'm signing up for, I was like, sync, pCloud, Dropbox, Box. Nothing I want to camera with the name of. Google Drive, and I'm like, okay, so how do I not go bankrupt? Send in like a terror bite and stuff. And like this is just my afternoon, I had to cancel the gym. And then I had to like cancel basically everything else. I was doing yesterday because there's been five hours researching all this dumbass file sharing. And I was using all these AI tools to rank all the different features and benefits. It's just like, this is life though, dude. This is life. I mean, this is the game. What's, and I mean, this is like, you know this because you do all this, this crazy shit too. Oh, oh yes, what was it? Dude, I spent two weeks doing that, can I do it? Thursday. Thursday, my web hosting site ground. For some reason, even though I didn't send out any emails all week, so it's actually, I was in Boston. I actually, my voice is still like, hoarse from speaking so much at this conference. But I was in Boston and then site ground sends me an email. We've disabled your email for your domain because we found that we're getting a lot of 550 errors, basically meaning that your email is getting sent to like, non-real email addresses, like you're spamming people basically. And I'm like, I haven't sent an email like all week. Like, I don't have anyone on my team sending emails. I have no automation setup right now. What is going on? Why is my email just shut down randomly on a Thursday morning? Like the emails that I get, and I'm sure you do too, just like the random shit, it's just day in the life. It's left feels stuff, right? That's why like all year, your morning routine, your plan and stuff just means nothing at the end of the day. Sometimes, dude, I had the exact same thing with like a counting literally last week. We're just saying we're going back and forth that they're like, oh yeah, there's like some accounting fee, you know, like these companies that work for all your accounts. I was like, what the hell? I sent this to you like two weeks ago, and then that went on for ages, and then the email was there. And it's just like, this took like three hours, does that make sense? And it's something so simple. And I have to pay some extra random fee, and then you're like putting in your credit card. So like, I'm always able to just really well, which is, you know, when a company's growing really fast, a lot of the employees want to get paid more, to get part of it. But they did not share in the risk. They did not share in all the pain and the uncertainty. That's what you're getting, right? So like when I'm setting these like accounting emails on like Saturday evening, what are people that didn't share in that journey, right? And yes, you want to reward your employees like well and so on and so forth. But I think it's just interesting because it's not just about like running the funnel and getting the product and so whatever. It's all those small changes, right? And you go back to the button, right? The button and SaaS. You can look at that button for three hours. You can be tinkering it and everything. And that's what makes people click on the button. She's been three hours working on it. It's not just creating the button. So this is all intangibles, right? This is all intangibles. One more story, one more story. So for that CPK company that we tried to bring to market that did not work, we were sued. And by the way, they don't talk to you about like employees generally hopefully do not get sued. Entrepreneurs, like you can sneeze and you'll get sued. Hopefully not, but it happens. We were sued for not, it was like an ambulance chaser looking for ADA compliance, like accessibility compliance on websites. So what they would do is they'd find websites that were just set up that did not have like proper like ADA compliance. So like usually on websites they'll have a little button that says you can click this button and then it'll read the text to you, change the text size, make it so it's easier to see a lot of websites don't have this. And what people do is they look for them. And then they partner up with a lawyer. You've any better to be doing. And then they go after them and they sent like legal letters. And they, and because ultimately you're not going to go to court, they try and get you for like, I think the amount was like, if you get fined, plus lawyer fees, it could be like 50 grand. So they're like, let's just settle. It's just, let's just settle for like a tiny $15,000. And you're like, you don't want to go to court. And you don't want to do it. This is a business. They're doing this as a business basically. I mean, you're not incorporated, but like it's a strategy because you go to the person's name who sends you this letter, you go to the lawyer and you'll see about 50 different lawsuits for different businesses. Just trying to target websites that don't have ADA compliance. So the point is, all the BS, you could ever think of. And even the BS that you couldn't think of is going to happen. Do you think that I woke up one morning and I was like, I want to make my website inaccessible? The people? No, of course not. But when you're building this out, and you really just haven't gotten around to it because there's a thousand other things you're trying to figure out like how to sell a fucking product. Yeah, exactly. Then all of a sudden, this comes in. Oh, great. Now we're down $15,000. We don't want it. So it's like all this stuff, all this risk, all this BS. One step forward, one, two steps back, you know? But again, so that's why like in the infinite game, you can only lose by exiting the arena. So all of these small things increased the likelihood of people saying, if this I'm gone, you know, I'm too embarrassed. I don't want to do this anymore. And it's like, it wasn't about the products. Even though it is, it's about all the other stuff that you're staying in, they're re-inaffirmed and certainly and whatnot. I saw a great clip of this. But it hardens you. It creates like mental calluses. It really makes you, it makes you can handle future situations. Because I mean, hopefully it'll never happen again. I'll tell you right now, my website's ADA compliant. Like as fuck, like I got all the right buttons on there. Like you hope it never happens again, but at the end of the day, it just makes you a better entrepreneur. And I don't, do you know who taught all this? No. He's a big following. He runs a publicly traded holding company. So what he does is he acquires companies. And he puts them in a pub co. And he gets shit on all the time because his stock price going up and down. People have lost a lot of money and made a lot of money. It's like publicly traded company. But he's like, I had a conversation with him. And he was like, the lawsuits and the stress and the emails that I get daily, every single one of those instances would give my younger self a heart attack. The things that happen daily. He's like, and one of his companies is they create technology to support C. Iron Dome in Israel. So recently, that's a very hot topic. Like we have armed guards in the front. We have metal detectors. I've had death threats. It's like the stuff that you deal with as an entrepreneur is just wild. Absolutely wild. I don't have any stories like that. But there's no there's no end to the game, right? With infinite levels of bullshit and stress. It's a problem solution. Yes. They're an enemy cyber problem. You have another enemy cyber problem. When a solution, it creates a loop for another problem. Right? Even last night, and I think that's funny. And I got observation you made was the fact that, you know, you get used to the problems. Like I had an issue with like a site yesterday. It was like a factory setting, like a deep underlying setting. When I went wrong, I didn't act from like a motion and they were like, Oh, God, I need to explain that. I kind of looked at it. It looked like a problem. I can probably see before I fixed it and moved on. Now, maybe someone else would look at that and think, Oh, God, it does a massive issue here. I just had gone through a similar problem before. And I was, okay, done. Stuffed easy at night. That makes sense. So I think there's a there's a part of that journey, which is important, which is like when I was younger, running all these parodies and waves and events, everything that would have happened negatively would have really affected me. We're just like, now it's like, okay, just get on with it. Yeah. Or hire people who are also, you can trust, right? Like I think the biggest thing for me now is that when I'm doing these tours and I'm traveling a lot and I'm meeting people, we have a very solid team that keeps everything running and not just running, but also progressing. People are getting better results, improving. We're getting more people into our ecosystem because it's, it's a maturity, right? And I think that's my one thing against solar entrepreneurship, which is like how to build leverage of solar entrepreneurship on a fulfillment basis, unless it's purely product and marketing. But I don't know, I hear it all to now. What do you think? Build leverage on fulfillment? Yeah, it's just like the solar entrepreneurship kind of play. Like you're trading dollars for time or time for dollars, excuse me. Kind of, but the way that it's positioned is that if you have a good content engine like Justin Welsh's model, I guess he's very much an outlier of the success of it, which is like, you just create content that content follows into product, the product is self-paced. I think it depends on the product you sell. Yeah. So I feel like the product that you sell, I mean, what Justin Welsh sells is education. And of course, it's real. And that's as close to SaaS as you're ever going to get. So this is the same as Jack Butcher, by the way. So it's build one cell forever. So can you scale that? Yeah, I believe you can. I believe that, I mean, I believe that you can scale that infinitely. I think that there's no cap on how many times you can sell a course. I think that when you bring an agency component in, or anything where there's literally like time allocation required, to fulfill, that's when you run into scaling issues. I mean, you can also build a bigger agency. I just think that I think that it's just about like your margins, your EBIT, your profit. I think that it's just going to be more complex to scale, but you'll have a bigger mode. So Justin, I don't think Justin's mode is his personal brand. That is it. So someone else, who's a charismatic, well-spoken dude, builds an audience on LinkedIn, launches a LinkedIn course. Justin does no longer has a mode. That's the only concern. So it can scale infinitely, but it can also be like the, it can be disrupted very easily. An agency business, every time you sell a customer, you have to fulfill. You have so many people working so many hours to fulfill on that customer's whatever they purchase from you. So it's just going to take a lot more for someone else to do that. Good point. You can still leverage Justin's mode for your own company. You can be a follower to yourself. That's exactly right. Justin could launch an agency, and then he can make himself a little bit more redundant. That's an interesting point. But also, sorry, just last thought on this very quickly. All these, he doesn't want to build anything more. That's the X factor. He wants this kind of business. He does not care that it does not have a big mode around it. He does not, this is all the things we spoke about. That actually isn't his focus. His focus is lifestyle. That is what he is optimizing for. So is optimizing for lifestyle the smartest business move? It depends if that's what you care about. If you don't care about lifestyle, then I would say that what Justin's building is not the smartest mode. My question on that is more so, if you weren't making all the money that you're making, would you still be optimizing for what? You say you're optimizing now? If you aren't making all the money that you're making. So let's just say, let's just use Justin as an example, but not looking at him specifically. Say someone, Tom has a five million year content business. But, and now he's optimizing for lifestyle. But if he wasn't making five million a year, and he was only making, since that was $1 a year, would he still be saying he's optimizing for lifestyle? Because you wouldn't have the cash that you need to upload. So that's why everyone needs a number. You have to know your number. But do you get the number? So that's the last one. I think you can work backwards from cost of living, how many trips you want to take in a year? What's your rent to your mortgage? What kind of schools do your kid, do you want your kids to go to? Do you care about like owning a $500,000 car, $500,000 watch? Do you care about flying private, flying commercial? Like you can build your number. Good point. I don't think anyone really does that. Very few people do that on one size. No one does that, man. Because everyone's just like, I need more and more and more and more. What's more? Like most people, most people would be just fine living on 50 grand a month. 50 grand a month, yeah. 50 grand a month is a lot, you say it, but I mean, a lot of people make a lot more than that. 50 grand a month, I mean like in high-tech states, that's like 25, instead of like private school, instead of mortgage, like in New York City, it's a lot, but it's not a lot. Yeah, I get to. And if your spouse doesn't work, it's a lot, but it's not a lot. So, but it's not crazy. It is, right? But if you live in a town of like 3,000 people, and you don't have kids, and you just like the nature or whatever. So that's, that's what you've got to do this exercise. So that's my problem. So on paper, we make a lot of cash, I don't spend any of it because I don't have a high cost living. So, I don't spend anything. I really don't care to, by the way, I hate fancy restaurants. Like I just say that like very, very high-end restaurant. Yeah, good food. Give me more steak, dude. Don't give me. So, Gina, so Gina was Michelin star, I can't stand it. I like, I like just like really good food. That's all I care about. I don't fly private. I follow business her first. If I made more money, I thought about this a lot. If you're gonna fly private, first of all, it's like insanely expensive. But you also don't want to do like the BS planes. You want like nice planes. I don't want like some fucking tiny... Shalmo. Yeah, like I see some people flying private and like he's like shit, tiny jets. I'm like bro, just fucking go fly Delta first. Like or go fly like like Emirates, like first cloud. Like you don't have to do this to yourself. Like it's not that cool. So funny. I'm six too, bro. I don't want to be like sitting like this in that. That's so funny. But even with the number, right? You know, even for ourselves, so like we're married, no kids. We haven't like a really nice house. Maybe you figured how much you spent like per month? Dude, when I'm home, when I'm home, probably no more than like including rent and stuff, probably less than I think I'm on. That's because you live overseas though. Yeah. Okay, so rent, rent alone in some cities would be like 10k. Exactly. But again, that's a decision, right? So let's, so let's not talk about like American specifically because I know there's like a lot of opportunity here, good New York, Los Angeles itself. But let's say you're based from like Ireland, UK. Yeah. My advice is immediately get out of those countries because they're declining countries, 100%. UK, Ireland, the company declining. They're just small-minded, backward countries. And if you're living in London, you're spending 15 grand a month and a half. Yeah, and it's shit, right? Like the place you're living in this shit, it's a bad, it's dangerous. I'm almost gonna stop. So my recommendations get out of there. Where you can go is you go to Asia, you're going to Dubai. I looked at Dubai. We were going to move to business there, but my business is based in America. And we're going to move to business to Dubai. And then I was just like, do I even want to be there? Because you can't be there 12 months of the year, because it's so hot. It's like 120 degrees for like four months of the year. Also, it's not really not fun. Like, you know, I'm not a guy that's going to be in the beach club, right? So it's like, that I really want to do that. Some of my mates, their parents are like 9,000 USD a month, and it's like average. Yeah. Two beds, okay? So it's okay, it's not great. And I guess all to myself, do I really want to do that? I've lived in Singapore. Singapore is pretty similar to like LA or Coswise. And then in Bali, I just have a really good center of living. So I've a huge house, low cost of living on my dogs there. I've businesses there, great gyms, great restaurants. My center of living is really, really good. So if I want to come to Miami, I can spend a few weeks here. I can spend a few weeks at our places. So it's kind of like understanding again, that number, but not utilizing that number to be really high for some reason. Like does that make sense? Like you don't get more fulfillment from spending more money on random stuff, something. Exactly. So when I said 50 grand, now it was more just like a, it was like a benchmark for most people to be like, okay, I can build a business that makes 50 grand a month. Justin's, Justin's as like 1.2 million, right? Here. A year. He has no expenses, 100 grand a month. Okay, congratulations. It's already double what I just said. So imagine you had an extra 90 grand a month per year for living overseas. And he's similar to me in the fact that he doesn't have kids, right? So that's what he's building a lifestyle business because he doesn't need the cash. Whereas when I'm in May to Ned, who I mentioned before, know his two kids were in university in the US. He was based in Singapore, you know, he's seven bedroom house in Singapore. He was CEO of a company called E-Trade. He was making like 75K a month of CEO. I know E-Trade, that's a big company. He was CEO of the company. And he was, you know, burning through all the cash because he has a family, right? So, bro, you can spend 50 grand at live for a table, close to the DJ booth one night. But again, it goes back to like, what do you care about that? Exactly, right? But even if you're optimizing for family and, you know, I recommend most people to do like building like a well-oiled family, even if it's just you and your spouse, which is our scenario, that you don't need all those bells and whistles, like you've a nice watch. I'd actually like to get a nice watch soon, just like a collectible, you know? It's like 12. Yeah, it's not. That's not expensive, right? Does that make sense? No, obviously, everything is in perspective. But I just think that if you have that frame, which I think is really nice, so you said for your number, it allows you to build a much more calmer business. So that's why I like my career a lot because my career is by building cal, elegant, systematized businesses. Which is... Yeah, it pulls over a million, it pulls out like three. And more, I need to do like a little bit now, to do a lot more now. Yeah. Bro, it's a course and a community at the day, right? And I have a lot of respect for what he's done and what he's built. But the reason I'm saying this is because his lifestyle, similar to Justin, similar to mine is that I can be here and I've spent a lot of money when I've been in Asia, I've been in America for the past few weeks, pseudo super expensive, which tells very expensive for anything decent. Yeah, yeah, yeah. But I'm going to talk to myself, okay, it's September. I'm what you're going to do for September. I won't be back here for a while. I don't mind, right? Because when I go back to living in Asia, it's going to be chill. But there's two ways to look at that. I don't go back there, I'm going to go, oh, God, I'm not going to make a lot of money. I'm going to go very cheap. I still want to push on a lot. It just allows me to build a camera business, you know, and optimize for the right clients, turning their own clients, not looking for a quick cash, you know, because I don't need the money and that's the big difference I'm all people have is up. But I also didn't need the money in the beginning too. It's like, you know, we're similar. I just eat chicken and rice and go to the gym, right? Like, you know, I'm not going to be in these clubs. I'm out in the clubs. I'm out in the party scene. I'm not rentin' those tables. I'm off buying Daytona's. So what am I, why don't you join the money on? I think that's why people have to do it. I think it's very toxic in Miami, because, man, dude, it's so, I don't really understand. This city is a little bit wild. I see more, you know, in R.M., like Richard Miller. I see more $500,000 watches walking down the street than I've ever seen in my life. And I know for a fact that the people Miami are not rich with the people in New York. I don't see a single R.M. in New York. So what are people trying to optimize for in the city? I have no idea. Status. The stupid fucking game to play, because you'll always lose. You'll always lose. Because the second you think your $500,000 watches is something cool, you'll go meet a billionaire who's flying a 737, you feel like a fucking idiot. So I just mean like there's, you could never win a status game. So why not play a game that you're actually happy with? As opposed to, again, you know, trying to impress people don't even give a shit about you. It's zigging whenever I'm so sagging. Yeah. This is accent approach, right? So I think that that actually, oh, go ahead. I have a funny thing on that. So I like watches, I guess like R.M.'s, I like observing them, I like going in, checking them out and so on. And whenever I'm trying to people watch as I always joke, being like, oh, yeah, this is mine. It's my dog. Yeah, it's on you. And it's just funny. It's just different, right? Even when I'm living in Bali, I don't wear shoes. I just like, I go around places I don't wear shoes. People like, you don't wear shoes? I'm like, yeah, I don't need shoes. Because it's like, that is a very Bali vibe. Oh, yeah. It's just different. And it's just like, oh, okay, when, you know, because we just don't have to play those games, right? It's the games we guess up. It's again, it's a counter trend. If everyone's buying a dead Hona, you don't need to buy the dead Hona, you can go, look, a different approach. You can go buy whatever F you want. But I think that people don't do enough work on themselves to understand what they actually want. In security. So then they default to what society tells them they should have. And that's why I think entrepreneurship is a matrix. 100% is because you've given up the nine to five to work seven to nine p.m. And now you're playing a different game. It's a status game all the time. So it's always like, get there, first 100 km on your first million a month and so on. Especially the online business space is definitely, again, my am is prime for it, prime there and Dubai. It's just based off status, you know? So, but I think that's a very toxic game to play. Yeah, because you end up building an amazing business. But then don't get any don't have the appreciation or value it yourself. Yeah, that makes sense. And this goes, but this isn't saying, oh, you know, you have to begin your mind and you're learning and so on. So for and you're for you forever have like a beginner mindset. This is like genuinely having zero self, like love, I guess, to appreciate what you've done and what you've built, because you spend most your time trying to impress people don't care. Very sad. Very sad. I wonder why. This is not just me like asking this as a question. I really have no idea why online entrepreneurship turned into this. So I should go point, man. Because like Silicon Valley isn't this. You go look at somebody who's sold the company for seven, eight, nine figures. Even billionaires, they don't, they don't look like clowns. So I think it's just because a lot of guys when you were younger. So a lot of the bigger guys and I wonder, you know, the guys you see when they were younger, they were making good cash. So that's a man, Sebastian, Georgia, who just interviewed, like Luke Belmer, all these guys, those are like, those are like, oh, G. Yeah, they're like the top of the market, right? Yeah. But they kind of set a precedent that like this was normal, right? They're like running. God, he looks like he's dressed like all money all the time. And that's intentional, right? He's trying to, so he looks like James Bond. Yeah. So Luke Belmer doesn't, he doesn't, he's much more natural based on RM, right? Yeah. But what I'm trying to say is like that ecosystem is really inspiring to people because it shows that it's possible. So it's good to open up the world, but it shows a, it's some, so basically that makes it seem easy, okay? And as a result, you have some people who are insecure, who flashed numbers, you see the screenshots on Twitter, which is like Porsche 911, a Daytona watch, a chick from like only fans and a, and a shop before a screenshot, right? Yeah. And then that makes it look super, super possible. Oh my God, that's funny. So when you have people who do not have the receipts, they actually haven't done the work. They start living through that lens, say that they're making it up. Yeah. They're actually making it up. So that's why people with the loudest voices are probably the guys that are making the least amount of money and they're proving that, man, I've seen that time and time again. And it's usually from areas in security, people that were friends with me ended up turning into that. And it's just trying to play a status game. Now, as a result, you have this massive disconnect from people who are actually successful, who are unplugging from that game. Yeah. And then there's people then that are trying to flash that game and this gets amplified in areas like this. And now there's kind of red pill, kind of community approach, which is like, you know, you can't get the girl until you get the 100 KM one. And then the girl that you get is actually an only fans chick. And then it's like, she's only with gang with guys because they actually have cash. And it's crazy. It's really bad vortex. I can't stand red, but I don't really understand it at all. I think red pill plus money. That's what that's what Twitter money is. It is though, but it's so stupid. So stupid. But like if you think about it in contrast to like what relationships are, at least met when I was at the very set of my journey, we built together. She supports me. I support her. You know, it's much more of a natural organic thing, whereas like I think the whole idea of like go making money, go make your bag and then go get the girl. Yeah. I just think it's awful, but especially your summer like here, or Dubai, but then there's like in red pill, there's like, uh, like he's like undertones of like this respect. Oh, and sometimes like, and sometimes overtones too, which is just is a whole other, it's a whole other thing that yes, so there's, and I also find what pisses me off is people adopted into their content strategy, because they don't have an identity, because that makes sense. When you don't have an identity, you'll be given to people that do have identity adopted. One of my biggest issues with Chris Williamson is that he adopts red pill into his content strategy. And again, I think it's so much smarter than that, but he brings it in. And a lot of my favorite podcasters that I listened to growing up, it sort of inspired me to do this shit. They turned into red pill or politics. You took the words that I met. I was going to say about politics. So like all politics and stuff. So I would actually, I would go a little bit of self-righteousness and this could be controversial, controversial, it's like politics, red pill, and then adding in religion into it as well. Because if I'm now my newfound, my newfound religion, which is great, you can do whatever you want. But if you start inserting that into what things should be or shouldn't be, create a huge dilemma. What what it's marketing, right? We have our tribe, we have the tribe, the regains, we chose stones that everyone ever against. That's how these people blow up. What is it? It's outdated. Yeah, exactly. That's what we're going to get to this because bear in mind, if someone blows up, that means that the counter side is that some people are giving out about it, right? So if you blow up because you build a great business, you look great, you're healthy, you have people that are the opposite of say, oh, you don't need money, right? The opposite of people blowing up about a religion argument is that it's causing controversy between religions. Yeah. Right? So that's an example. There's also relationships to red pill example and as a politics example, Democrat Republican, right? Tate did, which is very strategic is, yes, all the matrix is manufactured. It was based off kind of real examples of what happens in the system, right? But Tate did something very interesting, which is that he got people to wake up in terms of like, yes, you do need to take control of your life. You need to take responsibility, which is a great message, of course. But you have guys that were not ready for the message that took it further, let me give an example. That's where guys go down the red boat route and then they say, oh, well, then I should do this and do this. It's like, dude, one, you're not Tate, you don't have that influence on authority. And two, you're missing the point, you're missing the point of it. So Tate was actually influential on my character because he because made me realize that like, I need to take more responsibility for everyone's happened in my life, right? Which is a great message. Which is a great message, right? And of course, other things got blurred and whatever. You don't even need to say that, right? It's an obvious thing. But it's like, like this conversation today, you take the things that you are most helpful for you and you disregard the rest. Well, for me, Tate was like, he's a great marketer, and his and his conscience strategies phenomenal. He's got to does the same content strategy as Tate as well. And now I'm learning that strategy and I told you have a separate video editor guy. Now he's doing that. And he's cranking out like whatever 7 to 10 clips per week and we're going to ramp it up on all these different, like all these different, like, whatever channels. Yeah. All these different channels that aren't like my main channel, right? And he's driving people back. But dude, I know what a guy said started that here. Yeah. You know, Logan Forsyth, media scaling. Yeah. I know them. I met them at a conference in Orlando. Yeah. Definitely speak to them. If you're interested, I literally just prefer it someone to Logan yesterday. Yeah. Yeah. So like that sub account approach. Yeah. They're definitely one of the best in the world. They're doing it. Yeah. I'll chat with them. I have a guy doing it now, but I'll chat with them. But yeah. So I mean, it's so. So okay. So I have a question. I have an actual question. As a creator. We're just being shoot. It's good, though. It's good. As a creator who's looking to start when you look at all the examples of people that kill it with political content, religious content, red pill content. So you dive into it. Go ahead first. Or should you stay away from it? Absolutely. Avoid like the plague. Because you don't want your brand to touch just something that you don't even believe in. Like most people's beliefs, they don't really believe it. Like the red pill stuff. It's like, it's like a trend that someone goes through when they're going to break up. Same with like any hard belief like that that you truly don't see yourself doing forever. Why are you doing it right now? You know, so politics is a great example. Even I thought many people that were advisors in a company just had to stay out of it when you're in America. Because you don't want you don't know enough about it. Right. It's awesome. People that know the least about it are most vocal with anything in life. And two, you don't care. So if I don't care about it, why on earth would I go talk about all the time? Am I interested in US economy? I'm interested in the sub factors from it, but am I interested in the main thing? No. So it's almost like you don't want to attach your brand to it. Stick to your own core values. What are you? What do you believe in? Who are you as an individual? Are you truly an honest person or truly a kind person? Is that your brand stick with those elements? And yes, is your business based on a few different levels of content pillars? Lean into that. The first thing that I do whenever I'm working with someone is it's a pyramid. I'm not pyramid. It's like a schema effectively, which is like our content pillars are broken into personal experiences. Who we are, what we've done, our achievements. Then we have our tactics and techniques of what we do. So let's say for us it's content specifically podcasted specifically. And then we have how to go. So how would I do X? How to do what? How to do Z? That's it. Anything outside of that is not allowed to be talked about. So I will often catch our clients talking with things that are outside of this framework. And I'm like, not in that you're talking about as one benefit in the brand, benefiting you or actually contributing to revenue. Because we've built out the schema. How we should look. And if you're over here talking about relationships and X, Y and Z. Just to jump on some stupid ban. Exactly. Now, however, relationships could be a value of yours. So again, we're married. I think marriage is a very important framework and value to me. I play long-term games, long-term people. I told you we're starting a couples podcast too. So yeah, exactly. Yes. And I also like trying with other guys that are also married because like we both have similar views on like longevity. That's an important part of my brand. And that's an important part of my business because it just shows I'm serious about stuff. Right. Versus multiple why is multiple girlfriends talk about what's happening on any fan that's like, we don't need to talk with this. You're literally wasting your time. And that's if you go back to the value of content. Yeah. Is there a value in doing this? Is there a value in creating a podcast? Yes. If it's all with the right stuff. So my thought on this. And then I think that the last thing I want to talk to you about is just like some of the like the growth strategies that have worked best for you and your clients. It's very interesting. But the last thought on this that I have at least, maybe you can comment on it, is when people jump on these trends. These like highly controversial trends. I think it's a losing strategy for most because there will always be somebody that's willing to sit. There will always be somebody who's willing to say something more audacious or more controversial. So true. And you can never win that game. And it's not a game trust you ever want to play. And I'll give you, I'll give you an example of something that I just discovered like last week or maybe I won't name the podcast. It doesn't really matter. But there's a podcaster who again, everybody won't know the name. And he's more recently. I like them a lot. A while back. Didn't listen to her for a lot period of time. I tuned in again because somebody flagged me on something that he said. And he asked questions that are very much focused on like race. Like explicitly focused on race. Like asking, asking questions about which race does this worse or which race does this better. Dude, and I was listening and I'm like, bro, what the fuck happened to you? But the answer is, well, he found out the controversial content gets views. And he found out that not many people are willing to ask these questions. No shit because they're fucking insane questions. But the thing is he asked these questions. And now this is like a thing that comes up a lot. And I see him asking these questions. And I'm like, listen, now he's beating everyone else who's not who's not willing to go that far. So now to get more virality, are you going to start asking like racist questions? Like I would hope not. But the point is you can't win this game. It's a game that nobody should ever want to win. But if you dabbled in red pill and you dabbled in all this other stuff, someone will just take it to the next extreme. And what's funny is I've worked with a lot of the bigger growth operator agencies who build products or evil. And the number one thing that they don't focus on is people who do reactionary videos who react to things. They react to a trend controversial topic, what not because it doesn't build a brand. Yeah, because you'll pull in a ton of use. And people will look at it. Oh, that's controversial. And things move on with their life. You don't stick to those videos. You see those videos. It doesn't build the cult. Right. So if you think about it, all of this is the antithesis of what a podcast is. It's sitting down, having a conversation, learning with someone. I would say I would say the format of podcasts is super conducive to learning, upskilling, becoming a better version. Yeah, because that's what context does. Context allows you to be able to do that. And mostly, but I'm doing that though. No, do you get me? Yeah. So that's where we had to kind of. So when I saw a lot of this stuff in 2022, 2023 kick up, it was something that I had to really, really hold in on. Even with our clients, even when we were asked to make certain videos, certain intro. It's like, okay, yes, you want to improve retention and so on. But we don't want to be seen as like the latest, like controversial thing. Yeah. Right. Touching on the thing you mentioned before, podcasting ecosystem is super fragmented. A lot of different things you can do. Audio video to social to newsletter to pay to collaborate. Like there's a million different things that you should be doing. If you've sort of gone through this podcast journey and your shows evolve and, you know, you do all the marketing shit for it. But that's super overwhelming. So if you can drill down into the things that kind of work the best and as a marketer, I hate that because you do have to test everything. But just from what your experience has been, what are the things that actually move the needle the most or the answer could be nothing. The answer could be doing it for a long period of time. But I think there was one show that you work with. It's in my nose, but I'm not going to check it now, because I can't remember what I can't remember where it is. I'm not cheap. But there's one show that you grew to like 100,000. To a bunch in a month that way as well. But it was very quick, quick, all relative. But what was like the one lever that worked. So we don't do any ads. We don't do any paid. You don't do any paid at all. No. Why not? For audio or video. For every. Okay, why not? I think the retention is very low on paid. So if you think about what paid is you're driving people to a product or awareness. If the retention is low, which it is like YouTube ads specifically, the retention could be like one second, two seconds. So it's big number or engagement. If the content isn't validated, it's basically like pissing away money. So instead I try to build a content flywheel, which is all organic. So everything is organic. And what that would entail is. So again, we focus on the strategy, making sure that those content pillars are dialed in. It's a revolving system. It's very, very dialed in on that. Every piece of content from there is of high quality. So let's say the air in a studio. We have Greg Wally production number one. Second, then it's going to be your thumbnails. We're actually actively working on making sure the CD or is incredibly high. The design is almost like a, almost like a painting. Right? Just to give context. So the caveat is YouTube YouTube. Yes. But this just feeds into everything else. Okay. So that's going to be the packaging, the writing, the content writing. The writing is actually going to be engaging. It's like a piece to get our thumbnail and so on. It's for entitled. And that's actually done before you start recording. So again, we the strategy is making sure the episode is. We know what we're trying to achieve with the episode. Yeah, it changes so on. But there's a bit of an idea there. This is when we go on the actual flywheel then, which is your newsletter. We're building. You're building the email list. You're building the lead magnets. You're pulling them into. I would pick one or two different platforms. I've always focused on LinkedIn business content. We could focus on Instagram. I would almost leave TikTok. You know, we've. I nearly never focused on TikTok ever. So having Instagram as your secondary or LinkedIn as your primary. And then bringing all of that content across because if you think about it, if you're struggling to get views and downloads, you can get that organic traffic by telling stories on LinkedIn, telling stories on Instagram, building up much more of a framework. You might not even have to release clips. Because you can do this all with having your clips just on YouTube. And on LinkedIn, you're writing. Stories, lessons, insights from the podcast from you specifically. And that's the flywheel model. My favorite rate. And it's almost a combination of seeing which sticks best. It could be LinkedIn. It could be the newsletter. And just doing more of it. Right. Because we're not trying to get. Millions of millions of views. We're trying to get the right people to the right audience. So we have some podcasts that are doing a couple of hundred views a week. A couple of thousand views a month. But those views are the right ICP. Okay. So that's how we're kind of growing it. And if you want to put flames on a fire, then we just do more of it. So that's how I've just never explored the ads approach. Maybe it works. Maybe we've experienced with that. And maybe some insight on that. But for me. If we can get the strategy dial, then then all of those key verticals on the road sides can really expand aggressively. Now, you don't need to do more content with that. Right. Because think about what LinkedIn is. Think about Instagram. It's their platforms that are going to help you push your content forward. So for me, it's much more about lean operation. We have like maybe 10 people per team. And then it's about dialing in those processes, making sure that everyone knows what the business is. Everyone knows what the content is. Everyone knows what the content pillars are. So we're pulling not just fun stuff, but the right stuff for them. You don't have any issues moving the audience away from all these platforms into a RSS feeder YouTube channel. Good question. I view it slightly differently. I view like in the ecosystem that. That's such a good point. So in the ecosystem, some people want to listen to the podcast. Yeah. So we want to watch a podcast. Some people will want to highlight a clip of 10 minutes. Some people can only consume clips. And then some people will have nothing to do with audio and video. And they'll just read your newsletter. They'll just see your post on LinkedIn or just see your tweet and Twitter. But you have to scale up to serving everyone on different verticals. So as you mentioned to me about my threads. Most people think threads are stupid. I think it's great. It's a great platform. Great organic reach on it. Yeah. A lot of those insights are what I'm talking about today. It's the same concepts and principles. So you got to serve people where they're at. Right. Yes, we can have we can index on YouTube. Yes, we can index on whatever platform you want to. But if you can find more people with the same content, then why wouldn't you bring that same content there? Right. And that concept of like repurposing is oversimplified, but it's not executed well. Right. Yeah. So it's almost like we need to have one true source of truth, which can be your platform podcast, which builds your newsletter. And then all of the content from there is elastic. It'll expand into six, seven posts on LinkedIn, 20 tweets and so on. But if it's not growing, it's a content issue. If your content is good, you need to do more growth. Right. So I wouldn't launch a ton of clips. Unless I knew the episodes were really good, we'd have to go back and change and iterate it. If we are running a ton of clips and we're not seeing success, we go back to the content. Right. It's probably the podcast America fit. It's going back around that that a circle. So I just think that people are not putting more and up and more time into thinking really about the strategy and about the actual growth mechanisms. They're too focused on one or two folks and others. And if you're doing both and they're both running really well, then it's your opportunity to monetize it. And you can do it often. We dial all of that in first. Yeah, absolutely. Because how can you get people to your offer if you don't have the growth? And how can you get people to buy your offer if the strategy is wrong? And I understand now because now when you mention that, how are you getting people to your offer? You just said it. How are you getting people to your offer? You're not building a podcast, the sake of building a podcast. You do not need 10 million downloads a day on your podcast. What you do need is an offer. And if people discover your offer via LinkedIn or your newsletter and they buy your offer, that's a mission accomplished. And it's from the vessel, right? Yes. So it's like we focus on a podcast, but then the podcast then becomes everything else because the same podcast that you're releasing will still become everything you're doing on all different platforms anyway. Yeah. Right. So where do you want to show up at your face but the parasocial relationship is totally up to you? But if you don't want to do it, you have to pay for it. Right. So this is our opportunity to stop paying for attention, create a vessel, a content strategy that's very much aligned to your business, and then just run it every single day. So then you can increase the volume, daily posts, two posts a day, three posts a day, whatever. But if you know what's working, then you don't mind investing the money. Exactly. You can ramp it up the further. Right. But then there's also a diminishing part of returns for individual accounts. So yes, the sub account is a good vessel. No, I haven't. I have an experiment with it. But there is a point whereby I give an example. We have some podcasts that come to us that have come from the very big shows and they've been worked on by the very, very big shows but they're exhausted. They're doing a podcast a month and they're just absolutely fried. So what we do is we take them down to half the volume, eight to four, and focus on the four really good quality episodes. And then that's it. They're only recording weekly. Yes, you might be able to ramp it up a little bit more, but that just keeps it sustainable. A hundred reps. Yeah. And for a longer term horizon. I love that. All right, dude. We've gone through a lot today. I appreciate this. A lot of fun. Okay, I'll ask a couple like rapid fire to close this out. But where should people go connected to you? Anywhere, dude. YouTube. Darnily. Okay, easy. I'll put stuff in the show notes. Let me know. What's one thing that you're learning about right now that I haven't asked you about. That's really interesting. That's a good question. One thing that I've recently, a big insight, I've recently learned is that. Guesterboard. Right. Guester usually board. And there's sick of being asked the same thing, which is what I'm just trying to go super like counter trend with all my preparation, all my notes. Just completely unique. Whatever never do. That's why you don't like notes. Yeah, because I did it for so long. And I noticed that the more notes I had, the more I became everybody else. So it was like, let's just do something that's very counter trend. And let's just chill. We're literally just chilling now. Yeah. And allowing things to happen naturally, because I didn't do that for a long time. And if I was to go back and. Share my best episodes, it would be things that were much more natural like that. A genuine curiosity and inquisitive. Like you're a super inquisitive guy. Like you're listening, listening closely. You analyze people. This is not an offer. You know. You know what I think it is. I think it's like stop being so selfish. Yeah. I don't think it's a podcast problem. I think it's like a bigger ego problem. Yeah. I think people just don't give a shit about other people. I think that's the issue. I think that. I think Joe Rogan is genuinely interested AF in whoever's sitting across table from it. Yeah. If you people blame their phone, they blame the restaurant waiter who's coming in interrupting them. But it's not. It's like, that's where I love podcasting general, because you can be genuinely just stuck in the moment. I love it. I love it because very rarely. And like I might fall too. Like when I'm having conversation with somebody outside of what we're doing right now. Check out my phone. Like I'm watching TV at night. I have TV. I have computer. I have my cell phone beside me. Like I have three screens in front of it. So much information. So much right. So you can't focus. Your brain's like scattered all the time. So writing and interviewing people are like the most therapeutic things I've ever done. I love it. Yeah. What would be the biggest misconception about podcasting if people believe it's not true? Oh, we can go all day. It's a lot. We can go all day. So the biggest thing is that I had some of the bigger agencies in the beginning of it telling me that you couldn't make money from a podcast. And I realized that it was not to do with the podcast. It was to do with entrepreneur. People can't make money from podcasts. I actually just bought entrepreneurs. It's so fun. Because you can make money doing anything. So the 11 standard side you can scale that if you if you put the big enough lemonade stand. It's nothing to do with the vessel. It's to do with you. Like people who don't make money suck and make money. It's simple. It is true. There are some people that are phenomenal making money. Of course, so they touch something they make money. Dude, you could put some guys in the desert in Arizona. Yeah. Take off their pants, hand them a cell phone. I guarantee you they make 100 K like 20 hours. One of my one of my really good friends. One of my really good friends, his name is Joseph Martin. He's a small boxy charm for $500 million massive exit. But like this story that he doesn't tell you maybe tells on some podcast. But when he was I think when he was in college, he was making like two or three hundred thousand dollars a month. Like running traffic through AdWords or some shit like that. Then his first business was. His first business was a like a wholesale merchandisers liquidators business where you take like truckloads of like merchandise. His business was like just casually making 10 million dollars a year. And then he then he turned around while he was building that started boxy charm because that's so many excess and so much excess inventory of beauty goods that he actually turned that into it. Like some people are just very good at making or not just making money because that's like it sounds cheap. They're resourceful. They're resourceful and they see opportunity. And they aggressively pursue opportunity when it's working. And I think that that's a it's a skill that you can learn. And it's something that even as a as a successful I put that in air quotes because I've had some success not compared to what he's done. But as a successful entrepreneur, it's something that I still have to learn. So even though there was an exit that I started doing all these businesses. None of them are working. Now the podcast is working. And now I'm doubling down on that. And I think that that's actually like you start to. It's like shiny objects syndrome, but. What do you do until you final works exactly and then you just focus on that. I think that's I think that and then I think that. More people have to focus on that and. I'm always a fan of saying sick with something until. Like doing it for an unreasonable amount of time until it works. But the caveat is you're not. Doing the same thing over 10 years. So you're sick with something for 10 years. Your year one version of it is going to be very different than year two and you're three and you're five and you're 10. You're all going to be these like permutations of the first thing. But it's going to be you learning and iterating and evolving over those 10 years. That will allow you to be successful. So evolutions. It is evolution. Last thing that I love to ask is you go back. You're already young. So it's kind of like not that you're young enough. Whatever the question is if you could tell your 20 year old self one thing. What would it be? Probably to quit alcohol earlier. Really? Yeah, I quit alcohol two and a half years ago. Yeah. And so that was the you went there was supposed to have 500 days. Yeah. Two and a half years now. So I was like 900 days. Some shit. Yeah. It was just a waste time. It was a distraction. Like it was just pointless. We just didn't lose a priority when I was younger. It's a soul big in Ireland that it becomes indoctrinated into society that you have to do it. If you don't do it, you're a loser. And I was like, I could just be where I am plus 10 steps ahead. We're just soft drinking earlier. I had no problem. I didn't have like any abuse issue. But probably if you spoke to someone I probably did from a medical perspective, right? Because everyone in Ireland drinks a lot. But it was just a hinders progress. And it is used as a mechanism to suit, celebrate commiseration. Congratulations. Every single emotion it is used as a vessel just to distract yourself. Yeah. So if you are not successful and if you are failing, it is now a excuse to be able to take it easy and chill. And don't worry about it. Because go for a beer. Whereas if I just stopped drinking and if I just. If I stop parodying doing all that dumb stuff, I'd have figured out all the stuff that I figured out later on earlier. You know, it's so funny because I used to be so against. Like this sober movement. I'm like, how cool is not going to like really hurt you that much. I used to drink every once in a while. But I actually haven't drank in like, I'm sure like three or four months. Because I get so frustrated when I'm not clear and focused and high energy. And I didn't even mean to stop drinking and just like, I just. I definitely don't need it for like feeling comfortable in social situations. In fact, I'm already too much sometimes in social situations. Like I just give no fucks. So like alcohol doesn't help that at all. You completely sober. And then I'll still be able to like have fun out of party and chat with whoever the fuck I want. But for me, it was just energy levels and clarity of thought. Now I have his fridge right there full of a whole bunch of drinks. If anybody wants to drink, I have a drink with them, no problem. But it just it was just like not a net positive. It like there was literally zero positive. I think that if you are like super introverted and scared about the, you know, social. You can make an argument for a little bit of a positive writing the taxi behavior. You can actually quite fix for sure by going out and being more social more often for sure. And like it's also as you mentioned there, the other effects, right? So I felt like shit from drinking drinking so much. And I was foggy for two, three days and all this. Also being fat too. Exactly. But I was also like again, my way of training went down. I stopped training as much. I also became more anxious. I just, my sleep got really bad. I seemed like three or four hours of nice. Lots of negative things. I could just be startled by just stop drinking. So you may want to have a drink for your first child or you sell a company or whatever that is. But if I know that it's toxic for me. Yeah. Then why would I do it? And I'm the perfect case study of when you give it up and the benefits. So I was doing nothing on my life. Just going through the home drum. Do whatever else was doing in the ninth five I gave up. And I was able to solve the problems that I need to solve in the moment continuously. Yeah. When the weekend came around, it wasn't about when was I going to drink. It was going to be like, I have to get this done. This done this done. Yeah. Perfectly fine. Because I get more. I get more. What's the word I'm thinking of energy energy validation. Just like net feel good from on a weekend. Like doing work. Yeah. Or like spending time with you know or like going out. Like but like not having to. If I drink it's like I feel like the weekend's gone. Yeah. And I feel like I jump from like my weeks are tough. Weeks are like non stop. And I feel like weeks are like just sort of blurring into each other. And I actually just feel drained. Not from like the liquor from like the little from the lack of. Time sober when I'm not working like balls to the wall. Yeah. And also you fall behind. Yes. You do fall. Yeah. You enjoy your work. Yeah. As do I. Like I don't I'll jump on a podcast on a Sunday afternoon. When you act from a stable position though you know solid position. Yeah. So I think that's when you're. When you're behind you do irrational things. Yeah. You act from a piece of anxiety. Yeah. Okay. Second podcast going on alcohol. We could go on. I have no doubt. It's very because I actually hate the I hate. Like all or nothing in black and white. I don't believe life is like that. And I do not like when people are like I can no longer eat this. And I can no longer drink. I'm like you. You are setting yourself up for failure. And I don't like that personality type. To me it's. It's too extreme. I like people to do things for the right reasons. Not just because. They're tying into some like cultural norm of drinking or not drinking. Do it for you. Do it so it fits your schedule. I think it's just a healthier way to go through life. 100%. I'm not drinking anymore because. I wash the podcast and now there's a whole sober movement. That's not a good reason to never drink again. And also you don't have to talk about it every time you're at a party. It's also annoying as fuck. Yeah. No one cares. No one cares. So do things for the right reason and do things so that they're sustainable. I mean people do it for like health and wellness. I've been working out. And in this fitness game. I mean I used to be a much better shape than I announced. I don't like troll too hard. But I used to be in like you know really good shape. I'm talking like stepping on stage almost for like bodybuilder competition shape. Not anymore. I used to play a lot of sports. But. I've been working out since I I don't know. Like. Well working out gym working out like 14 15. Like. So like hockey and then sports used to coach tennis play rugby used to play soccer. So I've always been working out or around it. And the people that lose weight look good turn into lifestyle. It's not about extremes. It's about doing it again for as long as you possibly can. So I think that that's just a healthier attitude when it comes to like diet. You take on whether or not you're drinking or not. Just find a way to do it for the long term. Sure. Yeah. School boy to finish. I think so. Awesome. Appreciate it. Appreciate you so much. That was a lot of fun. You