Guest Podcast: Everything I Screwed Up When I Started My Podcast (That One Time)

Today, on that one time, I'm joined for the second time round by Scott D. Clary. Scott is an entrepreneur and the host of the Success Stories podcast, which boasts over 20 million downloads across over 650 episodes and has featured interviews with the world's best business This episode is a little different as instead of being an interview, we're pulling back the curtain of the business of podcasting. If you've ever thought about starting your own podcast or want to level up the one that you have, this deep dive is for you. Scott shares his journey, challenges and the strategies that has propelled his success. We also explore the A to Z of the key elements required to create and build a winning podcast. Whether you're a seasoned podcaster or just starting out, there is something in here for everybody. I really think you'll enjoy the insider's guide to podcasting success with Scott D. Clary. If you find value in this episode, please follow us, give us a rating on Spotify or like and subscribe on YouTube. We're on a journey to a thousand subscribers and your support means a world. Today we're doing something different. I'm here with Scott D. Clary, who's a friend of mine and the host of Success Stories podcast, which to date has done over 650 episodes, 20 million downloads and interviewed some of the greats in business such as Seth, Gordon, Grant Cardone and the founder of Netflix, Mark Randolph and many more. Scott, welcome back. Thanks for having me back. I'm excited to do this. It's it's it's it. Part two. Yeah, part two, we're going to be doing a deep dive into the podcast business, how to run a podcast, the stories, the ideas, the directions of technical analysis. So yeah, let's get into it. So well, let's start with your story. Where did you where did your podcast begin? How did it begin? What were the early days like versus what's going on now? So the podcast started when I was building a company that was eventually acquired and the sort of the thesis behind the the thesis behind creating a brand, which came before starting a podcast. And I actually first started posting content and building a brand in air quotes on LinkedIn. But it was about future proofing myself. So I know that the company that was building at the time was going to be acquired, but it wasn't going to be like, if you never work again, money, it was not that kind of exit, not that kind of company. It was listen, it was a season of my life. And I'm very grateful for it. But I knew that I had to start again at some point. And I didn't want to have to start from scratch. And I was also a marketer. So I you mentioned before we pressed the record that you have a bias towards content. And you know, the Gary Vaynerchuk's of the world and the Seth goans of the world and like the Grand Cardones and all the other people in the Hermosies and all the people make tons of content. And at the time, Seth was around Gary was around. Grant was ish around, but he wasn't really considered like marketing thought leader. He was more of like he markets, but he was more of a real estate guy. And Hermosie was not really around. So I was a student of Gary Vaynerchuk and I saw that he built the audience basically just through reps over a period of time. And then he used that audience to launch brand. So then he would launch. Well, he had Vayner Media, which is kind of what the first business he built with his brother. And then he had a Vayner sport and empathy wines and eventually dropped his NFT project. And he has a ton of other businesses. Some probably have never even seen the light of day. But the point is he's used this platform to launch stuff. And I didn't know what I wanted to do in the future. But I knew that I didn't want to start from scratch. And I wanted to basically make my life easier going forward. If I wanted to launch a new company or I wanted to launch a product or I say, I want to do like coaching or consulting or whatever. So that's that New York in the background. Oh, yeah, we love it. It's soothing sound that like makes me feel safe and at home. I miss that sound. I miss New York. But I have to. New York's a very inspiring city, actually, every time. So Miami, it's interesting because you have wealth everywhere. But you have like, you have wealth, but it feels like nobody wants to work. But you know that when you see all the yachts, the people work like crazy to get those. But I feel like now, people Miami, they just like the lifestyle, it's so much lifestyle. When I go to New York, I feel so small and insignificant. And you look out over the city and you're just like, shit, like there's so much I can do. I mean, you just feel like you've got to hustle more. It's such a, yeah, everyone is hustling. Yeah, very different vibe. I go to New York is like, is like a mix of like a palette cleanse, but also just like to lay like a fire under my ass every once in a while. Cause that like, anyways, back to the podcast. So yeah, just understood that I want to do stuff in the future. I don't want to start from scratch. And if I had an audience of people that knew who I was and liked me and trusted me, then I wouldn't have to spend X million dollars on marketing budgets to take a product to market. That was really the thought process. So then I was like, okay, so what do I know? What can I talk about what type of content can I create? I'm not like a big fan of short form video at the time because I didn't really understand video that well. I didn't think about I didn't think TikTok was a great medium for like somebody who came from an entrepreneur background to really kill it at. I saw people killing it on TikTok and other short form platforms. Actually, I can't even remember if short form was a thing on Instagram when I started. I don't think so. About six years ago, I can't remember when it was on marketing. Yeah, it was, it was just, it was just coming off. And it was like dancing videos. I'm like, okay, this isn't, yeah, this isn't a vibe for me. So what type of content would I enjoy to create? Can I figure out how to create and can I and can I build a system so I can do it and play the long game? Cause I've spoken this a lot. But if I believe if you if you do something for an unreasonable amount of time, you're going to have almost an impossible chance of failing at it. If you're a smart person, you iterate through some of the things you don't work and you learn and you improve. So I was like, I had that mindset going into the podcast as well as I would with any business. So I'm like, okay, what's the thing I can do for a long period of time? And I started with LinkedIn because that seemed to be my demographic. I was running sales and marketing at a startup and I understood sales and marketing. I spoke about these types of topics and conversations and hiring and ICP and buyer persona and avatar and sequencing and outbound. I don't know what any of those words are. You've just it doesn't matter. It doesn't matter. The point is it's about driving revenue for companies. And I was leading sales and marketing. I did that my whole career. So this is what I started speaking about on LinkedIn. Obviously resonates with a super nerdy LinkedIn audience. And I'm I am a nerd. So I can call people back. So started there. And I also realized that that's great. But it's not a scalable strategy. So if I write a long post for LinkedIn, it could hit on LinkedIn. But it's not going to translate into YouTube. It's not going to translate into Instagram without some sort of interpretation or some sort of massaging that. So that I looked at podcasts and I looked at, okay, not only is this type of content going to be video content, which is a little bit more engaging. It can be replicated across platforms. It's less lift in my opinion to take video and turn it into written content that it is. It take written content and to format it into video. Because if I'm already recording the video content, then I can just chop it up and distribute it. Also, a side effect of doing video content and podcasts, it's sort of like, check two other boxes. One nobody gave a shit about me at the time and nobody knew who I was. So I wanted to interview. Except for your mom of course. My mom always cared. I'm always care. Yeah. Yeah. She's always been a fan of my content. Sometimes I think she thinks she still doesn't 100% get what I do when she sees my face pop being up on YouTube all the time. But yeah, she's always been a very big fan and supportive. But my dad's actually really funny because he's like, he's like a big car YouTube guy, which is all like the car channels. And then he lasts because he's like, I always watch my car guys and then like your face pops up on my YouTube. But he's not watching. I don't think he's watching stuff. I don't think he's watching a kind of like entrepreneur interviews. He's like this. I don't know what my son's doing here, but whatever. Good for him. Anyway, I could rate to explain it that I've used is like, it's basically a new form of like CNN. You're creating a show that doesn't distribute through a TV channel. It's true, but it's such a hard, it's such a hard concept to wrap your mind around when you build it from scratch. Yeah. Because you build the you own the distribution and you build it from scratch. And that's a very novel. I mean, it is new. It's not like it's not new and strange for us because we live it. But it's new and strange for a lot of people. I mean, Joe Rogan having more impressions than like Fox and CNN. That's insane. That's absolutely insane. So it is new media. It is built your own distribution channel. Yeah. I mean, like I dated a girl a little while ago and she had, she was an influencer and she was, she would always like get weed when someone asked her what she did for work. And I'm, I just determined to say you work in media. You are, you run a media company. Like that is the core of it. It's so funny. Gina, Gina. So, so my better half also, she has a massive Instagram account called my therapist says they've been doing it for the hell like 8.3 million followers. That's her whole business. They built it with their sister. She built it with their sisters. And it's so funny. She also, I mean, she knows what she's doing. She built a massive company around this. But like when somebody asks her what she does, like there's been all these different versions of an answer. And I'm like, this is just like, you're not, you're not just an influencer. Like you built a media brand. You have media business. You have 10 different assets that have X millions of followers. Like this is, I mean, I, I, like they've hit over 100 million US impressions per month. Yeah. Well, they're not always there. But like they've hit that number. But that's like phenomenal. That's a wild amount of impressions. Like I wish my podcast did 90 million. That's wild. So, I mean, you are a media company at the end of the day. And that's, and it's funny because you go through this journey of all these different identities when you're building your contacts. You're a creator and you're an entrepreneur and you're a founder. And then you're also a media company and you're all these things all at once. But it's also, it's probably an interesting conversation about the psychological component of entrepreneurship and what you identify as. And I don't, I'm not an expert in that by any means. But I, there is something interesting there when somebody asks, what do you do? And the first answer that comes to your mind. And that's a really good signal as to what you're focused on or what you're not. And really where your energy and your passion goes. But anyway, so podcast seem to make a lot of sense. I could bring in guests. And again, not every podcast has to be a guest interview. But for me, it was like, I want to tap in other people's audiences because that's how I'm going to grow because eventually no one knows who I am and nobody cares about me. And that will eventually change as you grow and you become a creator and your own right and people actually do shop for your show for you, not the guest, but day zero. Nobody knows who you are. And then again, so super scalable content strategy, record the podcast, turn into all these derivative pieces of content, simultaneously tapping into other people's audiences, which is a helpful growth mechanism. And then the last thing that I really liked about podcasting is it, it was a medium that I enjoyed. I enjoyed the core of it. Yeah, I think so. I've thought about this a lot like I enjoy long form content. I enjoy content that has context. I don't enjoy clickbait. I don't enjoy short form that doesn't really provide value. I also don't enjoy people who oversimplify complex topics or who are not genuine. And I found that podcast just if you speak to somebody for two hours, it's really hard for them to bullshit you for two hours. And also it's not even about the bullshit. It's just about oversimplifying things that are not simple. So I enjoy listening to a podcast because I get like the real answer or the real insight from that person. I also believe that, you know, I have very strong opinions about books. I think that books are edited and filled with fluff from the editor just to hit a certain word count. I like listening to authors that come on podcasts around the time when they released a book because the author is going to talk about the points that they actually care about. Yes, there's a whole bunch of benefits of reading, but there's a lot of fluff in there to hit some page counter word count that I don't think was probably the first most important, most top of mind, most, you know, thing that this author is so intimately passionate about, that's not 100% of the book. But I do want to know what that is. And I can do that through a podcast, which is obviously I'm a fan of the medium because I do it. But that was really the that was a kickoff. And it's sort of just been doing it since then. It was the two ideas with the, I think the author idea, probably the really good authors get their book cut down by like 90% and then the bad authors need to get fluffed up. So it's probably, probably goes in those two ways. And the other, the other thought I had was, um, and the thing I love about podcasting, like this podcast has a, you know, that one time has a small audience right now. But it is, you know, we're 70 episodes in and that's, that's nothing in this like world. Shut up. That's substantial. What are you talking about that? You know, I've told you this stat. It's like, if you, if you do more than nine episodes, you're already in like the top 1% of podcasts. Let me rephrase that. It's, it's nothing in the world of successful podcasts because you hear the stories of pretty much every successful podcast that I've heard of like a, how to do a podcast episode on, they all say, yeah, we were doing shit for like three years and nobody was listening. And then one day it just went bang. But yes, but also it's, there's some other crazy stats like, uh, the top 10 podcasts account for 35% of the ad revenue in the entire market. So yes, there is, there is going to be a slow grind for a podcast. There's going to be a middle class creator economy with podcasts that aren't making a hundred million dollar Spotify deals. But if you stick with it long enough and you are good at it and you find a niche that you serve, I mean, they're, like in any industry, there could be outsized returns once you get to the top of your field. And then also, I do believe that again, you're building a form of leverage, right? You're building one of the four types of leverage, which then you can use to launch other products or services. And look, um, the thing I was going to say, Diary of a CEO, he spoke about the impact that podcasts have on people. He, he, there was a podcast you put out in 2021 that I recently listened to that he was talking about, you know, how much money is made and why he keeps doing it. And he mentioned that he's like, we would do these Facebook posts and they'd get millions of views. But then we would do podcast episodes and have thousands of views. And I would get stopped on the street 95% of the time because of his podcast. No one remembers the short form. But these long form episodes and these long form pieces of content with the right talking to the right person at the right time locks into their brain in a very, very deep way. Just as another example, I again, in context, small podcasts, small listener base growing up into the right, but small, I get a call from a friend of mine. And she goes, the last podcast you did was unbelievable. Like, I've told all my friends, I've told my family, I love it so much. Just that alone. There's one of those is amazing to like here and motivate, extremely motivating. You don't get that from like some random TikTok you're going to do. No, because because the trust that's built with the podcast is like any other social. I mean, I was actually just reading, I was in a Facebook group for Riverside. We're actually recording on right now. And one of the questions, because I like to read just for content ideas, I like to read like what problems people are having because it's actually a great way to create content because you know that that's like a topic that's going to hit. And one of the people, one of the people in the group was saying like, I had two reals on Instagram that got over a million views. And I had, and nothing happened to the downloads on the podcast. Yeah. Yeah. So, and also that's that's pretty that's a pretty normal situation. If you look at, if you look at not just podcasts, but long form video or long form versus short form. If you look at a big YouTuber and long form could be 10 minutes, it could be 60 minutes, it could be like Lex Friedman's eight hour long forms, anything like over 30. This is my whole episode too. Did you actually? I did. That's not too wild. That's too much. That's a long ass episode. But if you look at YouTubers, the biggest YouTubers, and you want to gauge how effective at building trust and trust leads to actual revenue and trust leads to evangelism. But if you want to look at the biggest YouTubers, they their audience follows them. So the biggest YouTubers have massive of Instagram and Twitter and Facebook and TikTok and everywhere else. You go to a big TikToker. It's like tickets everywhere else. Yeah. Yeah. Billions, billions with a B views on TikTok and have like a hundred Twitter followers. It's actually insane. I don't, I actually don't understand how disloyal TikTok audiences are. But I know that like in past lives, I've run campaigns and I've run marketing campaigns and I've run ads and I've done TikTok influencers and it's just the worst. It just has not worked out. I don't know what it is. I know that people, I know that people scroll and maybe they just don't build an affinity with the influencer or the thought leader on TikTok like they do. But I see the signals that it's just not an effective trust building platform. It's almost like if you think of social as like a funnel, I would say like TikTok is at like the top of the funnel and then YouTube could be somewhere closer to the bottom where you're trying to get closer to like conversion. But TikTok is just like awareness. Like I want, like if I'm using TikTok, I just want somebody to like not not everyone's going to be a Charlie Demilio. I just want somebody to like see my face once and then in a month or two months when they finally stumble across my YouTube or my podcast, they're like, oh yeah, I remember him. Let me see what this podcast is about. Like that's the conversion. But it's not going to be like and then they're going to listen to the podcast and they're going to become a subscriber or they're going to buy my product or service. But it's not going to be like for for from my experience TikTok directly through to lifelong fan or high value customer. Well, it's probably because if I'm thinking this through in any meaningful way, TikTok, there's like low intent, like you go on TikTok, you're scrolling through a 4U page, you're getting fed an algorithm, you're watching low intent, low impact videos. And you're not making any personal choice to get to that point. And then the other one, I think the other reason why I think YouTube's very, very powerful is you have to, you know, it's really going to see the same creator over and over again without a follow. So you like someone you follow them. There's like the first point of intent. And then let's just say a podcast or a weekly video or something. There's, I did, I didn't episode, I can't remember with who, but they said that, oh, I think it might have been, no, I think it was, I've got, I just, my brain just went, I don't know what, forget about the person, what did they say? Out of my head. Anyway, so I did, I did a podcast recently with a guy and he mentioned that he would build trust through spaced repetition, consistency over a weekly check-in with his self resulted in much more trust to occur. And you could do that with your business partners, you're done with your relationships, you do that with strangers. So the idea that every time, spaced repetition and showing up consistently builds a basis of trust in all components of the human interactions. So if you model that directly to content, that could be a weekly show, that could be, you know, a daily show with Oprah. You're there every day, same day, same time, you're doing a podcast release at 6 p.m. every Thursday, same week, same time, it builds that, that genuine trust that is just part of the human interaction, but TikTok does not. In any form. Yeah, TikTok is just chaotic. And by the way, that, that, that strategy is a pretty common strategy. So even in, again, talk about sales, like you have to have, depending on how expensive your product is, 15 to 17 touch points with the customer before they trust you, enough to make a buying decision. So that, that could be a call, that could be an email, that could be, that could be them going to your website. Like, it's not necessarily spaced out in a cadence like what you're talking about. If it could be, that'd be phenomenal. But, yes, that's a very, that's a very common, it's a very common idea. And I think that it's actually very smart for content. And the fact that, again, there's no, it, it's a little bit different if you're trying to structure this idea around somebody buying a product or service because they need this product or service. In content, the thing they need can be found anywhere. It's not, it's not like there's four or five vendors that they have to look at to buy this thing. The thing that somebody needs when they're looking at content could be entertainment, it could be distraction, it could be information, it could be humor. There's a couple different things that people actually need and get out of content. But it can be, it's almost like, there's so many opportunities to get it that if you aren't dialed into one person and if you just see them flip through your screen, great. But I can find content just as good if not better than that person in the next 20 slides or whatever, the next 20 tick talk thing. So it's just, it's just like a, it's a commodity. It's just like, it's just pure commodity and there's so much of it. So it's really hard to gain the trust with somebody. Now, the inverse would be if somebody discovered you on YouTube and watches all your content and then they go follow you on tick talk because they like you and they want to just consume you everywhere and they trust you. But the trust has to come from YouTube first. It's very rarely going to come from tick talk first. Yeah, exactly, exactly. So moving into your story a bit further, what was the point of inflection? Well, I think that, I think the idea, when I think inflection point, I think something that had to happen that pushed me towards starting a thing. So maybe, sorry, let me reframe that question. So what you started the podcast, you had, it started work, it started going and then there was there a moment in time where you went, where you saw that it was really clicking and how long was that and what do you think pieced it all together? No, no, no, not at all. Not at all. I would say that, I would say that because I don't want people to think that there's a point where it just gets a lot easier. The same workflow that I did in the first week of creating that podcast is more or less the exact same as the same workflow that I do now. Now, what is improved is I'm a better interviewer. I have better guests. I have a better team supporting me, which then creates a flywheel, which drives more revenue, which allows me to promote it more, which allows me to get better guests and hire better people and just do more and better. And I mean, the podcast growth has really been like just anybody who's listening who's created a ton of content on other platforms usually can equate their success to a viral moment. That's what I've heard from people that have built on other platforms. There's like one tweet that's shared by somebody huge or there was one TikTok that went viral and then you got 50,000 followers. For a podcast, I have found that it is very much like this linear growth significantly linear growth. And the reason why that is is because there's no organic discovery on podcasts, which is also why I also focus on YouTube a lot. But for the majority of this career, it's been just linear growth. It's so interesting because it's very tough to build a podcast. It's probably one of the hardest things that I've done. But it's also afforded me the most opportunity. And now is one of the funnest things that I get to do. So I don't mind it, considering the fact that I talk to people I find fascinating for a living. But there was no one guest or there was no one strategy that was like, oh, it's going linear. And then all of a sudden, it like shoots up into the right like some massive bell curve hockey stick growth. I would say that the hockey stick growth starts when you start. It's almost it's like this. It's life is so cruel. Life is so cruel. Because your hockey stick growth starts for podcasts, audio for sure, when you start to chart. And when you start to chart, that's when people discover you. And that's when you get like truly exponential growth. However, you when you chart on Apple. Oh, charge. Charge. Charge. Charge. Yeah. Charge. No, charging charging does not lead to exponential growth. If anything, it has the inverse effect. So how do you chart? You have to hit X amount of downloads a month. And that's how you chart. And when you hit that amount of volume, then that's when you chart, then that's when people actually start to discover you outside of the effort and energy that you're putting in. So my subscribers and my growth almost exclusively had been attributed to me. I mean, the gamut of marketing activity. So turning the podcast into a whole bunch of shorts, turning the podcast into a newsletter, into a blog, assuring the blog on my website, doing running paid ads for it, doing collaboration with other podcasts, cross pollinating my audience across all my different. So newsletter tells people to go to the podcast, podcasts, people go newsletter, social tells people to go to the newsletter podcast. So it's like the every single marketing activity you could do for a business you do for your podcast. And that's what helps it grow. But it's not like there's one particular marketing activity that had outsized returns compared to all the others. So but it's a very loyal audience. So the audience does stick with you. And the audience does follow you around. And that's a benefit of it. But yeah, so it's it's it's tough because I don't want that to be I don't want that to be, you know, to turn somebody off from starting it. But what I do want them to do is understand that if you're going to do this, do it for the long game and build a system or process that allows you again to do it for an unreasonable amount of time, five to 10 years, because it's fine. It's supposed to be fun. It's supposed to be enjoyable. But if you can stick around for five to 10 years, and then you adopt some marketing strategies to help it grow. And if you reinvest the revenue that comes from it right back into the marketing and the advertising of the show, you'll you'll be successful. It's not a matter of it's not a matter of if it's a matter of when. But I do think that expectations have to be met because we live in again an era of instant gratification and virality and overnight everything. And usually when success comes quick, it can also go quick. So I think that that's really that's what I found at least. I mean, people can definitely use virality to kick off careers. Don't get me wrong. But I don't mind having a loyal I don't mind having a loyal audience. It's six with me and continue to grow with me. And the podcast is only moving in the right direction. And I I have set myself up so that it is not so much of a burden on me time wise or financially that if it does, you know, now it's obviously successful. But if if it did take another 10 years, I would have to quit because I couldn't pay my rent or I couldn't pay my rent or I don't have any time with my family. In my mind, that's the podcast. That is there's no there's no point in speedrunning a podcast. I don't think it's valuable. I don't think it's a it's a way to win. Now there's ways again, there's strategies to help it grow. But still, I think that you do have to have some patience when you're building this out. Yeah, definitely. And I'm noticing that there's my editor and I appartners in this and he makes a joke that he's like, Oh, I mean, this for three years with nothing. I know that we're not getting anywhere for at least three years. But it's all compounded. It's all compounded. And also, there's other ways. So the way that I did it, I did not start a podcast for a business. I started a podcast because I enjoy chatting with people and I started a podcast for starting a podcast. But if you have a business, there's ways to leverage a podcast that can better serve your business. So if you have a product or a service you sell, then it can monetize much quicker, right? We're talking about podcasting just for the sake of ad revenue, which is different than having a business on the back end of it from day one. Well, some very interesting conversations are beginning to develop. Like I have one example of a sponsor that I had that started off as a sponsor and that relationship is slowly developing and we're looking at potentially coming on as like equity partners for that brand with a part of the sweat being incorporating media, which which is wild. So you're going into businesses. Yeah, buying into businesses through the media channel is a really, really interesting long term growth strategy for just life. Well, look at 20 VC with Harry. He started a VC focus podcast and I'm pretty sure that's how he raised his fund. He has a nice little portfolio of companies acquired. Also, I don't know if they use their podcasts to raise it. I'm pretty sure, I don't know, I don't want to speak at a lie. I don't think user podcasts to raise a fund. But I know that one of the co-hosts, for sure, I think both of them actually have their own funds. Again, business focus podcast, I'm sure at the very least it gives them access to deal flow because they have such great connections. So even if it's not directly like they're advertising, they're raising a fund and they're going out to some of the listeners to raise as GPs, it will give them access to deal flow. And also, I know that the opportunities that you get from doing this, they're huge. I mean, I've spoken at inbound, which is a massive business conference put on behalf spot for the past three years. And it sort of kicked off like a little bit of a speaking career for me. And now I speak at a variety of different spots. And those acquired guys that I just mentioned. Again, that's a very large business podcast. And they just did a live podcast interviewing Mark Zuckerberg at the Chase Center in what is it? SF, I think. And that was spot that was put on. And that was in front of 10,000 people. And that was put on by JP Morgan, who is their title sponsor for I guess this season or last season. So like the opportunities are absolutely huge. And there's going to be ways to monetize and just basically just improve your life in a variety of ways or build a bigger brand or whatever you want to accomplish if you start a show. And the reason is because you are just exposing yourself to so many ideas and so many people that the advertising component really, if you look, if you zoom out and you look at the impact, yeah, it's like it's so small compared to the impact that's going to have on your life. Yeah, really? No, I don't, I don't want to sound corny, but it's true. I mean, the stepping onto some of the stages that you'll get set onto and the people that you'll meet, it's like it's truly life changing. There's not many other ways that to do that, to have that many opportunities, it would be very expensive to do that without this particular, or this particular media. Yeah, well, look, you know, using the recent guests that I've had, which is the biggest guests I've had, you know, outside of you, of course, was Chris Voss, like he's a very well-known, Chris is a very nice person. He's massive, right? And and that came off the back of realistically, he's like, the list of reasons why he came onto the podcast. And I've read his book, I've done some of his masterclass, I've listened to a ton of his podcasts, like he's been on Joe Rote, no, no, no, no, no, he's been on Diro Vassillo, he's been on Andrew Huberman, he's been on Lex Friedman, he's been on, I think Chris William said, like he's been on, he's been on, yeah, he's been on a lot of spots. And they've all got millions of views on YouTube, he's got a book that sold two and a half million copies, he speaks for probably 20 to $50,000 for an hour. And again, I know you say that I'm in like the top one, but as far as I'm concerned with where my goals are at, we are at like, we are at the point five percent of where I want this to be one day. But just by the sheer fact that we at this point, I got to sit down with him, you know, camera to camera for an hour and 15 minutes and talk to him about what he's the fuck I wanted to talk about. I know, it's amazing. And then I get to potentially make money off that. That concept alone is ridiculous. And the thing I said before it was Chris, that was where the podcast, that was where that idea of like space repetition came from, because it came from him talking to, oh, about about like a hostage, yeah. Hostage is constantly negotiation with the criminals. He would do space repetition the same time building trust. And we spoke about this idea that, oh, is that relevant for the rest of your life? And he said, 100%. You can apply that to every other element. And that, that is an idea is going to fundamentally shift how I navigate dating, how I navigate my staff, how I navigate my friendships, desire of checking in, said from someone who does this at a high level to me, and not to anybody else to me, etches into your brain in a very strange way. And, and I just want to talk about the story specifically. He came onto the podcast because of a few things. It was, we had a nice branded website. We had a reasonably branded pitch deck. We had, what a set is a reasonably, like a reasonably reasonably branded pitch deck. It's just like, I want to see what a reasonably branded pitch deck looks like. You've got the pitch deck. Do I have it? Oh, shit. Well, clearly, maybe the pitch deck doesn't matter. No one reads a pitch deck. But yeah, we have the pitch deck links with the website, the kind of, the reasons why the podcast are clear, like why the podcast is just so clear, like the pillars are there, the pillars are health, wealth and wisdom. It's like, it's, it's easy enough to digest. The trust is built from that element. And we've done 70 episodes. So it's like, not a flash in the pan. He doesn't know who the hell I am before I reached out to him. But we've done 70 episodes, one of those episodes hit and went kind of viral, which means we've had some success. And that was the one with one of the, that one has like 120,000 views on YouTube. And it was interviewing the lead singer of an old metal band from New York. And he turns out he has a crazy story and a crazy viral, like a crazy, like die hard fan base. He's, he's serious. That's that. And the episode is, I'll send you it later. But the episode itself is, it's, and this is a funny point. I, when I did that episode, right, it was really hard to get him on because he's like, he lives in Tulum. He's in his, probably late 50s now. We randomly met because I was in Tulum for two months. We kept crossing past. He takes a call on, on his laptop, without a mic, sitting on his like rooftop looking, overlooking the jungle in Tulum. He's vaping. He's topless full of tattoos. That's so funny. He didn't even give a shit. I don't know. But I thought to myself, oh, this episode is going to be like really rough. And then it's the one that popped. So you don't know when it's going to go. Yeah. That's another thing. That's so true. It's so true. And then, and then, so you're to your point or to what I mentioned before, but you still have to work at it because not all 120,000 of those people are going to listen to the next one. No, of course not. But it's just, it's just a moment in time that shows a person that I don't know that, okay, this guy is worth at least considering. And then, I had a good cold email. I found his email on LinkedIn, emailed him. They said, yes, he came on. I see. You didn't, you didn't talk to him at all? No. No, no, no, no. This is like Chris Voss, I didn't talk to him. Oh, shit. It's going back to the Chris Voss thing. Yeah, yeah. I knew that the one that went fine, but getting back to Chris Voss, it's like, there's a little bit of success. And then it's a well structured cold email that clearly shows value and that there's, this has been done a number of times. It's not a complete waste of time and considering what they would want out of it, which was content. They, you know, I said, you can license this long form. You can have the clips. I don't care. Like, that's what you want. You can have it. All I want is to speak to you. And he came on. And you just got to move fast. Like, he's like, when do you want to do it? Here's my link. Book it in. Done. No fucking around. And that in my head, probably five years ago, version of me reading, never spent the difference, would never, ever, ever have thought that I would be speaking to him. And that's podcast. I mean, I've had, I've had a lot of moments like that. I mean, if you, if you just keep going, you'll just have repeat moments like that. I actually started wanting to become an entrepreneur because I was listening to Seth Godin's Akimbo podcast in a car ride back from, I can't remember where it was somewhere in the US. I was like driving back to Toronto. And it was like, I didn't do a lot of road trips, but this was a road trip. And I was like tired of music. So I was like, okay, let me just find some business podcasts and like listen to them. And I remember him telling a story about, oh my God, I'm blanking on the story now. What's the story? I always tell this story too. And I'm going to blank on it one second. I got to look up this story, one second. I'm going to find this story because I forget the guy's name and it's going to bug me. Who's the guy? Icarus. Oh my God. That's what I'm talking about. Okay. So he was telling a story about Icarus. And the story about Icarus basically goes very, very short version as a guy flew too close to the sun and got burnt. But like Seth Godin was kind of like tongue in cheeking it, saying like, hey, if you're going to be an entrepreneur, and these are not Seth Godin's words because he's a poet. And I'm going to bastardism, but everything he says, but basically Cole's notes was he said, listen, if you're an entrepreneur and trying to build something, don't worry, fly close to the sun, you're not going to get burnt. And I'm like, oh, so powerful goose bumps. I have to become an entrepreneur now. Seth Godin gave me the permission through his podcast, to become an entrepreneur. And I know that if I'm going to try and do this, I'm going to be okay. It's very scary when you first, when you, when you leave nine to five and try and build something yourself, right? Very unnerving feeling. I don't know that feeling. I've never got a job. Yeah, I have. I have. I have. I mean, good jobs, but I mean, still it's like, there's no more safety net. And when you start, right, you don't think of, I think that also, I think you're a little bit younger than me. And I think that 32 are, you're not that much younger than me that. I'm 34. Yeah, 32. Not that much. It's like a child. It's the, it's the conch shells around the neck. I'm like the surfer vibe or whatever the, you have like, I haven't worn, I remember it was like, what was it? Like, like grade eight, when you'd wear like the Abercrombie polo with like the white shell necklace around like the pop collar. And it's like the ultimate like douchebag get up. I love that. Pretty much. Anyway, so yeah, so that was sort of, that was like my introduction to entrepreneurship. And then when I started the podcast, obviously, we showed to him and he said, no, the first time. And then since then, like fast forward six years, he, he's come on, come on once. He's coming on again in I think a couple weeks. So like you have these like meet your hero moments quite often when you do this because you just start meeting cooler and cooler and cooler people. So it's a lot of fun. And then it'll get, you know, you know, it'll, you know, it'll be a mind fuck for you when you interview somebody who's listened to your podcast and then they're a little bit nervous because they're meeting you for the first time. That's also that also message with you. Or when you, when you get recognized in public from the, from the show, that also messes with you. So funny. I'm ready. I'm ready. I've been training for this moment. I'm practicing your autograph. So yeah. Oh, I actually found that there was a, I started randomly getting fed ads to have like a custom autograph template thing mailed to you. So you give them your name and some like calligraphy creates an autograph for you. And then you just get like books worth of like practice. That's smart actually. Yeah. It's a business. So I always use to practice my autograph because I wanted to play in the NHL and obviously you have to have a good autograph. So I would like when I was playing hockey, I'd like find a way to include my number in the autograph and obviously nine. I know I have this like shitty little signature. But at one point I cared about it. I'm time to bring back the autograph practice for when this podcast grows to the next level. Exactly. Have you ever seen them? There's like a viral clip of like Mike Cena signing all of his own merch before like WWE, whatever events. And he like would sign like 10,000 pizzas of his own. But you mean John Cena? John Cena. Yeah. My little brother Mike. Oh my god. John Cena. Oh man, it's a Friday. I am shocked that I'm doing this much of a deep dive on podcasting on a Friday. But then I realized he was bullshitting half the time. Yes. John Cena. My god. I don't know who I was thinking of. Yes. So he signs all his own merch and he was like there's this viral clip of him signing like it was like 10,000 pieces of merch and it took him like it was like an hour and a half and he's just like it's hands like killing after. So you know what? I can only I can only hope and pray that one day I have to deal with problems like that. Yeah. That's a crazy that's a crazy problem to have but there's always problems. Regardless of what you're doing. There's always challenges. You're always doing streams. Trains. Those are very those are very good problems that have definitely. Hey, look, I want a deep dive a bit more into the podcast business itself. We've spoken a lot on a high level. So you mentioned there's different different pillars of content. So what are the different content pillars? So in terms of just like where the part goes after it's like goals for people. So what are the different reasons why people listen to content in the first place or view content like entertainment etc. So I think that yeah. So I think that there's a few reasons why people listen to content. I think that I think that deep down the reasons are they probably stem from social interaction and or it's probably social interaction, financial betterment. There's something along those lines because if I think about why do people listen to content. Yes, they want to learn but why do they want to learn? They want to learn so they sound smarter with their friends or they want to learn so they get the next promotion or they want to learn so they can start a company. Like there is some motive and incentive there to to learn. If you think about humor content, well why do people watch humor content? They want to be entertained, they want to seem funny to their friends when they share a meme and there's also just information where people want to sort of seem in the nose. So there's always, if you're going to create content, you have to think about how is this accomplishing some sort of objective or motivation for the person who's listening to it. It doesn't really matter. There's no there's no ranking of which motivations are better or worse. It doesn't make no difference but know that it has to tap into the motivation of a person. Like what does that person want to accomplish? And it's okay that person wants to upskill and be smarter and maybe they want to get that promotion. They want to have more to talk about when they're at a social event. Whatever it is, that's fine but you have to know what that is and you have to serve that to them. And yeah, I think that's why there's only so many types of content that really resonate. I mean, it's news, it's entertainment, it's education, it's pretty much it. Like if your content doesn't do one of those three things, it's not going to really hit home with anybody. So that's how I think about content. Obviously, I chose education information. That's the type of content I enjoy doing too. Like it has to be something that you actually enjoy speaking about. I've thought about this a lot. I look at humor podcasts and stuff that grow so quickly and it's frustrating because it seems like guys just like bullshitting and whatnot. But is it something that you want to do? Is it something that you want to create? And it's not easy to create that kind of content either. The energy and the charisma and the personality you have to bring to that to very different skill set than being able to interview somebody and pull out wisdom and insight. So it's just as difficult. It's just a different kind of content. And you have to decide as a creator, what do you want to create? And for me, this was a type of content I wanted to create. And I think that ties back to, can I stay in this game long enough? If I was doing content that I felt was not fun for me to create or not exciting or was not aligned with who I am as a person, I don't think I could stick with it long enough. Yeah, exactly. You have to love it and you have to love doing it without being paid because you won't be paid for a long time if you want to make this a career. But eventually, as you said, you know, I'll let you know when it happens, but eventually you do get paid. Well, you said you had a sponsor, no? We've had two. Yeah, we've got two. We've got a current lifestyle. So use up here for your content. I guess I got paid for my content. Does that make you a professional? Or does it make you a professional? The more you get paid, the more I'm distracted. Listen, dude, I'm just taking a sports analogy. I think the second you get paid for something, you become a professional. Okay. Well, I'll take it. So on that note, when should you start a podcast? Yesterday? It's for everybody. Like, why should you start a podcast? Why should you start a podcast? And then when should you start a podcast if you think the why is there? Yeah. I think that we spoke about sort of the types of content that hit home with people. I think that as a creator, you have to decide what type of content you enjoy creating. I chose podcasts I like talking to cool people. And I also knew that fit into like my marketing mind knew that it would fit into my content distribution strategy. And I would achieve success quicker because I knew that I could leverage that pillar content and distribute it everywhere. However, I was comfortable with audio and video and interviewing people and doing the research and turning the long-form video and then doing the post-production and then editing it and then turning it into a newsletter. I was comfortable with all those things. So you did all that yourself? Yeah, I did everything myself. You still didn't like it? No, not anymore. Now I have a team. I have five people. I have a CMO and he has four people to do post-production. What was a lift? What was a lift on all of the like filming, editing, uploading to all the channels? Yeah, yeah. I'd say about eight hours per episode. It's not a crazy amount. No. I was pretty good. I mean, so just to give context, me being entrepreneurial and working in like startup environments has been a huge advantage to the podcast. It's not even a question. I have done almost every business function myself at some point, including up to not coding app but coding websites. So yes, I'm not a developer, but I can audit code. I can see something doesn't work or doesn't make sense or there's hygiene issues with it. I would code my own websites, which is really just HTML and CSS, but still that's more than some people. I would do my own piano. It's very difficult now with cursor and Claude. No, but keep in mind that I didn't have any of that when I was still building. I was using WordPress. The point of making is the excuses are even lower now because it's very quickly. Yeah, it's 100%. But like in startup land, I've done the technical side, financial side, owning a P&L. I've hired people. I put out job postings. I've set up all the tools, all the software, like SaaS tools that a team would have to use for basically any business unit. I've set up the marketing campaigns. I've set up the ads and done the targeting. I've done the sales sequencing. I've done the sales call. I've done it all. I've done everything. So for me, it was like, okay, what's the type of content? I already know how to do all the tasks associated with distribution and growing an audience. So what's the type of content I like to do? If I wasn't sort of like this startup in the weeds person, then maybe podcasting videos like very overwhelming for me. And maybe I just want to write, which is also cool. But the point is you have to understand your strengths, right? Your strengths. What is it? The Iki guy, which is I think like your strengths. What the market needs and what you can monetize is a rough. Something on my side. Yeah. Basically, you see some bend diagram of what you're good at with the market needs and what you can monetize. And this made a lot of sense for me. Now again, if you're talking to all creators, maybe you find that your content or the type of content you like to make is more short form content. Or maybe you don't like being in front of a camera. Like Gina, I mentioned, my therapist says earlier, she does memes. And they built this massive media portfolio of companies that have a whole bunch of memes. And they started their account when they were when there was like a betches and fat Jewish and fuck Jerry and all these meme accounts. A lot of them in New York, a lot of people in New York know my therapist says it's one of their largest audiences. Actually, if you talk to most women in New York, they'll follow my therapist says, or I'm not joking, you do it as an experiment. But if you don't like putting your face out there, there's an option. If you're only putting your face out there and your great writer started newsletter on sub-stack, beehive, convert kit, whatever it is. So yeah, you got to figure out what you're comfortable with because what you're comfortable with is going to tie back into the first idea that I had, which is you're going to be able to do it for a long enough period of time. Yes, there is something to be said for pushing yourself outside your comfort zone. However, pushing yourself outside your comfort zone to take on a brand new thing when there's not even money involved, I'd say is not just pushing yourself outside your comfort zone. I say that you're almost setting yourself up for failure. So I would say, oh, there's a key guide. Yeah, a key guide. That's what you're good at. What you're good at. What you love, what the world needs and what you can be paid for. So basically, the passion is what you love and what you're good at. Mission is what you love and what people need. Vocations, what you can be paid for and what people need. And then all for a combination, that is your yikigai. Perfect. So now we're only going to be guys. No, we know. But yeah, I would say that's my best advice because you can make a living doing anything as a creator. But again, how do you make a living? You have to stay in the game long enough, which means you have to do the thing that's already going to be tough work with as little friction as possible. Yeah. So on that note, what do you need to have, you know, maybe equipment-wise, skillset-wise, basically to be a podcast. Yeah, to start a podcast. So to start a podcast, you definitely don't need to do what I'm doing right now and what you see on like diary of a CEO, which is I think like six cameras or five cameras. Seven cameras. I noticed, I noticed, because we look, we model off all of the really big podcasts and try and like take ideas from, you know, that we like and put into our spin. But I noticed that the in-person podcast, which is crazy, they have the mic and then on the mic is a camera. I was like, that's such a good idea. So there's a mic and there's a camera pointing. Yeah, it's like a mini camera pointing to the other person on the other side. So there must be some form of like housing that allows a mic and a camera to exist. What's the shot? The shot is like the point that the front from like face to face shot if that makes sense. So the mic goes that way and the camera shoots to the guest and the other camera shoots to the host. I've never seen them cut to that angle. You'll see it now. If you look at the new ones and you look at like the setup, you'll see it if you really look into it. That's a brilliant idea. Anyway, it's smart. It's very smart. So that would make it so that because they have, they have one camera on a track, which I have and then they have two cameras and then I think they have another two cameras. So one, two, three, four, five and then oh yeah, then the mic cameras would be six, seven cameras. Seven cameras. I didn't know we need to start. No, no, no, no, no. But this guy, you know, this guy had a different goal. Like he already made his money. He didn't give a shit. He was having fun with it. He was like, if we're going to do it, I want to do it. I think you said in 2021 and that that deep dive episode he did, he's like, we spent a hundred grand on our setup or like 80 grand. So I'm just a big number. And another thing I did an episode with Kate Tollo who works with Brian Johnson and she went on diover seo and she said on my podcast that he has a button that clips under his desk. This little button that presses every time he has a clip. So he like in person can clip moments that then the editors can, I didn't even know how that technology would work. I think it's very custom. He would have something he would have to yeah, he would have to well, it depends on the camera, but you can feed information back to the cameras if you have the right setup. Like if you have the so if you have like black magic cameras and black magic mixer, I think you can feed information back and forth. I listen, like technical enough, I'm not that technical, but it's very interesting. But so to start to start, you don't need any of that. I mean to start, I would say audio quality matters so you can get it out. No, it's all put away now. You can do like, oh, what's that? This is a sure SM7 DB. Yeah, this is what I've got as well. But you don't need this. This is with the with the lifter included. That's about 500 bucks, which is expensive again. But there's the little, oh my god, Yeti, the Yeti mic, which is kind of like the de facto starter USB mic. That's a good start. There's also a sure mic, which is like $190. It's something cheap. Yeah, it's there's also a sure mic that is USB because this is XLR. So you could get a sure mic that's USB that plugs right into your computer, which is also easy. This is what I'm doing. So so I bought after the recommendation from you, you said to get the sure SM7B because I was on the road, the little road mic. Yeah, yeah. And it just didn't sound as good. This is the sure SM7B, not the DB because the DB has like the lifter. And then I bought a separate lifter that also turns into a USB C and then that USB C goes into the laptop. Yeah, so that's perfect. So it sounds great. And I think if I remember the first time you were pitching when we first started, then I had to get you to turn down your volume. Yeah, yeah, yeah. No, I didn't fuck it up. I looked like I was doing like 10 episodes with our settings. How good is it sound now? It sounds phenomenal. No, it's completely different. It's a whole nother level. Yeah, yeah, that's so. So yeah, so I would say, listen, USB mic, Yeti is fine or you can do a little bit more expensive. I personally recommend that you always start with video because then you have the content to clip out. Riverside is a great platform for recording. You can use zoom as well. It works just as fine. Riverside is going to get you a higher quality recording because it records locally and it uploads after the fact. I actually switch back to zoom funny enough. I switch back to enterprise. Interesting. For my reason why is because I used to some company that I was working on that was eventually acquired is it was a video, it was a streaming company. That was a piece of what we did. I know for a fact that video is very complex technology. It's very difficult to get right. Riverside is a web app and zoom is a desktop app. The difference between a web app and a desktop app is maybe about almost insignificant latency but significant enough that it rooms the natural flow. In most in some cases of a conversation, unless your internet is exceptional. So how do you zoom for a podcast now? Let me through the recording process of that. I mean, it's a you it's enterprise zoom. So we get 1080p recording on their end and I find that there's a better chance of the conversation not having any latency or lag which in my opinion creates a better vibe and a psychologically comfortable spot for the guests to open up because they feel like we're having as close to an in-person conversation as you possibly can virtual. Riverside is great. I used it for a while. However, there's going to be times where you have latency in between when I speak and you hear me and that latency just keeps reminding people that they're on a call and it's very hard to get them to be comfortable enough because they keep thinking about call and it's almost like you can't have a live conversation. Now it's actually much better than it used to be. Yeah, I mean, zoom is zoom. You set up a link. It records in high definition. Now I'm paying for enterprise zoom. So I get 1080 on the guest side and on my side, my camera is such bad advice because we're supposed to talk about how to get started but my camera is an FX30 and my FX30 can record at the same time as its streams. So that means that I get a 4k recording of me. I get a 1080 of the guest and the guests can also see me as we're streaming. It works. It works for me. Also keep in mind that I'm trying to retire the virtual as much as possible which is why I set up a studio behind me. So this is like, this is sort of, it's working for now. The only thing I'm missing by using zoom would be potential 4k on the guest side. But I found that potential 4k on the guest side is not worth ruining the conversation which has happened in the past. That's the only thing. And Riverside should take note and actually turn it into an app because then it would blow zoom out of the water. I think I have an app but it's not very good app. So that's, it's just because if you download software on your computer and you load it and you work through that, it will always be better than web. Web cannot work as well as an app ever. Like full stop. The technology does not compete. Anyway, so to start, ignore everything I just said. Just start. You need Riverside or zoom. You need a mic. And then you can use your phone which is probably the, like you can get a webcam. If you want to get a webcam, get like a Logitech Brio which is wild to think that I think it's been out for like six years and it still seems to be one of the better webcams available. Or what you can do is I did this for a while. There is an app on your phone and I'll tell you exactly what it is but it turns your phone into a webcam. And I found that everybody has a phone which has like a great camera on it. So that's the phone as a webcam is going to be a better, it's going to be a better camera than like a Logitech Brio. And the app or any webcam really. And the app is called Camo. C-A-M-O. And it turns your phone into a webcam and it's phenomenal. And then you just need a little stand to put your phone on. And make sure you put your phone on. Do not disturb or airplane mode. So you don't get a call that kills your video halfway through the podcast. But that's how you start. And then you pick a hosting provider. Obviously, I just told you to record videos. You're going to be recording video. You're going to post that up on YouTube and then you're going to go to megaphone or Libson or Red Circle. I use Red Circle right now. I've used megaphone in the past. They're all great. They all have different functions and purposes. Choose the one that works for you. And then upload your podcast and then start to market it and then build out a routine and end a cadence and show up every single week and don't stop and don't get discouraged when your first couple of episodes don't get downloads. But that's how you start. It's really not expensive or complicated. And I would say if you do make money, roll it back into the podcast. Find a way to make it so that any advertiser dollars come in, you roll it right back into the podcast and then remove yourself from the process as soon as possible by using Upwork or Fiverr to take care of the day-to-day tasks. I mean, even so my CMO that I have right now, his name's Ali. I think it was Upwork. I originally started working with him as a video editor and he built out an entire, this is obviously a unique case, but he built out an entire marketing agency. And we worked together the entire time and now he manages the team takes care of my show. But I mean, at the beginning it was just building a relationship with somebody who checked off one box and then I knew that he had aspirations to build out a lot more. So he just wasn't the editor just doing the work. He wanted to use very entrepreneurial, which I love, which is why we still work together. We're very much kindred spirits. And he built out a whole agency around podcast editing. And now he has a whole bunch of people to work for him and he manages the team as opposed to doing the work himself, but he's been great. So I mean, find great people is also the other solution to any business problem, but you need a little bit of money to do that. So you have to find a way to do it to the point where you make money, then you roll that money into removing some of those tasks off your plate. So how many, let's just say in total full time hours, do you think you're spending with this podcast? Like you said, you have five people working for you. What's your like weekly, weekly time commitment to a podcast now? Are you releasing weekly or bio weekly? What's your, no, I'm doing, I'm doing two to three a week. Okay. So you've got a bit of time into it. Yeah, but that's because I have a team supporting me. So I would say the time the time for me invested in the podcast. I like to do, I like to do, so I have a tiny bit of help with the research, but I do a lot of my own research for the shows. So I spent a couple hours doing the research and then I show up as a talent and I record and then everything else after that is, is a team. So you've probably got like four, five hours of work plus a little bit of management. Maybe a day a week. Yeah, but a day, maybe a day and episode, a day and episode, but then I'll, like I also enjoy, like creative things, like I enjoy writing. So sometimes I'll take a topic that we speak about and I'll spend a couple hours writing a newsletter about it. I mean, that's hours, but it's something I enjoy and I find that writing really like helps clarify my thoughts and it helps, it helps my thinking process and it just, I find it to be a very therapeutic exercise. So I really, really enjoy it. But that's, I guess, hours that you could add or subtract from the podcast. It's not directly related to the podcast, but it's all content, personal, brand stuff. So yeah, I would say, yeah, as well. So Ali, who I mentioned, he's CMO, he manages, and then probably like two days a week, do you think? Yeah, I think, yeah, maybe a little bit more than that, a little bit more than that. But yeah, I mean, I don't have that. So the actual hours, I can probably pull a list of like how many hours I contribute to every single piece of it. But so audio video, copywriting, you have a separate copywriter? Yes. And then graphic design. And then kind of like admin assistant, executive assistant for posting across social platforms. Yeah, that makes sense. So right now for me, we've, you know, again, much smaller on the output, but it's me doing the, uh, guest booking, the research, guest booking is, I forgot about that piece. The guest booking is just to touch on that IDM, a lot of people. And then I also get a whole bunch of inbound, which I review myself. So that would be a couple hours as well. I forgot that piece. Yes. Yeah. So, which is probably one of the most important parts. And I think I like the personal touch of it, of the guest booking, and then, and then dealing with the like advertising. So I, which we'll get into later, for me, I do that. And then I've got Joe, who's my editor, he does the editing of the videos and the audio uploading that to all the channels. He does a social media, posting, makes a clips, and does just like the thumbnails, and we're going to work together on the thumbnails and stuff. And then I've got a VA who I've recently given a role of each week, just doing the, the comms. So she'll take all the content off YouTube. And then she'll put it on to Twitter, yeah, uh, sub stack, the website link. Similar, similar ish workflow. I mean, there's only some things you can really do. But the standard is probably a bit lower because, you know, I've got a VA that's doing it through chat GPT. She's not, she's not going to be writing. And I'm not, I don't have the space to hire it right up. No, no, I know. But I mean, like, you know the jobs to be done, and you know what you, I mean, again, there's, there's even points like now when I have to step in and help out with something. I just try and, again, this is more like a, this is less of a podcast discussion, more of like a hiring the right people discussion. But Ali, in my opinion, is a, like, an A player kind of higher. He's very entrepreneurial. Uh, he is building his own business, which is fine, obviously, because he's not full time. But he spends a lot of his time dedicated to me and, and the show. But I enjoy that because he's always upskilling himself and he's always learning himself. He's killing it. And then when you have people like that working for you, they're going to hire other people that are also A player. So, and so then I, again, this is not like, it's not like been all easy. It's not like we haven't made misses on who we brought into the, into the company. But ultimately, if you hire the, you know, the, if you, if the person you hire, the C-suite, the direct report is an A player. They're only going to be comfortable with other A players. And then it's just going to help you build a healthy organization. Um, so I don't micromanage at all. I, I actually ask Ali and the team for ideas. Um, if we want to do something, and he comes to me, even without me asking for like different ideas that he wants to try. And I'm like, yes, sure. Like, it's just, it's just the people, the people make a break in organization. It's not, that's not unique to podcasting. But, um, yeah, I think that's also why you should always be hiring. I always be looking for new great people. Just quickly though, I want to talk to you about a taboo, but very important topic, sperm health. I bet you didn't think I was going there. One day, I want to have kids. And like any future parent, I want to give them the best shot at a healthy life. But let's face it, we're at a war every day with our health in this modern world. Chemicals, microplastics, and artificial environments are wreaking havoc on our internal systems at every turn. And if you know me, you know, I'm obsessed with health. And the health of my swimmers have been on my mind for a number of years. That's why we've partnered with Legacy, who are changing the game in at-home sperm testing and freezing in the US. Did you know that globally sperm counts have dropped by 50% in the last 40 years? Let that sink in for one moment. This is not just a fertility problem as well. Because low sperm quality has been linked to a high risk of testicular cancer, heart disease, diabetes, and even early death. And on top of that, your sperm quality begins to decline around age 30 and by your 40s, the risk of infertility and having a chance of a child with neurological disorder begins to go up. So testing and freezing now, maybe the best decision I make for my future family and potentially you too. So Legacy makes it easy. They send a kit straight to your door. You do the business in the comfort of your own home. And in 48 hours, the results are on your phone. Plus, you can freeze your sample at two secure locations for peace of mind. So if you're like me and you want to be proactive with your future, as well as support podcasts, head over to givelegacy.com and use the code TOT at checkout for 10% off. That's givelegacy.com using the code TOT for 10% off. Thanks for listening. Now back to the podcast. So you mentioned two to three episodes a week. What was the reasoning behind doing that? Because we can do it. Okay. It's more content better versus polish content. Where I think that I don't think you should do. I don't yeah. No, it's not. If you can't do good at three episodes a week, then don't do them. That's my that's my feedback. The type of show that we do with the prep that we're able to do. I don't think that interviews come across as unpolished. If they were, I wouldn't put them up. I don't think for example, with the style of content that we do, if we like I could change the style of content and I could be doing a four-hour interview with somebody that's a different style of content. With an hour to an hour and a half interview, I feel like the quality of the content is very good and I think that it competes with some of the best. Now if we were doing the type of and I also do virtual, I've decided that that's an okay piece of my show. I don't mind that. If I was doing all in person and it would probably be scaled down a little bit because I wouldn't want to compromise a quality. If we were doing a show like acquired where they do a month's worth of research before they put together an episode, it's just a different style of show. So I found that and I by the way, I have dialed back the quantity because the quality isn't there. So there's been many weeks where it's been one episode a week. We've just built out a process that I think allows us to deliver quality and quantity at the level that we're at repeatedly. And if I felt like if I felt like things were hurting or things weren't working well, then we take it back until we get the process, then we can scale up again. And that's always been like I'll always try and push and do more but do more better. And if we can't, then we bring it back again. But it never sacrificed. I personally don't agree on I personally, a lot of people have different opinions and not to say that there's shows that are not good quality, but there's shows that put out episodes daily and multiple episodes a day, just wild to me. And I think that you could blur the lines of quality when you start to get to that level. But it depends. I mean, you could there's news companies that put out news is 24.7 and they're high quality. Look at the quality of the content these days. Well, listen, okay. So in terms of content, it's it's not quality per se, but it's very highly produced. And it's a huge team that supports it, right? It's a multi-billion dollar organization or whatever or industry. So I think that you if I could produce a high quality interview once per day, great. The only thing that would be limiting me there would be my own like energy level. So my own. But if I had for like to push back on what you just mentioned, if I had a full researcher, I had like I had I don't even know what else I would really need to do that. Probably be research, a really good researcher researcher. Yeah, like like you're talking like paying somebody like a hundred grand a year just to book guests. I mean, it gets to the point where I have nothing else to do. If I don't have another like if I not work on anything else, then well, yeah, I can sit down and talk for two hours a day. It's not really that much work. If I had like if I had twice as many editors and we could we could push out, you know, twice as many clips, it's just a it's just a money problem. The end of the day if you want to do more because most people can handle talking to somebody for two hours a day, especially if you if you do it if you do it daily, you're going to get very good at it very quickly. But I think that sometimes people maybe try and rush and then that quality suffers. But it also depends on your type of content. So if it's more casual and it's less prepared and it's like two guys just like if we just like rift once a day, maybe the audience likes the casual maybe the audience likes the unscripted and then it works. You just got to know your audience at the end of the day. What if you don't have an audience so you don't know your audience and you want to know the people that are closest to you. You have friends, you talk to people who are close to you. And then you also so you you talk to people who you're close as to you send them your episode and you ask them what they think of it. And you're also a consumer. So you have to understand what do you like if I was going to create from scratch, which kind of is what I did, I looked at what I listened to and then I reverse engineered how that happened and how was put together. And then I started my first version was something similar to that. And then I've had I've had different people that I reverse engineered their content based on the type of content I want to put into the world. And I learned from other people. And then I have not the perfect content but I have a great working thesis as to what works because I know that there's a version of this that already works. And I do I'm a firm believer that if and somebody can figure it out, I can figure it out. It's not like it's rocket science. Nobody's that special. So why not? Why not reverse engineer something else? But yes, I do talk to people. I talk to friends. I talk to family, especially when I was first starting out. I talk to people that I trust. You can also go to if you don't have any friends, God forbid, that's not great, but it's another makes and forms makes and friends. But no, there's also there's also communities. I mean, like the barrier to to access is also lower than ever, not just the barrier to building an entrepreneurship and technology. I mean, if I wanted to start an entrepreneurship show, go to go to like why coordinator or a hacker news or something like just go somewhere where you can find people that would consume your content and just ask if you at Facebook groups, I mentioned Facebook, there's definitely Facebook groups that you go into right now. And when you ask for help, it's wild, but people actually want to help you. Like more often than not, early stage creators, people are so ridiculously supportive. You just have to have the balls to put yourself out there and people are going to respond and they're going to give you real data. If you're looking for real answers and you put yourself out there, people will give you real answers and they'll give you real data that should inform how you create content. If you have no other people to speak within your immediate circle, but that's how it's done. On the note of starting, do you just from my story, started things and it'll prompt potentially your thinking, but before I started the podcast, like launch the podcast into the world, we agreed that we were going to do a podcast and then we filmed the first 12 episodes before that, just because I read somewhere that most like 90% of podcasts don't make it to 10 episodes. I'm like, all right, we're going to meet that by doing, before we even start, I'm going to do the film 12. What are your thoughts around how to go before launching? Do you just start with one and see what happens or do you build out a content library and then launch? What do you think is a better way to do this consistently long term? I think for most people building, batching content is a very smart idea because I think for most batch creating content or batch creating content before you start or even batching content after you start, meaning you set like a day up and you do four interviews, I think batching content in general is a smart idea because I think that most people, not all people, but most people are very bad with their schedule and life gets in the way. When life gets in the way, you prioritize the things that are urgent and important and you don't prioritize the new thing, the thing that really doesn't benefit you at all. Again, this sort of brings it back to setting yourself up for success. If you're going to set yourself up for success, what's the action you have to take to reduce the chance of you failing? I think 12 episodes is smart because you know what it does? That's my mentor. Third week is momentum and that third weekend when you start posting and oh my god, I got to pick the kids up and oh my god, I have to work overtime or whatever or just life happens or I got a cold, you know, you still have, you have a podcast supposed. So you don't like, you're not going to kill the momentum right away. Now, do you need to? No, of course not. I mean, you could just record a podcast once a week and post it and you just hope that life doesn't screw you over, you just have a discipline to set time aside. But if it's a new habit, I'm sure that James Clear would have a little bit to say about this, but if it's a new habit, like you have to find a way to set yourself up so that the new activity actually turns into a habit and I think that taking the activities that reduce the chance of you failing, that's that's how you win. I mean, if you know, if you want to go to the gym in January, well, first, if you want to work out, you should probably get like a gym membership first and then you should probably set some time aside and let people know that on Sunday afternoon, I'm going to go to the gym and then it would probably help also if you pick the gym close to your house. You just have to set yourself up for success. So yeah, batch episodes because it just reduces the chance of you failing and just giving up. I think it's just all these little things are just smart. When you want to go on a diet, why do you eat like vegetables and rice and proteins or whatever because it's really hard to lose weight when you're eating a ton of fiber and protein. But you're just setting yourself up for success. If you want to go on a diet, you take all that shit, you take all the junk food out of your house because it's really hard to overeat if you don't have any junk food in your house. It's the same thing. It's just all like setting your environment up to this is a really low chance that you're going to fail. Yeah, yeah, okay. And quickly jumping into some more specific stuff, the editing process, editing the video. What's the process for you guys on editing the video? So, no idea. Yeah, so we don't really, I mean, so we record in Zoom, I take the raw files, keep in mind, so I'll download the Zoom recording. And by the way, if there's something that I didn't go into in depth enough, feel free to like go there again. I'm just, again, I'm in it. So I never know. You probably experienced this too. I never know if I'm being too high level or going too much into the weeds, because I just live it every single day. So for me, this is very normal. Yeah, but for Zoom, download the recording, transfer the file, which is now like a massive file from my camera. So it's going to be like a 100 gig file, which is 4k file. This is an interesting point. What's your data management tools like to upload to get to your editors, not locally, because this is where I'm getting in a lot of trouble. Like Google Drive was really difficult. It like uploads poorly. It's a whole thing. So what I do is I take the memory card out, I transfer the file, because I don't upload during the day. I could use a second computer. That would probably be the best way to do it. I don't bother with that. I take the file, I move it onto a four terabyte SSD drive, and I'll put that in a folder with my, so I actually record my audio through Premiere Pro. I record my podcast through Zoom. That's where I capture the guests video, and I record my video through my camera. Take all those three files, put them into a folder, put them on a four terabyte SSD, and I have a ton of these. I've got a couple of unlimited amount of these everywhere. I take that, and then I plug it into my computer when I go to bed, and then I just upload all the podcasts that I've recorded, and I've used to one per grand, so the more expensive one that I use is P Cloud. It's just another, they're all the same, really. It's just a matter of how much they are. So P Cloud is the more expensive one. I've never had issues with Google Drive. We just find it incredibly expensive, especially for people starting out. And then there's another one called SYNC, and I have, I paid some ridiculous price for lifetime unlimited storage on that. So upload there, and that's where the editors pull the clips from. P Cloud is very good as well. The only reason why I use SYNC now is because my files are huge. So it's really getting hard to find a cloud service that isn't going to cost me thousands of dollars per month to store all those files. And keep in mind, I don't delete files, not because I'm a hoarder, because I actually do like to have like, so all the episodes I've ever done, they're stored locally on these here, and then they're also stored in the cloud. How do you like track and manage where the episodes are in the by year? Yeah, just by year, and by guess name. Okay, I mean, it's only when you just write it down, you go, that's going away, you get a new one, you put a sticker on it. Exactly. Yeah, it's not that complicated. Yeah, because these are challenges, like these are challenges people will face it, like when they begin to scale and they get a little content. For sure. And I do like holding on to the old content. In case I want to pull, like in case I want to pull clips from old content, I mean, it never happened, but for me, one SSD drive is going to last me like a year, or a year and a half, right? So like whatever, I think I think a four terabyte is 220 something like dollars like that, 200 bucks a year for sort, like this is like, it's full time now. I'm doing this full time. And keep in mind, most people starting yet are not going to have 100 gig files. No, right? Like if you are doing zoom, and you're recording, and you're not recording locally to a memory card, you are going to have like 700 meg, maybe 800 meg files max, like they're going to be like so, so, so small. Do you need an older port for the podcast? I do not actually. Okay, I know. Is there a reason for that? For like the edits? Because I don't want my editor to get lazy and miss a part. Okay. That's really it. Yeah. So just for my listening, auto-pod is like an add-on to Premiere Pro that basically uses AI to do the like clipping between yeah, between the audio video of the different people in the podcast, and it just does it in like five seconds. And it's funny you say that because Joe, my editor, has said, I'm not using auto-pod for that exact reason. He's like, I build out my trailer off the back of watching it normally. That's true too. That's a very good point. He's not going to know what to put in the trailer if you use this auto-pod. But what I'm more concerned about is he uses auto-pod and human nature, humans are humans. And if you use auto-pod, you're going to be like, why am I rechecking this? It already did it. Even though you know that there's a chance it has screwed something up. But when you go, when you watch the whole thing, you're going to know, and first of all, if you watch the whole thing, you're going to know if there's any parts you should clip out. We don't really clip much out. But just in case, I mean, like there's times when like a doorbell rings and the guest has to go up and get the door, I mean like life happens. So you just want to make sure that there's no weird edits. Auto-pod's good, but it's not. It's good if you have an editor that is going to go against their human nature and still triple check the shit out of it. But I find that I don't know. I like the, I like somebody reviewing it. It also helps me create the really good intro, which the editor does. And if I ever want to pull out clips from it, then the editor, I'll be like, Hey, can you give me like two or three reels from the show? The editor is going to know where to go. If not, you're not going to know where to go. So it's just, yeah, AI is good. But there's some things that I trust it with and some things that I don't. And it's probably better for solo people as well. Like solo creators that need to do everything themselves, lean on as much AI tools and as much, like you lean on chat GPT, lean on auto-pod, lean on all the things you can to minimize your lift because you've got so much work to do. But as you build a team, like the little human touches really make those want to make a huge difference. It makes a huge difference. And it actually, it differentiates. I mean, even if you're going to use AI for copywriting, the way that I look at AI is just the first pass at a creative problem, but it's not the end result. So if you're going to use it for copywriting, I mean, there's very few times I've ever used it for like an Instagram caption and I haven't, I'll get an idea out of it, but I'm still going to change it because it's still isn't as good as, or it's maybe it is good. I don't know. Maybe I just think I know how to write, but in my opinion, when I look at it, I'm like, I wouldn't have written it that way. And to me, that's enough to change it. So, yes. So that's really the sort of like the workflow. So record your show. I just mentioned where I record everything. If you are going to use a camera to record, obviously you're going to need a memory card. And if you want to record in 4K, this is a little bit more advanced, but you need a high speed memory card. Oh, you need a, well, actually, yes, you would need a capture card too. That's a good point. So what do I have? I have a, oh, what's the name of it? I've got a cam link for K. Cam link works. What's the name of mine? So, well, he's looking at that for those listening. What is it called? It's called Aver Media. It's an Aver Media capture card. So for those listening, the capture card basically takes the HDMI output from the camera, whatever camera you're using, if you're not using an iPhone. And it takes it and converts it into a USB or a USB-C type that then connects to the laptop, which allows you to use your camera at 4K. And you have to be careful because there are 1080p ones and 4K ones. So if you have a 4K camera and only a 1080p capture card, it'll throttle your, your output of your camera. Like, imagine going from a highway into a small street. It's not going to be as good. So, you know, ideally, if you're careful that you buy a, I was going to say, I was going to be careful if you buy a camera and you try and use 4K, you have to make sure that it doesn't time out after 30 minutes or over. Oh, God. Yeah. So that's a whole other thing. So the camera, yeah, look for camera, because there's a lot of cameras that just stop after 30 minutes. And there's also a lot of cameras that with continuous recording overheat. So go on Reddit, go on some threads and look for cameras that don't overheat and cameras that work at 4K for hours because that's what you're going to need. Like, I've returned multiple cameras because of this exact issue. Just built a studio, bought FX30s, a bunch of cameras and they're all overheating and I couldn't use them for the studio. FX30s. FX30s don't overheat. Oh, maybe it was another one. The one without, I don't know, anyway, maybe it wasn't the FX30s. FX30s are actually, FX30s, in my opinion, are like perfect for this. Are they the ones with the fan? Yeah, they have a built-in fan. So it wasn't we got to the FX30s at the end because of the fan, but there was another one where we built, I bought three like $8,000 worth of cameras. Oh, my God. It's more, and they were just shutting off, like cutting off. So these are the things to consider, but this is as you, as you scale and you want to do a studio and all these other things. Speaking of the studio, though, just I'm conscious of time. Let's quickly talk about touch on blind. Okay, so I have, so I have sort of two sets in this studio. So I have the virtual set that you see me on right now. So I have a key light here and I have a little bit of a, you know, what I know, it's not going to talk. It's like the little thing that hangs in front of it. The fuser, right? The light, the fuser. Then I have, oh, I'm going to blank on the names of the actual lights. And I have one more light. Let me see if I try to on and off. Let me see. I have one more light here. I'm breaking the fourth wall. I have one of these lights. And then I have one last light here that just sort of gives me, it lights up the side of your head. So it creates dimensions. That's the whole goal. It's great depth and dimensions and the lighting. I know what I know where the lights should go. There's technical terms for all these lights. I can't remember what they're called. So it doesn't have the point. I was like, hey, you go on YouTube. There's a lot of people that give you an instruction on how to use these in terms of the actual brand. Let's see what we got here. This is newer, I think. Yeah, newer solid. Yeah, that's good. And also we've got a, we've got teleprompters here. So we're both using teleprompters to connect with the cameras. Yeah. So what I'm looking at now used to be I'd look at the, I'd look off and it would feel kind of off. But then Scott gave me, you gave me a kick up the teleprompter. And I brought a teleprompter out throughout. I have to say because I'm like, why do you look so much better? What's going on here? Tell me. And you said, this is on this. And you said, I mean, if you really think, if you're really taking this seriously, you should buy them. And I thought, fuck all right. I'm glad. I'm glad. I'm glad you did. Yeah. So now the camera sits behind like a screen that inverts the, the video from the laptop or the computer. And I can look straight at the camera. So it looks like I'm looking straight at you. But I'm still looking at like a version of the screen. So it's perfect. It's perfect. So now I, it works all right. It's amazing. And now the, now the, the ad reads a hundred times better. Now the intros are a hundred times better because I'm reading off a teleprompter. And I can actually like think about how I communicate as opposed to be like, fuck what was that line? Or just going off like the dome and just like rambling like a lunatic. No, I know. It's like such a game changer. At the end of the day, you have to realize like, yes, you can, you can upskill yourself. You can memorize an intro or memorize an ad read. But just, if you're going to take this seriously at some point, you've got to give yourself the tools to be successful. I mean, you don't have to make it harder than it already is. So don't really don't. Yeah. Yeah. So, and that's probably another point of how to get better on camera. It's reps. And it's using tools like a teleprompter. And I really amazing skill that I learned recently was, can don't talk to a wide audience. If you are on doing a podcast or doing any content, even just doing like a come with me as I do blah, blah, blah, today, you might feel like you're talking to lots of people, but you are at the core of it when you drill it down, you're talking to one person. So everything needs to be one-on-one. You need to be using eye and you and us and staring at the camera into the lens as though you're looking into the eyes of the person that's reading the con or listening to the content. And when you flip that, it changes how you communicate and it makes you a much better person in camera. Is there anything else you'd add to that? I would say, by the way, we can go a little bit longer. I mean, if you want to just, I've got like three or four things. Yeah. Yeah. It's cool. Don't stress. But I would say you sort of fall to the level of your preparation. So the more that I prepare obviously, the better the content is. It's pretty, it's the same as if you're going to go on stage and speak or go into a meeting or pitch and investor. I mean, you prepare. You do better. It's very simple. Yeah. You can use AI to help you with your preparation. You can do the research yourself. I recommend listening to a couple podcasts that the potential guests have been on. If you do an interview show or just if you aren't doing an interview show, you're doing a solo show and it's more educational. I like to spend some time doing research. Like the preparation really does show. Yeah. You talk to Lenny, what's his last name? Rick Kiewski. Lenny, Rick Kiewski, from Lenny's newsletter. It's a big business newsletter. If I'm mispronouncing your last name, Lenny, I'm sorry. But both him as well as the acquired podcast, one thing they've both said that's really struck a chord with me is again, Lenny's newsletter is massive acquired is also a massive podcast. But I've listened to them both just to study other. Lenny's, it's called Lenny's newsletter. It's actually called Lenny's newsletter. It's like one of the largest sub-stack publications. Might have to get him on the podcast. He's super cool. But both him and the acquired guys, they've done interviews and they've said the episodes that we prep for and the newsletters that I do the most research on just outperform everything. It's not even a question. So the acquired guys are in extreme. They spend about three weeks doing research before they record an episode. Lenny, I'm sure, has his own writing process. But did you find them? I wasn't sure if you were looking at like the icky guy maybe before. No, no, no. I've never done that before in a podcast. I like it. It was very cool. It was very cool. I'm just going to speed it up, get my like little side person here that can just like see what happened, a research for me. But it's all about prep. So I would say that's the most important piece out of everything else. Prep will make you more confident. Prep will make your guests feel more confident. They'll make you feel guests feel respected. It'll show in the content. It's all about prep. And the more unique questions you can ask, the more the guest is going to appreciate that you've done your research. And when the guest appreciates that you've done your research, they'll just be in a better mood. And when you create this vibe where you know you're respecting each other's time, that's when you get the best content. Everyone wants to see each other win. But if you know, if a guest is being asked a question that no one else has ever asked them about something super personal, not in a bad way. And like I cared about you enough to figure this out. And by the way, I can actually very much help this process outside of you listening to other shows they've done. It's just a positive experience. And it'll show up in the content. That's probably my best advice for anybody who's starting. I'm going to drop a bomb here. I'm going to give you guys what give you I mean you probably do it. But anyone that doesn't do it that doesn't really know AI too well. Every single podcast episode I do, I begin with AI. And it is it has cut down my research time so much. And I pretty much what I do is the script into AI is I'm doing a podcast with X, you know, who are they? What do you know about them? Provided details summary. And we start there. And then they give you a summary. And then I say, I want to build out some questions ahead of the episode. And we'll provide transcripts from other podcasts. He's done to get an understanding of him before before I get you to provide questions. Don't provide any questions until I've explicitly told you to and that I'm no longer going to provide any more relevant information. Are you ready? And that's his yes. And then I go, here's the podcast. Please summarize it and add it to the understanding of this thread with the intent to provide questions based on the initial parameters I said at the start. Please note the year that the piece of content was also released and consider whether any information you hear may actually not be relevant anymore if it's old. On top of that, please write out a list of every question you notice has been asked by the host to the guest in the transcript as well as a summarized answer so I can both get an understanding in detail of what they talk about and how to avoid those questions again. And then I say, please do not provide the actual podcast questions until our episode for our episode until I say so. And I put all the trend like I just go YouTube YouTube AI transcript, pull the YouTube transcript, chuck it in there, read the summary, next podcast, do that, next podcast, do that. And I get maybe like, I'll go through 20 podcasts and really get a really, really good understanding. And then at the end, I go, okay, please provide me 20 questions of the podcast with the following format intro about him, blah, blah, closing out. Here's the past questions I consider in every episode. Here's my standard question list. Further to that, please only come up with unique questions that haven't been seen in any previous podcast transcripts. And then it's just like it's good to spit sound shit. So I really think that I'm like, double down on this, give me 10 more of this one. Like and very quickly, this could this whole process from start to finish, I'm absorbing like 10 podcasts takes me like an hour. I'm smart. It's very, very smart. I don't remember my problems because I don't have in front of me. Yeah, I'm going to have an awesome. Yeah, that's awesome, dude. I also have a like a very similar process to just like understand what they've spoken about before. Yeah. So even the tools, yeah, the tools. Yeah. So a couple of things I want to talk. So while we're on this topic, how do you become a better interviewer? There's a book you can read. Let me find it. Let's can't remember it. I haven't read it in a while. I would say read this book because it'll teach you about different kinds of questions that I will find for you in a second. And outside of that, it's about the reps. Yeah, but but there is one book that I found. Let me see if I can find it. But ultimately, it's about reps because even if you know every every single kind of every single kind of question and you understand them like almost like the theory behind interviewing, there's really nothing like there's really nothing like just doing it because then that's good. And I would say that the prep is a big piece of it because when you prep, you have confidence. And I think confidence is actually like a major X factor in interviewing. Oh, it's called how to be a better interviewer. Oh, wait, no, that's the wrong one. It's by, it's by the guy who did Mixergy, which is Andrew Warner, one second. What's the name of the damn book? It's a yellow book. I just can't remember the exact title. Stop asking questions by Andrew Warner, how to lead high impact interviews and learn anything from anyone. I like it. It's a good one. I'm going to read that. I haven't heard of that. There is a there is a slight pushback that I'll that I'll have on this because I've got the same route like I have, you know, I try to prepare and I give the guests the questions beforehand to give them some freedom to like consider where I'm out in the direction. But I think there is also genuinely no right answer to this because something comes to mind is like I listen to a podcast a talk to that just did interviews of, you know, the top 20 interviewers ever of history. And their approaches are all wildly different. True. One of them specifically being Larry King did not do any prep. His team did not do any prep for any any interview ever. And all he did was sit there and go, wait, what? Your childhood. And then the conversation is just went in a direction that you would never expect because he had no bias of where he was taking it. And he was just there just chatting. So another another interesting thing to do after you're going to do that. Nothing wrong. I'm sure that first of all, not everyone is as gifted as Larry King at steering at pulling out conversation. And maybe he didn't do prep. But you self to understand what's the objective of the actual content. So no one's going to Larry King to learn how to raise money. Yeah. But if you want to build a podcast, it teaches something like that. That's the difference. So you do have to know what kind of content you want to create that does change. I guess like King was like an a list interviewer. And then he people a list interviewers want to know they just want to know like people listening to that want to just know things that they didn't know about this I list interviewer that you can't get in any other format than just like chatting with them for an extended period of time. True. I also think that I also think that there gets, I mean, with Joe Rogan, I'm sure when guests go on Joe Rogan now, the guests are trying to bring their A game because they know the reach. I would not say that's good advice for somebody with no reach. I would say prep a little bit. Yeah. I don't think yes, they're always going to bring their A game if they don't know who you are and you're just starting out. Yeah. Yeah. I mean, the process changes is podcast scales. If you want to be casual and you want to be entertaining and you want to just like shoot the shit and do like I'm trying to think of like Joe Rogan is that kind of casual like flagrants kind of like a casual podcast. But he does a little bit. Andrew Schultz is a little bit of research. There's some pretty like casual chill like just like shooting the shit podcast. Maybe you don't research as much because you actually want to have like like caller daddy. It's like that's a kind of podcast, right? Like they just kind of riff and they their personalities show through. So it really depends on what you want to make, I think. But yeah. Yeah. Another idea and going back to the Chris Foss thing, never split the difference is actually a really good book to learn about how to interview well because there's a couple of very specific techniques that I've used. And it reminded me doing the prep because I reread his book prior to doing the podcast with him. And it's just little things like if something is peaking your interest using upwards inflection mirroring. So you know, you say something like I made a hundred grand last year and you want to double down on that without being like tell me more about how you made a hundred grand. It kind of breaks the flow. But I would just sit here and go a hundred grand last year with like an upwards inflection. And then shut the fuck up. And that naturally will like lead, you know, draw people into saying more. And you can, I do this on a weekly basis. I can sit here and then up with one back and see when you are presented. I do it all the time, bro. I do it all the time. And I can sit here and I can have a person talk for two hours straight. And all I do is upwards and flat. I don't need to tell anyone else. Because they filled the space. I've seen some of his stuff before. He's very good. Yeah. And the second one is also silence. So being okay with sitting in that slightly silent space and giving people the space to think. So I think it's an energetic thing. But what I've learned, and I think I'm getting okay as an interviewer, like genuinely I'm getting feedback from podcasts, people who go on podcasts that have been on some of the biggest podcasts. And they say to my face, this was one of the better interviews I've done. And it's not the first, I've heard that probably half a thousand times now. So I think it's moving in a positive direction. And I'd be a big part of that is also I think due to slowing it down and being comfortable in sitting in silence. Like if somebody, if I ask a question and someone sits there for 20 seconds, I can give a shit. Just take your time. That's tough. That's very tough. I've also found that I found that like if I'm tired or if I don't, like I have to manage my energy levels too. So when I'm tired, I'm less good with those circumstances. And when I'm not tired, I have energy, not stressed out about other things. Because I think that all those external factors, and it's, listen, this is not easy to do. But I think they're finding ways to sort of be in the present and be in the now. And also maximize your energy as a professional. And it's an entrepreneur. These are all very important ideas that all play into this because it's like the podcast is like game time. It's like high pressure. It's like high pressure in like the least high pressure situation. It's not that bad. But it's like it's performative. You got to show up. You got to be your best. You got to feel comfortable as an interviewer. You got to create an environment where the guest is comfortable. You got to be comfortable with like you mentioned silences and not rambling and all the stuff that comes with interviewing. It's not easy. So it's just, but I think reps will either make you better or highlight your areas for improvement. Yeah. I don't think there's another way to do it. So if I show reps a K. And if I feel like I'm rambling or I feel like I asked an awkward question and then they didn't answer right away. So I felt bad and then I jumped in and well, why did I do that? Maybe it's because I was tired. Maybe it's because maybe it's because I didn't prep. Maybe it didn't feel comfortable to get whatever it is. There's like something. There's a tell there that you have to pay attention to. And I think you pay attention to those. That's when you improve. And the interviewing skill itself, again, I'm just going to purely go off my personal experience is improving every facet of my life. Everything is getting better because of my ability to have a conversation. I agree. It's really cool. And I think it's a skill that in copywriting are probably two skills that will probably never go away. They're going to be useful skills forever. I agree with that. Yeah. That's good. There was some good nuggets across the board. So a couple of last things I've got is how to monetize. Let's talk about how to monetize when you should monetize and how you should go about doing all those elements and whether you should let look, I'll just let you go. The way that I monetize is one way. Obviously, I don't think it's the best way. The way that I monetize was when I get so many downloads that I'm looking for. So I went through agencies. So agencies will usually start to accept you if you're at about 5,000 downloads per month, which is like a $200 ad slot or something. I can't do the math in my head based on CPMs, but it's not a lot of money. But yeah, I mean, that's what would you do in episode? So if you do a 5,000, sorry, you go ahead. I was going to say two pre-roll, four mid-roll for like an hour to an hour and a half and then two post-roll. So you get the 5,000 downloads a month. Let's see, doing a week of podcasts. It's approximately 1,000 downloads an episode or maybe 500 downloads an episode plus evergreen. You can revenue-wise, if you're saying $200 an ad roll to $6.8, did you say it? So that's times $600 a week in revenue. And that is at like higher numbers. That's just probably pretty average. And how likely would you get eight advertisers? Like is it? No, you wouldn't have 100% inventory sold out. So yeah, you're not likely at that point because maybe 60% sold out? Yeah. And your show is probably going to be bundled with other shows that they're selling. They're not selling your show. They're selling. I have 20 shows in the business niche that have this many downloads. That's what they're selling. And you're one of those. So you can go through agencies. You can go to Gumball, Advertised Cast, Red Circle, has an ad program, Glassbox. What are they tightening? 30% on average. Okay. Is it worth doing those in-house, do you think? Do you have the capacity to hire and train a sales team or jump on every single call with every single advertiser and do reporting? I felt like it wasn't worth it to me. I felt like I could do that, especially when I compare it to reporting. They're components are sales. The components are sales. The components are, okay, so how do I find decision maker email addresses? Because I did sales. I built sales teams. I know how there's not a single thing in sales that I haven't done myself or hired somebody to do. So you have to find the brands you want to work with. You have to find the emails of the decision makers. You have to run outbound campaigns. You have to run follow-up, not just one email, like nurture sequences. Make sure you're targeting properly with the right ideal customer profile and buyer persona. That's a conversation for another day. But then once you find those people you run emails, they're going to jump on calls. You're going to discover recall. You're going to demo call. You're going to eventually negotiate closed deal. You're going to get the creative brief. You're going to record the creative brief. You're going to send it back to them from approval. You're going to embed that either programmatically or baked in. Depending on which platform you use, some can do programmatic. Some can just do baked in. The difference is programmatic means you're just doing your setting markers and inserting across your entire catalog. Baked in means you're literally just when you're doing the edit. You're inserting like a 30 to 6 second ad like in the actual video and audio before you export it and then upload it to your channels. And just for context, baked in is going to be worth more because it's there forever, programmatically. You can change after 10 weeks to the next programmatic one. And after that, then you have to report on downloads or listen. So I would say for like, again, most creators are not full time when they start. I don't think they should be. So I think agency's help. The issue with not having agents, by the way, you still sell on your own because you don't need to, I would never sign exclusivity. Some people will try and get you to sign exclusivity. I don't do exclusive unless they can guarantee me revenue. They can't guarantee me revenue. I don't sign exclusivity agreements. And these are just ad agencies. We haven't even talked about networks yet. But that's the ad agency. That's my recommendation for how you monetize and if you want to sell deals on this. No, no, no, sorry. I'll talk about networks in a second. But if you want to monetize, go through ad agencies, go through podcasts ad agencies. And if you want to sell because you're not exclusive, you can still sell on the side. And then the other thing that you'll encounter when you're building a podcast is networks and networks are like the HubSpot podcast network. There's other ones as well. I'm part of HubSpot and networks do a couple things. Sometimes they'll find advertisers for you. Networks are usually more likely to ask you to be exclusive to them. They will definitely not want you in another network. But for example, with HubSpot, they don't care if I sell ads on my show. They just don't want me in another network obviously. And they'll do other things. So they'll support creators. They'll help them understand with emerging podcast trends. They'll do collaboration with other podcasts in the network. Sometimes HubSpot doesn't find ads. HubSpot is the advertiser and the network. A lot of other podcasts, networks like, for example, podcast one or young and profiting. Those are two other podcasts. There's a lot of podcasts networks. Other podcasts networks will find you advertiser. So they kind of act as a network in an agency at the same time. So the lines are kind of blurred. And when you get to this point, you'll start to learn. You'll start to look at what I've made a little bit of money through agencies. Do I want to join a network? Our network is approaching me. Is it a good deal? Is it a bad deal? Creators will be careful because a lot of networks are not for earlier creators is a really good chance that if you don't know what you're doing, you could be getting taken advantage of. And I'm just a caveat. HubSpot is the best network I've ever seen. And I have nothing but good things to say about them. But I'm talking about other networks that I have been approached by that are asking for unreasonable terms. And if I wasn't more confident in auditing contract language or whatnot, then I'd get myself into like a less than ideal situation that I would have a hard time getting out of, again, not HubSpot, other networks. Not sale networks are bad. Just make sure that this is like the classic thing, like even as if you were an influencer or a creator on Instagram, sometimes brands, agencies, take advantage of creators that don't know better because they're not business people. They're creators first and business people second. And I've seen in circumstances, bigger agencies and brands take advantage. So just be careful if you start to engage in contractual obligations with people that it's, you know, to your benefit and talk to people that have either done it before or just talked to people. If you are a creative first and you don't get business quote unquote, if you're not like a business minded person first, you don't have experienced reviewing a contract. Just speak to people before you sign anything. That's my advice. But yeah, so that's sort of the the ecosystem of who supports podcasting. And again, none of it, I don't want to make it sound bad or I don't want to scare people off. I just want people to get into situations that they aren't happy with. But there's a lot of agencies and a lot of networks that are phenomenal, like the one I'm part of. And you can use them strategically. And you don't have to go and sell your own ads, but also you can. It's just a time thing. If you add a limited money and resources, you could just go sell your own ads, right? If you could go hire a salesman, maybe you just sold a company for a hundred million dollars. You don't want to deal with agencies. You want to go to higher salesperson. Okay, that's cool. But I don't think that's the majority of people. I mean, people need a little bit help. Yeah, yeah. Okay, so basically if you're starting from scratch, step one is get to five thousand downloads a month. It's as quickly as you possibly can in step two is use once you're at that point, try and then find a go talk to agencies and just find an agency and get them to start bringing in revenue. And that's probably the quickest way to monetize. And you might be able to make at that point a thousand to two thousand dollars a week, maybe on on ad reads. I say a little bit less because your fill rate won't be a hundred percent. Yeah, you'd probably be a little bit less than that. But still, you'll make some money. You'll make some money. It'll cover the cost at least. Exactly. And then you can make any extra money. And again, this is not going to be like your retiring money. But if you make any extra money, then you can start to roll it back into ads and you can advertise on like player FM and cast box. And you can even advertise another podcast. And I've basically tried everything. Well, let's talk about that as well. Yeah, so right now I'm about to start like a Facebook Instagram YouTube ad budget just to try it out. Advertising on the podcast, advertising the podcast, how to do that, where to do it, what you found had the best impact. So I've tried everything and I've tried Facebook and I've tried Instagram. And I found that it's just very expensive because you could target the right avatar of the listener, but it doesn't mean they're a podcast listener. So I could line up everything perfect, US-based, English speaking, 27 to 37, works in tech, like all the demos that fit my audience profile. But maybe they just don't like podcasts. Maybe they read newsletters. So then wasted money. So I have a pretty strong view on this. If I'm trying to advertise and market, especially when I'm just starting out when there's I'm not needing to look for additional audience, like I can spend the money that I'm spending. It's not like I'm trying to find 10 million people. I'm trying to find like a thousand people. Yeah. I only market on the medium of that particular thing. So I'm trying to grow a newsletter. I'm only spending ad money on other newsletters. I'm trying to grow a podcast. I'm only spending ad money on other podcasts or podcast hosting platforms because again, I don't want to convince you to listen to podcasts or to read a newsletter. I just want you to listen. I want you to already like podcasts and like I put my hand up and say, hey, check my nose. Are you doing that ad raid? So what does that actually look like? Okay. So it depends. But so it depends. So if you are going to advertise on cast box or player FM, which are podcast hosting platforms, great places to advertise, this banner ads. So banner with your show shows up at the top of their app. And then they suggest that they obviously have a whole bunch of podcasts listeners. They suggest that people go listen to your show. If you are going to advertise another podcast, I have done both. I have done my own ad reads. I have asked the host to do the ad read both work. I would say I would prefer the host to endorse me than me endorse me because again, you have to think about who the audience trusts. Another kind of ad that I like to do with podcasts is feed swaps or like feed drops where I take a whole episode or even a part of an episode. But it's usually a whole episode because I know that there's alignment with their audience. And if I do a swap, I'll take one of my episodes. I'll take one of the other podcasts episodes. And I'll put I'll record a little bit of an intro. So like what this is. Hey, this is, you know, this is X podcast with this host. I speak about this. If you like this episode, go subscribe here. This is a sample episode. Hope you enjoy it. Literally, that's it. Append it to the front of their episode. Put it in mind. They do the same for and then you basically just give your whole audience a sample of the other person's podcast. And then if they like it, they can go download and subscribe. So I like doing that as well. I think that's a great way because they get a then you really get and you can use chartable to track conversions on that as well. And there's a couple other analytics tools that you can use to track conversions you don't have to. But I mean, it's helpful if you, if you have a, if, for example, if I have a million downloads a month and you have like 10,000, technically, I could still do a swap with you because I could even take it out after I hit 10,000 downloads, right? And it could still be valuable, right? So that's a, that's a, that's a, in my opinion, I like that way of advertising because when you do swaps, it could actually be like a free, it could be free exposure to another person's audience if you don't, you're not even paying for. Yeah, that's a good idea. I didn't, I'd never thought of the podcast swaps. Yeah. Trying to think that's pretty much that those are kind of like the main ways. And then you have all the traditional marketing, like you said, you're running paid ads on Facebook and Google. And it'll work. Organic matters. Or getting pros, but they have almost no outcomes when it comes to no, you know, going viral on like it doesn't really need to think about. Okay, so what? And you also want to just not, you just don't want to drive people who download an episode once because a lot of services who just focus on getting people to listen to one episode, and then they're like selling downloads and they'll basically optimize so that somebody who's a, like if it's like a hosting platform, somebody who uses this hosting platform, this app, they'll go in and they'll listen to your episode one episode. But then there's no real pathway for them to become a subscriber. So great. Now you boosted your downloads on this one particular episode. But if churn and of those people is like 99%, it's really not. Doesn't help you. Long doesn't help you. It's useless. So you want, you want people to subscribe. You want to bring people in. And if you can find a way to do that for cheap and optimize it and you can pay a couple bucks per subscriber, that's not bad. And you just want to keep driving that cost down. And you do that by testing different, again, this is business, not just podcast, test different creative, test different messaging, test different targeting, test different platforms, test, test, test, test, test, and then triple down on what works. Okay. And my last thing for this deep dive, which has been amazing, by the way. So thank you. I think we're good. I've got one more thing. And if you would start, I thought of one thing that we left. Go on. Yeah. Go. But I wasn't sure what you were going to go. I was booking. It was booking guests. Oh, yeah. We spoke briefly when I did the code email thing. So I thought I kind of touched on that. If you've got something to add on that, yeah, go ahead. So when I started booking, so booking guests is just another sales process at the end of the, like, it's just a sales pitch. So when you're starting out, there's something in sales. Well, there's a couple of things in sales. But when you're selling something to somebody, first of all, you're always solving a pain point. That's number one. That's just a general sales concept. And second of all, how do you make sure the sale closes quicker? And there's something called intent and sales. You mentioned this before, there's intent. So there's intent for the buyer to do something. I'll give you a non podcast example. If I have a cyber security breach, there is intent to upgrade our security software because I just had a breach. If somebody hits me up and they're like, Hey, you want a social media scheduling tool? And I already have five people scheduling my social media. Maybe, but I wasn't looking for it. So that's the difference. So how does that plan to podcast guest thing? So podcast guests, finding them and getting them to come on your show is really just closing a sale. So when I started the podcast and as you get bigger, it's much easier because they come to you. But when you start, obviously no one comes to you and you have to sort of sell yourself. So to sales process. So first, I look for intent because I know if there's intent to come on to a podcast by the guest, then that's going to speed up the sales cycle and increase the chances of them saying, yes, how do you find intent? The easiest way I found is to go on Amazon and you look for people in your niche that are releasing books and you rank it by popularity and by time to release and upcoming books. And then you go reach out to those people because they're already doing a PR tour and there's already intent to create some buzz around this new book that's coming out. So for business podcasts, literally go to Amazon, go to Up and Coming, best selling authors and all these different filters and rankings and then find like the top 10 people and then you can use like rocket reach or any male finder or any of the other tools to find their email addresses or their publisher's email addresses because I mean the bigger ones are going to be Harper Collins or Simon and Schuster or Penguin Random House. There's only so many people you have to reach out to. And then first of all, now you've established intent, so you know there's a book coming out. And then after that, you're going to solve the pain point. What's the pain point? The pain point is exposure. So I would have some sort of subject line that would create intrigue, highest, historically the highest subject lines that I've ever used. You can put other, you can put other guests in, it's not even bad. It's just funny yet how people respond to just certain copy, but you can put other big guests in your subject line if you like because that does help it sort of create some credibility. The best subject line that I've ever used and this is not my idea and I can't remember whose idea it is, but I tried it once after I watched a YouTube video and it worked very well and I just kept going with it was first name, last name, line and then cell phone number. Dude, I did the exact same. It worked so well. It's so good. Yeah, my little is first name dot, dot, dot, we need to chat line my number. Yeah, it works very well. So that'll get you like a 35 plus percent open rate. And I'm dead. And I'm like, is he going to say it? He's going to say it. Yeah, whatever. It's just so, I guess it's just so intriguing for people like who will kind of crazy fuck put certain cell phone number in the email subject line and they open it and then then you have to tell them like, okay, who you are? What reach are you going to give them? You know, who are they in the company of? Who are the other guests? What are the parameters of the recording? Like zoom, super low effort. We do, you get the final say on the on the edit, sort of reduce the chance of them saying something stupid. We create all these clips. We license them to you kind of like we just mentioned before we license it all the clips. You can use them for your social. So again, intent plus plus good copy, high open rate plus solving a pain point, which is really then getting publicity around their book plus reducing the friction of making it an offer that can't say no to this will get you guests. Like you don't have to over this whole framework. He's got me. Yeah, so it'll work. It'll work. It'll work. Got me Grand Cardone, Guy Kawasaki, Anthony Scaramucci in like the first 15 episodes, which is stupid because I was not ready for those interviews. I was so surprised, but it works. And after you get some big names and you can put those in your emails, I hate these guys have been on the show too. Yeah. Yeah, so good. That's a banger. So the final part of this is if you were to be starting again right now, day zero, no following your men with a with a market dream. Where are you focusing? Where are you focusing your energy in 2024? YouTube. It's very it's a very easy answer for me. I would have I would have spent more money quicker to up the production of the actual podcast and focus on YouTube. I would have done more in person on YouTube. I would have just gone to the I would have just just jumped right into the most extreme version of podcasting, which is in person in person production. Yeah. And if she didn't have I would have rented out studios and I wouldn't have bothered with the virtual. No, no, sorry. Should I just hang up through this all this? I would really. No, don't throw it away, but I would jump into it much quicker because I would have people like I mean, half the reason why we moved and I respect her opinion because she didn't want people. We had a condo and so we did Toronto. And I started the podcast virtual in Toronto, moved down to Fort Lauderdale. We had a condo in Fort Lauderdale. Gina didn't want people coming in the condo because there's like a small space compared to the home of Toronto. So like, okay, so let's move down to Miami. And I was trying to I was trying to look at places to rent to Miami and studios and there really wasn't much down here compared to like New York or even LA's wild LA has so many creative spaces. Now there's some, but half the reason why we moved down here and built it the studio is because like I'm all in on this and I wish I had done this and made these moves sooner. And it would have actually in for like I mean, we moved because I wanted to build a studio. So like it's informing like life decisions at this point because I want to take it seriously. I am taking seriously, it's a silly thing to say. It has been taken seriously for a minute. But yeah, I want to sort of take it to the next level and I want to have full control over it now. Not saying everybody has to move, change your life, build a studio, but I would jump into I would find a way to create a higher version of content and a content that has more of a moat around it than what the next guy or the next girl is doing immediately. And I think that YouTube is the most in person and the moats on YouTube. So what causes the YouTube moat is that just followers? It's organic reach. It's organic reach for something that has no organic reach. Are you focusing, you know, so how do you get more organic reach on YouTube? Are you focusing on thumbnail descriptions? What's important? It's all important, but the most important is I think the most important is being there, obviously. Good production, but it doesn't have to be overproduced. But being there, see yeah, my opinion is if you if you show up on YouTube and you prep, that creates good content and it will be found and discovered and you'll grow. I'm not a YouTube like I mean, I also leverage shorts. I turn every I use AI to take long form podcasts, put them into opus.pro and turn them into a whole bunch of short form reels and YouTube shorts and TikToks and Snapchat Spotlights and all that. But I think it's like focus on video first. That's that would be what I'd recommend. Cool. Yeah, that's that's where that's where my head's at and that's sort of what I I believe that that's the differentiator. I think that audio only you'll have some you'll have some people that will hit, but I think it's very hard. I think it's making something that doesn't it's already hard even harder. So that's why you asked me what I do. That's what I do. All right, thanks Scott. Any any closing statements before you wrap up? No, this is awesome. This is awesome. To turn this into a course. A little bit of bullshitting in between, but besides that, we can turn it into a course. Well, so yours, right? This is this is all your knowledge. So I'll give you the pace of content and get from it. Yeah, we'll see. We'll see. Well, I just like I was like chatting about it. It's fun. I appreciate it. No, I have nothing else. If anybody has questions about podcasts. Yeah, we're going to send them in and we can do like a I was going to say we do part two, but I think we did a lot. We did a lot. They can find me. So the podcast is success stories. You go to successstorypodcast.com and then all the social is at Scott D. Clary. So it's super simple. Tom. All right. Thank you, Scott. Until next time. See you next time. Bye.