Sales and Marketing Exec to 22+ Million Podcast Downloads

Hi, I'm Stacy and I am Mark and this is the Guru's Game Changers Podcast. Welcome, Gurus. Welcome, Game Changers. This is going to be an exciting one for sure. Today's guest is Scott Clary. Now, like a lot of our guests, Scott is an entrepreneur. He's an educator, he's an author, he's an influential voice in personal and professional success. Unlike I think any guest we've ever had, Scott has a wildly successful podcast called the Success Story podcast. It's on the HubSpot podcast network and he interviews his list of talent and guests is a who's who. It's crazy. It is influential business leaders, it is notable personalities, it is all of these gurus and game changers really that come in and share their stories with Scott. So we're very fortunate to have not only the ability to talk to him, to tap into his personal stories and his personal guru stories, but also see what he's learned from the people that he's had on his show. So Scott, thank you for joining us. Welcome to the show. Thanks, Scott. Welcome. Thank you for having me on. I appreciate it. Yeah, you got it. So look, I don't want to do a disservice, so can you please, for our audience, explain what's the purpose of your podcast and why you kicked it off? And then how did you become this business owner, right, there's a lot of business owners and entrepreneurs out there, but how did you transform into this Uber podcast, Maven, and content creator, because you're a wildly successful and we're going to go through just how successful you are, but how does that happen? Very different story than a lot of people that grew up entrepreneurial, people that grew up, you know, on eBay, like the GaryVee story or whatever, the selling of the lemon get the lemonade stand like very different kind of story, but still the exposure and the understanding that in a modern environment, that's the entrepreneurial pathways, the way to get to a life that I feel is more comfortable and more secure and more safe, where I'm investing the money that I have and I'm not really long independent on someone else, that all just made sense to me. So as I start to learn more about this, a lot of the things that I do start to be more entrepreneurial, I start to try and start businesses, I try and start consulting for companies, I eventually started a podcast, I was consulting with a variety of different parts of the university of Toronto, trying to get small equity positions in some of them as sort of like a fraction I'll see XO fast forward a few years to CRO chief revenue officer position in a company, we raised some money, we grew the company through COVID, it was acquired just the tail end of COVID, that was first exit event, actually it would be the second exit event that I went through, but the first like meaningful exit event that I went through and then I'm like, okay, so this is like, it was a good, it was a good exit, it wasn't like, you can't ever work again exit, but it was a good exit, I went through the process, made a meaningful difference in that environment and I'm like, okay, this sort of the secret to how do you build wealth, so I can do one of two things, I can continue to sort of take my skill set as a seeing operator executive, going to start up environments, it's also super high risk to do this, so I'm not saying it's easy because it's like you work a lot, 90, whatever 9% failure rate, so it's not easy to do this, but it's a pathway to potential significant payout at the end of the day, and then if you're smart about what you do with your money, it could be a way to kind of, I don't know, retire, retire, quote unquote, I say retire because at this point I really do enjoy what I work on, but I think for a lot of people that could be a pathway to retire, which is why I think people start to work with startups, but, so yeah, this is sort of like the evolution of my thought towards startup and entrepreneurship, another reason why I started the podcast and the podcast was like an entrepreneurial venture that I started well for a company, very side hustle because again, my goal in life is to take as many shots at winning as possible, and if I take as many shots as I possibly can, if I work for a company, if I build a thing on the side, eventually some of those shots are going to work out. My questions, I'd love to find out origin stories, that's like my favorite thing, and I think kind of this podcast, like goers and game changers, like how does someone become a gooer or a game changer, but also like does someone influence you? So hearing that your family life was really stable, because a lot of entrepreneurs are kind of like comedians, like there's stuff that happens in their life, and they're like I'm out, I want to be free, and it sounds like that's not the case, but so in your case, like you're in Canada, right? So you weren't in America, mostly you hear about Americans that want to go to Canada, but you emigrated here, thank you for coming, which is awesome. But so was your family, so do you have brothers and sisters, and was there someone in your family? And I know that you said you kind of just thought this through as a CXO and a CRO and you saw it happen and you decided yourself, but was there someone who actually inspired you to do it, or someone who lifted you up, or someone who was like your personal, you know, I guess guru, or someone who helped you to kind of see the path you're on now, or was it completely within you? It was, so it's never completely within me. I think sometimes we think that it's completely within ourselves, but we don't understand the influences that impact us along the way. And this is why I like the saying, like I'm, you know, I'm self-made, because I don't believe that anybody is self-made at all. I mean, there's been a series of influences, major end-minor for the course of everyone's life. And it could have been watching the YouTube video, could have been a period you worked with. So there's been, there's been many, there's been many, many people, like hundreds of people that have influenced me, impacted me with, with anything from self-esteem to a learn, to how to raise money, to how to sell a product, to how to manage your talk, like everything that encompasses who I am is the sum of influences, and that's everybody. That is truly how we progress as human beings. So I'm trying to think if there was one particular person, I don't think there's one person. I think that what allowed me to sort of move towards a life that I feel is, it's funny. I feel an entrepreneurial life is a more stable and secure life now, because I know how to play a game. Right. I truly believe that. I mean, I have a lot of faith in my own abilities to, if something doesn't work out, pivot, do this, do that, whatever. But I believe that the mindset that I had that allowed me to leverage all the people, all the incredible people around me was really the putting the ego aside and understanding that everything that you want, someone else has already figured out. I love that. And if you can remove the ego and you can really open your mind up, and you can, and all, you can open your mind up, but you also have to understand that the person that's achieved the thing that you want is no different than you in all seriousness, there's very few people that are naturally brilliant or naturally hard workers learned behavior. I truly believe that if somebody else has achieved it, there is a pathway that I can reverse engineer that will allow me to achieve the next thing that I want. It's just a matter of marking out those points on a map. And I think that what really grows people is they see this end result. And they think, oh my God. For example, I could never be like Elon Musk. I think a lot of people would say they can never be like Elon Musk. But if you reverse engineer Elon Musk's career, it's a series of a lot of luck and a lot of success and a lot of work repeated again and again and again and again. And then once you have a certain amount of capital and you have a certain amount of, that initial luck is very hard to not the initial luck. The initial success requires a lot of luck, a lot of like a lot of you figuring it out yourself. You have that capital and you have like an exit. All of a sudden you build this flywheel into your life where you can start to hire the right people and you can start to build again and again and again and again. And I think that you don't end up where Elon Musk is, but the point is you can really go along that pathway and one, two, three, four different exits later. Then all of a sudden, then you're looking a lot more like Elon Musk in terms of business success, right? You start to be worth a significant amount of money. You start to have a significant amount of influence. People start to respect your opinion. So I think that a lot of people just look at an end result and have a hard time unpacking the path there. Whereas for me, that always makes sense. I can unpack every single step that this person take that this person took in every single job they took on business they built person that they had mentor them. And I can sort of get this little playbook that I can incorporate into my own life. And as long as I owe it to myself to follow along and take step one and take step two and take step three and I have to pursue all these different steps of unpack. I will eventually get to a point where I'm actually quite successful. So I know that that doesn't directly answer your mentor question, but that's the mindset that I went in with every single person that I spoke to. So I understood where they were. I listened to the advice that they gave, which is very good advice, but I also paid attention to their path and their journey. So there's things that I learned from a lot of people in my life that were not spoken over to me. I was just very observant of who they were and what they were able to accomplish. And then that's how I incorporated that success path into my own life. And I think that's really what allowed me to repeat that process again and again and again. I think part of what you're talking about is sort of related to the amount of self talk. You tell yourself, I can't be Elon Musk, but maybe you can be your version of Elon Musk, right? You can definitely be your version of them. Right. So let's just talk about that for a second. And so you had a point where you started to talk to yourself differently, right? From an entrepreneurial mindset, you talked about mindset, what are some of those conversations that you're having with yourself? What are you telling yourself, positive, negative, whatever? So I always played a lot of sports. I always played a ton of sports. And you know, in university, when you saw playing sports, you start drinking and eating like that, you like put on a whole bunch of weight and like that was like, not okay with me. And I remember thinking like, okay, up until this point of my career, like I was very like ad hoc. You just play a lot of sports, you know, you eat, but you play a lot of sports. So you don't really, like you always kind of look good. And I'm like, I got to be like very full as opposed to just living life ad hoc. I got to be like very purposeful of my health and wellness. And then you start to research and you start to learn, you start to unpack. And then I realized that like, I think it was probably because of like the physical change in my body from adopting like a very strict health and wellness routine that I understood that if you actually unpack the steps that it takes to get to somewhere, like you can actually action that. And a lot of it is just like wall power and grinding it out and like going in the day out because that's like, I think the first like this is when I'm still in college. This is when I'm still like university in Canada, but I'm not really, really that focused on career. I'm, you know, I'm messing around in classes, but I'm very purposeful about like, I don't want to be a fat ass. That's kind of like my thing. So I'm like, okay, and I learned this and I'm like, holy shit, you know, you, you look at what somebody does, you, you look at a variety of different sources of knowledge and you incorporate that into your own life and you see a very physical change. And then I'm like, that wasn't that complicated. That really wasn't that complicated. I did something purposefully, very purposefully that I want to achieve a result. And then I'm like, okay, so if I figure that out, how is business any different than that? Businesses an end result that somebody's achieved that they would just be to achieve. Now you may not be able to see it physically. So I think that's actually where a lot of people get stuck up because they actually don't feel like they're progressing. Whereas if you know, if you go to the gym for a year, you actually physically see results. So it's very easy to gauge your progress. In business, it's the same thing. If you have an end result and you see somebody that has achieved that and you pack how they got there, then it's very, it just makes sense. It makes sense for me to be able to follow that pathway. So I think that was, it was a silly example, but a very real example for me. If you are a smart person, the tri's hard for 10 years at building a field is your semi-passionate about and you, you know, you iterate and you build feedback groups and you learn to that process, you will have a level of success. But if people believe in results and you're never going to start, or they're going to fizzle out after six months or a year or whatever, that's why I don't love motivation because motivation gets you started, but that dies quite quickly. I've heard that success is like 95% consistency and 5% brains, so I think if you could be consistent and resilient. 1000%. You know, that's funny. Agreed. There's also some dumb ass people that made a lot of money too. There's a lot of stupid people that just didn't give up. Every day they just didn't, they didn't give up. It reminds me when I think about, and I listened to what you're saying, there was a podcast that I heard of years on Einstein when you talked kind of about focusing, right? So focusing, I loved that because I think, what was it? It was Steve Jobs and somebody else who had talked about focus, now that's Steve Jobs. I can't remember. There's a number one thing you need to do. Oh, there's a lot. It's focus, right? And I find, I let him a little bit ADD, so I'm thinking, everything's always ping-ponging around. And I think like focus is really, really difficult for a lot of people, but it's really important. So my question, like after I listened to the podcast, I don't remember you actually talking to the fact of multitasking. So I know focus is one thing, but do you believe in multitasking? Do you think it's possible? No, I don't believe it's possible. I think that blocking time periods throughout the day, so let's use an example, because people are going to look at me and say, hey, Scott, you were working a company and you did a side hustle. Is that not multitasking? It's not ideal, but it's not multitasking. So I don't believe in multitasking. I don't believe, for example, throughout my day, I'm going to be working on one thing, then read emails from another company, and then answer a call from my doctor, and then I feel like, and then I'm going to go create some content and go back to emails. You have to block time, so that while you're doing the particular job or the particular piece of work, you have highly focused concentration on that one particular thing. So I don't, as a very small example, I don't check my emails in the morning, I'll check them at lunch, and then I'll check them at night. Like I block when I check in or it's fine. That's a difficult one, though. You have, I mean, there are some things that are incredibly urgent and important, but I know what my day looks like, and if I multitask throughout the day, there's a mental switching cost to switching tasks all the time that drains you. Even if you think you're going to multitasking, you're not, because there's actually science to back up that you're not good at, that no human is good at multitasking, and every time you switch tasks, it drains you a little bit more and more and more and more, and then you won't be always notice it in like being less efficient, but you may feel depressed or you may feel foggy or you're not going to feel as sharp or your words aren't going to come as quick, whatever it is, it will start to manifest it down repeatedly. So you really have to block time and focus effort towards the things that you're working on. So if I'm working on a business or a proposal, like I'm checking emails on doing that proposal, I really need to, and I also because I do multiple things now, I really have to like block off a period of time. So I'm not creating content through the day. I'm creating content after hours through the day. I'm working on business A, and this is very purposeful, and only when I'm done my most urgent, important task, that I'll move on to something else. But yes, the video on Einstein was really about focus, singular focus. He took it to an extreme degree where, of course, in his world, side hustles don't exist and when you're solving for the theory of relativity, all you do 24, 7, 3, 5 is focused on theory of relativity. But I think that the lesson learned from that is especially in a sort of a micro example of just a day, do not keep tasks switching because it will drain you to some degree. So as much focus as possible. And then the side hustle, this is why side hustle is like, side hustle isn't like throughout your job, peppered in, side hustle is like three hours from seven to nine, Monday to five, or maybe eight hours on a Sunday, whatever it is, but it's blocked with concerted effort and focus away from the thing that I'm actually doing to pay the bills, but food on the table, because that's how I do, but both like really successfully. You know, it's funny. We're on you and I are on opposite sides of this multi-tasking thing, right? But if you're, I want to just read some numbers, your numbers that show that you're probably right. Yeah, right. Probably wrong. Well, this is what we're learning from him right now, right? Yeah. So you're looking just some quick numbers about Scott here. His podcast says over 22 million downloads. He's got over 100,000 followers on YouTube, over 100,000 on Twitter, over nearly 150,000 on LinkedIn. I mean, this, this man is out there, one and a half million followers on Instagram. Do you have a company helping you do that, by the way, because how do you not multi-task when you're getting all those stats? So yes. So I do, I mean, I have a team and I hire companies, yes, I do. Most of the content now is edited by a post-production team, put up a post-production team. I review a lot of the stuff. I review everything before it goes up, but yes, I have like a team that I'm not editing all the little clips myself anymore. That's too much. So a lot of my content strategy and really the content strategy has led to the audience, which is you have pillar content, like what we're doing, we're recording the pillar content, the video podcast, and then that goes into newsletter, log on the website, goes into probably 50 different video clips. They go up across all social. I mean, everything you just mentioned, but also like YouTube shorts, Instagram reels. I was using Snapchat Spotlights for a while, but it doesn't really much, TikTok. So like I have a content strategy, I have a team now that takes care of the content, but day one, I was doing everything myself, like I know how to do the video editing. I know, like I coded my own website, I was doing my own audio mastering, and I learned it, and I build a playbook around it, and then I teach it to someone, and then I'm like, I don't want to do this anymore, but at least I know what good looks like, and hopefully I hire somebody who's even better than me, they can create something that I, or build, or ever, or edit it to a degree that I could never, but at least I know what like baseline good looks like. I just like this is another sort of like work mindset I've always had. It's like I have to do the thing first, and then I know what, I know what a reasonable effort towards that thing is, and then I'll teach it to somebody, and that is like podcasting, editing, posting on social, writing copy, writing newsletters, sales, you know, putting together email sequences, putting together a tech stack for my sales team, whatever it is, like I've done that so that nobody can tell me like you're asking me to do something that you will do yourself, I've always done it, but that's a start of mentality too. That's what allows me to function startups, because it's not like I want to do this shit all the time. You don't have to budget the hire people until you do it yourself, and then when it's successful, then you can actually get somebody to do it. I think that's also, this is more like a management lesson, think a lot of managers who have not done the thing themselves don't really know how to manage that thing properly. And I think it's also a detriment to the hiring of the individual's tasks without you doing that thing, because if you have not done it yourself, it's very, very hard to hire the right people to call them out when they're basically be asking you as to whether or not, you know, they can do that thing well. So I've always taken, you know, a bin of the mindset, like figure it out yourself first, and then you hire, train, teach over someone else. So if we were going to reverse engineer your success. Yes, please. For our potential. Be selfish now, sorry, because look, we're young, we're new. We're new. We're not young. We're not young. I think you launched, right? Yeah. We're where you are. And we're doing everything ourselves, which we love. Don't we? Yes. Yes. It's a lot of fun. Yes. We love it. So what, you know, how do you stand up? Whether we're starting a podcast, starting a business, every, every playground, every sandbox you step in is full. Yeah. How do you get the spotlight on you? So, yeah, it's a great, it's a great question. I think that I started the podcast, I'm going to sort of give you the reason why I started the podcast. That's going to, that's going to do the answer to your question. So I started the podcast because I wanted to build an audience because I was looking at the Gary Vies of the world that built an audience and then was able to launch products again and again and again into that audience. I've never actually sold the product into my podcast audience, but you did that podcast and that audience and that community would be very useful for any product or service or business that I was part of or working for or wanted to start in the future. So for me, I was building the audience and that's a pure marketing play. And then after you have the audience, it's very easy to position a product against that audience. Sell it. Now, the, the play to build a podcast in terms of marketing is very similar to how to gain attention to a business if you're trying to build a business. But my goal with the podcast is if I build the podcast audience and if I launch a business in the future, I won't have to do all the things that an audience would have to do because I have the audience already. It's a pure influencer play, but done very purposefully, very, very purposefully, right? So if you're going to talk about building a podcast, it is full marketing. It's like a full marketing strategy that is required combined with do it for five to 10 years. And I really have to emphasize it, do it for five to 10 years and I'll explain with the full marketing strategies, but to do it for five to 10 years because build it in a sustainable way that it's not burning you out, that it's not tiring you out, that it's not like annoying to do and they actually enjoy it. And that it's not, you know, compromising your, your quality of life and your, you know, if you have a nine to five, you can't hate it because it is, it is a very slow thing to monetize because again, you're not selling a product, you're playing it on us. So it's easier to be motivated about building a business when you're selling a product because five of good product, I mean, you could argue that from a drop shipping model, five of good product, I've seen it, but website, I run ads, I could be making money like this week or in the next 24 or 48 hours. Podcasts is very different podcasts are a means to an end, but they're not the quickest path to revenue, but they are very sustainable, very loyalty building medium that over a period of your life is going to be fantastic to own. So I mean, you look at like the Joe Rogan's and the Tim Ferriss's of the world, like they've been doing it for, I'm sure, over 15, almost 15 years now. And this is the ones that stand out. And then once you've sort of adopted and understood that, that you have to be in it for the long run or else it doesn't really make sense. But if you are in it for the long run, like for me, I'll do this to the day I die. I don't mind. It's fun. I don't care if I'm old and I'm just, you know, I'm not that old, but say he's older than me, but say, you know, I'm old and I can jump in front of a mic and I can still talk to people that I love talking to and I can have great conversations, like that just compounds over time. Now the actual strategy is full marketing strategy. So what I mean by that is my background of marketing really helped. So I understand content marketing, I studied the Gary V model, which is pillar content, meaning that you have long form content that is geared around a message that you want to communicate to your audience across all your social channels. And when you have that long form content, that video podcast that speaks about the things that you want your audience to hear, all derivative content that podcasts will also be good social content. So you take the long form podcast, you turn it into audio video, cool. Now you transcribe it, turn it into a newsletter and to a blog. So now I have audio video and written and my, you know, I'll do my exact strategy. So podcast goes into RSS feed podcast goes into YouTube. My written gets transcribed. I send it a newsletter saying the podcast is live, but then I'll also do a newsletter sort of commenting on a topic that we spoke about in the podcast. So each podcast gets two newsletters and you'll, if you actually subscribe to my newsletter, exactly what I mean. One of them is more just like a hey, we're live and then one of them is like a, hey, we spoke about this. And then this is like my, my thoughts on it. So I repurpose content that way and it goes upon my website, it goes upon medium, it goes upon hack or noon, it goes up to my newsletter list as well. It goes on an obscure platforms like I say obscure because they're not as mainstream. But I just put it everywhere. So on, and then I, I did do this as well. I put it up on substack, I put it up on beehive just for a more organic reach. I'll funneling back to one spot. I put it up on a site called paragraph.xyz, which is a, like a blogging newsletter platform on the blockchain, which I have like 10 subscribed on, but I kept there just in case somebody finds it. I put it up on LinkedIn. So my newsletter goes to like, whatever, six, seven different spots. And then I close all those emails from all those different spots and put it into one main sort of bank of all my newsletter subscribers. And then that's just the written stuff. Then I will turn each podcast into shorter 10 minute segments, which go up again on YouTube as individual smaller episodes. They'll also go into 30 to 60 second clips, which is like the reels and the TikToks and whatnot. And then I'll pull out quotes from that or thoughts from that podcast and then tweets. So it's like a ton of content. But now I have a process that breaks down this content. So the post-protein team, while they're editing it, knows to look for all these different, like really viral talking points and all these different, these different things that they know are going to viral as it's the best of their ability on all the different social letters. Everything goes viral, but you try for it. And this is just like an engine. It's a machine that's going at a single podcast. So you do that for 400, well, I've done 400 interviews. I think I posted about 350 of them so far. Obviously, I have a backlog that I have to get out. But you do that for 350 over like five years. And yeah, that you show up in a lot of people's feeds. And like they want people who aren't going to recognize you or care, but you do it again and again and again and again and again and again. Yeah, people start to recognize you and they start to see you because not a lot of people show up in that capacity for five years. I don't do, but not very many. A lot of people fizzle out quite quickly. So you do that again and again and like the talent, I mean, you know, building a podcast is similar to building a startup where you take, you take advantage of the up works and the fibers and you take advantage of all these resources. You take advantage of great talent that is fractional. That doesn't cost as much, you know, I've used up work for a ton of stuff as well. This is like the startup playbook. You got to be scrappy, you go ahead, you got to be super, super scrappy. But yeah, you don't want to blow a lot of money on it because I mean, Tim Ferris says that you shouldn't start monetizing till each episode gets a hundred thousand downloads. I don't know if that's the number that I would aim for because that's a wild number that a lot of people never even get to, but it will take a long time to monetize. I think the minimum, the minimum that most advertisers want to see is about five to 10,000 downloads across your entire catalog per month, which is a little bit more because then you're talking about like $100 deals, which not to sound like that's not great. That makes the money. Then you start to have it, you have to manage the advertisers. And it's supposed to be a lot of extra work for you. So you do have to be able to sustain this in the long term without blowing a whole bunch of money on it so that you know, you're three, you're four, you're five. I think your five is where a lot of people start to monetize. That's like, that's where you got to go. And then eventually when you monetize, you can hire more full time in house team. And it gets a little bit less stressful. But yeah, it's all about marketing and building this machine and building the SOPs around it. And then on all the social media channels too, I don't know if I've ever seen anyone who's so consistent on each channel, like in terms of like hundreds, hundreds of thousands and millions of followers though, that seems unique to me. I don't know, except for like maybe superstars and celebrities and stuff like that. Well, no, listen, I'm still a little baby influencer, baby podcaster in the, in the, you know, compared to a whole bunch of other people that are out there that are exceptional and doing it for a long time. But I always try to build the strategy that allowed me to be everywhere, which is a lot for people. I mean, this is a marketing background, deport against the podcast. I would say that if, if I was going to give advice to somebody that was like, you know, if that I'm not going everywhere, I would say YouTube is the most important because YouTube has, is the second largest search engine inside of Google. I mean, it's owned by alphabet, same parent company. But any large podcaster has been a YouTube first video podcast, the way it is. Because you build more trust with your audience, people, and I've also noticed this. If you build an audience on YouTube, if you don't post a lot on other social, they start to filter to other social because it's very, when somebody watches your video, it's a, it's an incredible truck building in size that you cannot accomplish by posting a picture on Instagram or posting a tweet. But when somebody puts trust with you, they, like, they, they, they want to know more of you. And they go and find you on Twitter, they go find you on Instagram. You find people with 500,000 followers on Twitter, and they'll have nothing anywhere else. It'll be crickets. So same with Instagram, you'll have an Instagram influencer. Now we have threads too, but we have an Instagram influencer that has, you know, a million on Instagram and just post beautiful travel pictures, nothing on Twitter, nothing on YouTube. Oh, if you can tack it, if you don't mind being in front of a camera, YouTube, like do YouTube, it is the best thing you'll ever do. And the podcast also has the organic reach, right, that has no organic reach just on its own. It's not like a social platform. You post it on a megaphone or a lip sink or whatever you use to host it. That RSS feed has no reach, whereas social gives you reach, social gives you access organically. And you can post it. So that's where you got the things. Yeah. Yeah. You could do anything once you're on YouTube, but yeah. So I just think that you, your success is just stunning for me. And I know, like you've probably talked to people like that too, and you know, but it's true. I mean, I just, you know, I know the work that has gone into what you do and hopefully we can, can get there, Mark, um, three years, you know, that's our goal. You will. Um, well, the good thing is we've had a production company, so I have some background in the future. So hopefully we'll do that. But, um, I read your article too on becoming Batman. And I was like, really, I love that, um, you know, Sasha Fierce and then you're how you're bringing everybody into that, um, and self-distancing. So but my, yeah, my question for you is, do you have an alter ego and if you do, who is it? And what's the superpower, um, you can fly close to the sun and you won't get burnt. Don't worry. Like it was something along those lines and I mean, it's for me, it meant a lot because it just showed that whatever we try and do, as, as scary as it is, it'll most likely be okay. It'll like nine and a half out of 10 times, okay. And I think that that was in my mind, like the permission, even though we didn't know me, I didn't know. I just listened to my podcast, but it was like, it was permission to just try to do things at a higher level, to play at a bigger level. I mean, I mean, there's another, I was actually, I was actually looking to see if there was like a quote, a, a form quote that about this and there really isn't the closest thing I could find was, um, a quote from Paul Kuello from the alchemist and the quote was, there's only one thing that makes dream impossible to achieve the fear of failure, which I also love. Very similar type of quote. So anyways, how does this, how does this plan to imposter syndrome because we all have imposter syndrome and we all don't believe that we can do it. And I think that, that the article you referenced is about turning on alter ego that had believes that that can be done. And I think that's a very hard thing for people to understand, but you have to realize that you just act in the way of somebody who's able to do the thing and you, you consistently show up in that capacity, the thing will actually get done, and I'm not saying it's going to be easy, but at least it won't be your own mind that will be sabotaging you. So if I show up as a podcaster thinking like I can podcast, I can interview again, anybody who's done this before also sucked day one, that's fine. I've already, I've already come to terms with that, but I'm in my mind, not sucking even though maybe you suck a little bit, but the thing is you show up and you do it and you learn and you have to understand that like when you, the alter ego is showing up and doing it, even when I feel like I can't like that is, that is my alter ego. There's a lot of things that I don't like to do. I mean, podcasts, you have to understand, I got like Guy Kawasaki on my, because I, okay, a lot of the podcast success was derived from sales and marketing skills, right? So podcast growth was marketing, getting podcasts, guests is all sales. It's writing cold emails with a good sub-line, you know, highlighting the benefits of what they're going to get out of the podcast. So I did this like right away, I'm like, if I'm going to get a guest, it's like selling a product or service, I got to like pitch them, I got to put them on the show. So I talked about the show, talked about what I was going to do for them, talked about the reason we had so far. I got like Guy Kawasaki Grand Cardone and Anthony Simuchi. I'm assuming in like the first fifth, I have to go back to it, May 15, 20. I was not ready for any of these, like at all, at all, ready for any of these. I was scared shitloads, but what do you do? I mean, you prepare, you do your research, you show up, you do it. And like, is it as good as if I had done it now? No, definitely not, but the point is I did it. Do you get through that psychological hurdle by showing up as somebody who's a podcaster? And I'm not telling, you know, Guy Kawasaki that it's my fifth episode or whatever. I mean, he could probably, he probably research and he probably could figure it out if you wanted to, but I did it. And I would say that, okay, smartest move, but like, I needed to do that because the opportunity presented itself and I need to get over that psychological barrier. And it was a good show. It wasn't the best show, but the point is for me, it was very meaningful because it allowed me to realize that I could do it. So that was like us being into an alter ego moment for sure with those guys because you have to. Yeah, you have to because you're not going to go because I, at the time, I didn't much about podcasting, but I didn't know that I'm not going to jump on and say, hey, I'm not very good at this. I've never done this for very long. And then he's going to be like, why the hell am I here? So you got to show up with that confident, you have to have to have to. So that's all I knew. So I wasn't purposely architecting an alter ego, but like, that's really what it is. You're like, game based on love, it doesn't matter if you aren't comfortable. It's booked. It's scheduled. You have somebody, most people put only a dream of talking to who's coming onto your show, figure it out. You figure it out. So, you know, I think that even, yeah, seriously, like, that's serious. And I mean, that's happened with speaking on stage too. I don't like, I hate speaking on stage, but you just, like, it was like, even, okay, so probably one of the largest audiences I've spoken in front of was HubSpot's inbound, which is a huge, huge conference at a Boston. And yeah, like sitting in the room or whatever, the pre, the pre room for that, I was, I was sitting with guys that were very, very, very tenured speakers. So a whole bunch of people that I had a panel discussion that I brought on. We did a live podcast last year, and that was the biggest audience I've spoken in front of. And it was, you know, they were all guys that were very calm, very cool. I mean, they looked calm and cool. I have no idea. Maybe some of them have anxiety, just like, I do have a going on stage, but I know some of these guys do key notes, like, for activists. So for me, it was like, well, you know, there's sort of two options. I basically forced myself to do things by committing to the thing and then booking the tickets to Boston and booking the, you know, the hotel and then forcing myself to go to the, like, I, I create an environment where I can't back out because I know that I would back out if I could, like sitting in that, in that green room, I was shitting myself. I did not want to do that at all, like at all, at all, but you know what, you do it. And you don't die. And it doesn't go that bad. And for the rest of the world, it actually goes quite well, and I'm then did back this year. So I'm going to be speaking in Boston again. So like, we should just, you just go into it. Yeah. I mean, you architect this life that you, it sounds strange, but you architect the situation you can't escape from. Exactly. That's what I was like. That's going to push you in the right direction. Right. It's going to happen. Totally. So you need to bring your A game to what it's about to happen. Yeah. I totally believe in that. Even like getting to the gym. It's like, I'm just going to put my shoes on. I'm going to get in the car. I'm just going to drive there. I'm going to put my mat down. I'm going to eat it. You know what? She would have. It's just one step. Robbins has a really smart rule. Is that? Mel Robbins has a, I think it's Mel Robbins. The very short period of time where you just have to do the thing. So it's like, if you're going to the gym, don't even think about it. Put on your shoes go. Like, don't think about it. Yeah. That's what I do. So I think that's very powerful too. Put it. I mean, let me just take a quick break back to some of your guests, because notable names you've already come out with a few and you've had close to 400, 400 of them. Is there a common thread of sort of a mindset thread, a common success thread? And kind of see in all of them that has benefited you or benefits are obvious. Yes. Yes. Yes, definitely. I think that there's a couple things. Let's talk about one question that I asked, which is what a success mean to you. I asked that question at the end of every episode. And there's been, you know, various, there's been maybe two to three percent of the people that have spoken about something different than this. That's a 97 percent of people have said that success is freedom. So success is freedom, not from doing anything, but from, but for having the ability to do whatever you want on your own time, on your own watch. So I think that I think that that aligns with my version of success. And I think it aligns with a lot of people's versions of success, but I think that it's very sad that a lot of people don't understand how to get there. That's that some one takeaway, because that is what I mean, who doesn't want to be like quote unquote successful, but successful is not the job where you're working 80 hours a week and have no time for your family and you have a broken marriage and your kids hate you and your, you know, your, your health is declining and your strength. That's not success, but you could be making three, four, five hundred thousand dollars a year as a vacuative C suite, whatever it is. So I think that people have to re, sort of, sort of redo or reimagine the ones at which they see success through because you see people that have these incredible careers. But ultimately, they success a freedom. That's really it. So I think that optimizing your life for freedom is very important. But I want to know too, like I think it's really important for people to see successful people have also had failures in the past and have fallen down and have had to, like, sort of pull them up from bootstraps. And I think how those successful people, you know, have overcome those obstacles and have, you know, gotten to a better level, you know, maybe even like a much higher level as a result of that, you know, or in spite of that. So it was there a time when you were there and when you were in the, I was in the fetal position during COVID, like, what am I going to do? I'm a production company and I, how am I going to, what am I going to do? And then there were certain things I did to get through that. Yeah. So, yes, I mean, I'm trying to think of very specific examples. So that's a point. I mean, I've been fired from clients. I've lost a lot of money in investments. I've, during COVID, during COVID, that was, I was working at the company that was acquired during COVID and we had to pivot products like five times, like, to give you an example. So the company was a broadcast software company and we were, we were basically putting, like, technology into like the jumbo trunks and arenas and whatnot. Like, that was what we were doing. And obviously during COVID, you don't sell a lot of shit that goes into an arena. So like, so like, yeah, we have a tech stack and we, and we pivoted products and we ended up with a product that was basically like, it was like a cloud control room that allowed you to do like news broadcasts virtually. So we pivoted a lot of the internal technology and we did that like four or five times. And that was tough. That was very tough. And I mean, now I'm glossing over it. So it's like, oh, yeah. Well, that makes sense. I'm like, when you have, when you have $100,000 plus contracts, million dollar contracts that overnight are in a way, it's not so cool in the moment. Like it's really not chill in the moment. It's not like, oh, that's no problem. It's like, no, we, we lost like a couple, they weren't lost. I mean, they were just pushed for forever. But yeah, you lose hundreds of thousands, if not millions of dollars. So that's very stressful, very, very stressful and obviously, and you tell yourself, you say to yourself, let's pivot or like what, you know, do you, well, it's like, it's like, you don't, I don't see, I never really get, so this is a thing. I don't know if this is a personality trait or whatnot, but it's always like, okay, what next, we got to figure out something what next. So like, the, the, the moment of lamentation and, and stressing out lasts for all of 30 cents because it doesn't f'ing matter. Like it really doesn't matter. Like it doesn't matter how shitty life is or how shitty circumstances are. And I mean, people dealt with a lot of horrible shit during COVID. I didn't lose anyone. Thank God. If I had lost family, friends, combined of losing my job, also it would be very hard to say this in the same, you know, you know, jovial disposition I have right now. I just lost contracts. That's just money. It's money. It's just money. So, but the point is you have, obviously, you have to take stock of your life if people have passed away. It's very difficult to have mine to, I get that I don't want to this, I don't want to just gloss over it. But at the end of the day, you do have to have this mindset eventually. So whether or not it's an afternoon for, you know, you lost a contract or maybe it's a week of stress because you lost your job or maybe it's six months of mourning because you lost a family member. The point is at some point in your life, you have to understand that this is the mindset you have to adopt. You cannot be in victim mentality for the rest of your life. In that vein, in that same vein. So I think I know the answer to this question. But if time is not an issue for you, if money is not an issue for you, if the love and support of people around you is not an issue for you, what are you doing when you wake up in the morning? So it's everything that I've done. I've done like a lot of thought on what I work on now because I work on very, very quickly not. I don't want to go into the specifics too, too much because it doesn't really mean anything for like the general person is trying to improve their life or whatever, but basically working in a startup, podcasting, building a private equity firm, all those things tie back to what I like to do, which is teach. So my first job ever was coaching tennis, actually, when I, like I had gone to a tennis camp from like, I don't even know how old you're able to enroll in tennis camps, like six or what, I don't even know what it is. But then went to that camp, love the camp, turned it to it and it's through there of coaching tennis, love teaching. Every role that I've been in a job or otherwise, like I've always defaulted to like this, I want to train the people, I want to onboard them, I want to teach, I love teaching. Like the seat, I don't know, it sounds like the silly, but like when you, when you see somebody that's struggling and you, and you help them come to terms with what they have to do to get to where they want to be, it is like the most beautiful feeling, it's like the most beautiful feeling in the world. So I think that the podcast, the reason why I started this, like not for, you know, commercial reasons or building an audience, it's like, it's like, I love teach, like I really do love to teach people. And I think that the podcast, I built it because it was something that I would use to learn myself, but then as it evolved, I'm like, this is hopefully going to be a tool, a mechanism to like actually teach people. And this is actually a very difficult thing that I have to come terms with because the teaching podcast is very different, like the clickbait, funny, pot topic, political issue podcast, which anything teaching business, it will grow slower than if I was talking about politics and talking a whole bunch of shit on my show. And so it's like, it's been tough because I'm like, I need to say true to like what I actually enjoy because I, that's why I look at Tim Ferriss as a, as a beautiful example of how he's built, like an incredible audience teaching over to people, things that are very valuable. He's a very, very, I mean, there's also a, like, and now there's like the Tom Billy, who does a great podcast. I mean, Lewis House, like these are all a very positive education, upskilling professional personal development style shows that I emulate after. I see people that grow like twice as fast that do a variety of content or trending topics or politics is a big one, right? And it's difficult because that's, in my mind, it's commentary, but it's not teaching. Like, I don't feel like it's actually making people better by leaning into politics or leaning into, it's educating them, but it's, there's, you know, it's interesting. There's a, there's a theory that, not a theory, there's like a, a mindset that sort of tells us that at any point in, in time, there can be two truths, both true at the same time, meaning that I could have an opinion, you could have an opinion, they could be, they could both be rooted in logic and grounded in common sense and, and data, in fact, they could both be true. The reason why I don't love politics is because both teams seem to think that their truth is absolute, and it's a binary world, and that there can be no other, other truth, which is fundamentally false. Two truths can be true at the same time. So I don't want to include that into my show to any meaningful degree, which means that I have to focus on personal professional development, which is less click baby. It's just absolutely, we didn't talk about routines, like I don't, you know, I, I should do the infrared sauna and I should do the cold ponja boat. I wake up, I go to the gym, sometimes I have my phone on me in the bed, sometimes I don't, like I'm, like I'm, I'm not perfect, but I like figure it out. So like I optimize a bit, I try and optimize my diet, so like my energy is a point, but I also believe that like people are just human and I feel like a lot of successful people start to seem unhuman and unrealistic when they're like, I shut off my phone two hours before I go to bed and I take a cold shower at 6 a.m. and I, bro, like, bro, like, I journal every morning, I journal every night, like all that stuff is good. None of it's bad. But I think that's not real for a lot of people with kids, with responsibilities, with hectic schedule, with they, like, no, like if you want to watch a show on Netflix and it goes a little bit too late, if you're not the devil, like you're good, like don't worry about it. Like I think that like a little bit more humanity while always focusing on optimizing. So do I work hard? I work incredibly, but I probably put in like 12, 13 hour, 14 hour days, like very, very long days. But then there's some days when I go to bed, like some days when I watch Netflix, some days when I don't. So my best idea was not, like, this bastion of productivity and like books and all that I love that. I love that. But I think that it's, you just got to, you just got to humanize the experience because when you listen to all these, you know, self-help gurus, they make it seem like you're so far away from where you should be. But again, it becomes insurmountable. It becomes too much. I'll throw it back. I mean, you know, I don't think, like Elon is a funny guy because Love and Married and he's very pragmatic. And he doesn't do like a lot of the self-help stuff and it doesn't do a lot of that. He just works hard. Yeah. Which is not always healthy. But I mean, it just goes to show you that you don't have to, again, be 5 a.m. club, cold plunge, whatever diet to be successful. All that stuff compounds if it fits with what you enjoy in life. I personally enjoy sometimes being on my phone before I go to bed. Yeah. I don't know. I scroll through Instagram. I don't really give a shit. Some people don't like it. Do you sleep at hours? Do you have like a full eight hours of sleep at night or do you? Yeah, sleep at night. Okay. I usually sleep at hours. Jealous. So, so I think that that's really important too. And like I mean, like I mentioned diet, like I do optimize, do intermittent fasting. I usually work out in the morning, so I'll work out, I'll usually wake up around seven, work out in the gym. I try and, you know, manipulate carbs so that I'm not as tired in the afternoon. Like I do some stuff, but there's other stuff I don't do. I mean, like I'm carrying that. That's right. The carburetor. Yeah. I mean, just that he's human being. You know what I mean? It's nice to. Yeah. Nice to feel that way. Sure. And by the way, I have a lot of books behind me. Yeah. The publishers include so much fluff in books to meet a minimum word count, which bugs and shit in me because actually not what the author intends to convey. But the editor publisher would be like, okay, we got to get to like so many words. So it's like not like a book like this big. So what I try and do if I actually love a book is I'll go listen to a podcast with the author around the time when the book is released because it is going to be like the meat and potatoes of what the author actually cares about. About that. Yeah. Great. What book are you reading right now? Do you have one or listening to I'll give you. So I'll give you one that I recommend everybody read. It's one of my favorite. It's not the one I'm reading right now, but I read about once a year and it's called Play Bigger. Well, there's two actually that I read once a year. So atomic habits, which is a book by James James clear everybody reads that one once a year. It's a really, really popular one. And Play Bigger is it's basically a book about building a company and innovating in a space where there has been no company before. So it speaks about IKEA, it speaks about salesforce.com, like with Benny off and just I think it's very tactical if you want to build a company in a blue ocean, but it's also very, it's for me, it's like do things that nobody has done before. And there's always a way to do it, even if it seems insurmountable. So I mean with the sale or stock on Mark Benny off story, when he started building sales force, there was no cloud computing. So he found a way to create the concept of cloud computing because at the time all companies basically had big computers in their server rooms, as I'm still do, but they had big computers in their server rooms after they held all their data. So he's like, well, I want to create a cloud product, but there's no market for it. So how do I conceptualize and evangelize the concept of cloud computing? And then once I create the concept of cloud computing, then I have a product that I can sell into the category that I just created. So he was, so he's a very, very obviously brilliant, brilliant, obviously, but that like the concept of thinking differently, I really like as well. But the point is you should always be like a category of one, especially if you're building a brand. So you shouldn't appease the audience by trying to directly copy what other people are doing. People, especially when building a brand and if you're building a podcast, you are a category of one. People subscribe to you because of you always as always. So you can have similar, you know, information, but if you try and, you know, change your personality for the podcast, for example, right? It's not going to work. Yeah. Longevity and no longevity and changing personality. This Batman alter ego thing is not a changing personality, but changing perception. It's a very big differentiation. But I think that's very important. Who are your top three wishless guests to come on your podcast dying to know? Ooh, it's a great question. Yeah. Have you had Gary V? Has he been on? I haven't had GaryVee yet. No, I haven't, GaryVee, I wanted to wait. So it's so funny. As I, as I progressed through this show, I, I did some really, really big guests early on and they went well, but then I'm like, okay, I got to like refine because it's like, oh, again, self-awareness. I'm like, they're good. But it's like, I got refined the cadence a little bit. So Gary, people come on eventually. Seth Godin was like a big one for me because Seth Godin was like, it's like a hell of Seth. I mean, I would say, I mean, at this point, I do, there's like big names that you can't not want to have on, but some do a little bit of shows. So I, like, I'm thinking like Richard Branson, I look at him and I love Richard Branson. He's, he's an older, the older nephew, so like full of life that I absolutely love that energy. I'm trying to think of people that aren't cliche. Like the cliche ones are like, yeah, you want to eat one, right? I knew you're going to say him, yeah, like, I'd even do like Obama, Oprah, like all the cliche ones like, like even like, even like, you know, like every, every sharp, sharp neck, I've had a few, but I haven't had like Mark Cuban or like Kevin, like I, so I think that there's like the cliche ones, I'm trying to think of non cliche ones though. I'm really trying hard. I didn't perfect. Let's see. Richard Branson. That's just fun. Yeah, you're good. Because we have our dream list. No, it's a, it's a very good question. Richard Branson, um, who has not done a lot of shows that I really, really like that I really, really like, oh, I, of course, like V2, but that's another cliche. I guess the big ones are kind of cliche, yeah, cool to have mom. You know what I would have? I would have, I would have Tim Ferris. I would love Tim Ferris to come on because he's such a podcasting inspiration. Yeah. That's to me is, yeah, that's, that's another, Joe would be fun to, I mean, yeah, but Joe would be fun too. Tim's more in line with like the type of content. I want to create Joe Rogan just like a huge media personality, right? So I would say Ferri would be like, Tim Ferris slash Joe Rogan, they can both occupy that podcasting. Okay. Last question. It'll all come. I know. I'm so excited. Yeah. So excited to see what you do because, oh, it's amazing. So question I ask everybody and then I'll ask you like what, how, how we can help promote you. But question I ask everybody that kind of, I don't know if I don't know if it's going to stop here or not, but I think they're going to be a story here. What is the one thing that almost no one knows about you that you can share and kind of break on this podcast? I tell you something that I used to think when I was young, I guess, I guess I'll lead into how I view the world now. So when I was young, when I was young, I always used to think that we lived like a simulation, like a video game. Like I always was like, oh, we live in like a simulation. And and I think that that actually probably shaped my, like I would like a, you know, I always thought of like, you know, like the game The Sims, yes, I was like, how cool would it be is if, you know, in The Sims, where when something wants something to have like the little sign on their head and it's like, oh, I want money or I want to go to the bathroom or a hunger or whatever, and I'm like, how cool would it be if life was like that? And we could like see what everybody wanted because everything is a big simulation in a big game. And it's like a, and we're all living in something like Truman show, you know, kind of the environment, but then I'm like, you know what? Like life is not, it's not that different from that where if you actually understand what makes people tick, if you actually understand incentives and leverage, life is very much a simulation that I think that it's not like we're actually in a video game, obviously. But like the way the world works is complicated, but it's not like confusing. Like if you understand the right levers to pull, the right people to speak to, the right things to work on, I don't actually think that navigating life is as tough as a lot of people say it is. I think that, I think that again, being aware of all the things that impact us, like the health, the wellness, the relationships, I think that we, for a lot of us go through life purposefully without wanting to go a level deeper because it's very scary. Like it's very scary if we understand that we're not perfect partner or it's very scary if we understand why maybe we're the reason why we're not happy at work or we're not making the money that we should or we didn't, you know, ask for the promotion or maybe when they didn't give us a promotion, we probably should have left, but that was scary too. It's very unnerving to understand it, well, I don't have the body, I won't, I'm overweight and I'm not healthy and I feel tired all the time, like what's really causing that? Like a lot of us, if we go one level deep, it's not that hard to figure out the answer, but it's like the, the, the taking the first step, which is like really scary. So life is not a simulation as opposed, in the sense of the term, but it's not as complicated. So it's like everything is just a video game and you've got to figure out the, the right code of the right hack to get there. Oh my God. There's so much more. I can ask him about that. Oh, I wish we had on the minute time. Oh my God. There's so much. His newer link has anything to do with it, where we might have some aura coming off right saying, I'm hungry. Oh, maybe. Yeah. That's very true. As we want to fill it. As we want to fill it when I come. Please, please, please. That would be nice. Yeah. Tell everybody how they can get to your podcast, how they can get to your newsletter, you know, the website, all that. How can our listeners find you? So I'm not really selling a product or selling anything right now. So there's no like, there's no course or there's no like download or anything like that. Right now, I'm trying to build a community that's, that's the goal and that's the goal with the podcast. So I mean, it's even, you know, maybe one day in the future, I'll start like my own company and I'll sell a product. I have no idea what I'll do in the future. We'll see. But right now, I'm trying to build a community. The podcast is really meant to teach people at apps themselves and their life through stories of people that have sort of done it before. And this shows called success story, which you mentioned at the beginning, but it's like, it's funny because a lot of the stories are not just pure success, right? A lot of ups and downs and failures and whatnot. So if you like listening to those stories from some of the most brilliant people in the world, you can go to successstorypodcast.com or just go to my website. It's like ScottDeclary.com. Everything's there. Podcasts is there. Newsletters there. Newsletter is, you know, same type of content, different medium. Social is all there. It's all at ScottDeclary, same type of content, just tailored to whatever, whatever blood you're finding. So if you like tweets, go to Twitter, if you like short form video, go to TikTok, all the same stuff. But it's just like learning from people, from my experiences, from people that I've had the, you know, the luck of being able to speak with on my show. And that's pretty much it. If you, if you just like, you know, consuming and you want their source of incredible people to teach you and hopefully help you through life, that's really what I'm trying to create. You have inspired me so much. I'm so excited to get on this journey and thank you for everything I could talk to you. You have to come to Philly because we obviously, we have to, we have to chat more, especially with that sims things. I get more on that. But thank you so, so, so, so much for taking the time. I really appreciate you. And hopefully this will be the last time we, we chat. It won't. It definitely won't. It definitely won't. And continue to trust you. Thank you so much. Thank you. I appreciate it, guys. Bye.