Content Masterclass: The Most Valuable 3 Hours For Any Business Owner in 2026

The reality of being able to wake up and go like this, and then a million people seeing that for free, is [ __ ] insane. Callaway is a ruthless, system-driven content machine. An entrepreneur who reverse-engineers attention, scales distribution with precision, and turns creativity into a repeatable business weapon.

There are seven Lego brick categories that matter. All you have to do is figure out what videos and creators are winning in your category. Explode their best videos into those seven pieces. Hold as many constant as you think are world-class and improve on the ones that aren't. Restack into your own new Lego formation and post. This Lego brick framework is the sauce to content.

In this episode, Callaway breaks down his systems for how he scales short-form content and YouTube to become one of the biggest voices in marketing today. People make this mistake. The whole point is to find a game that you get to play forever. You don't want to retire when you're 40. What are you going to sit on the beach? You don't have to work 12 hours a day forever, but like, there is no end to productive growth. So then, when you pick your game and you're willing to die on the field, winning is inevitable.

>> What are the biggest lessons you've learned as a full-time creator?

>> Damn, so many lessons. I think volume, volume negates everything. And I think Hormosi says that a lot. It's like, volume negates luck. But that's the truth is, the strategy is not actually the sauce. Like, the strategy is commoditized once you know it. Like, we'll go through in this episode the entire strategy. The sauce is, can you make one rep and then on the second rep, iterate off the first one? And the distance of that iteration is really where all the sauce is. And so, as a creator, like, when you get started, you think, all I have to do is figure it out and then I'm good. But like, the figuring it out, the strategy is nothing, right? It's just doing it a [ __ ] ton of times and improving at increasing rates as much as you can is really the sauce. And so, you don't really realize that until you make 10 to 20 to 30 reps and you're like, "I should be good by now, and I still suck." Like, you don't realize it until then. That's when you have a fork in the road. A lot of people quit at that point 'cause they realize they look up and they're like, "Oh my god, this is going to take 500 reps for me to get anywhere close to where I thought I need to be." Most people quit at that point. So, it's about the positioning and the strategy and then ultimately finding what is the system that I can increase the velocity.

>> System, but also it's like, how can I look at a made rep and break it down into pieces and then understand where my execution of those pieces was lacking compared to excellence in my niche or in my category and then actually applying the learning to the next rep? It's a very, it's a very hard skill, like being able to look at a piece of content and say, "That looks cool." That's one thing. That's like taste, we'll say. But actually looking at your own piece and saying, "Oh, the hook on this piece was a little bit too slow, and the visual just didn't grab me." And I know that because when I look at the winner from someone else, it did grab me. Being able to identify A versus B and seeing the differences and then apply that change, that's where all the gold is. That's why it's actually really helpful to work with someone that knows what they're doing because they can help spot those things if you don't know what they are and then tell you what to do. Right? If you're when you're alone and there's so many unknown unknowns, if your brain doesn't work to compare things A versus B, it's very hard to improve.

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

>> Yeah. So, hooks, and we're talking short-form. There's really three pieces. This kind of became popularized when I said it in this one video that went crazy. You've got the visual hook, which is what's shown on the screen. You've got the text hook, which is the text shown on the screen. Could be captions, but also I call it title text. It's like bigger text that's not captions. And then you have the spoken hook, which is what's actually said. Those three things have to align as much as possible. There's like a few principles that you want, and we'll break down like, of those pieces. But the number one is like, if your visual hook is not showing something that you're also saying in text that matches what you're saying verbally, you've got a huge problem. Because people hear a thing and they see a thing and it doesn't match in their brain. They get confused and then they churn. Confusion leads to churn. Right? So, the opposite of confusion is comprehension. So, you need those to really be aligned. Now, let's break down each of those pieces. Right? When a video comes on the feed, the very first thing that happens is the visuals act like a stun gun. Now, people may not be able to comprehend exactly what the visuals mean in that first second, but they know it's different from what they normally see. So, they pause for a second. So, the first job of the visuals is to stun you, right? Contrast.

>> Exactly. People see the visuals before they can read words or hear what you say. Right. Speed of light is faster than speed of sound. So, you see it and see something before you start reading text. So, that has to like jump out. Now, we can talk about things that you can do. One is like a visual set. Like, the reason why your clips do better than most podcast clips is because this scene, this set jumps out as different than the typical, like, you can picture like, those those wooden slats with the tree in the corner that like, every podcast has. That doesn't jump out anymore 'cause people have seen that over and over. So, if that comes up and they see faces they don't recognize, they bounce because they, they clock it as like, not interesting. Yours stands out, which freezes them for a second. So, that's like step one is just getting them, people call it a thumb stopper, like, just getting the scroll to stop. The next piece is really critical. You have to set the context in the first sentence. Meaning, what is this clip or what is this short or what is this video actually going to be about? You can't, the way the brain processes information is top-down. So, it starts with broad context, then you can explain the how. Then you can give examples, and then at the very bottom, you can extract out a learning. That's like how the brain learns. So, if you drop me in the middle of a funnel of of that funnel and you don't give me context, like, if you just say, "jumped was crazy," like, what does that even mean? Like, who jumped? How was the jump crazy? What were they jumping over? Like, there's so much context that's missing that leads to confusion. Confusion is the opposite of comprehension. When people are confused, they bounce. So, the next, like, this is the second thing. We're kind of going through the, the pieces. Once you stop the scroll visually, you have to add context on what's going on. Now, you can add context with all three of those pieces. The visuals can show a thing. You could have an arrow pointing to a thing, and visually, people are starting to understand. You could say the words that map to what you're seeing. You could also write that in text. But like, context is critical. Then comes the contrast, right? So, once I'm contextually aimed towards what you're talking about, the way you really get somebody curious, which is what drives attention, is contrast. All contrast is is the difference between what they expect to see or hear versus what you actually show them. So, if I have a video and like, this clip, for example, like, this is real meta, but like, let's go through the example. How do we use this clip to go? How do we engineer virality out of this clip? The first thing you need to show is you asking the question, "What makes a good hook?" That's the context. If you don't have that, we're cooked, right? And you'll probably have text above, like, the zoom-out shot of me and you, you'll have text above that says, "What makes for a good hook?" Right? So, that's aligned and clear as compressed as possible. Exactly. Speed to value is maximum. And and throughout this, I'll just say like, a bunch of terms and we can define them, but speed to value is like, how fast you can actually get to value or tease value. You want that compressed as much as you can. So, that's that's kind of context. Now, how would we add contrast to this? If I said, "Most people think the way to do hooks is this. But actually, the real sauce, the real framework has nothing to do with what you've been taught. It's this." That's contrast. You can clip that for the intro also. That would be good. But basically, I was like, it's getting too serious. But basically, you want to lean somebody towards what they think to be true and then reveal something that is the opposite of what they think. That will hold them and they'll get curious as to why the thing they believed was wrong. Right? So, typically people say like, "but" or "there." You know, "but" is the contrasting word. But like, if I just lean you towards, "Everybody thinks hooks are actually this one thing, but they're not. The truth is, if you really look at the data, they're this other thing." Just me saying those two sentences makes you kind of lean in and you're like, "All right, what's he about to say?" That's contrast. And so, all great hooks have those three things, right? Visual stop, context, and contrast.

>> And on the contrast side, I mean, there's a bunch of different ways you can do it. You could just be contrarian in nature. You could just say something absolutely wild, get them looped in, and you open up that loop, and then they just stay in for the rest of the time.

>> Yeah. So, there's two ways to create contrast. There's implied, and then there's direct. So, we'll start with direct. Direct contrast would be kind of like the example that I just said, which is, "Most people think X. I'm gonna tell you why." So, I I I lay out the common belief. "Most people think X." Implied would be just asking a question or making a crazy contrarian statement without actually laying out the common belief. So, it could be like, "Cars are driving backwards on the road and nobody knows why." It's like, kind of like a contrarian statement. But the problem with that is it requires the viewer to complete the puzzle and come up with what they thought should have been true. Like, cars are actually going straight. They have to like think of that. So, it's actually easier to establish more violent contrast if you say the common belief and then contrast to the...

>> ...because that gives the initial context.

>> Exactly. It it basically, like, imagine there's a spectrum of minus 100 to 100 and you're starting at zero. If you don't actually lay the common belief, they're starting at zero and they go to minus 100 at the most contrarian take. That's only a net difference of 100. If I lean you this way to 100 and then I flip you to minus 100, that's a distance of 200 arc. Exactly.

>> What about on the the text and the spoken side? Is there any principles or kind of key rules that you do in those two buckets?

>> Yeah. So, on this, let's start with spoken. Few possible words, active voice instead of passive voice. So, like, "the dog jumped" instead of "the jump was made by the dog." So, it's like fewer words, more direct, more clear, like more clarity.

>> Is it always fewer words? Because I'm all about respecting the audience's time and we aggressively shave down the podcast even though some of them are two, three hours. Yeah. Do you just think it's you should always air on the side of just respecting the audience's time?

>> So, you should always air on respecting their time, but the most important thing is clarity and comprehension. If you need more words to make it more clear, you add more words, but typically people add fluff that's unnecessary to like, it's it's not adding additional clarity. So, you need to cut it. So,

>> the KPI is clarity and however many words you need to do to get that clarity.

>> The KPI is absorption rate. That's the most important thing in content. And this is why I think a lot of my content does so well on YouTube because I can distill [ __ ] down to like a level where you can absorb 100% of it. So, if I say eight words, do you understand all eight? You can put them together in your brain and be like, "Yes, I'm 100% sure this only means one thing and I know exactly what it means." That would be 100% absorption. The problem is when people start cutting words, like, if you actually had a sentence of 10 words and you cut some, at some point the absorption goes below 100% because like, you're missing a key word to add that clarity. So, number one thing is absorption rate and clarity. And you can get there faster by cutting fluff, but sometimes you have to add a couple extra words to like, make it clear.

>> Interesting. What about on the text side? And if you could get a little bit more clarity what you mean by actually text. Are you talking about the copy in the short? Are you talking about text on screen? Are you talking about graphic overlays? Are you talking about kind of the closed caption type stuff over?

>> Well, that's a perfect example. So, like, the absorption rate of that point that I made was not 100%, right? 'Cause I left it open where you weren't sure. So, I should have done a better job. Like, that's a perfect example of why absorption is so important 'cause you then have to ask another question. So, I'm talking about the text on the video like overlaid on the video. There's two really two types of text. The captions, which is the exact words that's being spoken oscillating every word or two words, right? They're that closed captions effectively, but like you style them.

>> I see the little CC logo.

>> Yeah. But then there's title text, which is like big words that are, they don't have to be big, but words that are not necessarily being said word for word. So, if we made a clip, hopefully we can get a hero clip about like the best principles of hooks. The title text might be like, "Stop making your hooks like this," or "Three ways to 10x your hooks." Right? I'm not saying, I mean, I just said it, but I'm not, I'm not going to be saying that in the clip. That's going to be up at the top or at the bottom. The words I'm actually saying, you might have as smaller captions.

>> And that's context and that's curiosity gap. Those are those two kind of big things.

>> Yeah. 'Cause typically what happens is people will see the video, they'll look at the visual, they'll try to understand what the visual means. If you have an arrow or a circle on the visual, their attention will go right to it, but then they're trying to corroborate that their assumption of what that visual means is correct. A way to help them corroborate that is by showing them text that confirms what it is. So, if I say like, if I show on screen a robot that has like tendons, and then I say, "This is the first robot ever to have tendons like a human," and then I write in text, "Artificial robot has human tendons." That's perfectly aligned. And then when you see the robot, you can see the text and confirm that your assumption was correct. That is like a click in your brain that you're like, "Cool, I'm on track. High absorption. Now I'm locked in and want to hear the next sentence."

>> And you should be under the assumption that through the visual, the text that's spoken, it's very hard to make kind of one work isolated. They all, they all work in conjunction. You want to use them.

>> They have to be aligned.

>> They have to all be aligned.

>> Yeah.

>> So, you don't have to use, you don't have to have the title text on the screen if you don't want to. But that's just one less vehicle that the person can use to get higher absorption. Right. So, that means your words that you say have to be really dialed. The visual has to be really dialed because you're not giving them an additional surface to kind of like triangulate their assumption. Something that we've done that I think a lot of people mis, they wildly underestimate is quote-unquote thumbnails or covers for short-form, or if somebody likes one thing from your page and they want to go binge and look at all of them. Give them context just like you're saying to increase the absorption rate and let them know what they're clicking into.

>> Yeah. If I were to boil it down, this is the most important framework in all of content. It's called content minutes. So, in order to get someone to trust you and ultimately buy, they need to watch a certain amount of minutes of your content. It's pretty obvious. Imagine every minute was one block. And so, like, if you were to map out, okay, to get somebody to convert on an email lead magnet, maybe it takes four blocks watched. To get somebody to buy a $97 product, it takes 12 blocks. To get somebody to buy a $10,000 product, it takes 400 blocks, let's just say. And the only way the blocks count is if someone actually watches it. So, what you really need when someone discovers you for the first time is high bingeability. You want them to go down the rabbit hole and consume a lot of your pieces at the same time to stack blocks quickly because if if it only takes eight blocks to buy the $97 product, if I can create a chain reaction to get them to watch eight in one session, they'll buy. So, it's like, what can I do to increase bingeability? Well, one thing is you can make a series. It's like, "This is day two of 10," "This is day three of 10," because they'll want to go back. Another thing is you can just design the thumbnail covers so that you're giving clarity as to what the different videos are. So, when they watch one from you, hit your profile and they scroll down, they actually have context into what else they might be interested in. So, it's like, we can go into the content ministry, but that that is like a critical piece and it also explains why short versus long, which I'm sure we'll talk about later.

>> Guys, we're going to get into it. That is why YouTube is the chosen one.

>> There you go.

>> That long-form YouTube, you got a lot of that time under attention.

>> Exactly. So, the average YouTube video, if it's like a 25-minute video, the AVD is like, let's say, 8 and 10 minutes. So, you're getting 10 blocks every rep. Instead of a short, 60 seconds, and some, the average time is 30 seconds, you're getting half a block every rep. So, it takes 20 shorts of someone actually watching to get to one long-form equivalent in trust accrual. So...

>> ...versus YouTube too, where it's very intent-based too. They actively chose to do it versus getting fed in the algo. We'll get into that.

>> One more thing on the on the Instagram thumbnails. This is another like super hidden thing people don't realize. The virality comes from shares, right? So, like, the a viral K factor is just 100 people see it. Of the hundred, three share it. Of those three, that hits five people. One of those five shares it, etc. That's how the loop works. Shares mostly come from intra-DM. Like, in Instagram, you share to your group chat or you share it out to a text group. When that video gets shared in the DMs, the video is sitting there with the thumbnail cover showing. It's not looping. So, when someone opens a DM, all they see to get them to click is the thumbnail. Now, if you're sending it to a homie, they're probably going to click anyway because it's like, validated by you. But, wouldn't it be nice if you could increase that? If you had five people in a group chat, you had three click instead of two? And the way to get that to happen is to design the thumbnail cover to be better. Or, you know what's so crazy is my wife sometimes she'll go, she'll binge and she'll send me like five or six like funny memes. And if I'm like really busy,

>> I'll click like one or two of them. I won't click all of them. And I'll literally go off on the cover. Yeah. And if you, if people don't...

>> That is actually crazy. I did not know that.

>> That's sauce. That's sauce.

>> That's That's some random random sauce. We're actually reoptimizing the next couple days. I call them thumbnail, but I mean, they're covers on Instagram just to give context of the different types of series and such.

>> To button up on the hook side, anything on the visuals? Any like big key principles or rules or things you've learned specifically in relation to visuals and hooks?

>> Yeah, high motion, high color, high contrast are like the three attributes. So, podcast clips are notoriously tough to get to go viral. Why? Because if it's just us here, there's not a lot of motion. You could have high color. Like, these are going to be colored sick and like the background, whatever. You'll have high contrast, meaning it it differentiates from the feed and like, if you were to compare to black and white, it's contrasting well, but there's no motion. So, you can add motion with like a subtle push-in or you can like add a...

>> ...lens flare or something. Yeah, you can add artificial motion, but the best visuals have a lot of motion baked in. Why is this? If you think about like pure psychology, deer in the woods, head down, eating some grass off the ground, when they sense motion out of the corner of their eye, they pick their head up and look. The brain is optimized to look for motion, like look for changes in motion. So, if you're scrolling through the feed and a lot of people, like, let's say you're on TikTok and a lot of people are just like in their bedroom or in their car, they're holding the phone, there's just not that much motion. If the next video has motion, immediately it will lock you onto it. That'll that'll be that thumb stopper. So, the visuals just from like, a principle perspective, high motion, high color, high contrast. The next thing would be like, what looks interesting right now? It's it's going to be you on the screen. You're either hot or you're not. If you're hot, that's more interesting than not. So, like, that is, you should play into that. If someone's like super attractive, you should definitely play into that. But if you're not, if it's not like human-driven and you're using B-roll visuals, like what I use in my tech videos, I need to pick interesting looking [ __ ]. Like, it needs to have high motion, high color, high contrast, and be interesting looking. And I think everyone interesting is kind of like a mushy word. Like, it's how do you define that? Everyone knows what interesting is, right? When you see something, you're like, "Damn, that that's pretty interesting, right?" So, so you want to optimize for that.

>> We're actually doing that just based on like a taste perspective. We weren't doing it based on strategy and kind of the stuff that you're backing into. And now that I'm thinking about it, there's a lot of motion in your videos. A lot of things. Yeah, it's probably a little too much uh for, but but like my niche with the tech and AI shorts...

>> ...is pretty well optimized for like different niches are different levels of maturity in terms like the players actually know what to do. Tech and AI is pretty mature. So, like, you got to be very dialed. The visuals have to be very tight. Now, if you're like dentistry, for I don't know, like, or just dentistry in general is low. The bar is low. So, so if you have a little motion or like you have an overhead shot on a on a grainy phone of like somebody doing a root canal, that might still pop because there's just not that much else that's beating that relative to the to the benchmark. Yeah, I definitely want to dissect a piece of short-form content and I, you know, just go through all the different kind of key steps and levers that you need to pull to win at the highest level. But I want to back up a bit. You text me, I don't know, 45 minutes ago, this new concept about the five content games. I just want you to go through that to kind of lay like a macro framework before we dive into each, just so people have context in what should they be doing. Yeah.

>> Yeah. So, most people will go to a guru or whatever and they'll be like, "What should my content strategy be?" And most of these gurus don't have the sophistication to be like, "Well, it depends what your business is. It depends what the offer is." There's these different buckets, these different games, right? So, I want to like lay out every single person watching this is watching it because they're trying to get better with content, either long-form or short-form. We're going to cover both. You need to pick which of these five games we talk about that fits you best and then adapt the strategies and maybe as we go, I can like break them down. So, the first game is, we'll call, or the first two games, we'll call the media game. So, one of them is entertainment. So, entertainment media. The second one is education. So, education media. The media game's full purpose is to maximize views at all costs because you're monetizing via like CPM, so like ad YouTube AdSense or like the TikTok creator fund or brand deals. And brand deals pay based on views, right? So, entertainment media would be like Mr. Beast, streamers, anyone who's like just trying to entertain at like the highest possible volume, highest possible audience size. Education media would be like, and the difference between education and entertainment is just, education videos, you can watch them and then tactically apply something to fix a problem. Anything else is entertainment. So, technically, like my tech and AI videos would be like entertainment media. You would think they're education 'cause they're like tech, but actually most of my videos, you can't walk away and like apply something. I'm more just telling you about something so you have the information. That's a nuance. It doesn't matter. But first game is entertainment media. Second game is education media. Those games need a [ __ ] ton of views to play. So, like, there's a certain strategy around ideas, around niching, around how you actually execute the videos to get a ton of views. Okay, so those those are the first two. The second two are about consumer products. If you have a consumer product at the bottom of the funnel. Number three, like the third one would be, you know, the first of the consumer products is if you have a commoditized consumer product. And what I mean by this is like, you don't need to educate the viewer on how the product works. So, like clothing, or you sell couches, or you sell hats, like every person can look at a couch and be like, "That's a couch." So, you don't have to educate them on how it works. However, you need to get them aware. So, there's a strategy there.

>> Less context.

>> Yeah, exactly. You don't need any context. You can just show the couch and be like, "This is a sick couch," or like, just have a cool person sitting on the couch be like, "Yeah, I [ __ ] with that couch." Like, that is clear. So, we can talk about the strategy, but like, there's a strategy for that. Then bucket four is like consumer products that do require education. So, this could be like AG1. AG1 is just a green powder in a box. If you see that, you don't really know what that is. Like, that could be matcha, that could be greens powder, which is what it is. Like, you don't know. So, the the viewer needs some amount of education to close the gap. Now, they don't need a [ __ ] ton of education. You can give it to them pretty quick, but that's a different content strategy. So, that's bucket four. Bucket five is like everything B2B. So, that's like, you're selling business services, coaching, info products, B2B SAS, everything where lots of education is required, right? So, those are like the five content games you pick based on the business model, right? Because everyone's making content because they're trying to make money. Like, let's just be honest. You pick whichever business model you want to play, media, media, consumer product, consumer product, or B2B product. And we can, we'll break that. We'll use that framework to explain the differences and the nuances of like, how to play short-form, how to play YouTube, etc. But that is a critical first step. You have to pick the game and adjust accordingly. I think something really key to point out there is on those first two buckets of media, talking about the entertainment and education. First off, blending both. I think you get an asymmetric outcome from that if you can actually educate and also entertain. And then also be very, very careful there in playing that CPM game. You want to also be playing the brand game. I talked about this with Samir, Colin and Samir about if you feed a very narrow ICP and you really audience match correctly, then you can charge a premium.

>> For that. And I think that that should be the goal of anybody in content. You don't want it to be just a direct CPM game. You want to be like, "Hey, I can charge more money because I'm positioned in the marketplace as such."

>> Yeah. I think the, in general, you'll make way more money playing the products, services, offers game than you will the media game. A, and B, within the media game, agreed, you can make way more if the audience value is higher. C, three, whatever whichever I said that, the media game is arbing to zero. That game's going to zero. Like, AI content will run that media game over, and we can probably get into that later. But like, the reason why all the mainstream YouTuber, like, there was a tweet that went viral the other day, most people watching this will have seen it where the the guy was like, "I'm I 7 million views a month and I still live in my mom's basement." That guy is an enter an entertainment YouTuber. Now, he's not only making five grand a month, like he's probably making 30, 40, 50, but he has a big team and so he's netting five or whatever. The point is, like, the media game is a dumb game to start in 2025, 2026. It's just not the right game to play. It's a losing game. Mr. Beast is one of the winners of that game. Netflix is playing that game. The NFL is playing that game. You will lose to Mr. Beast, Netflix, and the NFL. And so, my proposition to most people and like, where where I specialize is the other buckets of like, do you need a personal brand to accrue trust to sell something? That would be like bucket five. And then strategies within buckets three and four, you have consumer products and you can you can build like these UGC swarms or like these other strategies that we can talk about. But I'm like, not that interested in the entertainment game. My tech and AI is that, and that's where I started, and I'm realizing that like, oh [ __ ] that's a losing game. So, like, we can talk about that, but that's for for more clarity though, you can start in the media game, i.e., media entertainment or media education, build a personal brand, build the trust, and then you flow into bucket three, four, five, and you actually sell a consumer product.

>> Yeah. So, the most common. So, so the, and this is a framework that I think we should talk about. All business just boils down to is traffic, funnels, offers. That's it. It's just three things. So, you either start with an offer where you know what you want to sell and then you got to go get traffic to funnel to that offer. Or you start, you don't know what you want to sell, which is very common, and you start with traffic and you're just like, I want to figure out content and I'll figure out the offer later. That's that's the path I took. What most people end up doing is they either pick the entertainment bucket or education. If they have no skills, they're going to be in entertainment. They do have skills, they sometimes niche down into education, but usually they end up in entertainment. And they start making content and they get addicted to the views game. And so they try to rev the views as high as possible. To do that, you broaden the aperture, you expand the TAM of the ideas, and you become less focused on one audience avatar. What happens then is you're like, "Okay, I'm making 5, 10, 15, 30, 50k a month, whatever, like, you know, varying degrees, but you realize there's a cap and you realize that is going to decay over time as the competition, the niche rises, and as AI content comes out." So, you're like, I need to build an offer, service, or product that I can sell to this that I own that I can sell to my audience. And you start doing that, and one of three things happens. A, before you even build the offer, service, or product, you start asking the audience what they want, and you realize they're all over the place because you have a super broad audience because that's what was required to get a lot of views, or you just pick a slice and you build it. But when you go to push because you assume I have a huge audience, I can push people to it, not that many take it because there's not that many people in the audience that actually want that that offer. And so what ends up happening is you're like [ __ ] I don't have the ability to sell through the audience I already have. What do I do? And one of two things can happen at that point. You either stick and just keep playing the media game, which is what a lot of people do, or you have to rebuild a second audience from scratch, narrow, using the offer that you that you want to sell. And that's exactly what happened to me. That's why I know it so well.

>> Yeah. I mean, for us, for people out there listening, we're almost at this point, we'll probably be on episode 20, is just like, we may be serving too many audiences. We might we might have too much variety of the guests on this show. And once you have a massive audience, you have escape velocity. You're Joe Rogan. You can talk to MMA fighters, comedians, scientists, and Donald Trump.

>> Yeah.

>> But if you want to win in the beginning, I do think you got to go narrow with the ICP.

>> But that's the thing is Joe Rogan's playing the media game. So he's accepted.

>> But it's a barbell though. It's once you get escape velocity, then you can play that game because there's just so much money to be made on just the CPMs.

>> Yeah. And and even even at the beginning is like, if you want to, if you want to be a face, you want to be famous, you want to be like an influencer, you want to be like a creator,

>> you can play the media game. It's a harder road.

>> I think we also need to give context for out there for the people listening. I definitely do think that there's two sides of the coin listening. There's the creators and then the business side. I mean, there is a, I mean, you can have a one or two, three person team doing a million dollars, a million and a half cars. We've had RPN on. We're just talking about like, if you want to make, I don't know, there's obviously outliers, but if you want to make $5 million a year in profit, $10 million a year in profit, like people that are playing the the media game, that there's not that many people that are making well into seven figures doing that,

>> right? And that's and that's I want to demystify that piece of it, right? Because I think a lot of people think being a creator, when I say being a creator, I mean the media side because really, if you're the other side, you're an entrepreneur using content. There are like two two sides. People think if you're a creator, you're just like rich. You're flush with cash. It's actually very hard to break into seven figures as a creator. Like, only the top 1% or 0.01% in the niche can do it. But just to give context, like, I never wanted to be famous. I never wanted to be a creator. I never wanted to be an influencer. I'm a savage entrepreneur that has identified organic content as the cheat code lever to fuel businesses. So that's why I I started figuring out how does content work. It the byproduct unfortunately was that I grew like audience and people kind of know me, but like that was never my intention. So I I do think there's two buckets and and again, like we said, the five different business games, there's two buckets here. If you want to be a creator and you want to have influence and you want to be like at the parties and you want to be plugged in and tapped in, the media game is the best way to do it because you get the highest views, the most exposure, and it feels like you're you're in that world, right? The other world is like entrepreneurs in the trenches that don't actually want to be known, right? These are two different buckets. Like the approach is different. And so that's I think it's important for people to like self-select into what they want, right? And then build the strategy accordingly.

>> I think another big thing to note too is on the former, when you're playing that CPM and view game, it becomes very, very difficult on the the sponsor and partnership side because you're so wide.

>> Yeah.

>> That you don't have these narrow products and services to sell into an audience. It's a very...

>> ...It's just like you have 20 different types of people listening to your podcast.

>> Yeah. And that's that's actually a good a good thing for people to think about is like, the reason the brands are paying you is because they want to get a return on the spend. They think your audience avatar matches their buyer profile, which is why they're taking a bet. The wider your content ranges, the wider your audience ranges, the less confident they are that that bet will pay off and the less they'll pay you to do it. So, it's like, in a way, going wider is antithetical to dollars. Not in a way that is that is the truth. So, it's like the wider you go, the harder it is to be like specifically valuable for a certain slice, which is kind of counterintuitive.

>> But then it's also an eco game. You're going to get less views. The more narrow you go, the less views you get. The slower the game is. It's so funny too, 'cause for people out there listening, we'll have context obviously in the trailer. Not only Kane was a former rapper, guys. We're going to pop up right here, his rap album. It's actually really, really good. Kind of like a Logic. You sound like Logic.

>> Yeah, a little bit.

>> But also, you were in management consulting and...

>> ...hobbyist rapper.

>> I think hobbyist rapper, not not a pro.

>> I think it's good, bro. We're going to show, we're popping up. We We might stop and just play and play a song 'cause I think it was good.

>> Yeah.

>> I wasn't going to glaze you either. When you sent it to me, I was like, "Yo, I was with my girl. I was like..."

>> ...I was like, "This is questionable." But it was good.

>> Yeah. It always. But yeah,

>> it makes sense to me that you're formerly like a management consultant. Going through your content, like, there's just no way that you could know the stuff that you know without obviously having a business background.

>> Yeah. And to tie a bow on that, I just, I feel like the future, I'd obviously put myself in the same bucket as you. It's like, yeah, I'm a content creator, but I'm an entrepreneur and operator by trade. I just see how this is going to play exactly

>> into my future. I think that is going to be the future. I think that there's for entrepreneurs and operators out there. It is a hard game, content creation game, but there is asymmetric benefit and I think there is so few people in the arena. There is so few people in the, I mean, we talked about how many creators can come on here and really have a business conversation. It's it's shocking how much white space exists. Like, if you're if you're a young kid and you're ambitious and you have a little bit of this like analytical slant, dude, the game is wide open. Like, the cost of building is coming to zero. The cost of attention is coming to zero. And you can use data and like a science-based approach to out-engineer anyone else who's playing the content game like by gut feel. Dude, it is like, it's open season. It it is so open in every niche. It just doesn't appear that way from the outside because you see so much volume of [ __ ]. I'm telling you, it's wide open in every lane.

>> I'm with you on that, man. Let's dive into how people get that awareness. Let's go a little bit into kind of like formats, visuals, and editing a bit. First off, anything you want to close on on that those five content games?

>> But the one other thing I wanted to say, which is will be a framework to like the short-form stuff. Everything I look at, I try to break into Lego bricks. This is like how I, my whole worldview works is like, see a thing that doesn't make sense or feels complex. Break it down to the studs into like atomic units. Figure out the options that you can use for those atomic units. Those become Legos. Stack those Legos into a stack and then you can make whatever you need to make. So, for short-form, there are seven Lego brick categories that matter. And I'm sure we'll get into this and for YouTube. And I want to contextualize this now because we're going to talk about other categories within short-form. It's just helpful to have this framework. The seven Lego bricks for short-form are: topic, angle, hook structure, and within the hook structure, those three things we already talked about, visual, spoken, text, hook, story structure, which is the way the story is actually laid out. You could also call this like video type. So, you could have like a case study, a breakdown, a listical, a storytelling, narrative, whatever. Number five is visual format. How are the visuals actually laid out on the screen? Are you doing split screen, full screen? Are you doing the little circle thing? Are you in the world? Are you doing a vlog POV? There's a bunch of those. Six is key visuals. So, what what visuals are you actually using in the visual format? A-roll, B-roll, graphics, whatever. And then seven is audio. So, and audio is music and sound effects. Those are the seven like categories of things, elements that make up a short-form video. So, all you have to do is figure out what videos and creators are winning in your category. Explode their best videos into those seven pieces. Hold as many constant as you think are world-class and improve on the ones that aren't. Restack into your own new Lego formation and post. That's like this Lego brick framework is the the sauce to content.

>> Guys, get out your pen and pad. Stop right now and get out your pen and p. You're dropping just bombs.

>> If you're driving,

>> you are dropping, pull over right now. He's dropping bombs right now.

>> But that but that is really important to think of the world that way. I think

>> I would also

Say too, a good way to look at that is when you look at those seven buckets and you look in, kind of, the cohort that you're playing in. Think about contrast, too. What can you do that's radically different than the other people in there? And you dissect each one of those seven. What can you do completely different?

So, to, to give, to give explicit context and direction to people, if you're a beginner, the reason you're struggling is because there's so many unknown unknowns. There's a hundred things that you can't do and there's another hundred that you don't know what to do. The easiest way to reduce the sphere of unknowns is to hold constant a bunch of them for what's already working in your space. So when people say, like, "Just copy what other people are doing," what they really mean is, of the seven buckets, topic and angle are probably going to change for every video. But like hook structure, story structure, visual format, you can hold those constant and replicate what's already working.

Now, some people say copy. I don't really think you should copy, but use like, "Oh, I see the split screen with the motion from the left to right is catching my eye. I'm going to do that for my visual execution, but I'm going to switch the topic." This is why the beginner should do this. Now, as you get better and you close the gap on some of those unknown unknowns, then you can be like, "Oh, I'm going to invent a new visual format that people don't have." The problem is beginners try to invent new [ __ ] because they're like, "I can't replicate what's already there." I don't think that's the right way to approach it. When you're a beginner, close down the things you need to learn until you learn the fundamentals. Copy what's already working. Once you get better, then go back to the things you were copying. You're like, "Can I do this in a new way that no one's ever done, or can I borrow from this industry and remix it originally for my own space?" That's how to think about like stairstepping based on your skill level.

What about from, uh, when I look at these seven, what about like formats? Like, what short-form formats do you think perform the best right now? So when, when you say formats, do you mean the story structure, like the type of the video, like case study, breakdown, listical, like the way the information is presented, or do you mean visual formats, the way it's laid out?

You can chop it down however you want under those kind of seven buckets. What, what is working right now in short form? If somebody is watching this in January of 2026.

Yeah, so you can get any format to work in any, in most niches. I won't say every format in every niche. The hottest thing right now is narrative-driven visual storytelling. That's like, by far the hottest. So Khloe Shu is a really good example. Maybe you, you guys can play this up. Is like she had this like 30 lessons in 30 days by age 30.

And basically, most of those videos were her taking an individual story from her life or her experience, using like cool shots and visuals to make it, whatever I call it, visual storytelling. But a lot of the narrative was like, "I experienced this problem. Here's what I tried to do to solve it. Didn't work. Here's what I did do to solve it. If you have a similar problem, here you go." It's less like, "You should be doing these three things." It's more like, "I did this thing, take it or leave it." That's very popular right now, this like personal narrative-driven storytelling. And I think the reason why, Orin may have mentioned this, I don't, I don't know where I heard this, but you go through seasons of formats where like certain formats work and it really, it really matches with like the maturity of the platform. So initially, when Instagram Reels came out, 2022, TikTok in 2020, the like lower effort, more transactional formats worked because there was no supply. So like you could say, "Here's the five best AI tools for doing this," lististical, or you could say, "Let me break down how to like flip your camera setting to get this shot." And it's very like transactional information, tutorial, information-based tutorial. Those became saturated because like the market sees it opportunity and fills it. So then the next season after that was kind of like these case study breakdowns, we'll say. So it was like, "This person achieved this result in this way. Let me explain how." Still like a how-to, but adding more original context that you couldn't, you couldn't do.

First one is like a reporter, right? Like a newscaster.

Yeah, exactly. Exactly. The first one's very transactional. Anyone, like, you could argue AI could probably come up with five tips for whatever.

If not now, they're coming up with it very, very soon. So there was that season, then there was like this case, and I'm talking mostly educational content, obviously entertainment is a different bucket. You had these like case study breakdowns. What's happened over the last 5 to 8 months, unfort, not largely due to me, but partially due to me, is I open-sourced the playbook for how to do these like transactional formats on my YouTube channel, and a lot of people did it. And so the supply really increased. Like, between Orin and Alex Garcia and me and like a few others on YouTube, the sea of volume increased on all these transactional formats.

Guys, no gatekeeping here. No gatekeeping.

I'm not g. The gates are open. Like, like, basically.

When, when we explain the hook things, or the, the how to make a hook, or these three components, people actually take that and then use it and then [ __ ] their hooks get better. It's like there's a lot of people doing well now because of the last 6 to 12 months of education. So now, the re, to close the loop on this, the reason why personal narrative-driven storytelling is working now is because it's more one-of-one. It's like there is less of a formula. Like, you could break down the storytelling formulas for the hero arc, or like the A versus B, or like, "I tried this and failed," and that, like, there's a few common storytelling patterns, but the actual lived experiences are more one-of-one. Like, Khloe Shu worked, I think, at Deloitte for a few years and then struggled with her own stuff. Like, she can turn that into a single one-of-one experience. It's hard, harder to copy those. So that's why that's in vogue.

What, what is that?

I think that is staying in vogue. You're going to say, "What's happening next?" I think that's going to stay in vogue forever. Yeah. Because that is that one unique piece of sauce that no one can, no one can copy what's happened in your life.

Well, by definition, one-of-ones will stay one-of-ones, right? Until you could copy them. So, and you won't be able to because they're lived experiences. So, I agree, like that will always be a mainstay format. It's a lot harder to execute than people think to like write an individual story structure that maps to storytelling. Visually, tell it well. The way she does it is pretty cool. Like, she shoots in the world, but even if you didn't do that, the motion graphics required to like keep the attention is pretty tough. So, it's just getting harder and harder and harder to cut through with the base [ __ ] like you need, you need more unique individualized formats.

It's so funny because I did watch one of your YouTube videos and I do know who Khloe is and we're actually doing our quote-unquote like offsite to really map out what next year looks like for the next three, four days. And one of my like ideas and things I'm thinking about is like 40 under 40, like 40 lessons I learned before I was 40 and kind of interweaving in obviously lessons through Open Residency and my own personal lessons. And then from an aesthetic perspective, matching this aesthetic. So we get kind of like a compound effect of what's going on here and then my own unique take.

Nice. Yeah. There's a guy, Marshall Hos. Do you know who this is?

Marketing Max was gonna introduce me to him. He just sold his company. It was somewhere maybe.

Yeah. Yeah. It was the, the staffing, staffing overseas staffing company.

Yep.

And he sold it. I think he sold, I don't know if he owned the whole thing, but he sold 40, 50 million.

Yep.

So he's making videos now and he's not like a creator per se. He's like, he's more in this entrepreneur bucket, but he's making these personal narrative-driven stories, but only he can make them, right? He's like, "These are my, these are the eight cars I bought after I sold my company. I have like the, the 911, the G-Wagon, like that's more one-of-one. Like only so many people can make that video." And so even if the editing sauce is a little bit less crazy, those work better because you don't see that [ __ ] every day. And that's, that's the thing is if you're making stuff that is commoditized to where 50 other people could also make it, it won't cut through unless you're the best out of the 50 at executing and or you have an existing personal brand, which most people don't if they're starting, right? So, for example, like, I'm going to take over marketing short-form in 2026. Like, right now, I have zero presence. Like my YouTube is top of the charts, but I, I have no short-form presence for marketing intentionally because I'm, I'm building things out. When I take that over, it'll be as if I don't really have a personal brand in short-form for marketing. So, I'm gonna have to put these principles to use and be like, "Okay, what ideas or topics do I have differentiated knowledge on that other people don't?" It'll be tough since I've given all that knowledge away and everyone now has it, or what formats or personal stories or experiences can I tell to cut through. So people will be able to follow that in real time like at Callaway Marketing on Instagram. Right now, it's like a zero channel. But that's a perfect example is like, even I, who have a pretty deep personal brand on one platform, I, it's non-existent in that vector on another platform and so I'm going to have to figure out how to cut through. I'm doing the 40 for 40, just so you know, too. There's not many people that got a DM from Rick Ross and then pulled up to Atlanta with a couple of his team members in his house. We could show that video, tell that story. A lot of crazy, crazy stories have happened with the 10 years with Iconic and obviously before, is definitely going to do it.

You probably have the footage for it, right?

We have all of the footage.

Yeah, that's that's.

We literally have.

Three and a half hours in Rick Ross' house, Evander Holyfield's old estate. It's a hysterical story, dude. I have a zillion of those stories. I'm doing it. I'll be a, a case study for your, uh, there for, for your format.

In relation to that, too, another big thing that I've seen, and this is actually how my wife popped off, was when you do those, is the 30 for 30, the 40 for 40, is actually numbering them. It increases that kind of like bingeability when you number them because then if you number them and then going back to kind of that thumbnail and someone sees the eighth one and they see on your Instagram, two, three, four, five, that's how you get people to get that again time under attention as well, too.

Yeah. Exactly.

Numbering them.

Yeah. I think the, the human brain is basically like a puzzle machine. So if you say, "There's a puzzle in front of me, like, you need 10 pieces, here's eight, number nine and 10," I'm like, "Holding in here." Everyone's like, "I want number nine and 10. Give me it so I can complete the puzzle." So it's like, if you create a series of 10 days of this, or solve this problem in seven days, and you're like, "Here's day four," I'm going to want to go back and see day one, two, three if I like day four. So it's like, it's, it's almost like forcing the connective tissue to drive the bingeability. Now, the, the con of doing it numbered is that if you commit to daily and then you don't want to do it daily, you'll burn out and you won't finish and then it will not meet the promise that you set. The, you got to just stack.

Yeah, exactly. Guys, if you're starting a podcast and you don't have five stacked and you're on on the treadmill.

That's a big, big mistake.

But that's, but that's it's a huge hack, I think, to do the series, especially. So Khloe, Khloe basically combined the numbered series, the personal narrative-driven storytelling. She executed it super well and, and like, there's a few other like visual pieces that she did to pop off. When you stack those together, it cuts through significantly. A good kind of tie-in and question, actually directly in relation to something like this, is I guess the downfall of stacking is you lose out on kind of that like A/B split testing and the learnings that you would get from video one, two, three, four, five.

Yeah. You saying batching?

Yeah. Yeah. So like, how do you use like A/B testing and outlier analysis to like find these these breakout formats?

Yeah. And that's to that point, I don't batch and specifically because, yeah, when you batch, you lengthen the iteration cycle.

He says he disagrees. Okay. Continue.

Well, you, to your, I, I'll talk about.

I got a good baseline, bro. I got a good baseline. I could rip like five. I think.

Well, the reason you can batch if you know what you're doing, because then it's like, you don't need the iterative learnings as much. Like the iteration distance is much shorter. But when you're, when you're a beginner, the best way to do it is make a rep, struggle, post that rep, see that it sucks because the data will be horrible. Look at that rep, use the Lego framework that I just went through and be like, "Okay, the topic's number one." Okay, is this topic relevant to the audience that I want to build? Yes or no? Is this topic interesting? Have I framed it?" Like, there's like these checklists you can go through. You want to then iterate. Think about what you need to change. Focus on a couple things. One, if you know one thing is best, but like, if you can do multiple in one, that's great. Make rep number two. Do it again. You need to iteratively improve. If you, if you batch five in a row, you don't get that data back until number five is done. You've made mistakes from the same mistake from number one, two, three because you didn't get any learning. So it's like a beginner should definitely go one at a time. Once you know what you're doing, you need to build a system, right? So you can get to volume. And that's what everybody wants. They try to shift to volume before they have the fundamentals and they know what to look for. So that's.

I'm going to say something that's going to blow your mind for people out there listening. I think it's going to give a lot of people a lot of reassurance. I've been following you a long time.

I remember not thinking you were that good in the beginning. Your annunciation, your, in the beginning, years and years ago.

Yeah.

Yeah. I was horrible.

That's crazy to think.

I remember in the beginning I was like, "This guy's not that good." I was like, and then I started seeing you get better and better. For people out there listening, like, you got to just start. And yeah.

For beginners, definitely one by one.

And everybody is ass in the beginning. Everybody. Because of the unknown unknowns. Like, there's a hundred things you know you need to do that you suck at, and there's 100 things you don't yet know you need to do, and so you definitely suck at those. Imagine there's 200 things. Everyone at the beginning, nobody born is like, "Yeah, I'm doing three hooks." Like, no baby's like, "I'm doing three hooks." You don't have that knowledge. So like, you got to systematically close those gaps. The people that are good are the ones that can close multiple gaps in one shot, that are egoless about the learning, and that don't stop. That's all you have to do because eventually those gaps are closed, and then you have one video rip, and then you have a chain reaction where from there, all of your reps get better, incrementally better. So yeah, if you scroll all the way back to my [ __ ], it sucks. Like, I'm super monotone. Well, I still am, but I'm super monotone. The the pacing is slow. The topics are not that interesting. I don't even look like I want to be there because I probably didn't. Like, everything sucks, like objectively, about those pieces. But if you just have an urge to want to get better, and then you are emotionless about the fact that it sucks in the beginning, you'll get better.

Guys, you should probably binge my channel, but you might want to avoid a couple of those early ones. I started off a little slow.

On on the podcast, I think I think the early, episode one with D is good. And then the next couple, I was like, a little, I didn't respect the audience's time. I just wish I could just go back and just edit a little.

Yeah, I wish you could edit and re-upload.

A little more, just in the beginning. Like, no one cares about my caloric deficit and how many grams of protein I have.

Why don't you guys just? This is what I would do. If you really think the episode stands on its head, take that, cut the, cut the stuff you would have cut, re-upload it just as like a, you know, you can call it like "from the vault." No, no one's really going to remember. And then just delete like, first, delete the original one so that, because what you have to do is, and I know this because this happened to me. If you have an old channel, like let's just say with videos that that you want to repost, YouTube's copyright system effectively has a memory of the video. So, you got to delete that video to like sever the memory. And then when you re-upload it, it's like a fresh video. So, what I would do is just take those old ones, delete them from the channel, wait three days at least. You can schedule whenever you want, but at least three days. Chop all the stuff you want, re-upload them as a new episode, let it rip. You can retitle it, repackage it. There's no reason not to do that if, if you're bummed about, unless you want like the historical archive in order, but I don't think there'd be a reason to have that.

Guys, just go see how much I suck. We're just, we're just going to leave that out. And maybe, maybe I'll do another episode with those people. I guess we're talking about there is editing specifically in short form. What do you think is the most common kind of editing mistakes that people make?

Yeah. So, editing is like, personally, my worst thing. I never wanted to be an editor. So, I have a bunch of editors. I've trained them up. So, everything I say is like framework and fundamentals and like, I brute-forced it for the first few hundred videos myself. But if you want to really, really become a master of editing, there's probably other people on YouTube to study. The biggest mistakes are misalignment with the visuals, which you talked about already. You're using the wrong visuals at the wrong time that are not matching with the words. The pacing is off, either too fast or too slow. So, a good test for this is like the eyes closed test. Whenever you make video content, after you have it like ready, you should close your eyes and listen to it. Don't watch with the visuals. Listen. You're bored. It's too slow. Like, the chopping is too slow. So, that, that's an editing thing, right? The pacing, how fast or slow you chop the actual sentences. That's a huge mistake. I think sometimes people do it way too fast where when you close your eyes and you listen to it, you're like, "Holy [ __ ], I there's no way I could absorb this." You got to add a little breathing room. Some people do it too slow where you close your eyes, you're like, "Damn, this is so boring." You got to chop it down a little tighter. So that's, that's one like small thing.

People are going to think this is on 1.5. This. Uh.

Yeah, I kind of, I talk pretty, pretty, pretty fast.

My mom says we got to slow it down a bit, but no, no, we're, we're going to keep the pace.

I'm trying to think what else from the editing perspective. I think just like visual selection is really important. At the end of the day, it's like, you got to think, "What is the best possible way to visualize this sentence?" Sometimes it's no visual, sometimes it's just you on the screen, and that's fine. But if there is a visual that will help add more absorption, add more clarity, add more comprehension, you want to use that visual. And if you use the wrong visuals at the wrong times, it confuses. And effectively, comprehension is just a decaying graph. So when you first hit the video, it starts at 100%. Every word, pixel, sentence, frame that happens, that comprehension can only go down. It can stay the same or go down. So at some point, that comprehension hits a level where the per, the viewer is so confused that they bounce. That's, that's why people churn, right? They don't turn because they're clear on what's happening and they're interested. They turn because they're unclear and or uninterested. And so as that comprehension is decaying, that's when they that's when they leave. So you have to figure out how do I make sure the visuals, especially in the first 5 to 10 seconds, are really, really tight with what I'm saying so that comprehension stays high. If they leave, but they're clear on what the video is about, well, that's fine. That wasn't for them, right?

Even a good video is going to have a smooth line going down. You just don't want that like asymmetric hockey stick where just they fall off a cliff because then you know you can look at kind of each piece of it.

Exactly. You can look at the retention chart and see where the biggest, it's going to look like this, but you can see where there was like abnormally high bounce. And usually that bounce is because they didn't understand what you were saying, or the visuals didn't align with the words you were saying. And so they didn't understand the visuals. Let's talk about people bouncing and that retention looking at short form. That first block, that I don't know, let's call it two and a half seconds, is that hook. If you're looking at, let's just call it, I don't know, let's make it easy, a 60-second video. The first two and a half seconds is a hook. What are those like blocks that you look when you're analyzing from a retention perspective? How could someone look at a block that that's short?

So, there's, there's definitely a bunch of metrics. I don't actually look at the retention charts or anything. I just go pure intuition. So, like when.

Effectively, when I watch it, I go one sentence at a time and I ask myself.

Am I clear on what this sentence is and what I should be taking away from it?

One sentence at a time. If I'm not clear, then there's going to be drop off. So, I don't actually, I don't actually go data video. I go video and just let it live. But that's cuz that's obviously because I've baked that into my brain. So for people who don't have that like muscle yet, I think the, the, the stat on YouTube Shorts, which is the thing that really shows the retention the best, is after the first 3 seconds, you want the, I think you want the viewer retention to be at 70%. If it's above 70% viewers held in the first 3 seconds, you're going to have a a banger. If it's below 70%, if it's like below 50, you have a huge problem. But the problem is like, what do people actually do with that? This is why I don't like analytics because if you look at it and you're like, "Oh, that was bel, it was 49%." It's like, "Okay, yeah, I should make the hook better." It's like, "Yeah, no [ __ ]. You should have made the hook better from the beginning." It's like, data is confirmatory. It's a lagging indicator. The, the leading indicator is like, just follow the principles that I'm saying when you're actually making the video. And if you can't intuitively tell, that's the beauty of content is you can watch it and be like, "Is this clear to me or not?" If it's not, it's not gonna be clear to them because you've watched it 10 times, right? It's just like, I don't actually use data as much as people think because I think the people can get obsessed with the data and it, it, it distracts them from what they actually need to do, which is like, make the, make the video better.

Pragmatic. I just always pick for you as like a data scientist and that's actually very, very surprising to hear, but it makes a lot of sense, just going sentence by sentence. One framework on that too, I'll say.

I don't think I've talked about this anywhere. The easiest way for short form to like validate the story, you write the first line. The first line should open a question in the viewer's head based on whatever it is. So if the, if the first line, which is context, usually is like, "Google just came out with Gemini 3 and it's a crazy AI model." The question that should pop in someone's head from that is, "What can it do?" Right? If, when I read that first line, I'm not sure what the question should be, or there's multiple questions at like about equivalent strength, you have a problem. You need to make it more clear. So, it's one question. Now, whatever that question is, answer that question in the next line. That next line will pop another question. Answer that question in the next line. If you just do that all the way through, your story is perfect. So, like, "Google just dropped Gemini 3. It's crazy model." The question is, "What can it do?" "It's crazy because it can do da da da." Next question is, "How do I use it?" "If you want to use it, go to this." The next question is, "How much does it cost?" And if you go here, you can actually get a discount. Like, it's just logical thinking, one question at a time. That's the easiest way to audit whether you're kind of like the, the story flow makes sense. From a compression perspective, too, I'm just going to keep using 60 seconds. I'm always under the notion, obviously, within 60 seconds, how many open loops, close loops can you do?

Well, broadly, you can do like three story loops or like sections, really. So, it's kind of like the intro piece that opens that first, "Holy [ __ ], what is this?" There's the, for me, it's like the how it works, or kind of breaking the breakdown, and then there's the implication. But that's, that's more like story structure. I'm talking specifically sentence by sentence. It's just like, when a, when a viewer watches the video, what's really happening in their brain is that they're guessing what they think will come next, and then you're either telling them, or you're telling them something else, like to add contrast. But that zigzag is happening in their brain the whole way down. So if I say something and or show them, "This robot has muscles that look like humans," paid off. That, how are they doing that? Why are they doing that? Where are they doing that? It's like, that's the question a viewer would have. Like, if you were having a conversation with that story, you would ask it those questions one line at a time.

Yeah, dude. It's so crazy because me and Jake were talking last night at dinner about, I'm not, I listen to like a couple podcasts, but I'm starting to kind of consume more, especially in kind of other niches to get more like ideas and concepts and structures and such. And like, dude, I just, I can't watch podcasts that just like, they open it up and then they don't close it for like, I was like, 16 minutes into a podcast, I'm like, "Yo, what are we doing here, bro?"

Yeah, I can't do that.

The easiest way to get the.

I got to go on 1.5x speed. You mean, this is, this is, this is the speed that I'm at, bro.

Yeah, this is, this is high octane for sure. So, like, I have this framework that I don't know if I've said it or not, but it's basically like, it's like the two dopamine hit framework. If you can get somebody to two hits of dopamine before they churn, you've got them locked. If you can only get them to one, you might have them. If you get them to zero, they're bouncing. And so, what is that? What is a hit of dopamine? For an educational piece of content, it's like, "Tell me something I can actually use that when I implement will solve a problem for me." So, in this episode, you and I was talking all over the place. I.

Have tons of dopamine coming in this episode. Yeah, it's a dopamine casino in here. Hope, hopefully, hopefully I was kind of all over the place when I was doing the hook thing, but hopefully when people watch that in the first minute or two, there's at least one nugget that they heard that they can be like, "Oh [ __ ], that's valuable." Now, the thing I said.

I mean, I think that they got nuggets on that. We'll see. We'll see. I think they got nuggets, bro. I'm pretty confident.

Like, the thing I said about the Instagram thumbnail in the DMs, that's a guaranteed dopamine hitter. Like, nobody knows that. So, when you hear that, you're like, "Oh [ __ ], I could use that." Boom. Dopamine released. That we'll say that's number two. Hopefully they got one before that. At that point, you've got them locked in because they've heard two things that they didn't know that they can actually use and they're like, "I have to keep listening to this because there could be 20 more things."

You're not giving yourself enough credit here. There was way more dopamine hits than that. That was like the rand, that was actually a random dopamine hit for me. I'm sure that you felt that because I'm like, "Damn, I'm going through that right now." I woke up to six memes this morning and I was like, "I'm going to pick two. I only have time for two." So, it's crazy.

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Yeah, and this is, this is somewhere I need to get better. I don't really plan in advance, right? So, I'm, I'm operating in like a just-in-time scenario, which is not ideal for my life, but that's cuz I'm, I'm spread a little thin. But for the tech and AI content, basically, I try to get to four to five pieces a week. Sometimes it's three. I've got brand deals on coming in on one side. I've got organics on the other side.

And maybe we can just talk about my operation, like my team would be helpful.

So, I have two editors that are dedicated to tech. And I've got what I'll call like an ideas guy. So, this is a guy that I hired. He's, he's technically called an EA Plus.

On those two editors, are those in-house? Are they agency? Are they sourced on a per-video perspective?

They're full-time dedicated to me from an agency.

Nice.

From the Philippines. They're both cracked. Like absolute.

Shout out to the Philippines. We back, baby.

So, if anybody wants to get the editors that I use.

We're putting that link below.

Yeah, we can put the link below. So, I've got two of them.

Each one of them can make a video a day or like a day and a half depending on like how long it is or how crazy the visuals are, how.

Rigorous systems and templates that you've embedded in these guys' brains.

Yeah. But what I do is like, because I'm not an editing savant, I'm like, and they are, I basically tell them, "Yo, if we ever have an off day where I just like can't get to a video, I want you to spend the whole day building templates and systems for the other one so that you guys can go faster." So it's like, I've embedded speed into the system for them when they're not editing. When they are editing, they're like trying stuff out or whatever. I've also given them virtual credit cards so they can sign up to any AI tool they want to generate the visuals faster. So, I'm like trying to get them to be both editors but also like proactively systematizing. It's worked semi-good, but like, it helps a little bit.

I have the same exact system. I have a team in the Philippines and they are, I just yesterday approved some new Adobe program for them. Yeah, I love that.

They're correct.

So, I've got those two. And then so if you think about the workflow for short form, it's idea, research, scripting, recording, editing, posting. That like six-piece loop. You just loop it. So that's what I just described solves the editing. Obviously, the recording is going to be me. You could use an AI avatar, but it doesn't save that much time. So the recording is me. So this idea, research, scripting piece is really where the time-saving sauce is, but it's the hardest part to automate away. Editing is pretty, I don't want to say commoditized, but like, it's pretty clear. You get an editor, you hand them the footage, they edit the footage based on a style. Like, you can solve that pretty quick. The hard part is that first part. So I've got an ideas guy. I call it a content operator. He's also overseas, but I basically cloned my brain into him. So like, effectively, what I realized is as an entrepreneur, you're just in the cloning business. That's, I'm just trying to clone myself as much as possible into people, and then they become me and they can do the things to a level that's like close to me. So I, I spent like three to six months cloning myself into this guy. So like, what is a good idea? How to look for ideas, how to, how to filter out good versus great ideas, how to go develop those ideas, what are the core pieces to that make for good ideas in my niche. What is this? 180-page Google Doc. What is this?

Uh, a lot of it was like live calls I find is good and Looms. So, the way we have it set up is like, he, he goes and scans what I call idea pipes. So, it could be like other creators in the niche, Twitter, Reddit, YouTube, newsletters. What for me, it's like those are the pieces, but there are different pipes for different niches. He's trying to find good ideas. What are things that are interesting? And we're talking about for tech and AI. What are things that are interesting that I could make a video about? He then creates a short list and develops those ideas. And by develops, I mean he goes and finds visuals from either the company or Twitter or like we have live examples or whatever. He's find, he's curating what he thinks is interesting, what he thinks the angle could be for the video, and what the visuals are. And this is just a Google Doc. Each idea is a tab. He puts it into, he drops that stuff in each tab. Then once or twice a week, we have a a pitch call where he pitches the ideas to me like a showrunner would in Hollywood. And he's basically like, "All right, I have this idea. I found this. It's time-sensitive. So, if you want to make it, we got to make it in the next 24 hours. Here's why I think it's good. Here's what I think we could do with it. Here are the cons for why we wouldn't make it. What do you think?" Now, now I'm sitting there and I'm just like, "Nah, it's too, too tame, it's too small, or visual is not good enough," or, "Oh yeah, that's a winner." And we, I filter out the shitty ones. I take the winners and we have a short list. That saves me so much time. Like, I don't have to go scrolling. Now, I'm like one step delayed in knowing the news, but that's a trade-off I'm willing to make because I don't want to be like scrolling all day. So, I've outsourced all of that like idea process, which is huge.

Oops. It's hidden right now. Just keep, keep going.

Yeah.

Yeah. This, this is a, this is right now. This is a systematized sauce for sure. So, we, we do that. Then, when it comes time to make a video, the next piece would be if I could train the scripting sauce into him.

We haven't fully got there yet, but we're doing that now. I also have Sand Castles, which I haven't even talked about, which is my software for trying to automate this. It's good, but not as good as me off the dome yet. So, it's great for people that are beginners, like level one to five, one to six. If you're a nine or 10, the scripting is not good enough on any AI platform to like place you, is what I found. So, usually I will sit down, I will pull the idea from the list, and I'll write the script in 20 minutes. Then I'll shoot it, hand it to the editor, and then it comes back usually done. So that like that system is what I'm doing and I'm trying to bucket it. Like we said before, for the first 300 reps, I was going one at a time because I wanted to get learning up. Now I'm trying to bucket it where I do two or three at a time. Eventually maybe we'll do five to 10 at a time, but that's kind of the the flow I have right now.

How long have you had this ideas person? I had never heard of a quote-unquote ideas person until the Sahil Bloom episode. He told me about it. Yeah, I've always actually thought about the curation and the taste is what makes this this and I can't source that out, but I actually love this concept. How long have you had this type of guy?

I've had him for like 6 months, I think. So, it took 3 months to, I mean, to to install my brain into someone is very hard. Like, you can hear, like, I'm, I'm a psycho. Like, like, I'm so deep in the weeds on this stuff that.

To for anyone who doesn't want to be this deep, could never do it. And then for someone who wants to be this deep, I'm like, pulling you into it. Like the nuance that I go, like the detail is crazy. So it took a lot of time just to like, first he's, he's raw, then it's like, you got to aim him, then you got to get him moving in the direction you want, then you got to get him on the nuances, then you got to have him do it and review him doing it. So, it takes like three to four months to clone yourself in this way, but it's paying dividends because he's legit as good at finding ideas as I am. And he has like the systematization to do it.

Guys, I'm hiring for this position. Email below.

Yeah, I call it, I call it a content operator.

Content operator.

It's the person that op, is like the quarterback of your first half of the process, right? This person is not going to edit for you. And ideally, you can get them to where they find the ideas and write the scripts all in one and just hand you the script. That's, that's the dream, which we're, we're getting, we're going to get there soon. But yeah, if you, the way to find this person, the cheap way is to go offshore and bring somebody up to speed, but it's very hard. The other way is like to find someone like you have with Jake, or someone else who's like been doing this type of thing, but like doesn't want to do it alone and is like, it's hard to find a unicorn, right? This goes back to, I talk about in the Mark Manson episode, or he talks about it, is like, everyone has their own sauce, and you don't want to hire yourself out of that sauce. I think if you can duplicate yourself, this is a no-brainer that you don't want someone internally in your team. You want to find someone net new that's passionate about the topics and the podcast and you as a personal brand. Yeah. You just tell them everything and they do all all.

The other thing I have, which I hired very recently, is, and this is pretty much unique to the AI space, but.

There's kind of two categories of things I cover. There's like news and then there's the GenAI tools. Like Hifield drops some new model. I have a guy on my team now that's dedicated to playing with the tools all day and when we have a GenAI video, he just, I'm like, "Yo, make something sick." And then he.

Understanding all the nuances.

Yeah, because, so basically, what, what I realized is there's just not enough time to go down every rabbit hole. So, you, you need.

You need a rabbit like for each hole. And like, I can only do a couple. And, and the more projects you take on, the less rabbit holes you can go down. Some people love, and, and I do love going down the rabbit hole. Like, I love scrolling Twitter for 3 hours and like seeing interesting [ __ ], but it's just not productive, right?

It's so crazy you said that too, because we'll have, we're just now starting to kind of bring on more partners and sponsors and like someone will come, you know, that reach out. It'll be interesting and like I have to go down that rabbit hole to see the use cases. I have to test it. I need to champion it, or else I'm not going to obviously make a partner or sponsor.

And then even for the ad reads, is what are those overlays and B-rolls in conjunction with the product? This person could just do all that.

Exactly. But basically, the curriculum that I've made for short form and now YouTube is essentially a manual for upskilling these people. Like, it's also the playbook for anyone to actually use. But like, if you think about it from the other direction, in theory, I could hire any content operator raw, give them my curriculum, and they come out 90% upskilled without me having to do anything because I spent all the time to like codify the process. So that's, that's one of the things we did with my guy. I had just made the curriculum for short form and really it was like skinned for my style. So he ran through it. He watched every single video. He watched everything I had on YouTube and I was like, "Spend two weeks and."

go all the way down. Like I want you to watch every single video. I want you to take notes as as what I would expect someone to do like who's interested in this. And he comes back and he's like using terminology that like is mine just by default. He knows all the weird nuances. Yeah. So I was like it worked like it it worked. Now you you got to iterate that person because like I said the strategy is the easy part. The iterative the iterative looping is the hard part. So he has to go we got to go through hundreds of ideas and I have to yes no yes no yes no so he can learn what I actually think. But like that's how you clone yourself. Bam. So two editors the content operator the bunny going down the AI rabbit hole. That's on the short form side. Yeah. Anybody else? No. On short form. Well I have my manager Rugo. Shout out Rugo. Hey us too. Yeah, they've done it. Yeah, there you go. They bring the deals in obviously, so that helps with like the admin on the email side, but that's the whole operation for short form today.

Uh, I want to I guess that's a good shift. Let's get into YouTube. Why are you so bullish on YouTube? Well, a lot of it is the content minutes thing. So, it's like if you want people to buy, they need to trust. If you want them to trust, they need to watch a lot of stuff that's valuable. And if you want them to trust as quickly as possible, you need them to watch as much stuff as quickly as possible that's valuable. YouTube allows me to compress the value. I guess I wouldn't even say compress. It allows me to give more value per rep. So, it's like if I make a short and it's the best it could possibly be and people watch 45 seconds, I'm I'm really transferring like one idea. If somebody really likes my YouTube, I can transfer like 10 ideas in one video and get them to watch 10 minutes worth. And they can also see it's cut fast, but it's you can see my mannerisms. you can see you can start to like understand me and like me and there's a lot of like X factor that comes with longer form and so for the combination of just the math that I need you to watch more minutes and the psychology I need you to like seeing the way I think and explain stuff YouTube's the perfect medium to get trust acrewing quickly I also think it's a longer rope too like if someone is 19 minutes into our podcast I have a 90-second window where I can probably you know not be as compressed in in the conversation and they're not going to churn.

Yeah. But I mean, people are going to turn on short form in [ __ ] two and a half seconds. So, it gives you more rope and kind of Yeah. bobbing and weaving in there. The other thing is you kind of have to understand the Have you ever custom built a player in Madden? I have not. No. So, like if you play any sports video games and you want to custom build a new player, there's like attributes and they give you like 100 points and it's like split the attributes across like speed, jumping, agility, whatever. Every person is like that in real life. There are these different attributes and some people have a lot of XP in one and low in another. So you kind of have to understand like where your strengths are. I'm like off the charts at explaining [ __ ] I'm not that good at editing creatively. So it's like short form rewards editing creatively disproportionately than long form. Long form rewards explaining disproportionately than short form. because my unique abilities are rewarded at a compounding rate on YouTube. It's just like better for me to explain stuff to get people to understand me. So, I prefer that and people prefer that as well. If you're not good at explaining stuff and you're really good at like the editing sauce, short form might be better because it accentuates your unique abilities. We talked about audience matching kind of before. If you're looking specifically for YouTube, I want you just to further go down that rabbit hole. What do you think wins on YouTube? What type of content wins now and will age well? Which game are you playing? H Yeah, give me like we're in the Caleb episode right now. It's all about the positioning and what's the end game.

Yeah. And mostly just cuz if you're going to do work, you want to make sure you're walking down the right path so you don't have to come back and restart. So if you have an offer or product, you should be able to pick which game pretty quick. If you don't and you just want to like acrue a personal brand in a category, I think the high value nichebased educational content where you have proof and credibility is the best positioning you can go after. So for me, I mean, so just take me as an example. When I started, I had no skills. I mean, like I was a management consultant, but basically no skills. I had no skills, no proof, and no offers and no audience and nothing. Context, what year was this? This was like 2020. It was like two and a half years ago probably. Yeah. But I had like lived as a professional for eight years. So I at least could like talk and like write emails. Like I had some skills but no no like actual real entrepreneurial skills. No audience, no offer, nothing. How old are you? I'm 32 right now. Forbes 30 under 30 is tripping. We were talking about this. I I didn't know if you had the slot to make it. I wasted my 20s selling my time to a a corporation. But basically, and this is where a lot of people are, I think, listening. you have no skills, no audience, no offer, nothing. So the question is like what should you do, right? The first thing is not make content. The first thing is go get skills like actually get a valuable skill that people will pay for. Develop that skill that to me the best skills right now are content related. So it's like can you generate attention? So, it's it's almost like a self-fulfilling loop, but like the best place to start is to get a skill where you can actually generate attention on demand. That could be organic. It could be paid, although that's not really on demand, but you pay for it. It could be written. So, there's different formats, but like you need to build a skill. You could also build skills in product. You could build skills in sales, right? There's like these core buckets that matter for business, but at the end of the day, like I said, business is just traffic, funnels, offers. So you need a skill in one of those three. Offers is building building offers you just read hormone's book problem solved. Building a product is very tough. So that's like either physical or digital. That's that's a whole set of skills. Funnels pretty transactional. You can learn funnels pretty quickly. Although there are people that have made a ton of money as like a specialist like your your many chat guy. He's doing really well. He's like carved out a niche within funnels. Awesome. Or traffic. So you got to pick one of those three buckets and build hard skills. What does build hard skills mean? do the thing and get the result that you would want to charge people to help them do. So what I did at the beginning is I was like offers is not as valuable as traffic because you could have traffic and monetize without an offer but you can't have an offer and monetize without traffic. So it's like traffic is the most valuable thing in this next era for business. So I was like I'm going to go become a weapon of traffic. Like that's that's what I'm going to learn. The best way to learn content is to make it. And so you want to grow your own channel on something. Now, this is where it gets like hard because you can't really grow a content channel on how to grow content without having done content. It's like a self-fulfilling loop.

People need to listen to that one. Yeah. People shouldn't be giving content advice when they haven't actually mastered content. And the way to master content is not to make content advice from scratch. It's to like pick a different niche and learn how to do content in that niche. So, I picked tech and AI because that's what I'm interested in and I knew the brand deals would be lucrative, but that's where I started. You have to build a skill first. So this whole question was like what what niche should someone pick basically or where should someone start on YouTube? If you're going to do educational and you're going to build an offer at some point, you need to have a skill. That skill either has to be the products like I'm the best protein bar manufacturer in the world. Okay, so now you can make the protein bar and go on YouTube if that's the right play or you need to learn traffic. One of the two. So that it it starts there. Now assuming you have a skill, you're like a really great tax accountant. you're amazing at B2B sales, whatever. The best way to monetize that skill is with an owned offer. Either and there's many services agency, info products, coaching, consulting, there's a variety of different models, SAS, build a personal brand around that expertise using high value content on YouTube. What is high value? Non-obvious, tactically implementable. If I'm a tax accountant and I know a bunch of [ __ ] and it's vaulted in my brain, can you say that [ __ ] in a video so that when I as a business owner who would pay you for services hear it, I can actually make a change in my business and save money like get the result. If true, if that's true, I will trust you and eventually ascend down the funnel if I'm like the right type of customer for you. It is that simple. I think we're going hyper niche, hyper educational, hyper valuedriven. the nonvalue entertainment stuff will arb to zero. There will be AI content that is more personalized like AI Netflix shows that are more personalized to me than something that a random person that doesn't know how to make content could make on YouTube. So it's like you're going to lose that game. So that that's a long-winded answer, but

So it's a race being an attention expert just backed into building trust. It's all just about right now is about building distribution and trust. That's what it all backs into. Exactly. You want you want onetoone trust at scale as fast as you can get it. And the way to get it faster is to have higher value density in your content and value like I mentioned is non-obvious tactically implementable things that can get someone the result.

Let's dive more into YouTube. You say YouTube is a packaging game more than a content game. Yeah, 100%. I agree in a big way. Why do you think that it's that? Well, it's just like like blogs is like a headline game versus like the actual body, right? You need to get the click so that people actually get into the world. And if they don't click in, the video might as well have been a black screen. And that's that's mostly like everything in the world I view is either math or psychology. Everything. And so that's purely just math. It's like you don't have enough eyes on the vid. You want you want to have eyes on the video if they don't click in, right? So it's like you just you have to focus earlier in the funnel, which is the packaging. So YouTube is generous enough to put your [ __ ] in front of people for free. Awesome. But if they don't click, it's worth nothing. You know, so that's why Mr. Beast and Mr. Beast figured this out pretty early. He was like, "Yo, it doesn't, it's not that it has nothing to do with the video. The video obviously matters, but he's like, if we don't overinvest in the packaging and get people to the video, all that money on the video that we spent is worth nothing." So that's why you have to have a solution. If you're going to play YouTube, you have to have a solution for packaging, titles, thumbnails, the actual idea itself kind of wraps in there, and the the intro confirming that click. We can talk about that. But the the core difference between short form and long form. Short form, the viewer doesn't have a choice. The feed puts it up. You don't need to do packaging. The hook is the package, but that's also part of the video. It's way easier to win on short form because your [ __ ] just gets served automatically. Long form is a completely different game.

What percent of your time looking at the let's just call it idea pre-production all the way down to the click of the button distribution. What percent of the time do you focus on prepackaging? I don't spend any time personally cuz I I hire that guy. So my thing when you were doing it yourself though pre six months ago I I started with a team from day one. Wow. And I and I here's how I looked at it. YouTube is like a professional sport. Short form was like fledgling. It's getting to be professional but it's still like winnable by anyone. So I thought if I'm going to play a professional sport and I don't have the professional skills, I need to go pay for them from experts. So I got to go get money somewhere else to fund the YouTube team so that I can have the A players from day one. because I identified the packaging is critical. And what is the packaging? Coming up with the idea for the video, but most importantly, titling and thumbnailing that video so that it gets a click. There are savages that know everything about YouTube and everything about packaging that are out there selling agency services. I was like, I'm paying them immediately that are not that costly. Yeah, they're not 3K a month. And basically, and I can walk through what they do, and we can put it in the description if you guys want the same people I use. But basically, my YouTube team from day one was the ideas team, the strategy team, which does the packaging. My thumbnail designer who just executes, well, he comes up with the designs as well, but like they work in tandem, and then my editor. So, all I do on YouTube personally is write the script and record it. That's it.

What do you think is the most common mistake that people make when they're doing that title thumbnail outside of just not doing it? Well, the most common one is they do it at the end. So like we'll have just said it's the most important thing and then they'll be like skip and and then they'll make a video, they'll spend like 20 hours because really the editing takes the longest time, but it's the it's the least important thing I would say. So they'll spend all that time they're burnt. They're like, "Oh my god, it's took three days to make this video. Like I don't even know if it's good." And they just do the packaging at the end. Like they're just, "Oh yeah, I'll throw some." Like that is the worst thing you can do. The reason they say make the title thumbnail first is both because you have to confirm the click in the first couple seconds, but also you want to put the most effort when you're the freshest on the most important thing, right? So that the biggest problem is they just do it out of order. That's number one. Now, that's obviously not tactics that people want, but that's the truth. You should do it first. If you're designing the thumbnail yourself and you're titling the video yourself, you need to get that solved before you waste your time on anything else. Because if you can't solve that, the video is basically a dud. What's good though is formerly you could only abslit test thumbnails, you can absolut titles. That does give you a little bit more malleability. I do think they should be done beforehand, but I think understanding and knowing the macro identity and like a rough idea of what it is and then knowing how you're going to open and make sure it reflects that,

I would argue that we're moving into a world where that works as well, too. Ideally, you have it all done, but as long as you have a good good idea of where you're and what are the key words you're going to use, I think that's enough. What we do is the titles are done, but we don't have the thumbnails done before I make the video, but that's cuz I know I have a guy that can execute it fresh. So, I make the script, I record it, and then I hand the finished script to my thumbnail guy and my editor at the same time separately. They edit it, he does the thumbnails, it comes together. But the only reason I do the thumbnails after is because mostly from a systems perspective and because I know this guy is a pro. If you don't, if you're doing it and you're not a pro, you shouldn't wait till the end, right? So, that's that's how I kind of do it. The biggest thing is that people don't trigger what I call a desire loop in the title. So, if you think about how the psychology actually works when someone's on YouTube, you're scrolling, scrolling, scrolling, scrolling. Your eye catches a thumbnail. You don't know what it says yet, but you like lock in. That's this like first awareness angle. The next thing is you read the title. People look, they look right below and they're like, "What is the title?" and they're trying to find key words that trigger awareness around what I call a desire loop. So, it's like you either need to you want to solve a pain or you're feeling FOMO about missing out on having solved that pain or there's like a benefit or desire that you have. Right? So, I was looking at the one you did with Orurin. It was like this is the most valuable marketing conversation you'll hear in 2025, right? It was something like that. Yep. FOMO. Got a lesson here. a marketer seeing that is foaming at the mouth because they're afraid. They're fomoing that they're going to they're going to miss some nugget, right? So, you create a desire loop. There's a they have the desire to need to know that information. The thumbnail then after they see that title, they go back to the thumbnail. That thumbnail needs to complement and amplify that desire. It doesn't need to repeat the words because it's just another canvas for you to increase that desire. So, if you would have said on the thumbnail, marketing conversation, that does nothing cuz you already said it's a most valuable marketing conversation. What you said in the thumbnail is I figured out the cheat code or like I solved the cheat code, which ratchets up that desire even more because now I'm like, damn, this guy must know it. I have to click. So, if you're a marketer or a business owner who wants to solve marketing, you're going to click on that.

Guys, it's the dopamine. More cheat codes. In short, thumbnail, title, thumbnail, intro. They look at the thumbnail first, then the title. Yeah. Reaffirm, and then they go in. Yeah. And so that's how that's how it goes. The most important thing to understand about YouTube is like the thumbnail title's job is to get the click. Okay. Once you get the click, their job is done. The intro's job is to confirm the expectation that confirm that desire loop immediately. So if you say, "This is the greatest greatest marketing conversation of all time." and you and I click, I better be hearing in the first five seconds something about marketing to validate that you're not bait and switching me, right? So, the intro's job is to confirm that and then get you to the first main dopamine hit in the body. Once you get to that first dopamine hit, it should come within like 30 to 60 seconds. Hopefully, people will have forgotten what was on the title thumbnail. Like the title thumbnail does not it's like discarded. It's like a rocket. You blast the rocket up the booster. Well, shout out Elon, but like before that, the booster was just falling in the in the ocean. Discarded. It's job is just to get the rocket up there. Same thing with the packaging. The packaging's job is just to get you to the intro. The intro's job is just to confirm the click and get you to the dopamine hit. That dopamine hit hit is meant to tease you that there's value here. You should keep watching. But at the dopamine hit, the title and thumbnail is being forgotten. Like I guarantee if you're watching this right now, you forgot what the title was and what the thumbnail said. I guarantee it. And that's because we're I mean we're probably an hour and a half in but like your brain is like a durable you can't you're caching the information like every 15 seconds like you only could process so much once in your brain. Yeah. I would say too you said something there about up bait and switch like we've had that issue before where like the good stuff this is when we weren't doing it beforehand. like the good stuff came 45 minutes in and we're like, "Fuck, we want to make it the title and thumbnail, but then they're going to think we're just reorder it." Bait and switching them. This was early in the game where we didn't even realize that you can you can cut and edit and reorder. The thing is you you want clickbait. You don't want bait and switch, right? You want to bait and then give. That's like the whole people are like, "Oh, it's too clickbait." He's like, "No, you want clickbait. I'm trying to bait a click, but when when they click, I want to give them the bait. I don't want to switch." Right? That's the whole That's the whole nuance. That's a good way to put it.

When you're looking in YouTube Studio, what are those big metrics that you're evaluating? So again, with the metrics, I try not to go too deep on the metrics because it's it's the same like logic around the inputs. But overall, there's really two ways to approach YouTube. There's from a business perspective, like I want dollars out, and there's from the media perspective, like I want views. If you're playing the business game, you don't actually care about views. You care about ontarget views. Really, you care about dollars per view. If you can make a metric that says, "I got 5,000 views on this video and it generated $50,000. That's $10 per view. This video had 300 views, but it generated $300,000. That's $1,000 per view. I should make more of the one that got the most dollars." Right? If you're a business owner, that's how you should actually look at it. The metrics in YouTube are not built for that, right? The metrics in YouTube are built for the media side because they want more views because they monetize off ad revenue. So if you're looking in YouTube studio, typically you look at the one of 10 ranking because you're trying to see like relative performance, but that only matters if you care if you're playing the media game and you want more views. So the reality is you're it's only as good as the tools you have. And so for me, like and for everyone, you only have YouTube Studio. So when I look, I'm basically looking at CTR, clickthrough rate, which is how many what percent of people that my thumbnail was being shown to are clicking. But that's a noisy metric. Like you could have that be high and the video do worse. You could have it be low and the video do high. It's not clean. And I'm also looking at the one of 10 relative ranking. And and roughly like here's how I broke I'm breaking down my like analytics process. If the video is a again for the media game, if the video is a one, two, or three of 10, I'm letting it go, right? Because it's it's like outperforming the relative ranking. What I'm trying to do is study what I did in that one so I can replicate it again. it. There's a lot of variables that go into a YouTube video, like hundreds of things. So, it's tough to like isolate one change and be like, that was the reason this one did better. Typically, it's conflating factors. So, it's kind of hard to like extract that learning, but that's that's like the the one path. If it's a four, five, six, four, five, six out of 10, like ranking wise. So, so the the only thing I look at in YouTube Studio is the one of 10 ranking. And the and the one of 10 ranking is just like what rank out of your last 10 videos is this one relative to views. But it's a very like I said it's for all the caveats it's a crude metric. So if it's a one out of 10 that's the best. If it's a 10 out of 10 that's the worst. 1 2 and three out of 10 signals that it's outperforming relative to the field that of my own videos. So it's the best apples to apples metric you can you can get for your own channel. If it's a four, five or six out of 10, it's kind of like middle of the pack. I'll I'll again still leave it, but I'll try to figure out was there something different. Usually, if it's a four, five, six relative to a one, two, three, it's just the idea TAM was smaller, right? So, if I made a video about storytelling, that's a big TAM versus a video about systematizing your short form content engine, that's kind of a small TAM. So, it's like if I see that small that 6 out of 10, I can't really hold myself like in too much contempt like like negatively because it was a smaller idea. So like it's going to get less views. So that's why that metric is kind of weak. I think most people want to know what happens if you see a 7 8 n or 10 out of 10. Like you see a low performer. Typically what I do is there's only one thing you can change in real time. It's the title thumbnail. You can always switch the title thumbnail. So if it's seven 7 8 9 or 10, I'll ask my ideas guy like, "Yo, this is not performing well. Do you think we should switch the title to this?" Like usually I'll come to him with like a guess for why it's not performing well. and he'll say yes or no and we'll repackage it or we just let it go and we try to say like what didn't work this time let's take that for next time.

It's so hard to get conclusive evidence for anything. I mean if you do like a thumbnail test and you do three different thumbnails and like one of them is like I've seen as high as like 45% compared to the other ones and it's still not enough conclusive evidence. It's got to be almost over 50%. Yeah. Because they're like with all of our things consistent. So what you should do is once once one of the three is breaking out, set that one as the winner and ideally you make two more that are closer to that one to to test all three. Another dopamine hit. Love that doing that. I think another big thing and I mentioned it in the Caleb episode is forget if you're playing the media game one of those first two buckets but if you're playing the consumer game or the B2B SAS game soft skills offline stuff understanding and knowing an example for certain episodes I get texts from certain people and the intellect of that human that texts me saying they got a lot of value out of the episode I mean I've gotten one text from people and I'm like wow Wow, this person got value from this episode. Like you have to take that into account on the book of 345.

And those things don't show up on the stat sheet, right? So it's like the problem with analytics is there's so many conflating variables on the analytic side and there's so many conflating inputs that drive those variables that really the best way to improve and I and I I don't say this in a way to be annoying. You want to find somebody that knows what they're doing that can objectively look at the inputs and be like this, this, and this were not good. Look at this, this, and this as a better example and improve that way. Like you, it's not it's not that you have to have a coach, but like you need that's what Mr. Beast had. He had like three or four homies that were all about the same skill level. One of them would make a video and the other three would look at it and be like, "Nah, like these things are off." And you have objective feedback at somebody at your level or one level above. That's what you need because there's too much variability in the things that could change. There's 20 variables that drive the performance. Nobody is going to be able to look on their own with emotion and be like, "Yeah, that was definitely like the hook was too." They're not they're not going to be able to take emotion out of it. So, you need somebody that actually knows what they're doing to give you that feedback. That's the best way to improve. Period. I have a very strong stance on this specifically to YouTube. I think you 100% do need a coach and an expert. And I mean, again, we were, I don't know, two, three, four episodes in. We paid money for very high level people. [ __ ] I would have paid four times the amount of money that I paid for that. So, I definitely think that you can get from a I mean, even listening to podcasts like this, like you could really get to top 10% in the world, understanding and knowing YouTube if you just put in the time upfront.

Yeah, 100%. I want to close up on YouTube and and move on to the next topic. The last thing is I really want to touch on what are those like biggest kind of expectation mistakes that founders make when they're going onto YouTube? Like what what do people fundamentally misunderstand about the platform? So many. Well, first first of all, if you're a business if you're playing the business bucket, you're not a YouTuber. You're an entrepreneur that's using YouTube as an effective free traffic source. So because of that, you want to look at YouTube just like you look at all other marketing channels, which is iteratively testing with data. Like you would not go into paid ads and put one ad out there and be like, "Oh man, it didn't work." And like give up. You wouldn't. You'd be like, "All right, I'll put a hundred out there and see what performs and double down." Like that's that's you would think of it with a science-based approach. YouTube's the exact same way. It's just people are more emotional about it because each rep takes longer a and really because they I guess they're romanticized by the idea of being a YouTuber potentially. But you really want to look at YouTube like a series of iterative experiments. You have to go through the process of making a video, sucking, learning what didn't work, making a second video, etc. Just like I did with short form, you have to do the same thing with YouTube. The the shitty part about YouTube is that every rep takes 5 days instead of one or seven days, right? right? If you're posting once a week. So, it's like the growth is just slower. The iterative learning loop is slower. So, the expectations are a you don't need as many views as you think. You'd rather have ontarget views that convert to dollars. So, that's great. Like, you don't need 100,000 views. You could couple thousand I mean, couple thousand views is huge. You don't need a ton of views, but you're it's going to take way longer than you think. Do not start YouTube unless you expect to put three to five years into it. Like I I've built this whole program that'll come out in the next month or so where I'm really trying to operationalize the playbook for YouTube for business owners because it's really not out there. A lot of the teachers are all like entertainment focused. My goal is that if you go through that in 12 months you can have a machine that's driving meaningful lead genen. But that doesn't mean in 12 months you're going to be a celebrity. That doesn't mean in 12 months you're going to have 100,000 views every single video. Like it just takes so much more work than people think. so many more reps than people think. So that's the biggest the biggest expectation mismatch is really the entire expectation of what how fast people expect it to go. It's so slow.

Yeah. I mean the two other huge things to touch on there too is one is it's evergreen. It lives forever. People can go back and binge there lives forever. Especially like the links in the description live forever and then secondly it's long form usually for the most part and you can disseminate that down to short form and crosspollinate in all the other platforms. So it's like the the best of the best is you get all this content, you can just chop it up into other stuff. You can even chop the videos into words and newsletter, etc., etc. The way I think of it is like every video is a sales agent. I if if your content is aligned with your offer, every video is a sales agent working 247 for you that at any moment can reactivate, get juiced for free to all of the buyers, which is insane. Shorts are not really that way. Shorts are a little bit more short term obviously like it's in the name. They only last for the the halfife on shorts is 72 hours maybe 5 days and then if if you really share one on a different feed you might be able to get a second life. YouTube's evergreen unless you make newsbased content that's timesensitive. So I mean I can't emphasize how powerful YouTube is as an engine depending on the game you're playing of course as the caveat.

Yep. And I think another interesting thing with YouTube is to tie a bow on that too is you have the ability to repackage after the fact and title and thumbnail. So you actually can revive right stuff. I mean there's stories of videos that were left for dead and nine months later they change the title and packaging and it goes crazy. So you have way more at bats technically.

All right. So let's shift a little bit towards distribution and growth. You obviously have a massive following across a ton of different platforms. I guess let's just start with what do you think is the biggest myth about virality? I think the biggest myth is that you need virality. I don't think you do. I think this this this idea of like ontarget views verse total views is kind of the fundamental thesis that I believe and I I didn't always believe that because when I started doing the tech and AI which is fundamentally a media play I needed more views like the more views the more money. So like that's because that was the media because that's a media play right. So brand deals, brands will look at your last 10 videos and based on an average of the views, the engagement, and then your following, they use those three metrics to judge how much they'll offer for a deal. And you can obviously negotiate it up, but like that's the band that you can charge is based on that. So fundamentally, if you're playing the media game, you have to have more views, which means you're going for virality, which means you're broadening the ideas, you're broadening the TAM, you're making them more sensationalist, more shocking. There's a bunch of like tactics you can do to get more views, but the myth is that like that's not actually where the money comes from in the media game. Yes, but there's a cap on how much you can charge for brand deals. Like, and varies niche to niche. But the most these huge mega celebrity people that have 7 million followers, they're not actually getting that much for brand deals because their audiences are so wide. The brands now know they're not worth it%. But like the real truth is that dollar per view or ontarget views that convert to the offer is where all the money is. That's where all the actual fandom like category level fandom comes from is depth in a narrower slice. So that kind of applies to like myths around virality and positioning and strategy. But I fundamentally believe that to be true for sure on long form and on short form. You could make the argument both ways because of the way short form works. So you you could win short form playing the views game and you could win playing the the niche game, but YouTube for sure you don't want broad virality.

So subscribers and followers basically mean nothing to you. It's just a proxy to people that are uneducated for how much they should they should trust you. This is how the psychology works. Someone sees a video on a short form feed and they're they either judge this is good or bad to them. Then they look to the right and they see the metrics, the likes and the comments and the shares or the saves. If those metrics are above a minimum credibility line and that line oscillates, there's no like perfect number, they will trust you more. But if it's below a line, they'll be like, "Something's off here. This should I liked it but no one else did cuz like the group thing kicks in." They'll then click to your profile and if your followers are below the minimum credibility follower number, they will not trust you. They won't follow you. It sucks, but like that's the case. I completely agree. If it's above, they will. So followers matters if you're doing brand deals. It's one of the three attributes they they price on. So it really matters if you're doing brand deals. And if you're not, it does matter in a binary state whether or not someone trusts you. But the difference between 180,000 followers and 365,000 followers is nothing. That doesn't matter at all. So I only want an incremental follower or subscriber if it's on target to the offers that I'm selling.

Yeah. Yeah, I think there's like a minimum amount of followers you need to have on each platform to be like quote unquote real. I think Twitter, it's a couple thousand. I think Instagram over 10,000 you're real. Probably the next lever is probably a hundred. Feel like with YouTube, it's probably 10,000 subs. So, I think just racing to get to that minimum level where people can look at you and be like, "Okay, this person is doing something." And the same goes for engagement. And the blue check used to be a proxy for that, even harder really than the number of followers, but now that's gone because you can pay for it. Yeah, the engagement stuff too is sometimes absolutely criminal. Like you see people with massive followings and they have no engagement and it's just like and the thing is an unsophisticated viewer would not know the difference. And so if you're selling a commodity product, you can pay for followers and not have the engagement and a sophisticated viewer might not realize. But if you're trying to do a brand deal game where a marketer actually knows or a game a high ticket offer game where like fake engagement doesn't matter, that's not going to help you.

What are those like key signals to the algorithm, especially going into 2026? Because obviously with all of this, the more narrow and the better you feed the algorithm, just the more reach you're going to get in general. What are those key signals? Yeah. So, it all goes back to audience matching, which is this fundamental principle. Like, if there was if there were the three core frameworks that I would die, the hills I would die on, it's content minutes, audience matching, and then probably like anti-views, we'll say, like the ontarget verse vir virality thing we just talked about. So on the audience matching piece, fundamentally the algorithms have one job. It's keep people on the platform watching because if they watch, they watch more ads. They watch more ads, the platforms make more money. That's the only job of the algorithm. So how do you keep people on? You give them what they want to see. How do you give them what they want to see? You know exactly what type of content is coming from that channel so that you can bucket it accordingly to give it to people that want to watch it. So, it's like if I make my first video about tech, my second video about science, my third video about basketball, the algorithm is not really sure what my fourth video is going to be going to be about. They don't know. It could be any of those three. It could be a fourth thing. Now, they're transcribing it in real time. So, you'd say, "Okay, well, who cares what the three previous ones were? They'll transcribe it and figure it out." But, they've built a sample pool based on the people who've liked your stuff before, who've watched your stuff previously. So in that sample pool, a third of them watch like the basketball thing, a third of them like the science thing, a third of them like the tech thing. So when they send out your next video, the data coming back is weak. Like the people don't watch and engage with it to the level they would expect. If the channel was focused and narrow on one topic and so and we can I can go back and explain that pendulum you're talking about now too because if you're playing the media game and you want views, you want to go wider from a topic perspective. You're saying you always want to be within one topic. But wider I mean like within the topic. So if if you make content about marketing, wider means you could do uh paid marketing, you could do viral marketing, you like like different subtopics. You always want to stay within marketing. You don't want to then go to like the MBA, right? Those are like two completely different things. So even if you're playing the media game, you want to be within one slice. You just want to be the most shockworthy, sensational, wide within that slice type of topics you want. That's how you get more views. If you want to be narrow to drive to a specific offer, you don't necessarily need that, right? You can be way closer. Does that make sense or

Yeah. What about all those other different elements? Is it specifically transcribing the audio to understand and know the the topic or is it formats from a a visual perspective or is it audio only? Tough to know. I don't I don't think the AI models are good enough to be able to ingest a full especially for long form like a full video and really break down like a specific type of cinematography and and match that. I don't think they're sophisticated enough for that. The main thing is they're transcribing in real time and trying to under get basically build a context mapping of what the video is about. So in the video, if you say terminology that's like more longtail keyword stuff that you say, it helps contextualize what the video is about.

So you're basically wow, it's like SEO, like you're tagging words in the back end. The video the video is basically a longtail blog blog post effectively. And so it's and you could say it's using the hashtags and the keywords that all that stuff it might be using but that's like icing the cake is the transcription. So what are you saying in the video? It's building a contextual map on that. Now what it does cuz let me just double click on this cuz I kind of breezed over before. This is how the videos are actually this is how the algorithm works. This is how they're sampling the videos. First it builds a test sample pool. If you have some subscribers or followers, it'll be like some of your existing audience, some of your new audience. So, let's just say 200 people. You post a video, the YouTube algo transcribes it, it builds a topic map of what it's about, and it builds a 200 person sample pool, some of subs, some of new, and it's trying to guess who would like this the most. Okay? So, it blasts the video out to those people. Now, on YouTube, are they clicking through the thumbnail to even watch it matters, but like on shorts, it doesn't matter. Based on that 200 person sample group, it's assessing did they like and

watch it more than usual, about the same as usual, or less than usual. If it's more than usual, they will build another sample group at an one order of magnitude higher. So like instead of 200, it's 2,000 people. Similar makeup because now they know, oh [ __ ] of the 200, those people liked it more than usual. We should go find more people like them.

But if the signal comes back the same or weaker, it's not going to boost it to cascadingly.

>> Will it try another? Will it try another cohort of 200? Do they try and find it for you or?

>> Yes. If it's neutral, they may try another. If it's bad, they're going to throttle it pretty quick. So that's why like bad videos on YouTube or shorts, get like 200 views total. The reason why is cuz that first sample group came back shitty. like the data was bad and they're like well nobody wants to watch this so like let's not risk lo like getting you know turning people off the platform and so knowing that what that should trigger in your mind is like okay I need my existing followers to be really targeted on what I'm talking about so that when the video samples them they like it and I need to be very consistent with the videos that I make the topically so that the same type of people like it over and over and over right so the algo can have like a consistent audience demo to then build those concentric circles.

When you go broader, the only way to get a ton of views is for the circle to get muddier and muddier, right? As it gets bigger. Like if I make that storytelling video I made that got 2 million views. The first group might have been my existing followers that just liked me. Then the next group might have been people that liked storytelling. Then the next group included like script writers and like cinemat it started to get muddy. But eventually it'll run out of people that like it and the video will throttle down. That's how the algorithm actually works. So, if you make topics that are all over the place and you build a following that came from those all over the place topics, the sample data is going to be horrible on any video you post and you're just going to be consistently getting [ __ ] signal back and it won't boost you.

>> It's a lose-lose. You're not going to get the views if you're playing the media game and you're going to be too wide to actually get people to convert a bucket of 3, four, five, the consumer B2B game.

>> The best strategy is pick one topic and hammer that topic until retirement. makes a lot of sense. What about from a a content mix perspective? Like when you look at content, like an example, like when Roberto was on, he would try and have like an 8020 or a 9010 in relation to organic content versus paid. What's your system on from an output perspective? If you're putting out like 10 different posts, is it like I'm going to do, you know, two on this micro topic, two on this micro topic, five paid, one, how do you look at your content output

>> for short form?

>> Yeah, for short form. So most people that attack Shore Form have like pillars or buckets kind of like three to four groups. I think Orin talked about his specific pillars. That's typically what most people do. So for me on my tech channels, I'll have like science, sports tech, kind of like lifestyle tech, we'll say. So those are meant to be bangers. They're meant to be million plus views, meant to juice my numbers. So you know, random company Microsoft comes out with like a breakthrough on stem cells using an AI model. Let's break down what it is. Not educational at all, just like techreated news meant for bangers. The second one is Gen AI tools. So like Higsfield just released a new model. Here's what you can use it for. And I totally agree that like if you're listening, you're like those two have nothing to do with each other. I agree. I'm not very well optimized on my tech, which is why I'm I don't have millions of followers because I did the opposite of what I'm describing. I can only say what to do in hindsight. Yeah. So like th those are the two main buckets. And then the third is kind of like I like breaking down random thoughts on stuff that most people wouldn't come up with. So for example, Disney announced that they're going to have like AI short form content on their IP. So you're going to see like Snow White alternate endings that people can make. Wow. With like AI generated. Yes. Kind of like an interesting thing. So that doesn't fit in any of those either of those two buckets, but I'm like I kind of want to like make a video explaining why I think they're doing this from a business strategy perspective. that makes me one of one, but it doesn't like fit. So, if you look at that strategically and you were starting tech from scratch, you would never follow that model because it's very it's it it they don't really align very well. News tech, genai tools, like tactical tools, and then like we'll call it business strategy meets tech. Like those are kind of weird, right? But those are the three buckets that seem to work well for me and that I post and oscillate between. So, by doing that though, one benefit is that I'll get brand deals from Abu Dhabi Racing. I'll get brand deals from F1. I'll get brand deals from Genai Tools. Disney might even come. So, like it does provide a broader surface area for brands to be like, "Hey, I've seen you make two of these in your last 100. We don't care that you don't specialize in that. We're interested in you just like doing it again." But I wouldn't suggest someone follow this like super disconnected pillar strategy. I think what Orin's doing is a lot more dialed within his like >> four different types of like topics and then he'll iterate every, you know, two, three months or quarter layer on it. >> So I' I've tried to break into different segments, but those three are the ones that tend to be like the ideas are the most interesting to me. They perform the best and the brands also want to pay. So it's like kind of like a good triangle.

>> Yeah. Yeah. And for people out there listening too, if and when you understand and know how to create content that demands attention, this F1 video, it may or may not make sense on your channel, but they may want to use it for their organic channels to get their views because they might have a different initiative than you and or use it for ads or for whitelisting or something. Yeah.

>> So, the asset could go elsewhere.

>> And I want to say like what I just described with what I'm doing may be confusing to people because they might have listened to the principles and then heard my example and been like those aren't congruent. I agree. My short form strategy is not optimized. I didn't realize what to do until after I was too far down the pipe on that. If you look at what I do on YouTube, it is hyper precise on just social media growth. Basically, video content, social media growth, and the occasional YouTube growth. Hyper precise. I only talk about topics in that exact slice. And I can talk about the way I come up with topics for that, but very, very, very precise. And wouldn't you know, I'm the fastest growing channel in that space. So, this stuff really does work when you stay really narrow on one topic. You could argue like my tech channel should be at 800,000 million 1 point like I have tons of views on that, but the following is not that big because people follow when you have topic consistency and a Disney AI to Adobe to like random sports tech, they're not really related.

>> So, is the future different topics, different channels? So if I if I had unlimited time, I would have 17 tech channels, one for robotics, one for geni, one for news tech, one for science tech. I would break them out topically and just go hammer like very very very narrow and just hammer volume. someone just starting out, they should just go super super narrow on one channel and that's where you win.

>> Because the way the way to think about term ownership, like personal branding, I think I talked about this in a YouTube video like in the last couple weeks, people in their brain only have enough room for two to 300 names. Generally, think of it like the Dunar's number but for the internet. But as soon as you say a term, you delete all those rows and you just think of the person that's associated with that term. So when I say many chat, you think of that guy Ganon. Yeah.

>> But I wouldn't think of Ganon as like one of the 200 people that I'm is just like swirling around in my head. He's associated to the term. So the way you get notoriety and fandom quicker like cult category cult fandom is what I call it attached to a term. The terms that are easiest to attach to are the niche terms that nobody owns yet. If I say business, who do you think of?

>> No one.

>> Yeah. Because it's too big. So, it's like you want to find if if you do AI robotic factory robotics, if you own that lane, well, there's less brands that will pay you, but the brands that are there will pay you a lot because you own that category. So, it's way easier to start way more niche.

>> Wow. Shout out to the people that own those big macro terms.

>> Yeah. Like Hormosi owns business, you could say, or like one of the people that owns business. And shockingly, the only person that potentially owned business before is like Gary Vee. Maybe

>> he owns attention. I think attention is the big word for him.

>> And so to say it's like bidding on keywords and on Google, right? Like to say you could go from zero to owning the keyword business as a personal brand in like 5 years is pretty insane. But that's Hormosi did that. I want to talk uh you talked a little bit about owning a word. I want to talk about owning your quote unquote audience or community. How are you moving people from your quote unquote least community social onto your own community like your newsletter and other platforms? Yeah. What are some key strategies there?

>> It's all lead magnets. Lead magnets are like the I was trying to think of a metaphor and I was getting real nerdy in my head. I was like lead magnets are the hemoglobin that takes the oxygen. We we'll can that. Lead magnets are really the the most important like rails. Like if you think funnels it's all lead magnets, right? So I can walk through exactly what we do.

>> Yeah. Effectively, there's a few types of lead magnets and and all a lead magnet is is getting someone's email in exchange for free value. That's all it is. So, you've got the oneoff PDF or doc. So, if I say, "Here's my storytelling framework. By the way, I went through that really fast. If you want a doc where it's written down, the links below." So, that is a lead magnet where you're giving me your email for free and I'm giving you a doc that is like a template or captures what I just said. So, there that's one. That's the easiest one. Number two would be like a three or five day free email series. So it's like a doc, but it gets delivered via email and it gets delivered on three or five succeeding days. So that could be like if you want to learn virality, I know there's a lot to learn. So I don't want to just give you like a 20page PDF. I'll I'll tear it out for you over the next 5 days. Put your email in and I'll get it. So we have one of those. Viralitybloopprint.com. That's like our landing page that leads you to the fiveday email series. That's a lead magnet. Third one would be a free community that you're getting their email on the way in. So you could be like, "Hey, we have a free community. There's a bunch of cool people in there. There's a bunch of free curriculum in there. We're in there. If you want to join the community, it's completely free. Give us your email." That's pretty compelling because it's free and there's a lot of [ __ ] in there. We have one of those. It's called Wavy World. So that that would be the third one. Fourth one would be like a landing page or a sales page where you have like a weight list, right? Fifth one would be a form. So, like in the description to this video, if you want our editors, we're going to have a form in there. You fill that out, I get your email. So, there's a variety of different flavors. There's probably a few more, but like those are the main ones that we use. And the whole goal is, can we use content to get you to email? Because if we can get you to email and you have a problem that I have an offer for, I will sell you on it. Because people open email at crazy rates and they buy from email and they trust email. It's like the email is the only place it's like not fully taken over by algorithms. You still like kind of control your own inbox even though you have a bunch of spam from like random brands.

>> We have 60% open rate on our emails.

>> Yeah, it's crazy.

>> It's insane.

>> So all you have to do like like I [ __ ] you not you can build a sevenf figureure business just doing content to a lead magnet that's ideally connected. You give them a lead magnet, you get their email, you put them in a drip, either an automated sequence that goes out as soon as you get it, or you send them once a week recurring, and eventually you ask for them to buy the thing you have to sell. If you just do that, you could probably do eight figures in revenue. Just that Jesus. And you are organically and authentically integrating this in any and every way you can into any content on my podcast. Yeah. on your YouTube, on your Instagram, anywhere and everywhere. Is there like a specific cadence that you do that or is that just top of the mile?

>> I've probably done four of them on this already. Like like I talked about the editors talked about how crazy they are like if you want the editors go below. Like that is an ad, but we didn't have to pay for that ad. And it's I call it a native embed. So this is this is a actually Yeah. When you asked what are some common things about YouTube that people get wrong, here's a huge one that we didn't cover. Native embeds. When you make content, the goal is to hypnotize the viewer into forgetting that they're watching your content. Like you you give you lull them into a delusional state, basically. That's how I look at it. Like on YouTube,

>> that sounds devious.

>> Yeah. Well, but you Yeah, it's only white hat. It's white hat. No black hat. But basically, it's like 20-minute video. My goal is that you click, I confirm the click, I get you the first hit of dopamine, I get you the second hit of dopamine, and then I've lulled you into this hypnotic state where you keep watching because you like it and it's also helping you. If you break the hypnosis for an ad, that is the dumbest thing you can do. So like, if I have a video about storytelling and I'm like, we'll be right back. By the way, if you want to buy this couch, like that's the dumbest thing. You bring someone back up to the surface and they're like, whoa, whoa, where am I? and they realize they're watching a video that they don't need to be watching. They should be doing work and they leave. So, it putting I call these non-native ads. Putting non-native ads in content is the dumbest way to make content. The easiest way is to or the best way is make the video and then natively integrate the thing that you need to say like your own products or you're getting paid to say in a way that does not break the hypnosis. And the way to do that would be weave it into the conversation or set up the conversation so that the lead magnet is the answer.

>> Is this a bad time to say that we're sponsored by Manyhat and we have to go to a ManyHat ad.

>> No, but no. A perfect example would be I talked about Ganon, right? So when I talk about that, you should have been like, "And do you use ManyHat?" And then we talk about Many Chat for four minutes and we and that's it. That's the ad.

>> You know, ManyHat is a sponsor.

>> Yeah, I know.

>> Yeah, by the way.

>> And >> you didn't know that. I did from the last episode. Did you? Yeah, I saw him last. But but that's an example of like

>> if you break away to a new clothes, new scene, new shirt because you're trying to like systematize it,

>> that breaks the hypnosis.

>> I'm at a point now where like very very as strategic as we can get to

>> they're not the authentically integrated, but they're actual ad reads, but I put them into the right part of the conversation. Yeah.

>> Like the many chat ad read is going to go while we're talking about

>> which is the best thing you can do other than natively embed.

>> Exactly. Yeah. Yeah. No, I completely agree with that. Also, one point on that, if you see the AVD is like 8 minutes, you should put the interrupting non-native ad after 8 minutes and like the brand should want you to put it before 8 minutes, right? Because like 8 minutes would be the time where the average person leaves. So, if you don't want to break the hypnosis before that point. So if if you think about if you have your own native embeds, you want to put those in as early as you can and then as often as you can without alienating your any of your partnership sponsors. I would also argue too if you're a partner or sponsor and you're in towards the end, obviously you're not getting the whole cohort of the viewers, but anybody that stays towards the end, it's that much more sticky. And I think the conversion rate at the end

>> is high.

>> Yeah, I think it's high at the end. I think it's I mean it's highest right at the beginning but yeah like the people that you get the click they for 10 seconds they start the content they're like all right these are our sponsors like that's the worst thing you can do now if you've caught fandom on podcast you can get away with it because people would just skip the ads but still they want to listen but if you're just trying to grow that's the worst thing you can do what we do say though in the beginning and also guys do it now is make sure you subscribe to the channel I think there's 83% of people that listen that aren't subscribed make sure you guys subscribe back to the show last part on distribution and growth Before we get into the future of kind of content and attention, just tying it up, what do you think is the number one biggest hack on short form?

>> The best hack is to look at your own content for winners. So, if you were to prioritize where to study to get new ideas, the highest is [ __ ] you've made that has worked before, make it again. Now, if you don't have your own winners, you want to look at the best people in the space with as much as many of those Lego bricks held constant as possible. Look at what they've made and remake it. If you don't have those, you should be using sand castles because we can give you those. That's really the hack is like don't go out on an island and try to reinvent the wheel before you even know how to bike. Go and study the people that have already won and look at what won for them and remake your own version. If you just do that for the first 100 reps, you will close the gap on a lot of the unknowns and you'll do well along the way.

>> Yeah. I think like from a looking at those kind of seven Lego blocks from a a quote unquote first mover advantage, I think you win on taking like six of the seven blocks are the winners throughout and then being first mover on one of those seven blocks. Exactly.

>> Which I think that's what we've done in a good way on a a visual perspective. Let's transition over kind of to the future of content and attention, and I want to just start with what major shifts do you see coming just in content and distribution? I know we've talked about a couple of them. I don't know if you want to riff a little bit more on kind of these new narrow channels and breaking down your identity into kind of sub identities. So AI content's coming like a wave, title wave, tsunami. It's coming. I think the more commoditized the content is, the faster it'll be replaced. So, Twitter for example, people are already building they already have AI content machines that's pumping out textbased written content via AI. Interestingly, the counter to this is that I tweeted about this. When people see that your content is made with AI, they it's almost like a soft cancellation. Like the new cancellation is being caught by using AI. But the funny thing is everyone wants to use AI to go faster, but you can't get caught that you're using AI or else you'll get softancled. So it's it's hilarious this hilarious dichotomy right now. But effectively if you map content from easy to hard in terms of how to replicate AI is going to come like a wave across that entire spectrum. So the last thing to be replaced will be live streams like threehour uncensored uncut riffs with two people. AI will not be able to replace that very easily without you being able to tell. Then long form is like the next best etc. You walk all the way back until you get to Twitter. So

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

>> I'd argue it's two years, too. I don't think three. I think maybe two, maybe three. If if you want to go the other route where you're trying to build a business that can endure this like AI wave, you want to go niche, you want to own a term as fast as possible, you want to go signature and one of one. What what is one of one? What unique experiences, credibility, proof or or like lived Yeah. lived experiences do you have that you can storyt tell around that you can make content infusing into that can't be replicated by a beginner? That's where I think you want to play. I think you want to you want to get really good at a skill that is AI proof. The issue is most skills are not AI proof. So fundamentally no matter where the AI ball lands until humans are not the buyer attention will always matter. The thing you sell them the product will always matter. Like a human brain will still decide to buy stuff. At some point maybe that won't be true in like a B2B perspective. It might just be agents buying from other agents. And in that world, all of the fundamentals about traffic and offers completely change. But like let's assume that world is like 5 to 10 years out. I think for the next 5 to 10 years, you want to understand psychology and attention as much as possible. Every company is a marketing company. Every company is a content company. So that's where I would like invest all my time in understanding. And to to have a moat, it's all the things we already said. Signature, one of one hyper niche.

>> Yeah. Dan Co says it really good. He talks about future proof. And he talks about understanding four things. Marketing, sales, writing, and speaking. And I completely agree. And content and copywriting is a kind of like a a big thing that can kind of drive all four of those. I'd love to know like how do you leverage AI just in your world, in your business, AI tools, anything and everything you use on AI side?

>> Yeah. Well, sand castles.ai, that's my tool. I use that a lot. That's meant to be like a content workflow tool. So it's not necess it's called AI. The writing is AI but not the the whole product is not AI. So I use that a lot for content. We can talk about that if you want. I obviously use Chad GBT. Claude Gemini. Honestly, I love Gemini. I think Gemini is overtaken Chad GBT in terms of like natural normal day-to-day LLM activities.

>> Wow. Just like

>> I've actually never I don't use Gemini.

>> Oh Gemini 3 is cracked. It's sick.

>> I've moved from Chad GBT to Claude.

>> Yeah. So Claude Claude and Gemini are my two favorite. Chad Jupit is like a distant third right now.

>> Too agreeable. chat GB2.

>> Yeah, two agreeable. I I think in general they're hurting. We don't need to get into this, but strategically they're going to have a problem because they don't have a cash cache machine like the others. But I think Gemini and Claude are the best too. So I use those for like daily tasks. And then on the Gen AI image and video side, I don't use it a ton. Certain spots we'll use for like certain use cases. All my editors use it a lot and they have subscriptions. Higsfield is my favorite for AI image and video. They have a basically Higsfield it I hope Higsfield doesn't clip this but no free ads. Higsfield is doing to AI video and image what Instagram filters did to photography. So the way Instagram used filters to allow the average person to make their photos presentable, usable, creative feed. Higsfield is doing the same thing by templatizing AI image and video creation in a way that's very intuitive. So, I really like Higsfield. Freepick is the other one that we work with a lot. They have this cool like node-based editor called spaces. So, to give you a sense, maybe we can show this on the screen. Right now, I've got my my Genai guy building a workflow where we put in one line of a script or one image and it spits out like five to 10 AI generated videos that are all in an aesthetic that match our brand that could represent that line in different ways. And so at scale, my editors can just drop in the lines of my script and then get assets made all automatically. And it's like a it's like a visual workflow, a nodebased. These are assets used for what, like B-roll?

>> Yeah, B-roll in in shorts. So just like and they might only be on the screen for one to two seconds, but like just to have more assets if we can't find them from the brand is huge. So we're using that, but I don't use AI tools a ton even though I am one of the like top AI guys. And I think the the reason why is cuz when you have a really particular way you do stuff, especially on the writing front, the minute I can sense a quality loss, I won't trade off quality for speed when it comes to writing and ideas. And so there just aren't that many. Like AI is very bad at generating new thought. It's very good at compressing a [ __ ] ton of stuff down. So if you're making a YouTube video and you have a 100page document, it could be amazing at turning that into an eight-page script. But if you're like, "What are the six best ways to do hooks?" And you're trying to come up with novel ideas. It's not good at generating novel ideas because it's trained on what already exists, right?

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

>> the interesting thing is you would think someone like me who is willing to try anything. I'm I'm obviously emotionless when it comes to like winning. You would think someone like me would just all day be in the trenches with AI tools trying to figure out like a better mousetrap, but even me, I don't enjoy a task that I know how to do well in 10 minutes. I don't enjoy taking an hour to do it worse. I don't enjoy that. And like

>> that's where the AI bunny rabbit comes in. The AI bunny rabbit is figuring it out. and until he can get it to one or two minutes and not lose the quality.

>> I think we're in this weird like this weird inner in between period where the tools exist to where people that spend all day on them can get marginal gain but they're not good enough to where an average person like let alone me who's deep on this stuff can get 10x output with like the stuff I would need content writing etc. So we're in this like weird middle ground where there there is an arbitrage if you can spend time learning how to set up these systems. Yeah. But today it's not an overwhelming amount.

>> What do you think is the next like major platform? Do you think anything new is going to pop up or just iterations off the current ones?

>> I think we'll see a zag for human only content against the zig of AI content. I made a video on my YouTube channel breaking down like how I think AI content will play out and there's like four paths. All paths lead to or like how the social platforms will treat AI content. all paths lead to them allowing it for their interests. So I think there will be a zag to that where there'll be like the Etsy of human only human verified whether it's like biometric or whatever content. I don't nec that doesn't mean that's going to be the popular platform cuz typically people like junk food. So like if the AI gets better than the humans, which it will just from a math perspective, people will prefer to see personalized stuff that's like amazing versus humanmade stuff that's what

>> maybe that's where the blockchain will come in and be super useful potentially to really really verify.

>> Yeah, 100%. So we'll have that for sure. That'll come. I think once we have AR as like a primary vehicle, so like the smart glasses, you'll have another native type social experience to that. Like it makes no sense to wear those glasses and scroll like this with it in your eye. That makes no sense to have a feed. So there'll be a reinvention of whatever content looks like in a AR world and then eventually like a VR 3D world. Um and I'm sure I'm sure someone will come out with a new mouse trap, but the reality is these Instagram got caught flatfooted on Tik Tok and they won't get caught flatfooted again. So whoever innovates on anything that's even remotely popular, the big boys will rip it. So I I don't think we'll see another like Chad GBT or OpenAI tried to make Sora too like the feed of AI generated content, but there's actually a and a lot of people using it, but there's a pretty violent community against the like AI slop niche.

>> You see those in the comments.

>> Yeah. So maybe maybe Sora 2 becomes Sora 7 and that becomes amazing at like like Netflix on demand type content. So I could see something there, but I don't think there's going to be a huge new thing that comes out of nowhere that's not what I just mentioned.

>> I guess the big question to put a pin on that is someone that's understands content marketing attention in a big big way. How much longer do you think we have for this content distribution arbitrage where people can get from zero to 100,000 followers in three, four months? How much longer do we have until this is over?

So there's there's two questions there. There's how much longer do we have of being able to do it? And then how much longer do we have of it meaning anything? Because if if today there are 50,000 people with over a million followers and tomorrow there's two million accounts because a lot of them are AI generated, then the value of having a million followers goes down, right? So I think we have three to five years, probably two years on the short form platforms and then closer to five years on the longer form before AI content is indistinguishable but actually so and is accessible to enough people that are not experts to be able to actually flood the feeds. Rough guess. I mean the this is what I wanted to say. this era will close like the the same the same way people would probably thought in 2020 like the Zer era where they're like oh I should have got it then cuz like I had a 2-year window and it closed this like free distribution at scale for free or I said free distribution at scale from let's say 2007 or 8 to probably 2028 RIP 20-year window you never coming back ever again that's

>> ever you had a 20-year window where you could make [ __ ] and have free amplification to infinity. And you could argue, okay, the 2008 to like 18 era, the tools were worse and like there were not for you feeds. So, let's just say the 4U era is this Gen 3 of social or whatever from 2020 to 2028, 8-year window. If you didn't eat during that window, you're never getting that back. And so, what does that look like after 2028? Maybe it's paytoplay, which is basically just paid ads. Maybe there's a bedrock of AI generated free content that is so competitive and so data optimized that like you just can't cut through via human and so the only way to cut through is that platforms will sell you a $10 per post option to cut cut above it. That's probably that's one very legitimate path where we end up and I guarantee when people are paying 10 bucks a post they're going to be pissed that they didn't go harder during this era. I'm like I couldn't be more pounding the table. Like you have about three years to just go ham. And because the because of the supply demand dynamics and the way for you algorithms work, you can you can do serious damage in three years. You could build a $50 million business in three years. I mean, you've had many people on here that have basically done that. So now's the time. Guys, we're going to give 15 seconds of silence to pop up a video of the attention guru, the attention Yoda, Gary Vaynerchuk. Let's just watch him for 15 seconds because you just sounded exactly like him and he has so many [ __ ] good things. All right, this last thing. What is the biggest difference between quote unquote telling stories and telling stories that convert for a business?

>> Yeah, that's a great question. Well, conversion comes from trust. Trust comes from proof andor demonstration of ability. So, I would say that's the the right question is not the difference between the storytelling. It's more the topic and then what you actually cover in like the meat of the video itself. Storytelling is just the way to preserve attention throughout. It's just like the connective tissue, which is still contrast, setting up stakes, making it relevant, like these things we can talk about. But the difference between conversion and not is just giving someone a hit of something that they would get if they bought the thing, right? So, if you're selling like AG1, it's showing the transformation that some people get by getting it. If you're selling an agency service, it's demonstrating your ability to get the results that the person is paying for.

>> Makes sense. Any type of kind of like tactical process or systems that you use to go from a raw idea to a finished script? Yeah.

>> Any advice you can give to someone out there on storytelling in that?

>> First thing is to try to figure out what's interesting about the topic and I call this the angle. So what is interesting? It's either shocking from an entertainment perspective or useful for an education perspective. So, the angle needs to be one of those two depending on the type of content you're making. What you want to do is think through what do most people believe that I disagree with, which is kind of goes back, it's like a full loop on what we said at the beginning around contrast. So what I try to do is say there's a piece of the story, a fact, a take, some implication that I have and I try to rank on a scale of zero to 100. I call it a shock score. How shocking would it be to reveal this thing? And a shock score is usually out of a hundred people in a room, how many would have thought that previously, which is getting to the same idea of like common belief versus new reality. The whole deal with storytelling is figuring out what you can say that most people don't believe, but then they can believe pretty quick once you say it. That like aha moment, that is contrast and that's what gets people curious to keep listening. So if I say Prince Charming is walking in the woods, the common belief would be he's going to keep walking. But if a dragon pops out of the woods, you weren't expecting that. So out of a hundred pe and now we've everyone's seen Disney so like maybe a few people would say that but like agnostic of Disney out of a hundred people how many would say a dragon's going to pop out? Not many. So it's like that's pretty shocking. Now there's new stakes, new information. So people's new reality becomes the prince and the dragon. So it's like what do you think is going to happen? Most people think they're going to fight. Maybe this one I say okay they do fight. So I I give them something they would believe. It's just zigzagging down the path of being like what do most people believe? What do you believe that is not true that you can prove quickly? and then do that in succession.

>> Talk a lot about contrast. What about conflict? How important is conflict in the story? Do you use that in all of your storytelling?

>> Conflict is basically a form of contrast, right? So like conflicting beliefs would be like contrasting beliefs. I I kind of think those are interchangeable. Usually conflict has to do with stories that have subjects, right? A lot of the stories I'm telling in content, maybe the subject is like Google, but there aren't like people.

>> It's like hypothetical versus

>> Exactly. But it's still contrast.

>> Makes sense. What about the payoff? How important is it to have the payoff at the end? What happens if you don't have the payoff?

>> I think people don't like being bait and switched and when you don't have a payoff, that's what it feels like. Because again, and this goes back, everything really ties together. It's all the same really. But like if you establish context on something and you bait them, they need some fulfillment of the bait. Could be different bait or the same bait, but they need bait to confirm. If you switch and you take the bait away and you're just like, "Yeah." and the story ended, they're not going to be very interested in that, right? And people hate being bait and switched. So, you need the payoff to kind of close the last loop. That's really what the payoff is. Need the bait, but not the bait and switch. All right, we're just going to quick strike a ton more questions before we close up. This has been amazing. This is dopamine on another level. Nice. Hopefully valuable.

>> It definitely is. I guess let's start with what's the single most important system or workflow change that has allowed you to go from kind of sporadic content to true content machine.

>> So on short form it was getting the content operator the idea guy to offload a lot of the because because ideas are a bottomless pit. You could spend infinite time. So getting that off the plate is critical. Editing is not a bottomless pit. It's tight, right? So you want to get that off the plate but like there's a fixed amount of hours on the YouTube side. It was starting with the A team from day one. Love that. Biggest learning lesson from interviewing Mark Zuckerberg.

>> He's actually a dope guy. Like I think he he got a lot of bad a bad publicity like during the Senate hearings and stuff, but like he's actually sick. Like he's he's a cool guy. He's chill. He's really locked in. Like he can task switch like no one I've ever seen, but he's actually like a cool guy.

>> Sure. He's got a lot of big problems he's got to deal with. He can't be flawless. I mean,

>> yeah. Running one of the biggest companies in the world.

>> He's just a normal guy, right? Like that's the thing. What is the biggest regret in your professional life?

>> Uh, waiting too long to go into the entrepreneurial game. The entrepreneurial game.

>> How old were you when you started?

>> Well, I'd been launching I built my first company when I was 20, but it failed. And then I've been launching stuff in my 20s, but I was half in, half out. So, like my biggest regret is just not going balls to the wall sooner. I do think you need and I think Sean from Ridge said this, you need to go into a real job to like get your teeth kicked in and actually build some skills. Like you need some ability. So I think it it's not the right advice for someone who's 18 to just go into entrepreneurship without any skills or backing. But very quickly once you're like I have that dog in me, you want to go and and go all in.

>> Yeah. For me looking back and for my future kids, definitely not going to college. just developing the skills earlier and then being able to start that entrepreneurial journey early because I feel like people go to college and then they develop the skills through like mid to late 20s and they start then.

>> Yeah.

>> I'd rather just start that in high school so they can be entrepreneurs at

>> 21. To build off that, it's basically I didn't realize that it it was all skills. It's all skills. And when you're in a job you hate, you try to resist learning skills because you're just trying to sneak around to keep getting paid, but you're just delaying the reality, which is you need skills if you want to win on your own. So, you want to start that and it's going to take 5 to seven years to actually build fundamentals. So, you want to start that clock as soon as possible.

>> What's the biggest learning lesson from interviewing Spotify founder Daniel Ek?

>> He was also super chill. I think the learning lesson zooming out to like compare the two cuz I have only interviewed those two and like no one else.

>> Guys, light flex only done two interviews in his whole entire life.

>> Yeah, those I never wanted Spotify and Facebook.

>> Yeah, it's kind of crazy. They're very different though. So, I think the learning is that you can win big in a variety of different ways. There's infinite ways to play the game, infinite attributes that help. Both of them seem very locked in and present on what they're doing. That's the common I mean there's many commonalities but that was one that being in the room with both of them physically they can lock in so quick like task switch but then be like 100% present I think is a real skill.

>> Yeah. I feel like they're like there's very few people in my life where it's like a lot of it's 15-minute meetings. Sometimes I do 15-minute meetings but he's locked in from 3:30 to 3:45 and then 3:46 he's on to the next.

>> Exactly.

>> Definitely. Y

>> What's one question you wish people asked you about social media but don't? I wish people came to me holistically and were like, I have this business. I have this these resources. What is the strategy to win the game? I will do anything to tell me what it is. I wish more people came with with like a more open mind to me solving it for them instead of closed mind like I have this one singular problem. It's like

Well, let's actually like zoom all the way out. That's not the right problem, right? People get very fixated on what they think the wrong the issue is. So, I wish people came to me with a more open mind sooner about and just let me lay it out for them.

>> Love that. If you had to go from zero to $1 million in a year, how would you do it today?

>> First thing I would do is build a high ticket, high margin. So, it's $1 million revenue or profit. Let's say profit. Let's go profit. Yeah. Okay. First thing I would do is build a high, high ticket, high margin. If I have no skills, I'm going for a done-for-you offer. But if I have some skills, I'm doing like a done-with-you offer somewhere in the 5 to 10k range and then I'm making super precise, high-value educational content on YouTube and I'll be at a million in a couple months.

>> Love that. How do you use the comment strategy to drive discovery?

>> Yeah, so comments are actually a super underrated way to get virality. Again, might not be after virality, but if you have the right people commenting, it actually can trigger on-target virality. Comments are just another surface for people to be entertained by whatever you're you're making. So if you use the script effectively to drive a certain question that people can debate, you want like contrarian debate in the comments. You create these like little cyclones where people are fighting with each other in the comments. That actually boosts engagement a lot. So that, that would be one way. The other way is use the comments to get like to get people to trust you more by like respond actually responding, taking the time to respond to.

>> Yeah. Do you know what's so crazy too? It's so weird because Nerberto Nixon episode, RPN, great episode, guys. The views on one of our shorts went absolutely bonkers, like out of nowhere. And it was because the CEO of Instagram, Msari, liked the asset.

>> Nice.

>> And apparently, I think certain people, certain likes are disproportionately given more push through the algorithm. I didn't know that. Did you know that?

>> I, I call it super shares, but I'm assuming it happens with likes, too. Who's like a 500,000 followed account shares your video is going to be worth a 1,000x what like a normal person would be. I assume the same thing is true with likes.

>> He liked like two or three and they went absolutely bonkers. It was crazy.

>> Maybe he has the the super flip super switch in the back end where he's got that 100x when he double taps. All right, when I ask you these last four questions I ask everybody. Favorite book or podcast and why?

>> That's a good one. I actually don't read that many books. I should read more, but I prefer listening to stuff and I just don't like consuming other content to be honest. It muddies my thought. But favorite, I love this pod. This is a great one. What else do I listen to?

>> I think Sweat Equity with Garcia and Brian Blum, if you know that one.

>> I do.

>> They're good.

>> Callum's my homie. Callum Johnson. I know. You talk to him.

>> Yeah, you connect me. I like him. He's great.

>> Yeah. So, I listen to his sometimes.

>> Charming, charming accent, too.

>> Yeah. Group chat sometimes I'll listen to if I'm really trying to like just disconnect. They talk a lot about LA which I can't relate to. So I always feed through those parts.

>> I took a, I took a a random trip on group chat like six and that was fun.

>> Yeah, I, I heard you. Yeah.

>> Yeah, it was fun.

>> That was when I heard that and then I went to go DM you and you had DM'd me. That's that's when that's when we connected. So

>> shout out D.

>> Yeah, shout out D.

>> I haven't talked to him for a minute. He actually just messaged me last night. I don't know.

>> The master connector. I listen to like a random Chris Williamson episode every now and then, but I, I really I usually go based on the guest whatever I see on the YouTube.

>> That goes back to that ICP game and about staying deep and narrow. He obviously has escape velocity. He's huge. I mean, he's having on very, very different type of people. Obviously, he's dominating.

>> Once, once you get, once you transcend the algorithm, which I would say Diary of a CEO, Chris Williamson, Rogan, then you can, you have carte blanche. But I, I think it's harder and harder to get to that point. And only a few people have ever got to that point. Guys, if you're listening, it's been 3 hours, maybe two episodes of an hour and a half each, that means that you really [ __ ] with this podcast. If so, please say in the comments, topics, guests, who do you want to hear from? Because we're in the midst of going through a lot of these uh cane exercises currently. It's been a shot to the face, understanding, and knowing this.

>> Yeah.

>> Entrepreneur or brand you want to give flowers to and why?

>> Nice. There's so many. Well, I love George Heaton. I, I love rep. Episode went absolutely crazy.

>> Yeah, it went crazy. Listen to that. I'll have to meet him sometime.

>> I think like on the creator side, there's a lot of my homies. Brandon Wang, if you never heard of this guy, Brandino, he's sick.

>> I really like creators. Yeah, good taste. I love, I was about to say that. I love creators with good taste. Like I think Alex Garcia, the way he shifted his visuals is sick. Orin's got great taste. Roberto's the homie. Roberto's like the best in tech by a mile. He's so sick.

>> Ror is another guy in the family. I just had a crazy, crazy convers. Do you know that guy's story? By the way, I don't want to interrupt you.

>> I don't. I don't.

>> This guy's [ __ ] story, bro. He was doing like live streaming and people were paying him like $30 chug this beer. People were like paying to like

>> he was like chewing ice.

>> Well, it was he had the craziest life, at the craziest turnaround. Yeah, he's a great guy.

>> Steve will do it into Ror.

>> Yeah, literally it's, it's a crazy, crazy artist.

>> It's wild. I'm trying to think who else. I shout out a few with the pod as well. Yeah, those are those are the, I mean, there's so many more, but those are kind of it's like freshman double XXL classes is kind of how I think of creators. There's a bunch of people like in my class. I think Roberto, Orin, Garcia, Riley Brown, Callum, like these guys are we all started around the same time and we're it's cool to see like everyone's winning but they're all doing different stuff.

>> Love it. Last question. I'm kind of going to adjust it a little bit. What does success look over here? Where is Kane going to be in let's say five years? What does success look like? What does a successful Kane Callaway look like in five years?

>> That's a tough question. Well, the my original goal was to figure out how to do a million a month in profit. So, that was like pick a mountain top and then play the game to kind of figure out the mountain. So, I climbed up, got a little bit away, come all the way down, back up, rebuild, back up. I think I have a path now that I'm pretty clear on to do it. But that's like not success. That's just like the money goal. I don't know. I think I want to be I want to be doing something obviously want to be doing something I care about. I really like being good at stuff as most people do. So, I want to be doing something I like that I'm world class at that has an impact in the business world. I love playing the game of business, like the macro game. So, I'll be doing something in that sphere. Right now, I'm trying to be like the best in the world at attention. So, whether it's short-form video or long-form video, like I'm trying to build the rails so that any business owner could come in one side and out the other comes dollars. And the the the factory was attention and video basically content. So, I'm trying to like completely productize that whole process right now. So, that's going to be my focus for the next few years mostly because it's a fun game. It's very high impact and and yeah, high leverage, but I think there's a I have a few more seasons to me beyond that. So, my initial goal is like build a machine that can build machines and that's what a content factory really is. But at some point, I'll have to shift and start building machines, right? So, we'll see.

>> Dude, I think you're well on your way. I had an amazing time, bro. Why don't you tell everybody where they can find you? All the socials, all the URLs. Go crazy.

>> Awesome. So, if you're interested in the social media marketing, YouTube stuff, which you probably are, Callaway Marketing, Callaway Marketing is my YouTube channel. I have a newsletter called Content.game. I have a software tool for short-form growth that's I think is best, best in the world today, going to be the best in the world compounding called Sandcastles. So that's sandcastles.ai. If you want my help on the short-form side, I have a program that I really do not push or advertise ever. This is the first time talking about it here. Shortform.academy is where you can find that. I'll be launching the YouTube equivalent which is basically like the world-class information with group calls and me helping you on both short and YouTube. So shortform.academy, academy and then the YouTube one is not out yet, so we'll I don't have a URL for that, but just look in the description. I'm sure we'll put it in there. That's all the like marketing stuff I do. If you're interested in the tech stuff, Callaway or Kane Callaway on TikTok and Instagram, you can find me.

>> Amazing. Guys, hope you enjoyed. Sweet. What's up, guys? If you guys got this far in the episode, I would assume that you enjoyed it. If you got any value, it would mean the world if you hit the subscribe button, give it a like, post a comment, tell a friend. We could keep going bigger, bigger guests, bigger locations, more value. See you in the next episode.