The Crazy Genius Who Solved The Youtube Algorithm (Literally)

Vexian, I would like to have all of these plaques.

Okay.

I need you to walk me through the step by step of how to go from nothing to a thousand subscribers, okay?

To 10,000 subscribers, then to 100,000 subscribers, then to a million subscribers, and then lastly, I want you to help me figure out how I'm supposed to get to 10 million subscribers.

But I want to start from scratch. Okay, I haven't made a video yet. What's my first step?

Step number one, it's the easy step. You got to figure out what do you want to make. There's two reasons why people watch YouTube in general. Reason number one is education. Reason number two is entertainment. Education usually stem from the fact that they want to watch something to get an outcome. Let's say I want to learn how to change a tire. I'm going to look on YouTube how to change a tire. Entertainment is going to be I'm going on YouTube for the specific outcome of trading my time for something that makes me feel good. So that's going to be Mr. Beast video when it comes to the entertainment. So I'm not going to learn anything about Squid Games, but I'm going to watch 100 people fight for a million dollars. Whether that's dystopian or not, up for debate. But those are the two kind of main factors why people watch YouTube. It's education and entertainment.

So if you want to hit a thousand subscribers fast, I recommend this to basically anyone. It's going to be education because the value symmetry there is way different than entertainment. Entertainment, there's way higher bar to get people to click versus education. Education. It's very simple. Hey, I have this problem. I want to solve this problem. Grant is gonna solve this problem for me. I'm getting a lot of value. Therefore, through reciprocity, I'm gonna give him a subscribe. It's very low effort, low friction. Easiest way to get a thousand subscribers consistently is through education. You can do it through entertainment, but you're going to find that it's a lot harder. It's going to be kind of an uphill battle, and it's not going to be as clear-cut as I make something valuable for someone, someone watches it, they get the value, they subscribe in return.

So if I'm looking to make an education channel, what are some mistakes that you see people making when they get started?

They make content that they want to watch themselves that's not helpful. What you want to do is you want to make content that people are going to watch that get desired outcome. Like your whole point as an educator is to lead people that have an issue to a solution. You don't want to talk about your struggles. Your struggles can be great. It's contextually though in terms of like as long as the struggles I face are something that other people are going to face, that's good. You want to be broadly applicable in terms of like here are the issues that you're facing. Here are the solutions I have. Here's where you want to go. Here's how you can get there. Like that is what you need to do. You got to put like everything else to the side. And a lot of people introduce like the issues they face because of an ego thing. It's like I want to show that I overcame this because it's a better emotional story. It doesn't help the audience at all, but it helps themselves like perpetuate like their image.

H. So what if I'm someone that isn't creative?

Isn't creative?

Yeah. isn't creative in the sense that like I might not own a camera.

Okay.

I might not know how to really use technology, but I want to make content. I want to make something that I enjoy. Maybe it's a hobby based thing.

How would you approach someone because like I think there's a lot of fear and trepidation of I need to have the right gear. I need to have the right setup. I need to have everything kind of be perfect in order for us to get started. What would you say to that person?

Perfection is the enemy of good. Um I'd rather slow progress than no progress just in general. Right? Here's the other issue with like let's say the gear argument or you know I want to make sure my tees are crossed, eyes are dotted. If you do that, you might not have a good idea of what you actually want to do. Let's say I'm waiting on getting the correct gear. Let's say I'm doing all this prep work, but there might not be a market for it. The guy that just picks up the iPhone and just shoots whatever he wants to shoot that's interesting to him that there might be an audience for is going to win because he can get validation, he can get feedback loops quicker, and he can iterate faster than the guy that has all the gear. Some of the biggest YouTubers in the world started with an iPhone or an iPod. Like, think about that. You don't need to be perfect. You just need motion in the first place.

What is one thing I could do to guarantee that I get a thousand subscribers in my first six months of making content?

Oh, that's such a great question. Cadence is a big thing. So, the reason why cadence is a big thing is for two reasons. First being is that you want to have that audience that doesn't know you get exposure to you. Like you want to increase your exposure area as much as possible because if you do that that's more potential shots on target for YouTube the algorithm which is not against you in any way shape or form. It's actually for you to get your content in front of the people that want to watch it or have the ability to watch it because it helps them or entertains them in some way shape or form. So the cadence is good because it also sets to press piss in terms of TV for example like you know when brand new shows on it's like out every Saturday when Game of Thrones is big like everyone like came over on Sunday it was an event you want your channel to be that. So like that's number one is it conditions them from that aspect. The second thing is it conditions it from the algorithms aspect where it's like this guy's consistently uploading. We know roughly when he's going to upload. We know when his audience is on. So then we can then put his video in front of that audience in terms of you know that session time.

The other aspect of consistency that's that's killer like it's so so important is what's kind of called an impression snowball. So when I upload on YouTube let's say the first video gets a thousand views. YouTube will give us maybe 10,000 impressions. We'll call it you know a 10% CTR. We'll get a thousand views. Our next video.

Can you define CTR for me?

So CTR is clickthrough rate. That's the amount of people that click on your thumbnail and title video in general um based by the number of impressions. So like like I said, 10,000 impressions, 10% CTR or clickthrough rate is 1,000 people clicked on the video and watched for enough time for it to be counted as a watch, which roughly 30 seconds. So when you're uploading consistently, you have this viewer snowball going on or impression snowball. My first video might only get 50 views. My next might get 70 because YouTube figures out, hey, this audience right here is pretty good. We'll expand it out for a little bit of a larger audience. So, you know, this new audience has some overlap with the previous audience. So, we'll serve some impressions over there as well. Increasing those impressions. Oh, this video caught. Now we went from 50 views a video to 70 views a video. Maybe now we blow up, we get a thousand views a video. And you can think of it as compound interest for attention. And if you have a consistent cadence, then YouTube knows when to serve your content, who to serve it to, and how often to serve it to keep that snowball growing. Um, and like that's like the biggest thing. Like I see guys all the time who upload once a month. They want to be, like you said, perfect. Doesn't work. You're not giving YouTube enough time to figure out who your audience is, who that secondary audience is, that tertiary audience is, the overlapping audience is. And that's bad. You don't want that to happen. So, by uploading consistently, same time, let's say two times a week, three times minimum is what I really, really like, where you're still at the forefront of your audience's mind at all times, um, that allows it to kind of grow over time. And it's just, it's just so natural. It's so easy. Like, if you just uploaded three incredibly good, high value, long-form videos every single week for 6 months, it would be impossible to get less than a thousand subscribers. It'd be so difficult. Like, you don't even have to improve 1% every time. You just have to show up and be there for the audience because the audience exists. You just have to have the content for it out.

How do I come up with content ideas? Because that sounds overwhelming.

It is overwhelming. It's hard.

Three a week sounds overwhelming. I think the two biggest stoppers for somebody is one, I don't know what to make content about. So, you solve that. Hey, if you know anything about anything or if you solved anything for yourself, make content about that. But that cadence, it's almost impossible to be at any level of professional if you're posting that much volume by yourself. Let's just even say the baseline is one a week if that's the goal because I think it's a lot for some people. How should I be thinking about my content ideas? If my goal is growth,

What you want to do is you want to find the top 20% of creators in your niche or who has the desired audience that you want and you want to track them. So, you can do this a lot of ways. There's tools that do this. If you don't have any tools, you don't want to spend any money because it might be, you know, too daunting. Google spreadsheet, Excel spreadsheet, get that list of channels in a spreadsheet and check it every single week. And what you're going to be looking for is you want to see the most recent videos performance relative to the last five videos. And you want to see if it's higher or lower. And there's going to be different like time cycles. Like let's say if within 3 days this video is outperforming the last five video average. That's a really good indicator that something about that video worked. And generally what it's going to be more often than not is the actual core idea or the premise of the video. And if we want to be like reductive, the premise of the video can be boiled down to just purely the title. Um, it's a little bit more complicated than that. But for the average person, someone under a 100,000 subscribers, you can look at title and be like, the title of the video is the idea of the video and you can reverse engineer that. So let's say for example, we were doing a video on bass fishing for whatever reason. And we talked about the best lure setup for bass fishing. And that video, like, you know, for us did really well, but it's like, okay, what do I do next week? Maybe next week is going to be about bait or maybe it's going to be about the best lakes or like how to find a good spot just by like your eyes. And it's like, okay, maybe that'll work. But like, what do I do after that? Then after that, I'm like, I don't know. I go and I look at all my competitors, and one of my competitors just did a great video. Maybe it's a little bit different, which he talked about a $1 fishing rod, a $10 fishing rod, $100, and $1,000 fishing rod. And now I'm like, okay, I could look at that. I could either do the same exact thing or maybe instead of doing that exact same thing, I could look at that and I could maybe remix it. So, what you want to do when you're tracking the top 20% of competition, you almost never want to steal one for one. It's never going to work. The competition is your competition for a reason. They're either beating you at speed, production quality, ideation, access to things that you don't have access to. There's a myriad of reasons why they're beating you. But you can look at the core idea of like, okay, $1, $10, $100, $1,000 fishing rods. Maybe I could do something with budget fishing rods, best budget fishing rods. Okay, could do that. You could also add seasonality to it. So, you can start adding these modifiers. So, seasonality to it could be something along the lines of best budget rods for the summer, best budget rods for the winter, depending on where you live. In addition to that, you can also find like what's the reason why people are watching the $1 versus $10 versus $100 versus thousand. You can look at it from a psychographic aspect. So in that case, this where it gets a little bit complicated, but you can do this as a beginner. The reason why people are watching that is they want to see the comparison between like cheap and expensive, but they also want to see the expensive stuff they don't have access to, right? In this in this exact case. So if you understand that, what you can do as well is maybe you can look at something along the lines of let's say that did well, but what about T-Mobile versus Amazon fishing rods or Amazon versus Walmart or Bass Pro Shop versus Amazon. Basically, what you want to do is you want to find the titles. You want to find why those titles worked. Not hard to do. You can even throw the title into chat GBT. If you really want to do this as a base level and be like, what's the psychological reason this title worked? What's the framing of this title that worked for this audience? It'll tell you, rudimentary, but it'll work. You could reverse engineer that. You can figure out, okay, now how do I come up with ideas that fit this title format or this reason why people watched?

H. What are some things I want to be looking at if I'm researching channels to figure out what kind of content I want to make?

So the simple aspect is in terms of what content I want to make, it's going to be views. So the only number that matters is views is how many views are channels getting and how many views per video are they getting and are they getting videos that are outliers? An outlier is a video that performs better than its moving average or channel average. I prefer moving average, but if you were to say, "Hey, this video is doing better than the channel average views during a time period, 30 days, 90 days, a year," that's cool. Totally acceptable. Will probably work. I prefer moving average. It's a little bit more accurate.

What's the difference between that average and moving average?

Channel average accounts for your entire channel history. And if you did year average, also counts that. What that doesn't account for is a few things. Number one is seasonality. So, let's say, again, I'll just do the fitness niche. It's a niche I know well. I have a few clients there. Um, in the spring we get more views because people want to get in shape for the summer. So, if we use the research from the spring content in November, it's not going to work as well because there's less of a total addressable market and there's less momentum behind it. So, it doesn't account for that. It also doesn't account for improvement. Let's say I get better quarter over quarter by like 5 to 10%. I'm increasing my production quality. I'm, you know, dotting the eyes, dashing the tees. Everything is like really, really well done. I'm spending more money. It doesn't account for that. So, I don't like doing that. I don't think it's as accurate and there's also kind of like a call it like a beta decay of sort where an idea that might have worked nine months ago might not work now. So that's why I don't like channel average. I prefer moving average because I can track like okay within the last five videos this video is doing better than the last five. There's a reason for that. Then you can keep doing that. It tracks more in line with the fact that creators going to increase expenditure. They're going to increase production timelines to make better videos. They're going to get better at strategy. It it kind of takes account for that. So you can just look at the idea where the idea is and you can use that as the reference point.

So everything you're saying is basically that's the best way to start is figure out a niche and learn about it first.

Y. Understanding like this is a format that has worked for other people in the past. Think about a way that you can use that same format for yourself.

Y.

How do I go about deciding what niche is there niches that are like not worth making content about?

So, I prefer like audience and like the way that I would look at it is like how big of an audience is there for the content that I would like to make. Is there an intersection between that audience and what I want to make? If the answer is yes, then you have what I would define as a niche, right? There's an intersection between my interests and the audience interests. From there, it then depends on are they going to be entertained or educated. So, in the car niche, Matt Armstrong does entertainment content rebuilding. But then you could do someone in the F1 niche. Still the car niche for example that is purely education on terms of how tire management is done on how like these upgrades affect the car on the track. But generally speaking, what you want to focus on is how big of an audience is there potentially and how much of that audience can then I get into like a sub audience for what I want to specifically talk about.

That's how I look at it.

Give me an example. So for example, let's let's take a niche and let's say that the entire niche is the audience might be a million people.

Okay? Break it down for how I would determine the likelihood that I can get this subsection of that niche.

Okay, number one is language market. So let's say there's an audience of a million people. Call bad mitten. That's probably roughly fine. In bad mitten, there's an audience of a million people. How many of those people speak English? Okay, well it's only 50% of that niche. Okay, so now my maximum total market is probably 500,000. So it's 500,000. Then it's like, how much is the biggest creator getting within that language market of that total audience? Okay, that guy's only getting 200,000. So now, the way I always go about it is I look at the guy that's been doing it the longest or who is the biggest in terms of like views per video or views per month, whatever metric makes the most sense. If it's higher competition, I'll do views per month. Uh, if it's lower competition, I'll do views per video. And I'll look at that and I'm like, okay, I can realistically in two years get 80% of this market. So, in that case, I'll get what, like 160,000 potentially. Now, I have to kind of come up to myself. I'm like, does it make sense for me to spend two years to get potentially 160,000 views per video within this market? If the answer to me is yes, then I'll do it. The answer is no, I won't. And that kind of depends on the creator, which is like, do you want to follow your passion or do you want to follow the money? If you want to follow the money, probably wouldn't do bad mitten. I'd look for something that's a little bit larger. Maybe golf if I'm interested in golf and I have some knowledge about golf.

So, within two years, you could get that 80% of the market.

Yeah. What's realistic in the first three months?

Oh man, first three months it depends because it really depends on your quality. There's a lot of tiny creators blowing up. There's like a few reasons for it and we'll get into that later, I'm sure. Um, but you could easily capture 5% of the total market share in terms of like maybe three months, six months at the very least, but like three is possible if like you really really dial down. This is definitely not something for beginners. Um, but like what you want to focus on is not capturing market share early on, but capturing audience equity, which is different. So audience equity is how much your audience that you have right now trusts you and respects you. So for example, Alex Rosie has an incredible audience equity. Like look what he did with this $100 million book launch. It's that's it's only insane. It's insane because like he built all that trust for years. That's incredible audience equity. He also managed at that same time to like maximize the market share. In order for him to get any more subscribers. Like the amount it requires is far more difficult effort. So like early on it's not about capturing an audience, it's about building a relationship. The audience that you have, whatever that size that is, you can capture it later on. Like that's the easy part. Um, but building the audience early on like that'll get that viewer snowball going that we were talking about. That matters way way way more. It doesn't matter the percentage of the market size. It matters the quality of the market that you have and how much you can keep them coming back over and over again.

Can you give me like the thesaurus of YouTube terms? Like the most basic basic basic of like every person that's starting on YouTube needs to know these terms.

Okay. Yeah. So, I can do that. So, here is the full 2026 thesaurus of YouTube words and definitions. TAM total addressable market. How many people you can possibly reach with a video. Outlier. Outlier refers to a video's performance relative to its moving average or channel average depending on how you calculate it. But regardless, you're focusing on the outlier. CTR, that's going to be click-through percentage. AVD is going to be your average view duration. Then you have average views per viewer or AVPV. Um, that's a little bit more of a a niche one, but it's useful. Um, then you have audience equity. U, I don't know if I coined that term, but it's how much that audience trusts you and respects you. Generally, I measure audience equity with AVPV, which is average views per viewer. If I have a high average views per viewer, that means I have a high audience equity because they trust me to keep coming back. Um, from there you've got ideation, coming up with ideas. Nice and easy. That is probably all the

Thumbnail.

Oh, yeah. Thumbnail. That that's a good one. Oh, yeah. Packaging. So, packaging is thumbnail and title. Thumbnail is going to be the image that is displayed above the title of a video. Um, then you have

Maybe like split test.

Yeah, you can do split test. Yeah. So, split testing is YouTube's backend or custom software you can have. You can split test thumbnails by having multiple run in parallel or sequential order. So, you can just test them multiple at a time or you can test them one after another.

The uh the next question I would have is what are some things that people freak out about that don't matter at all when you're just starting out.

Oh, dude. This is such a [ __ ] good question. 10 out of 10, man. Everyone loses their mind. 10 out of 10.

Yeah. So, 10 out of 10. So, when you upload on YouTube, YouTube has gamified the upload process, which I think is genius in terms of like a psychological reason to keep people coming back. Um, but when you upload on YouTube, the YouTube dashboard, I'm sure we can show one here, uh, will show your video's performance relative to the last 10 videos you uploaded. If you upload a video that's 10 out of 10, that means that video is the worst performing video in the last 10 videos. That is a nightmare because you're spending all this time, this effort, you're getting better, and you're not rewarded for that. People freak out. The thing is, you learn so much more from when a video bombs than when a video does well. There are things that you can't control when a video does well, but if a video does bad, you can like very very autistically dissect the video and you can figure out, oh man, duh, this didn't make sense. It's not like we're not in season for a video like this to do well, right? There's a lot of these things that matter. And when people get 10 out of tens, they freak out, man. They freak out. And it's for me, it's like I just look at it, I'm like, "Oh, that's just a data point." Like, what is that data point telling me? Okay, it's telling me all of those things I just listed and many, many more. Uh, it could be an editing issue. I can look at that 10 out of 10 performance and you can dissect it by looking at the average view duration. So if I'm like I uploaded a 20-minute video, my average view duration is three minutes. That's bad. It's not very good at all. Why is it 3 minutes? Okay, well I said this. Oh, I made this joke. Oh, that joke didn't land. I can see in the retention graph. So YouTube gives you a studio shows you how long you're retaining them throughout the video. So if I have a 30% that's bad and like that could contribute to the 10 out of 10 because YouTube doesn't want that. They want people to be on the platform as long as possible. So, if that's the case, then I'm like, "Okay, I did something that people clicked off this video. YouTube obviously didn't like that because it's not keeping their users on the platform. How can I fix that?" So, 10 out of 10 don't matter. They're just data. And people get really emotionally attached to it because they don't separate their emotions from the outcome. So, I think a lot of people put way too much emotional effort into videos and they get married to the outcome. They get married to the video's performance. And that's not what you should do. Like, you should never do that. You should get married to the channel's performance, not the video's performance.

Anything else that people look at and they're like, "I freak out about this or I care about this or I'm looking I'm looking for this."

Yeah, dude. Comments, man. People People let comments get in their head. Um, like you could upload a video, gets 10 million views, but if you get 10 bad comments, it'll ruin your day. And like again, you just have to divorce yourself from the outcome. It's like if you're dissatisfied, you're more likely to make like a comment expressing your negativity towards something rather than a comment praising if you have a good experience. That's just how it is. And again, like it's what I tell all my clients like, "Dude, those are just pixels on a screen. Like you have to think about this as a video game. That's just an NPC. Like that guy doesn't exist. Like you don't even have to take what he's saying at face value. Now where it does get interesting is if there is a lot of the same common sentiment shared between negative or positive comments, you can then track that. Like one data point calling you a dumbass or an idiot or like disagreeing with your opinion or your taste or your choice in editing or whatever it may be. That's one thing. A dozen. Okay. Now that's a signal and you can use that and track that.

Is there something that people overthink that they shouldn't overthink when making content for the first time?

Editing. A lot of people focus a lot on editing. Really doesn't matter. Um, that's like that's the whole like gist of it. Look at Sam Sulick. He shoots videos on his iPhone of him taking steroids and lifting thousands of pounds, millions of views. Uh, look at Togei. Not very well edited. Um, so people like get way in their head about editing. It's like, you know, first of all, it's like a big skill gap a lot of people have, right? Like the thumbnail thing like anyone can kind of like open up Photoshop and figure out how to move things around. Editing a little bit different because there's an emotional discourse to editing in terms of sound design, in terms of shot selection, in terms of setup and then you have way more creative control of that when you are editing it, right? Like you're the guy cutting the footage. Like there's a lot of like people that get really invested into it and married to it and they're like this is like too daunting for me. And also like the price difference between hiring a thumbnail designer is like maybe $5 for an entry-level thumbnail designer. An entry-level editor is like $35. So, like now you have an expense thing that's like, "Okay, now I'm like emotionally tied to my money. If I [ __ ] this up, then it's like I'm out $35 for $5." So, it's a bit of a harder pill to swallow. I don't think it matters when it comes to editing. That's where people get hung up on a lot. Like, not even the thumbnail, not even anything else, but like specifically editing and how they want it cut and they freak out about it.

What is something that like is like a little bit of a hack that someone watching this, if you start out, you'll be ahead of everybody else?

Oh, man. Um, there's like 4,000 things. I'm trying to think what's the highest leverage. Ideation is like the the king. Like if you nail ideation, like dude, [ __ ] editing. [ __ ] a thumbnail. You could just upload a video with a black screen and no title and you could print views. Um, like quite quite literally.

That sounds crazy.

That's pattern breaking. So ideation is all about pattern breaking and how to stand out. So on YouTube like dude millions of hours of content get uploaded daily. That's ridiculous. So the way you stand out is through the best ideas and to find the best ideas. There's tools and software that do that. Um, not necessarily tell you exactly what to post, but you can track and you can find patterns. This is where like uniquely my skill set crushes everyone else in the world. It's like I am autistically obsessed with the patterns of YouTube. Like I find them before anyone else. Like I don't know like people watching this podcast probably have seen the seven levels format. That's me. Like I'm the guy that popularized it and I found it. Um, there's a lot of other things like that as well. Like for example, Dire of a SEO thumbnails, right? Not necessarily ideation per se, but still pattern. He was the only guy doing those thumbnails within the podcast niche first and foremost. Outside of that, there was two guys in the carnivore diet and like the alternative diet and lifestyle niches that were doing it. And those three guys consistently like between DEO outperforming the podcast market and these two alternative diet and lifestyle guys outperforming their respective markets. I was like, "Okay, well, I'm just going to make a tweet about it." And then [ __ ] every thumbnail and every niche started looking like it once again. Um, so like if you want to get ahead, it's ideation, but like in reality, like that's the outcome. The skill you need or the input is pattern recognition. If you are better at recognizing the patterns on YouTube, consistent thumbnails that work well, consistent titles that work well, consistent hooks, intros, editing styles, etc. that work well, you can win because first of all, you can tap into that before anyone else does. But you can also tap into that and front run it by figuring out what makes those work. Pivot early on, and then you can pattern break. And if you can pattern break, dude, the [ __ ] game has changed for you. If you're saying someone that's jumping in and doing that effectively, the odds of them getting a thousand subscribers very fast dramatically increases.

It's 100%. Like, I mean, I could pull up a tweet right now on my phone from a guy who just followed all my tweets and then within 3 months he's at 6,000 subscribers making $5,000 a month. [ __ ] mind-blowing. Like, it's 100% if you just do everything the right way.

Let's move on to the next level.

Cool.

I want 10,000 subscribers.

Okay. What is the first thing I should do different after achieving 10,000 subscribers?

I've got a pretty hot take on this one.

Okay.

I think you should collaborate. Um, so YouTube is a zero sum game of attention, but it's it's not it doesn't present that way. It's disguised a little bit because of how sessions work and how session time works. So, if I upload a video and you upload a video in the same niche, a viewer can only watch one at a time unless like they're a freak. In that case, they can watch both, but that's not happening. So they have to watch yours or mine. That's fine. That's cool. But there's a drawback of that where I'm not getting the view if they get the view. Or if they watch my video and they get the answer they want, they might not watch my friend's video. But if you collaborate, you have a stronger audience and you can double your audience size artificially. So if I have an audience of thousand subscribers, a thousand viewers per video and a guy larger than me has maybe two or three, you'll find a lot of times people are more than happy to collab in some way as long as you can provide value back. And if you can collaborate, what you can do is you can attach yourself or anchor yourself to their audience which is larger and you can slowly get their audience to come to you. Now it's not zero sum in the sense that you have to choose one or the other. It is just zero sum every time you upload videos. So, if you upload videos the same day as him, maybe this new audience that I've garnered by collaborating comes to me. The thing though is like end of the day, like if you collab, he gets a little bit of your audience that he might not have. You get it probably a disproportionately larger size that you don't have, but it'll average out where the sum is greater than the individual parts. And that is what I've seen time and time again from like smaller guys that really [ __ ] kill it is they collaborate and they get themselves within good graces of people that are a little bit larger. Not at 100,000 subscribers, but hey, like within 10,000 subscribers to 20,000, very easy to reach out like, "Hey, you know, I've got this channel. I'd love to do a collab." It could be anything. It could be education. It could be entertainment. But if you do that, oh dude, so much goodwill as well. The way that you are perceived, your perceived value, which is [ __ ] huge as well. We'll talk about that later. Is also like massive.

What if I don't know many people? I'm not really connected. I'm not really plugged.

Dude, you can reach out. You can reach out. It's not hard. But if you you're anti-collab for whatever reason, you're antisocial. You've got massive distances between you guys. I live in LA, you live in New York, whatever it may be. There is other ways you can do that. You could do what I like to call like a virtual collab, which is anchoring, which is like, let's say the biggest guy in my niche makes a video. Maybe I could do a video reacting to it. Then I get his audience, my audience wants to know about it as well, but they're getting it from my point of view because they already watch me. That's my core audience. I get this new audience from reacting to this guy's biggest video. You get that little bit of a trickle down effect going on. Um, you could also do it in the sense that, oh, dude, a [ __ ] dude, this is such a sick question. A sick way you can do it if you want to do that which you're anchoring towards someone that's larger than the niche with a larger audience is you can do uh what I call like an inverse normality. So an inverse normality is like this guy says pink is the greatest color right Mr. Beast says pink is the greatest color. You make a video Mr. Beast is wrong about pink.

It's just a negative hook.

Yeah it's a negative hook. Um, so when you do that, it's like you get this like really interesting effect going on where you get the trickle down effect of like this massive audience that just watched this video as well as that person's core audience to come to you as a smaller creator and you kind of become a beacon for it. Dude, that's [ __ ] so sick. And I I've even done this myself back when I was a creator and before I realized, a dude, being a strategist is way better. Um, I did the same thing which is like I would like dissect the larger guys like within my vertical and I'm like, is this guy actually good at what he does? Um, and I'd get his audience watch my content because they wanted to know themselves.

Just for my understanding, how many YouTube videos have you watched this last year?

That's a great question. Um, I'll put it this way. I don't know the exact number of videos I've watched this year. Uh, I do know the exact number of individual channels, which is I think like 6,67 individual long form channels I've consumed. I know for a fact I've done a data export sometime last year, and my overall long form consumption was over 100,000 videos. Like

100,000 videos.

100,000 videos. Long form.

After watching 100,000 videos, what do you think is the thing that separates the creators that are just starting out above 1,000 and the ones that actually hit 10,000 to 100,000?

I think it's consistency. Like I really do like it's there's like a lot of like gimmicks and hacks and like strategies you can hit 10,000 quickly, but consistency is good in the sense that a lot of people get discouraged from like an emotional standpoint, but if you just keep going and push through, you'll get it. And the other issue like with not getting 10,000 is if it's not consistency, it's understanding. So like you can be consistent, but you might not understand what the audience that you want wants to watch in the first place. Like again, if I am doing email marketing, I hate to break it to you, entertainment is not going to [ __ ] work. Like it's very boring. You want to educate your audience. And then consistency in two aspects. Consistency in the first aspect of consistently uploading and consistency in the second aspect of consistently uploading the same content. Like for example, if I uploaded a 100 videos and 30 of them are on cooking, 25 are on gardening, 15 are on whitewater rafting, that doesn't make sense. But I am consistently uploading. So I'm doing what Vex saying right now. You're not being consistent with consistency. So like that is like a very key factor that like the guys at 10,000 are consistent in terms of uploading, in terms of cadence, whatever it may be, but also in terms of topic selection and angle. And a lot of people will be consistent with one but not the other. So like if I do that, that's not very consistent. So, you need to be consistent on amount of uploads, type of upload, and focus of upload. And if you do that, dude, again, no [ __ ] winner. Just do it for six months to a year. Like, it you'd be so hard pressed to fail if you just did like everything correctly. Like, not even to like a 10 out of 10, but like a one out of 10 level where it's just like I'm consistent with my uploads. I'm consistent with the type of content I'm uploading and the framing of the content.

How do I know if where I'm going is actually not worth it?

Audience will pretty easily tell you it's not worth it in the sense that let's say I'm uploading political commentary videos. If I start getting a Nick Fuentes audience, maybe I don't want that. Nothing wrong with that per se, but it's like maybe that's not the audience I want. Maybe I want a different audience. Um, the other aspect of, you know, where I'm going is something I might not want to be is money. At the end of the day, like you got to make money on YouTube. It'd be great if everyone was super rich and they could make whatever they want. But that's not really how the world works. If you want to be passionate about it and you don't care about the money, then you want views. Um, that's going to be the key metric. But I look at audience, views, and revenue. So audience is can be like distilled into views, but it's really like people commenting and like good comments versus bad comment ratio. Uh, or like comments that like I align with versus not align with is probably like a better metric. Um, and you have like a bunch that you don't align with that are vocalizing support, probably not where you want to be in terms of audience demographic. Uh, in terms of views, if I'm putting my heart and soul into it and I'm at like, let's say, you know, 9,000, 10,000 subscribers, but I've increased everything by 25 30% in terms of like, you know, objective quality and I'm not getting that same return or an outsized return in viewership, that means I might have hit a total addressable market cap or like a localization issue. Um, in terms of like maybe that's only pertinent to English speaking people in South Florida. Um, so there's that and then the other one is revenue. If I'm uploading a lot and like the revenue is bad, dude, you're doomed.

How much can we learn from the gaming community? I feel like they've got YouTube dialed.

Dude, gaming community has got all these plaques right here. I think like 70% of them are gamers.

Really?

All different games. Yeah. Like um I've done it for everyone, but um the gaming community has it dialed because they have a unique advantage. Same thing with the business community over everyone else. And this is where we can talk about the craziest [ __ ] Do I'm gonna drop some [ __ ] heat. Um, and what they understand about YouTube other than like more so than anyone else is YouTube is fundamentally a game and the prize is views and there's a gamification of it. So I can increase my skills and stats being storytelling, that's AVD, okay? Making better thumbnails, understanding composition, that's CTR. And I can increase those stats and I can focus on the inputs. If I focus on those, I get a clearly defined outcome that is beneficial, which is money. Video games are a game. They're just played in a virtual world. Business is a game which is played between other business guys trying to get customers to give them money. Like that's a game. Not everything is a game though. Like a lifestyle vlog is not a game. That is what you call like an art or performance rather. So like that'd be like the form of performance. And like if you understand that, dude, oh my god, that changes everything. The best storytellers on YouTube bar none are Minecraft YouTubers. So, you have like these weird market dynamics going on where it's like [ __ ] massive market that pays incredibly well for the most part because you're uploading longer videos and we'll talk about why. Um, because you have this larger market, you have more competition. Competition is great, breeds innovation, and in order to keep people's attention, you got to optimize. So, a lot of people would optimize on the front end early on by doing things in the game no one else could do, right? Alex Mosie also did this, funny enough, where he optimized for doing things no one else could do. Look at the amount of content he posts. He always posts. I post 347 pieces of content a week or a day or whatever the [ __ ] it is, right? Something insane. And he boasts about that and he does something no one else can do.

What can someone who isn't into gaming learn from gaming YouTube channels?

Storytelling. Like that that's the clear answer.

Let's just say this like I I think it's different because what something you said previously which is that the best way for one to 10 is through collaboration. I think that makes a lot of sense especially if you're in the podcast niche, right? So everything I'm doing is

From a collaborative perspective, I'm working with people. I'm talking to people that I want to collaborate with. There's brand association. I want to be associated with the other people. Uh, it's a little bit different when you do storytelling. The person that's probably making content at the 1,000 subscriber level that's saying, "I want to get 10,000 subscribers." How do they get good at storytelling? Like, what can they learn from these Minecraft people?

"This is interesting. There's a few things you can learn from the Minecraft people."

"Um, so, first of all, you have..."

"Oh, man. How, how do I even set this up? There's so many things you do."

"Well, I'm just saying like I have zero interest in Minecraft."

"That being said, I want to understand why that stuff works."

"So, the storytelling aspect there is like just leading the viewer along from like point A to point B to point C to point D to get to point F or whatever it may be, right? And then like every bit of those segments is like a mini story within itself. Like that's what they crush on is like they want you to get from point A to point Z and every point in between is a mini story where you're going from like point A to point B, but point A to point B I have to do A1, A2, A3. And also the escalation of stakes in a way that's not so crazy where you have to jump the shark per se, but where it's escalating enough where it's interesting."

"So, give me some simple hook storytelling frameworks. I need you to actually help me clarify what is a hook."

"Okay. So a hook is very simple, but it can also be like crazily complex. So the way I define a hook is it's part of the intro. So the intro of the video is the first 30 seconds. The hook is the thing that gets you interested in the video. I generally speaking define the hook as the first seven seconds. That's where like you really kind of want it. You can kind of expand it to nine seconds, maybe eleven, but I generally like that as the hook. And the hook is the thing that's going to get you super, super interested."

"So I can do this for Will Tennyson, who's one of my clients. We did a Teu home gym that is doing like, I don't know, did like a million views in 10 hours, which is crazy. Um, so the kind of premise of that video or like the themeing or the premise of the hook rather is like, 'I spent all my money on my dream house. Now I'm broke and I have to build my home gym from Teu.' Like, that's the premise of the video. That's the hook. He spent all this money. Okay. So like now he's broke because he's broke, he has to now do this thing which is like not something he wants to do as a bodybuilder and he's cheaping out. But like, what does the cheap out stuff look like? Now I have a curiosity. Okay. He spent all this money. What does the cheap out [ __ ] look like? He's a bodybuilder. Then it's like now we have to see him like struggle it, put it together. And then like, there's like mini hooks within there where it's like, okay, he's gonna build the thing in the video. He struggles to build it. Then that's like a rehook. It's like now we have to like watch him overcome this mini challenge and do that. Um, but like that same framework is like essentially like ripped from a Minecraft video. It's like, 'Hey, I want to do this, but in order to do this, I need to do this,' or 'I've done this, but now because I've done this, I can't do this, so I have to find another way around it.' Like all those things are just derived from Minecraft videos for the most part, to be honest."

"So, what are some key elements in my hooks? I, I've heard, I've heard it said that like sometimes you want to be stating what the video is about."

"Yep."

"And confirming essentially confirming their click."

"Yep."

"And then also uh laying out, if possible, the tiers to get there."

"Okay."

"Like what points you want, what points are going to be covered to get there, and then a promise that by the end of the video they will X."

"Yep. So there's a few things um like kind of that like toward that framework that you were just talking about is like proof, path, promise. That's Hermosi's framework, which like, 'Here's the proof of who I am. Here is like the promise and like here's like the path there.' Like it's like the 3P framework is what we call it. Um, which like you show the proof, you like make a promise and you like, you know, show them the path or some like variation. I have like it somewhere in my notes, but um, like that's like that framework, that framework can work, but it's dependent. So it's really dependent actually on your outcome and what you're trying to focus on. So we talked about earlier, education versus entertainment. Education channels are focused on getting someone to the outcome. So, it's like, 'I'm Vexian. I've done 6.1 billion views. I've made my clients over $10 million. And I'll show you the five-step framework I use to get my clients tens of millions of views every single video.' Like that would be that framework right there, which is like educational. I'm like, 'Here's who I am, right? Here is the path and here's like the promise that I have, right?' Like that's like I just did it live right there. That's a good example. An education video would be like, 'I decided to go undercover as a brand new YouTuber to prove blowing up on YouTube is actually easy.' So like now there's a curiosity gap there where it's like just a position where you're making the hard thing easy. Right now I want to see how I've done that. So like option one is like I'm educating the audience on my exact framework. Option number two is I am doing a challenge that will still have my framework into it to a degree, but like you're watching because you have a curiosity gap of how he's going to do that thing versus the first one I'm watching it because I want to get the outcome that he has."

"I love that. And I think if we make this, I want to make this tangible because I think I think we'll cover a lot of additional stuff like this in scale."

"Yeah."

"Because I think a lot of the things you're talking about, like they really, really apply when you're going from, 'I have covered the basics.'"

"Yeah. And I want to then get to that point where I'm excellent. Like it, I'm, I'm officially like, you know, it's like, you know, if we're playing Halo, it's like I'm not on the beginner level. I'm like, I'm on the level where it's like, if I die, I go back to the first, you know, it's like it goes to that extreme."

"I guess the question I'd have is, is there anything else that's worth covering in this basics? Like, if we're saying that under 10,000 is the goal for a lot of people, that's the dream for a lot of people, is there a basic thing that we haven't covered yet that they need to cover?"

"I think there's two interesting things we can cover. This is probably more pertinent at 100,000, but you can start dabbling here. Um, you have audience timelines. So, audience timelines, um, we'll call it like impression decay. So, like, let's say I upload three times a week. Probably don't have to do it, but let's say you upload once a week, right? The gap between uploads is seven days. Your audience might just fold out of your content because they're watching other people's content. You might not get recommended to them anymore. But if you make a post on YouTube, which is just like whatever, maybe it's like just it's like a text post. It'll show up in your feed on your homepage. They show up on phone really well. I think they do TV as well, like pretty like well in terms of like distribution. Um, if you do that, that's another touch point for your audience to stay into your ecosystem. I think it's totally worth doing and it's like way lower effort. I do this as well. Um, and you can do it like in a creative way. So, I've done it creatively for clients where it's like we'll tease the next video, but we won't outright be like, 'This is the next video.' It'll be like on vacation and it's like, like a pick of like the client doesn't say Will. Like if Will was on vacation. He did a video in Greece. He probably should have done this year. You could probably deduce uh your Sherlock that like, 'Hey, Will's on vacation in Greece. Greece has the Mediterranean diet, which is the healthiest diet. Maybe he's doing something like that.' So it's like a little bit of like an inside thing for like the core viewers, which is really good, but it also allows you to stay constantly in front of your audience. I think that's worth doing. There's no downside for posts. Then shorts is not necessarily awful. I [ __ ] hate shorts personally, but I mean..."

"Why do you hate shorts?"

"Okay, I can explain why I hate shorts. The core reason I hate shorts is on long form, you have to get someone to click on your video. On shorts, you just have to upload a short and have it in front of a person. I value the fact that there is an action being made to click on the video versus the action being made to swipe past the short way more. Way, way more."

"Yeah."

"And and the the long form viewer is much more valuable."

"Incredibly more, like, dude, way more valuable long-term. Easier to sell to. It's going to stick around. It's going to trust you. Has way more trust because he's more time exposure to you versus shorts. So like that crushes. Um, so yeah, I I prefer long form. But if you are going to experiment with shorts, it's not bad to do it like early on, like 10,000. And the way I would do it is a few ways. I would experiment with shorts in this manner where I want to test a long form video in the sense that like I have a long for long form topic I want to test. Let me go test that topic in a short form capacity. That short does well. That's a positive indicator for me to make that a long form video."

"At what point does editing actually matter?"

"Uh, the answer is it doesn't have to matter at all if your whole brand positioning is like, 'I'm the guy that doesn't edit [ __ ].' There's a great guy, his name is Mark Builds brands in like the ecom space. He's like the run more ads guy. He just rips looms shirtless in the dark and they get hundreds of thousands of views. There's another guy which I think is named like, is it Snooks or like Esuk or something like that. Um, it's this dude. He made a video which is like, 'I'm 34, I have no friends, I'm a failure.' No editing, just talking to like a C920 webcam, 500,000 views. Then you got guys like spending $10,000 on production that get five views. So it's like, you know, what are we doing here? I think editing matters more the more that you're getting views. Like you will get views that outpace your quality almost always. Like you never want the inverse to happen, actually. Um, so like when you start like doubling views, tripling views, and you have more viewership, then it makes sense to invest in editing and packaging. Let's transition. A lot of people want a 100,000 subscribers. At this point, we've covered how to get to 10,000. It seems like the 10,000 is really achieved by understanding your niche, understanding your storytelling framework, understanding uh a lot of uh maybe a format that you want to test, and then iterating based off of the amount of volume that you've actually done. That seems to be the the the theme that has gotten us to that. 10,000 subscriber mark. What needs to happen between 10,000 subscribers and 100,000 subscribers for me to get this plaque?"

"A [ __ ] ton."

"Let's dive in."

"The game changes realistically between zero and 10,000. The game's pretty similar. It's really kind of iteration. Between 10,000 and 100,000, and especially 100,000 and a million, it's evolution. We're no longer iterating. We are evolving. We can still iterate, but there is more back-end strategy that matters. So, let's talk about back-end strategy first because this is where it gets really sexy and the stuff that I love that most people overlook and hate. Backend strategy number one, talk about curated viewer journeys. At this point, over 10,000 subscribers, you have a very solid core audience. This is something that I didn't find, but I found worked really well for my clients testing it back in like 2018, 2019, is if I have a video that's an on-ramp for a lot of people, whether I position it that way or it just so happens to do that through luck of the draw, a video goes really viral, I want a percentage of that audience that watch that video to watch a video that they will like to watch based on what I think they'll want to watch. So, for example, let's say I have a video blows up, gets a million views, that's me doing an air fryer cooking video. Um, if I have that, the next video I want to watch, I want to have one end screen. So, this is a thing on YouTube. You can put in the studio, a video that like shows up at the end of the video to redirect them to another one of your videos. So, I have an air fryer video that gets a million views. Maybe I'll do a video that I've done previously, which is another kitchen gadget adjacent video, which is 'Top 10 Blender Recipes' if the 'Top 10 Air Fryers' one did well. So, it's a little bit of a smaller market, but I'm going to get a higher throughput to that than maybe me making an invisible Big Mac, for example, because it's like completely different in terms of the reason why the audience watched the air fryer video. So, if you do that, that crushes. And the best way I I can recommend doing this is you can use a free website called Miro and you can draw out these like viewer flowcharts, what they are from like, 'This is an induction point. I want this to be the end point, right?' And then you generally like want to make it sure so like you never want the videos to kind of like feed back into like the first video that someone watches. That's bad. It's not going to give them the ecosystem. But doing this is going to increase your average views per viewer. Also massively increases your trust with the audience, like the audience equity. And in addition to that, uh, it's also going to be [ __ ] super sick for a secret stat that YouTube has that doesn't YouTube won't show you this. It's impossible to derive."

"There's a secret stat."

"It's a secret stat. There's a secret stat. And that's going to be session time percentage. And that is the [ __ ] kingmaker stat on YouTube, which is increasing the session time percent allocation."

"Basically watch time of your content."

"So let's say I watch YouTube for two hours a day. I don't, first of all, I watch it 20 hours a day. Um, but if I was the average person, two hours a day, and I spent my two hours watching five people, right? They each get an equal percentage. But then I find Barry, Barry Lewis, former client of mine, find Barry Lewis's channel, who's a cooking channel in England, and I see this video and I just got to watch more Barry Lewis. So now I've spent three hours watching this, but I've spent more time watching Barry Lewis. YouTube will look at that indicator, that secret stat, session time percentage increase, where this person has spent more, they they've increased their overall session time because of this channel number one as like the first touch point, or they this channel has taken up more space, more percentage of the average session time. So like two hours now instead of watching five channels evenly, watching three channels evenly, and then I'm watching these two more predominantly. Both those stats are the kingmaker stat, which is like, 'Can I increase someone's session time because of my content?' or 'Can I increase their allocation of session time to my content?' If I can do those two things, dude, are we dude, are we like, holy [ __ ]? Like that's a complete game changer from like a YouTube aspect of things. So that is like those are the kingmaker stats. No one talks about that. It's like it's kind of like hidden. It's also like it's not clearly defined. Like YouTube is like, that's we'll say like, 'That's not how it works.' But then I've got like data that verifies like it looks pretty on track in terms of like if I increase my average views per viewer and I increase my total watch time, which is why watch time is a leading indicator for video success or can be a leading indicator for video success because it relates to session time. It's a direct correlation to session time, but you can only calculate your watch time per video and like you can't calculate session time of individual users, which is hard. They should add that. I don't know if they will, but that's like that would be the most overpowered stat of all time. M."

"So, you want your viewer to stay for longer and to watch more of your videos."

"Absolutely."

"And if they do that, then the other people that also like those same videos are more likely to see your videos."

"Oh, dude. Night and day. Not even remotely. You can track it in real time."

"Nice."

"You do that, you're guaranteed 100,000 subscribers within 18 months."

"Within 18 months?"

"Easily. Oh, so easily. So the the separator here of achieving a plaque like this is not necessarily doubling down on the niche, or is it completely doubling down the niche?"

"It's not doubling down on the niche. It's doubling down on what works in the sense of keeping people on the platform. You want to double down on high-leverage things. So, high-leverage things could be length of video. Length of video is going to get more watch time. That can be good. Could be storytelling. Well, storytelling can get people engaged for the same length of video. So, there's like a few things that matter in that regard, but it's doubling down on the things that keep people on the platform and keep people coming back."

"I've heard of this. I've heard, I don't know if it came from you or if it came from somebody else. Essentially looking at different niches that are adjacent to yours."

"Yep."

"And using that same packaging that works for a niche that like is completely different, but applying it to yours because I I find that a lot of people at these levels, right, you start looking at what someone else is doing and then you, a lot of people make the mistake of being like, 'Let me just do that. Let me just take that same exact title. Let me take that same exact thumbnail packaging. Let me do the exact same video and it performed really well for this person in my niche. Let's see if it performs well for me.'"

"Yeah, it's the it's the biggest leveler. Like even for my biggest clients historically speaking and like right now, ideation matters the most. Um, but let's talk about, let's kind of break down the ways to ideate because at 100,000 subscribers and get there quickly, ideation matters. So the first aspect of ideation, we'll talk about that adjacent stuff we were talking about. So that's adjacent niche selection where you look at niches that are adjacent to you in terms of psychographic profile. So if I am a basketball content creator, I can look at soccer. I can look at football. I can look at maybe baseball to a degree, but it's probably like a little bit farther off, but like direct adjacent niches, and I can see what's working there, and I can see if I can apply it here in my niche. That's number one because the people that watch those videos that are doing well in the adjacent niches had the same, it's like the same click trigger and the same emotional trigger to watch the same video in my niche for my core audience and an expanded audience. So what you'll see, a great example again, 'Seven Levels.' 'Seven Levels' was popping off because it was 'Seven Levels of Rapper' and there was 'Seven Levels of Fantasy Book,' I believe, or fantasy series were the first two that really [ __ ] popped off. And I tracked it and I'm like, 'Okay, well, these things are doing well.' Then I saw, I think it was 'Five Levels of Dream.' Maybe it was 'Seven Levels of Dream.' Um, which like fairly similar. And I'm like, 'Okay, there's a pattern here.' So 'Seven Levels of Rapper' and 'Seven Levels of Fantasy Book' don't look too similar on paper, but in reality, they're actually fairly similar, right? It's like 'Seven Levels of Rapper' is like 'Seven Levels of This Thing I Like to Consume,' which is rapper and rap music. So it's like kind of their image. 'Seven Levels of Fantasy' or 'Fantasy Book' is like again, 'Thing I Want to Consume.' So it's 'Seven Levels of Thing I Want to Consume.' 'Seven Levels of Thing I Want to Consume.' And then now it's like getting a little bit weird. We're twisting it a little bit, which is 'Seven Levels of Thing I Have' or 'Thing That Everyone Experiences,' rather, which like, 'Why Dream?' Really [ __ ] crushed. I really like that one. Um, so then I can be like, 'Okay, I can look at that and I'm like, okay, seven levels of rapper, seven levels of fantasy book, seven levels of director, seven levels of actor. Seven levels of now we can go like, we can go like, okay, dreams. Now we can go like, medium. So it's like seven levels of language. Everyone has language like difficulties of language. So you can do like English is like number six and like the easiest language is like Spanish, for example, or something like that. So like now you have like all these like permutations you can do based on the fact that you can distill some levels of rapper and some levels of fantasy book down to 'Thing I Like to Consume' in varying levels of skill or degree or whatever it may be. Talk to me then about those. I mean, that's that's a really easy way to think through it. Let's get, let's get tactical on like, what are the bigger levers that are going to actually drive subscriber growth?"

"You'd be surprised, but call to actions, believe it or not. Like, really?"

"Yeah. Yeah, dude. Really?"

"Uh, last third of a video and generally after value is provided. This works both in entertainment and education. So, after the biggest payoff in an entertainment video, be like, 'Hey, subscribe.' Or before the biggest payoff in an entertainment video as well can also do well, which is like, 'Subscribe before we blow up this truck,' or it's like, 'Hey, we blew up that truck. Subscribe.' You could do either or framing. The first framing I probably could have like worked on a little bit over the example, but that's how it'll work. Big subscribe if you like this. Um, for education, for example, at the end of this podcast, when I reveal to you in the most that has probably ever been recorded on how to hit a million subscribers, and I'm like, 'Hey, subscribe if you want more value from Grant.' So, you're going to be very easy because if you follow everything in this podcast and you study it, and like you have to piece together, yeah, you can hit a million subscribers. Like, not, not hard at all."

"So, is a mistake to put a CTA in the beginning of the video?"

"Yeah. You never want to do that because you haven't, there's no value."

"Yeah."

"Like you're like, 'Hey, this guy watched this guy clicked my video. This guy's giving me time for like his attention.'"

"It's actually, I want to ask about that because I noticed Darco, he has an interesting CTA. There's a couple of other people that are in the podcast space that also do it, but he was the first one I saw that did it where it was basically like, 'Hey, I've recognized,' it was like after his intro, 'I recognized that 82% of people that are watching this video right now are not currently subscribed. And we just ask that we put a lot of effort into this. We really appreciate you. If you support this channel, please just hit that subscribe button.' That's after the trailer intro. And then before he dives into the content, is it just that he has the, he's earned the right to do that, and that doesn't really apply to someone that has under under a million subscribers?"

"I hate it. I hate that."

"You hate it."

"Yeah, I hate it. And I'll tell you why. You have to think about this in terms of audience gradient. So now we're going to get a little bit weird. Audience gradient is this, which is like you have diehard fan. You have like no one's who like, guy, this first video he's ever seen from you, right?"

"Yeah."

"Okay."

"If I think about podcasts, Joe Rogan Experience, for example, I might consume. I'm a casual viewer. I'm not going to watch every episode. I'll watch the one where he's talking about getting abducted by aliens or doing DMT. Those are interesting. U but the one where he's interviewing like some banker, probably don't care about that too much, to be honest, or some UFC fighter, not really my interest. Um, so as a casual viewer, it's like that's fine. Like, you know, I know the whole spiel. But if it's my first touch point with you because you're talking, you're talking about a topic or an expert that I like, I don't know you. Like, you don't deserve my sub. Like, yeah, you're putting all this effort in, but this is my first touch point. It's kind of weird. Um, so like, there's a gradient of audience. And I also think, by the way, first of all, subscribers are a metric that don't [ __ ] matter. It only matters if you want a plaque. Let's be honest."

"Really, they don't matter whatsoever."

"They don't matter whatsoever."

"How do you, how do you make that?"

"Because like it's just a number. Like that doesn't [ __ ] matter. Like in more important. So views and reach are so much more important than subscribers."

"Oh, yeah, subscribers matter. Like I've got all these plaques cuz like, you know, this is like proof I did something that got views that got converted. But like..."

"If we look at the total amount of views I have versus a total amount of plaque, I have like 6.1 billion views. Like long, long form, not short form, and it's like I only got like 12 plaques. But like, if you did want to get that, like I don't think the CTA matters that much. I would prefer after like the most interesting thing, like before a break, it's like, or after an, like imagine like, okay, you have podcasts to do ad reads because that's that's how they keep the lights on. Instead of doing an ad read, it's like, just make your content its own ad, which is like, 'Hey, if you found this podcast valuable, so far, this podcast is sponsored by no one but myself, hard work, and my my hard-earned, you know, dollars. So, please subscribe.'"

"This episode is brought to you by me. I have no sponsors for this podcast. This is entirely self-funded, and all I ask is that you please support the channel by hitting that subscribe button. I put over 100 hours and thousands of dollars into every single episode because I'm committed to making the best thing possible so that it's worth your time. My hope is that this is worth every second of energy that you give to it. And all I ask of you is that you hit the like and you hit the subscribe. Thank you. Now, let's get back to the episode. Uh, I'm actually going to guarantee you, I'm going to guarantee you that by the time this episode comes out, I will have that exact, that exact thing. I think I think I think it's, I think..."

"And viewers will know I got it from this podcast that was recorded later."

"Yeah. Cuz like my my whole thing is like, early on in the intro, even after the hook, no one knows who you are. And also like the weird thing as well is like, YouTube wants to keep you on the platform and keep you engaged. If after this like [ __ ] super sexy hook you just gave me, you're like, 'Hey, can you do this thing now?' breaks your attention and then you're like, 'Well, [ __ ] like [ __ ] this guy. I'm not going to sub.' But now I'm like not as..."

"Attentive. I'm actually, I I know this for a fact. When you do CTAs, you have audience drop off because people either skip ahead because they don't care or they just leave because they're like, 'Oh, now like I'm not I'm not locked in, if you will.' So, I don't like it. I like it at halfway point or after biggest value point. That's what I like a lot. Um, I think it's interesting. I think they should replace ad reads. Uh, I think ads should be integrated a little bit differently into podcasts, but that's like neither here nor there."

"Yeah. But um..."

"I'm still trying to decide if I actually want to do ads ever."

"Uh, I mean, money's cool. Like, but at the same time though, like there's there's a sexier way to do ads, I think."

"What's your idea?"

"I think the dedicated ad reads are great because it's like direct value for the sponsor. I think. And oh, dude, Red Bull does this [ __ ] fantastically. This is so interesting. So Red Bull, we have these SM7Bs. Uh, not sponsored, by the way, but I would be nice because they're expensive. Um, Red Bull will partner with streamers. They'll be like a Red Bull athlete or Red Bull creator and like they'll have like this custom like piece right here. It'll be like a Red Bull piece. So, it's like subliminal branding, if you will, and it's like subliminal advertising. Like that's a big thing. And like they're just basically paying for ad space on your stream as the form of a physical product in frame. Um, so it's like an association play rather than direct call out, which is like more to conversion. But I'd rather like the association play and then one big campaign for conversion. I think that's better than like constant conversions through every episode. Like, I'm throwing it out there. No one gives a [ __ ] about NordVPN, man. Yeah. Um, throwing it out there like I, I like NordVPN is like, I don't give a [ __ ]. Um, like that..."

"I mean, it's and also like, I, I've found out like how little Better Help pays and I'm like, that's why they're on every single podcast because they can just, they're just like, 'Hey, I'm going to toss like $1,500 to every single person I met,' like, and I'll get sponsored, and I don't think it converts."

"No, it doesn't. Here, here's an interesting thing about conversion rate. Um, conversion rate goes up later in the video."

"Which is really interesting. So let's say I have a million people watching at the 30-minute mark, halfway for an hour. I'm not, I'm gonna get less conversion percentage than if I would toward the end. I'll get probably even more total conversions at the end because I'll have increased percentage. But the reason why you'll get more total conversions and more specifically um value per customer is the people that watch all the way to the end are your dedicated audience that are like those rabid fans."

"They're not transactional whatsoever."

"Really? You think so?"

"I'm saying I would say that the person that's dedicated to the end, like I've, we were just talking about Kill Tony. Yeah."

"The amount of Kill Tony videos I've watched the entire three hours where I'm like, I know for a fact that the last like three are not going to be that great. You know what I'm saying? Like I know like it hasn't been good. Y..."

"And the last three because like, you know which ones are bangers."

"Yeah."

"And then you're like, but I'm still going to watch."

"And it's because like I'm not viewing it transactionally. I'm viewing it in a way that's like, I just want to spend time listening to Kill Tony."

"Okay. So you're, you're for you, it's parasocial."

"Yeah. Yeah. So I think it's a little bit different because it's like depends on the creator. Like Grant, great example. You've got that plaque of the gold plaque. Will Tennyson. If Will Tennyson did a CT at the end of the video, he'd have a higher conversion because he's a higher trust and equity with that specific audience."

"Yes. Okay. Because he's, he's supplied the proof of whatever has just happened. Hey, I've just given you this diet. Hey, I've just shown you this."

"Exactly. Exactly. Exactly. So instead of having an ad rate earlier on when there's more viewers, you get higher conversion percentage on the back end because they trust you more. So I think I think it's like I think it's dependent on the like type of content."

"Yeah."

"And the person. Like Kill Tony to me as a brand, I don't want to buy from a brand, especially when they're showing Blue Chew. Yeah. Um, also not their target demographic. So..."

"Let's get back on track then. So the goal is, I'm at 10,000 subscribers. I want to get to 100,000. And I'm going to be like, I'll put myself in this situation. I would like to grow fast. With that in mind, so like, what would you say are the levers I should care about the most beyond just ideation?"

"Impact. I think impact is so sick. I think it is the most radicalizing thing that's happened to me this year in what I do, which is like autistically predict the market. Time and time again, I see that creators that are optimizing for impact, and like that is very nebulous. So like, to define impact, I'll define it to me, which is like visual impact. We'll define it that way. There's there's like emotional impact. There's other forms of impact, but to me it is..."

"Visual impact."

"So for you, you are a small podcast. Yeah."

"Objectively true."

"Yeah."

"But your production quality is really, really high. So you have a lot of impact right away to a new audience that's never seen you before because you are spending all this time, effort, and money. Therefore, like they think it's good. It's perceived value. It's a perceived value play. But perceived value is achieved value in the sense that if it looks good, it sounds good, it's probably good. If it walks like a duck, talks like a duck, probably a duck. Um, and impact does that. So, impact is the combination of, and I'm using visual impact here, the combination of shot selection, um, pattern breaking, and pattern breaking. What that is because I've been talking about it, is generally speaking on YouTube, there is a meta, right, which is like the most effective tactic available. Um, or most effective tactic always, I think, is the actual acronym for meta. Um, which is like, you know, the Mr. Beast edits for like one point in 2022, like fast-paced. That that was like the meta back then. But a pattern breaking to that meta would be laid-back authentic content. So laid-back authentic content looks like Sam Sulick, right? Or Rury Aana um, who's like kind of like a YouTube educator. So impact is pattern breaking, but not in the way where the traditional pattern breaking is everyone's going left, I'm going right. Pattern breaking is everyone's going left. I'm doing a corkscrew straight down. It's like just [ __ ] crazy. And what I'm seeing right now is the rise of absurdism. So, I gave you a great example of how does the fall of Constantinople affect LeBron's legacy? Or maybe it's how long LeBron's legacy affects the fall of Constantinople, something like that. What What does that even mean, right? But like, it's so absurd, you have to watch it. And it's so absurd that it breaks the pattern in such a way where it's like, just interesting. But like, it's absurd. It's not high impact. But now we're meshing the absurdism with high impact. Let's take this video for example, for for a podcast, because I think a podcast is very formulaic."

"Yeah. How would I go about titling a podcast like this to go for absurdism to make it stand out like that?"

"Oh man. Okay. Uh, if you want to t like, if you want an absurd angle, I think YouTube at this point in time right now is a communist company. As of this morning, they delisted or unlisted rather the YouTube Rewinds, which were part of you. They were ingrained in YouTube history. They unlisted all of those. They're spending hundreds of thousands of dollars on those productions. If you wanted to say something crazy like for this podcast, it's like, 'YouTube Expert Exposes,' or like [ __ ] you don't even want to do that. You just be like, 'How YouTube is Worse Than Communism.' That's it. Like, 'YouTube is Worse Than Communism,' or like, 'How Marxism Created YouTube.'"

"H..."

"And then you just have to figure out how to tie that together. First of all, we're not doing that because it's not, it's bad framing for the podcast, but like, you would do something to that degree. Um, also a great example of absurdism as well is like, quickly back to the gaming niche. 'Can I Beat Minecraft Without Breaking the Laws of Islam?' Biggest religion, I think like somewhat like that. Um, Minecraft, most popular game of all time. Can I beat the game without breaking the laws of the biggest religion? Like that's an a great example of absurdism. Um, it's also a great example of like melding interest topics together, which is what a lot of people should be doing in the 100,000 subscriber."

"When you say when you say impact, it's really interesting that because your term of impact and my term are very different. As soon as you said impact, I was like philanthropic. I've wondered how to create that sense of feeling like just by existing or just by being a community member, you're contributing to something bigger than yourself because otherwise it's just like someone's doing it very like for selfish gain and for selfish reasons. You're just like, 'Please support me for the sake of supporting me.'"

"Uh, I don't think it matters at all. Like, really?"

"Yeah."

"I've got clients that are like purely selfish. Like my best clients are the ones that are like narcissistic. Um, and it's like because like they will like let me puppeteer them, if you will. Um, but like I don't think most people like measure like great example, it's like Alex just made 100 million. I don't know what the [ __ ] he's gonna do with it. I, I don't know. He could burn it all for all I care. Yeah."

"But it's like I don't know if he's using that for like philanthropy, but like I'm not going to lie. The way he made the hundred million was by saying, 'Hey, if you give me $6,000, it gets 200 books to other people.'"

"Okay. That's fair. I think that's a marketing mechanism. It's a little bit different donating books."

"Yeah. It's it's..."

"Paying more money equals, if you pay me $25,000, you're donating a thou like 800, you know, like that's just that's..."

"You know what's really interesting? We'll go on a side tangent. We can keep this in. I have a bunch of friends, well, me and a bunch, but let's say five or six that did the $6,000, and I had two that did the $24,000."

"Okay."

"The two that did the $24,000 both regretted it and asked for refunds. Um, of like the guys that did the $6,000, they all did it because they said, 'At this point, I feel like I owe Har Mosi.' That's what I did. That's I did that, too."

"Oh, yeah. Okay. Yeah, you did that."

"I did that."

"I wasn't even including you in that number. Then it's like six or seven."

"Yes, cuz I, I bought it cuz I, at that point, I had consumed so many years of his content that I was like, first off, I want it. Sure. If there's an AI that sounds pretty cool, I want to see what's in there."

"Pretty useless."

"But at the same time, I was like, at the end of the day, I've, he's given me this much education, and that's a fraction of the value that I've gotten based on the education what I've applied. So, it's like, that to me is worth it. But that is that just like the maximum amount when you like maximize like your audience impact?"

"I think so. Yeah, I think so. Like that's what's really interesting about that is like, there's probably like a new term there, which is like parasocial reciprocity. Like that's probably like a whole like field of study you could go into cuz like I think that's like first of all, really like that. I also think like when Mr. Beast does the first of all, this is gonna sound crazy. I think Ryan Trean can raise more money in 30 days than Mr. Beast could raise in 30 days from his audience for charity. Number one."

"Um..."

"Because the reason why is I think Mr. Beast is an idea. Ryan Trean's a person."

"I don't know if that makes sense, but like I no longer view Mr. Beast as like Jimmy Donaldson. I view him as Mr. Beast, the media conglomerate that owns a bunch of companies that like may or may not be like good for humanity. Who knows? Or I'm like, Ryan Trean is a person, and I'm sure if I wanted to get a beer with him, I probably could, in probably good time. I don't know if I'd want to get a beer with with Jimmy Donaldson. Uh, or the idea of Mr. Beast."

"Yeah. Yeah. That's really interesting. It's about how accessible they come across."

"Yeah."

"So like Alex Rozi, like, yes, Alexi is like acquisition.com, but like Alex Rozi is like somewhere in between the idea of Alex Rozi and the person Alex Rozi right now. And I think like if he lives in that space, it's fine."

"Yeah."

"Um, but like when he did the book launch, he was the person Alex Rozi. After the book launch, he became the idea of Alex Rozi. Mhm. Which is so funny because probably the majority of people that would be clicking on this video don't know who Alex Rozi is, which is like..."

"Oh, that's Yeah, it's super interesting, isn't it? Yeah."

"Let's get back on track."

"So, ideation and impact are the two things that will push me to 100,000 subscribers. Anything else?"

"Uh, it is super nebulous concept, but sauce. I think the kids nowadays are calling it aura. Yeah."

"But it's like the minutiae of everything. It's like how the idea, like the idea comes to fruition. It's the silent moments. I think a great example of this is I'll keep bringing up Will because Will is a one of my favorite clients. Love that guy to death. Um, but like what we're mastering there, you know, deliberately or not deliberately is sauce. It's like the sauce that makes up Will Tennyson, right? Like we've mastered the jokes, the timing, what the audience likes, what the audience doesn't like, right? Like that's like mastered. And I like 100,000 subscribers. We want to get there. Like, yeah, the ideation matters, the impact matters, but the connective tissue between ideation, impact, editing, storytelling, thumbnail design, like the sauce also matters. And like that's a non-tangible thing that's very hard to quantify. And it's not like if I do X, I'll get Y outcome via the sauce. It's like, you either have it or you don't. You can tell, like, you can just [ __ ] tell. Yeah. Like a great example is I'll bring this video up again, which like 'Searching for a World That Doesn't Exist.' It's the Minecraft video, 16 million views. That video has sauce. It just, it objectively has it. You can feel it through the screen. Another example, it's a great example. It is a video by a channel called Styrofilm Bonfire. I don't know if it exists, but it talks about how um Conan O'Brien killed a man and got away with it. Like, what does that even mean? But you watch that channel. It documents this beautiful story about how like Conan took over like the late night talk show from like, I think it was like Jay Leno or something similar, something like that. Um, and Jay Leno took it back."

Yeah, exactly. It's that it's the telling of that story and how he killed the man and got away with it. Um, it turns out the man he killed is like I'm not going to spoil it. I'm actually not going to spoil it. I'm not going to spoil it. It's really good. But that video has sauce. I don't watch late night cable. I don't give a [ __ ]. I don't even like I don't even like Conan besides the fact that most people say I sometimes have a similar hairstyle to Conan O'Brien, which is objective.

>> And now I can't unsee it.

>> Now you cannot see it. I've ruined it all for you. Got the same like head dimension and everything as Conan. But with that being said, it's like that video had sauce and that video like lives in my mind. It's like two years old. You can't put like your finger to it, but you'll know it when you see it. Not everyone has it and you can't manufacture it. It has to be very authentic. And once you understand like how it's authentic, then you can like build an ecosystem or formula that induces it. But you, I don't think you can outright have sauce.

>> How much time has to be given in this? Let's say, let's say the goal is 100K.

>> I think it's dependent on I give you I give you like a pretty straight answer. I give you a weird answer. The straight answer is it'll take as long as it needs to take or as long as you allow. So if it needs to take five years, it'll take five years. But if you like allow it and force it to be done in two years, it can be done in two years. But like the quality of your personal life drastically goes down the faster you want to hit it. I just objectively like >> many more late nights, many more, you know, caffeine-induced psychosis. Like there's like ways to like get there. Like >> when I helped my my somewhere here there's like the 100,000 subscriber plaque for Shock. When I helped Shock go from zero to 100,000 subscribers, I had known him for years prior to that. And we've been doing YouTube since 2018. He hit it in like 2020, so it took two years.

>> But like now I can get a client 100,000 subscribers in like two months if we really want to. If we really like if he's like really dedicated and he's all in and he's willing to like completely like burn himself out, >> yeah, we can we can get it done.

>> It's not pretty. It's not easy, but it is simple.

>> What needs to be covered in that 10 to 100K that we haven't covered?

>> Outsourcing. I think this is the point where probably after 50K because like 10K is not like it's a milestone personally, but 50K is when like there's a financial milestone to it, I believe, where it's like you can really kind of like start seeing a return. You got to figure out what the best lever for you to pull is and it's it's usually being you.

>> So like for Will, he hired me to be like the guy behind the scenes puppeteering things and doing work that he not necessarily doesn't want to do, but that doesn't make sense for him. Like, yeah, he can research, you know, 2,000 videos, but it's like, "I'd rather do that." Thumbnail design. Yeah, he can figure out what thumbnails work, but it's like, "I just know."

>> "Just let me do that." Like, you make the joke about maybe or maybe not having sexual relationships with the guys at the gym. You can do that in the sauna. That's fine.

>> But like, leave the autistic stuff to me.

>> Yeah.

>> And you should do that in all aspects of the YouTube channel. So, a big aspect that you should focus on is if you're bad at editing and you know it's your weak spot or you hate doing it or it's the biggest time sink, hire an editor.

>> If you think thumbnails are holding you back and your competition has better thumbnails, but you have better value, get a thumbnail designer.

>> If you [ __ ] are getting completely [ __ ] on in the average view duration department and you watch your competitors, they have better flow, they have better story points, they're stringing the viewers along more easily and you're finding out that you're watching their videos to the end, that means it's a scripting issue, probably. Get a script like get a script writer. So you just have to figure out like what the high and the thing is. By the way, is like once you do that, then like when you hit the next financial milestone, then you replace the next weakest part to the point where it's like there are no weak parts. You are the weak part and you can't replace you now. All you have to do is spend time getting better. Like if you can do that, it's great, but it starts at like probably around 50,000 and it's usually going to come down to editor. And if it's not editor, it's thumb the designer. And then over 100K is when you need a strategist. That's where if like you're at 100K, you want a million. Very difficult to do it without a strategist right now. With a strategist, makes life super easy.

>> All right. I would like a million subscribers.

>> Okay.

>> Goodness gracious. This is an insane plaque. This is a crazy plaque.

>> How many How many people have this plaque?

>> Less than a percent of a percent of a percent. It's like I think there's probably less than I I don't remember the exact stats, but it's like probably less than 4,000 people have a million.

>> That's crazy.

>> Sounds about right.

>> That sounds really daunting. Especially me starting out. At the time of this recording, I have a thousand. So, we just ended the last section talking about when you have 100,000, you want to have a strategist.

>> Yeah.

>> What does a strategist do to get me from here to here?

>> Ready?

>> Yes, I'm ready.

>> Okay. Comes here to get a million, right? It's why most guys over 100,000 are hiring strategists right now. We're in high demand and low supply. Um, is they see things that you don't. So, we're talking about exposure here and exposure to not only adjacent niches, distant niches, but everything that's working. This is where ideation really [ __ ] matters. Like, you can probably get to 100,000 subscribers with being really bad at it.

>> It will not be easy, but it is doable. It is impossible to hit a million subscribers with bad ideation and positioning.

>> That's what matters. So, let's talk about positioning first because positioning matters more than ideation. Um, somewhat like it it you have to nail the positioning for the ideation. So before we're talking about like, you know, consistency, consistency in upload duration, upload length, type of uploads, frame of uploads. This is what really matters, right? So it's like, what do you want your positioning of this podcast to be? "I talk to cool people and let them rant." Whereas like Diary of a CEO is like, he talks to cool people and that that's like cool, but it's like there's a clear outcome for the viewer. It's like, it's better sleep. It's better information on this topic. M. The Joe Rogan stuff is like, "I my direct outcome is I learn what it's like to be a Christmas tree for 24 years in a DMT-induced dream, right?" Like that's the value proposition, right? Um, what is your positioning? Everyone that does the drop shipping content [ __ ] like knows exactly what it is, but it's like maybe my positioning is like, you know, "chill drop shipper," right? "Ethical drop shipper," or whatever that is. Or it's like "organic drop shipper." Maybe that's my positioning. Or maybe it's like the "Etsy drop shipper" or the "Amazon drop shipper," right? It's like it's that positioning. It's that angle. It's that uniqueness. Novelty is really kind of the answer there. So, you want your positioning to be new and it has to be like novel. It doesn't have to always be novel, but that's like a good way to be first. And that comes down to this would be really interesting. My "How to Win on YouTube" matrix. Um, and most people over 100,000 to a million nail this better than anyone else. There are four ways to win on YouTube. Objectively true, potentially a fifth. And I'll talk about that. But the first four are: you have to do first, you have to do better, you have to do more, or you have to do different. So doing first is being the first to the market with something, novelty, or first-mover advantage. Depends on what it is. Being better is having the best quality in the market. Mr. Beast tends to be better. He's no longer first to something. He's no longer novel. The novelty has worn off, but he's better than a lot of people. You have to do differently. So if you're not Mr. Beast, you can do something differently. That's where Eric comes in. Eric fills a Mr. Beast-like void, but he does it differently. And then you have to do more. If you can't do it differently and you can't do it better and you can't do it first, you got to do more. Now, no one's doing more in the Mr. Beast context because it's really [ __ ] hard to do.

>> But if you were in the gaming space or the business space, if I went back and I went to my Loom education channel, I could rip a Loom every day for 365 days and no one would be able to compete with me on that. I know for a fact. So, I could do more. I could do volume. The fifth thing which could help in terms of winning is doing longer. I don't subscribe to the idea of doing longer wins. There are a lot of people who've done longer and they've won, but I no longer think that's applicable because when they started in YouTube in 2012 to 2016, it's a different landscape. If you did longer and you did 10 years starting today and you didn't improve any way, shape, or form, or you improved moderately or below average, you could never get a million subscribers. Back then, it was you could do it in two, you could do it in two years. So, those like that's the matrix. And that's like what the guys at 100,000 know better than everyone else is their positioning and they usually follow one of those things in the matrix or multiple. So like Will does differently and does better. Some people do more and first.

>> Some people do first, differently, and better. Some do all four. Like a great example is the the vlog era 2016. Casey Neistat was doing all four of those things. He was doing daily vlogs. He was doing it differently than everyone else. He was doing them better than everyone else. And he was the first to do them. Not necessarily the first. The first dude then was technically um that dude who did the Snapchat stuff. He like basically almost killed his friend with an excavator.

>> Oh. Oh, yeah. Uh

>> Yeah, exactly. I don't remember why. David. Yeah, David Dobrik. So what happens when you live in LA and not New York? Get forgotten.

>> Um, but yeah, like David was like the first guy that did the daily vlog quote-quote and then it was like Casey like mastered it, but then he was like the first to do it in New York. Well, I think the thing the thing that's interesting about Casey is Casey was he almost Seinfeld-ed because he was like, "Let me take something that's very, yeah, >> normal and my job is to make this very interesting." It's like the question becomes, is it is the job then to pick one or to pick how many of those are?

>> It's to optimize the levers. So it's like if you have infinite time and infinite money, you can optimize all four. If you have not those things, you can optimize some of those things. Um, but it's like what makes the most sense for you. And then it relates back to positioning, right? Sam Sulek can do differently and he can do more if he wants to. I don't think he actually does a lot of volume right now, but he can do differently because he's so different. He's maximized that lever. It works. Yeah.

>> Right. That's what works.

>> Um, so it's like what lever can I pull that makes the most sense for my positioning. So for someone in e-com, maybe it's just doing more. Maybe it's "I just do daily [ __ ]." Like if you did a video series, oh man, you know what? Here's a [ __ ] great example. Here's a great. He's such a killer example. Like the e-com example, there's a guy called Chris Heathia, one of my all-time favorite YouTubers. He bought a Philadelphia row home. Um, and he's been restoring it. And every Monday, he uploads a video updating us on the progress. Guess what? House restoration is a [ __ ] massive niche. Have you seen thumbnails on your homepage when you're laying in bed, specifically on TV, in 4K with two-hour long videos of chateaus being restored in France? American couples going over there and restoring a chateau?

>> No.

>> You haven't? That's That's surprising. First of all, really boring content, but they get 10 million views every single time.

>> Really?

>> Yeah. Every single time. But they do it differently and first. Like the first person who went over to [ __ ] Ireland or France and built like a castle, like rebuilt a castle or chateau.

>> That's crazy. High impact, high novelty. Um, and then like it's also different because normally people like flipping houses on YouTube. This guy's flipping a castle. That's [ __ ] bizarre. Um, so

>> you have all those things and it's like really interesting. So like they max out that part of the matrix. Chrisia is doing, I'm not gonna say first, but like the first, the artistic aspect of it. Um, and he's doing it more consistently than everyone else.

>> So he kills it there.

>> I think what you're kind of spinning around is like you have to create a moat.

>> Yeah. Moat would be a good term. Moat would be a good term. I wouldn't I don't like making it that simple because I don't think like moats super exist. But if you wanted to define it as like a moat, then yeah. And like your moat could be doing it these ways. I've just always done it like here's the like "How to Win on YouTube" Matrix. Yeah.

>> Sure.

>> So, with that in mind, uh what is the difference really in the strategy of going from like a 100,000 to this? Like I imagine doubling from 100 to 200 is harder than going from like 500 to a million.

>> Oh man, that's really um not too sure about that. Uh really.

>> Yeah, it depends. Like for some clients and some people it's like that 700 to a million is a [ __ ].

>> For other people 100 to 200 happens in two weeks.

>> Really?

>> Yeah. It all depends on

>> Because you got motion.

>> Yeah. You got motion. Um, some would say sauce.

>> Yeah.

>> Um, velocity. Well, it could be motion. It could be total market size. It could be saturation. So for example, my total just market is 1.2 million. Really hard to get that last 20% from 800 to a million. Really [ __ ] difficult. So the only thing so like I guess it really if we're talking about total adjustable market size, going from this to this means that we realistically have to have access to

>> 50 to 100 million people. That would be interesting.

>> Yeah. You have to have a vehicle that gets you there. So like that's a play button right there that you're holding. I'm not going to say who it is. Um, gaming niche, right?

>> If that game has 10 million players and a million of them speak English, you can 100% saturation be a million. You could probably get like, you know, YouTube has doubling now, so you're actually your total market is a little bit larger. It's like artificially larger. So like that guy could probably hit a million.

>> Um, also also matters in terms. This gets really interesting. It matters the medium and modality. So medium is how the video is executed within the video. Modality is the format of content. So modality is like phone or TV. So if I upload short-form content, I have likely a larger total addressable market than long-form content. Number one, because there's more people, it's more accessible and it's lower barrier to entry. So, you're lowering the barrier to entry. It's why I value the long-form work because you have to get the people to click, but people don't have to click. And if there is 10 million people, maybe I get more of a distinction of that 10 million people on the short form because that is that specific demographics modality. So, gaming will skew a little bit younger, generally speaking, and

>> most young people consume content on their phone. And when you open up YouTube, it opens up to the shorts tab. So, if I wanted to get a million subscribers, maybe I do a modality play on something that I'm kind of enjoying. But like for golf, probably actually harder to hit a million subscribers doing only short-form content on golf because it skews all their audience. People watch on TV, so they want to watch that ultra long-form premium content, which is going to be around 30 minutes to 4K quality. Um, now it's a little bit different.

>> I've heard you describe I've heard you talk about this term viral vectors.

>> Oh [ __ ]. Okay.

>> What is that?

>> I am the I am the progenitor of that term viral vector. Um, that's me. We were going to call it the viral vector for a bit, but I was like, maybe that's too on the nose. So, viral vectors are um words, things, people, phrases, nouns, adverbs, whatever you want to call it, that regardless of niche or audience, does well. So, for example, the word "invisible" will do well in cooking. It'll do well in gaming. It'll do well in making weapons. It'll do well in cars. It'll do well in technology. The word "invisible" will do well across the board. And if you really want to [ __ ] go from like 100K to a million, your optimization in terms of ideation, focusing on these things, viral vectors and interest topics are that that's what that's going to do it. That's that's why that's why I have clients that'll pay me no question asked 100 grand like that.

>> Just because you've over the course of looking at 6,000 channels in the last year and 100,000 videos, you've dialed in.

>> I [ __ ] know basically all of them. There's still ones that show up all the time and it's ever evolving, but I can give you a list of 100 videos I've worked on in the last two years and I can be like, "Here's the viral vector. Here's the format. Here's the interest topic."

>> And like if you distilled all of them and maybe I'll I'll release a video on this one day or kind of like a

>> Can you break down like I mean just hit me with something that I can take away as an example of what of what one of these is.

>> Let's talk about 25 million view video. More views than the population of Australia, a continent. Mike Shake, "I Built an Invisible Katana." That was the original title. So format of the idea, this is where it gets crazy. Format of the idea is "I built a." The interest topic is "katana." So if we want to do the etymology of ideas or the total just market like kind of like Russian nesting doll, the katana is the most known weapon out of all handheld weapons. Handheld weapons being swords, for example. So actually, technically, it's sword is the lowest common denominator of swords. Katana is the most known of the swords. So the interest topic is katana.

>> The viral vector is invisible. So I was working with a food creator. We made he made clear ketchup. And then I'm like, "Okay, what if we instead of saying it's not..." Did a million views by the way because it's like that's juxtaposition, right? Clear ketchup. That doesn't make sense. And I'm like, "Well, what if we made an invisible Big Mac?" Big Mac being like obviously the most known type of burger of burgers from fast food places. Invisible being the modifier in this case instead of clear. Uh, like 500,000 views, one of his best videos of all time. And then I was like, "Okay, well, then he did an invisible pie like 13 years ago. That did really well. I think it did like clear pie." Then I saw someone else do like a clear pizza that did really well. Then I saw someone do an invisible phone that did really well. Then I saw someone do an invisible desk or invisible gaming PC where instead of the gaming PC being invisible, it was just hidden, but you called it "invisible gaming PC." Um, and I'm like, "Okay, well, across five to six different niches, across 13 years, the word invisible always yielded more views on average relative to the moving average at the time." Why is that? Well, actually, here's the crazy thing. I don't really need to know why the [ __ ] it works. I just need to know that it works, to be honest with you. But just by knowing that, I was able to deduce like, "Okay, hey, if we pair this, which is like the most overperforming viral vector that I've seen so far, invisible, and there's also like variations of that. You've got camouflage, you got clear, you got transparent. We apply it to the format of 'I built a thing,' and that thing is a katana." [ __ ] crushes.

>> 25 million views.

>> 25 million views and it's accessible to anybody and and

>> Everyone can understand it.

>> Everyone can understand it.

>> I've seen this video.

>> You probably have.

>> Is this Is it a guy in LA?

>> Nobody. He looks like he could be in LA.

>> Cuz And because he It's the course of him building this thing. Yeah.

>> And really it's like it's like made of it's like was it like made of glass or something?

>> Plexiglass, I think.

>> Plexiglass. Yeah. And then and then the whole step was like at the by the end of the video, wasn't it like, "Find out what he can cut with it?"

>> Yep.

>> So within that, you you're rehooking. Yeah.

>> Cuz it's not even just about like

>> Yeah. So it's it's first of all, it's like the thesis of the video, right? We're talking about the storytelling stuff in the Minecraft. So it's actually building upon it, right? Where it's like the thesis is like, "I want to build an invisible katana." Yeah. Well, how the [ __ ] are you going to do that?

>> Yeah.

>> Okay. Well, I'm doing this, this, and this cuz I have to do this, and this, and that. And like, "Oh, also, I want to see how good the invisible katana is at the end of the video."

>> I I'm interested in in in your how your brain works with this. What are channels that are at this 100K mark that you would say I would bet money that they get to the million mark?

>> I look at total adjustable market size and relatability. Um, and then like interest market cap, which is like kind of separate than total adjustable market. So, total interest market is a total amount of people that

>> Could consume this.

>> Yeah. Interest market cap is the amount of people from the total adjustable market that would be interested in this thing, which is different.

>> I think I want to dive in on this because I think I'm really interested in this aspect with how I'm shaping this podcast in general and I think this is probably applicable to any viewer cuz we're talking about in this initial level where we're having like here's our first thousand subscribers. It's relatively easy to get that with just sheer volume and just doing work. Then you have 10,000 subscribers and that's just iterating based on the data that you're getting from this, continuing this and working on some of the base level frameworks of how to hook, how to add storytelling, thinking through packaging. The 100,000. What interested me about this level is

>> It does matter the TAM. Yeah. Like really more than anything else because at the end of the day, you could be the biggest person when it comes to building desks, but

>> Not a 5 million view market for that, by the way.

>> Yeah. Okay. Exactly. So like the biggest person in this, you're not going to get a 25 million video.

>> I think I think they have

>> Really.

>> I'm pretty sure like Blacktail Studios, they build desks.

>> They build desks and they go, they get so

>> They get millions of views. Yeah. When it comes to reviewing a niche game like Settlers of Catan,

>> Okay, very familiar. Work with the biggest Settlers of Catan YouTuber.

>> I'm just going to say like the odds of 100 million people wanting to watch that. Not very likely.

>> Super [ __ ] low. Yeah.

>> But the thing though, is it's low, but you could artificially get there because I think that's actually fundamentally an educational problem, which is like imagine you did like, "Here's a [ __ ] great video," which would be like helping with education. It's like imagine we framed it this way: "This is the hardest tabletop game you'll ever play." Okay, tabletop games broadly applicable. Now you're educating the audience on what Catan is. Now you're getting the ecosystem. It's actually the same b. It's a user acquisition problem. It's a viewer acquisition problem.

>> So you're just trying to you're just trying to expand that base versus like, for example, in a podcast setting. I could there's there's so many different ways from this format to reach more people. One,

>> Bigger guests. You have people that are really massive, people really famous, maybe people that have never done a podcast in this context, right? Right? So like maybe they've done podcasts, but they haven't done a podcast like this. Or uh changing up the location. Like there's so many different elements of how to make that interesting. The reach is very guest dependent or topic dependent. If I do a ton of podcasts on Settlers of Catan, I'm going to have the same problem.

>> Yep.

>> Everyone in that space will know me, but I'll be known outside.

>> I won't be known outside of it. So uh is that the main driver of what separates me from 100K?

>> Yeah. Total market. Um, I think modality matters a lot as well. Um, because you can like kind of like fudge the total addressable market issue through modality. Yeah.

>> I think as well. Oh dude. Yeah. Viewer experience matters a lot actually at this level.

>> Let's just say like let's pretend like we're looking to speedrun it. The goal is not to do it in 10 years. The goal is to get, you know, let's say five years is the goal for a million.

>> Yeah.

>> I tell people it's like, "Hey, if you want 100,000 followers, you need 100 million views."

>> And so when you're perceiving it, "I need 100 million views." That drastically changes the type of content you're looking to make.

>> Okay, here's Dude. This is sick. This is so sick. Here's how I translate that to subscribers. I don't know what the exact number is, but if it's like if you want a million subscribers, you need 100 million watch hours.

>> I think like that's like it's viewer experience and viewer equity. And like that is done not through subscribers, not through views, but quality of view and duration of view.

>> How can I go like really really really deep into ideation in a way that actually gets me a chance at a million subscribers?

>> If you want to do that, the easiest way to do it, there's a few easier ways. Let's talk about the schools of ideation because there's schools of ideation, right? So, it's like Hogwarts. You got to Well, I guess the hat picks you in Hogwarts. Um, it's like Skyrim. You get to pick, maybe do I want to do divination? Do I want to do destruction? Do I want to do whatever the [ __ ] the healing one was called? Um, illusionary magic and whatnot. Um, you can pick the actual school that benefits you the most. I like outlier ideation. It's the industry standard. It's tried, tested, and true. And it works consistently. There's variation in terms of the outcome, but the input stays the same, and you are basically playing like you're basically beating the house, right? You're b you're beating the house if you do outlier ideation. It's basically like counting cards, right? You have an edge over everyone else. The issue is as that becomes more prevalent, everyone now has the same advantage. So now we're back to net neutral. But there's there's always going to be an evolving arms race. Like the best guys at outlier ideation and splicing format, spotting trends early, like the most autistic guys will win, so that's cool. Um, won't be out of a job just yet. Um, but another school of thought, which is like not commonly talked about, which is one of my [ __ ] favorite ones and the one that I invented. Um, "casual flex" is presence of mind ideation. And this is a great one for a lot of people and I'll try to explain it as as simple as possible.

>> There are things that take up mental space within your mind. Okay, whatever that is, it's a few things and if you can tap into that, you win. Let's talk about movies. For example, I always bring up like Oppenheimer and Barbie. Crazy marketing campaign, super viral organically. If you made a video talking about Oppenheimer or Barbie, it would crush because there's a lot of interest in that and it's present of mind.

>> Okay, another example is you can pull this up as an example like in the edit is the Minecraft movie came out. Smashing success, billion dollars, of course, biggest like [ __ ] gaming IP of all time. But someone made a video talking about what mods were used in the Minecraft movie. Like that's like a that's first of all, modded Minecraft is like kind of niche. Like the mods used in the movie. That's that's that's weird and niche. Did millions of views.

>> Um, but it only did millions of views. Course, like big curiosity gap, but he did it like within the first two weeks of the opening, which is when the most interest is. People were going to "I went to see the Minecraft movie."

>> Um, and like people were [ __ ] dressed up. Like that's crazy. There's like all this like cultural cache and this mental bandwidth and it's present of mind.

>> Mhm.

>> So

>> So if I were to make a Barbie Oppenheimer thing right now, it wouldn't be relevant because it wouldn't be relevant because the half-life is gone. Yeah. Yeah. The the attention half-life is gone. But if you did a video, okay, if you hypothetically, let's say you wanted to do a video talking about Super Bowl ads, right? You timed it right? Super Bowl comes around. Halftime show ads are a big thing, big cultural part of the Super Bowl. Always present in mind during the Super Bowl. If you did a video which is like the highest grossing ad of every Super Bowl or the best converting ad of every Super Bowl as a marketing guy and talk about like, "This is the ad, here's how much the ad made from the back end," that would crush because a everyone knows about the culture of the Super Bowl ads, number one. And number two, it also relates to all of the previous ads,

>> right? And like that would crush that would just do so well because it's present in mind and you're tapping into the fact that you have this surge in interest, right? So

>> it's almost evergreen because

>> every year

>> there's new ads coming in.

>> Dude, I I have so I've got a gaming channel. Uh it's a video essay channel. It's a passion project. Doesn't make money. I lose $1,000 a month on it, but I do it for the love of the game, baby. Um, and it's my it's my experimental playground and I can I can experiment with [ __ ]. Um, we uploaded a video on like a Star Wars game and every time there's a piece of Star Wars media that comes out, we get more views. We get a bump in viewership. This might be a tangent, but it might be it might be directly related. Do you think that the impact of seeing how many views are already on a video impacts whether or not they're going to click on it?

>> Oh yeah, dude. 100% psychological thing. I said subscribers don't matter earlier. That's true. But would you take advice from a guy with 10 subscribers or the guy with 10 million?

>> I think the framing that they'd have to overcome

>> If they had 10 subscribers, I'd have to see the status frame, like a a mad status frame to be able to be like, "Yeah,

>> So that's that's how I overcame it with my my tiny little YouTube education channel. It's like you click on the video, it's like this guy's got 2,000 subscribers, got 500 views. Oh [ __ ] he's got 12 flags.

>> Yeah.

>> Um, he's got a [ __ ] YouTube play button ring.

>> Yeah.

>> So it's a it's a silver play button ring and it's the same like dimensions as Yeah, you can see it. Go for it.

>> A slide across the table here. But yeah, it's 925 silver. There was going to be a silver one, a gold one, and then there was going to be for 10 million a diamond inset one. It's badass, isn't it?

>> That's so cool.

>> Yeah. So it's custom made. There's two of those in the world. Me and then I I have one for a friend that I ship out. Um, we shut down the project, but super super sick.

>> Super sick. Yeah, subscribers matter because it's social proof and social proof is just great for lowering the barrier of entry.

>> But then seeing a view, seeing a video that's like, "I'm looking for a video on a topic, whether it's entertainment or education, and be like, 'Oh, this has a lot of views.' I'm naturally going to click on that video."

>> 100%. Yeah.

>> Her mentality. Why did 479 million people click the Mr. Beast Squid Games video? Also, Mr. Beast Squid Games video is a master class in present mind ideation. That [ __ ] was massive. Break that down. So like basically what he did was he, cuz it did he do it right when it was being released or season two was being released?

>> I think right like right after like like within like three months after it came out.

>> That's crazy.

>> So like everyone was talking about it, translated like number one in like 79 languages. Yeah.

>> Crushing.

>> He does it.

>> Yeah.

>> Also easy to get behind as well. It's a game. Everyone knows games.

>> Yeah.

>> There's going to be a clearly defined outcome. You know what the clearly defined outcome

>> Matches a lot of his current content as well.

>> Exactly. I I don't think he'll ever have a I'll put it this way. I think it'll be five years before he has a video that beats it organically.

>> I mean, I think if he did if he did Beast Games the way he's like if if it was just on YouTube, it probably

>> Yeah, I would agree with you there. I am I [ __ ] hate the fact it's on Netflix or not on Netflix, Amazon Prime. I think you should just commit and just give up on the channel. I'm like totally like tangent aside, but like I think he's super shot himself in the foot and I have no desire to fix it even though I'm sure I could.

>> What else? Anything else in this?

>> Present mind. Yeah, let's go back to present mind. Um, so present mind, that's like the the the main theory. There's like specific schools. So you have trendjacking. Let's say seven levels trending. The format itself becomes present of mind. It like penetrates

>> the like the public consciousness. Present mind sentiment analysis. Let's say I don't know, uh GTA 6 comes out. First of all, mass, that's probably a bad example because it's there's the [ __ ] biggest slew of attention of all time. Yeah.

>> Um,

>> but let's say a new John Wick movie came out. It sucked. Right? If you made a video, not even like even though it's present of mind, but the fact that it sucks is also present of mind. So you can use that sentiment analysis to come up with something. You can also do this as well in terms of like you can aggregate sentiment from multiple platforms. This is where it gets really autistic. I've done this before. I have like proof of me doing it. Um, which like you can aggregate the sentiment across like Reddit, Twitter, these forms of discourse and you can use it as a signal. We're talking about negative comments earlier. You can use negative comments on IP, on movements, on whatever. And you can do we can make a video about that and it'll crush because you'll be the lightning rod for all this hatred. But like you're not getting hatred, you're getting support because it's framing the hatred that's not been framed before. Yeah.

>> So it's sentiment analysis, presence of mind.

>> Interesting. So basically like you're giving them a place to put their hatred and it's not towards you.

>> It's Yeah. So like I don't like it, but like that is present to mind. Like that is like the name of the game. So you got trendjacking, social hacking, um actual like sentiment analysis. You have present mind in the sense like movement-based where it's like large like wave-like surge of interest. Super Bowl examples like a surge of interest that you can focus on.

>> Authority hacking can also work if you have like a super good authority that's also present in mind. Like Alexi's stuff. Like yeah, he's also like popular.

>> Basically like I mean uh Caleb Ranson's in my world and Caleb Ranson's ent most of his brand whether it's it's it's known like the viewer clicking on it is aware that this is the guy that built Gary that was on Gary Ve's team and built

>> you know Alexi. He doesn't even necessarily say in his videos he did that, but like the framing of it is like

>> The other one is like brand hacking. So here's here's a great example. Um, there is a thumbnail by I think it's like Zachary Sigil or something like that. Um, but basically he like talks about like YouTube has an ad problem and like the it's like black background white text and then like the highlighting text is like the Pornhub yellow color.

>> And like that shape and like pattern recognition. Oh, what? Pattern breaking present to mind, though. It's pattern breaking because it's present of mind and it's like a juxtaposition. What's normally on YouTube?

>> It's really interesting, but that's all present of mind stuff.

>> Yeah. That's the deeper levels of ideation that I think people people want to systemize at this level. Yeah.

>> And that's just like you can't systemize that. So when you're saying hire a strategist,

>> Their job is to go and be like, "Yep, we're finding these pattern recognitions and these are the hiring the most autistic guy you know."

>> Yeah.

>> Doesn't have to be me. There's also like a lot of other really good autistic guys out there.

>> You bet. Like you need an autist on your team.

>> Yeah. You don't have one. Like Mr. Beast has like a room of them. Let's uh let's transition to this last level. What can we learn? So like there are so few people that have one of these. Yeah.

>> Right.

>> And everything we've talked about from a strategy perspective, I think realistically gets us within this ballpark, which again is unheard of territory. I I would say objectively speaking, if you genuinely listen to this podcast and apply what you're talking about and actually put it to practice with enough time, with enough volume, I would say this is not unrealistic.

>> You agree?

>> Yeah.

>> I would say this is definitely realistic. Yeah, everyone could hit 10 million or not 10 million. Everyone could hit 10,000 in a year and 100,000 in like two to two to five.

>> Okay. Based on what we've already talked about, for the people that want to learn from the best of the best, what are the separators from the people that are just the one million subscriber channels to the people that actually have this 10 million plus plaque?

>> Insanity.

>> Really?

>> Yeah. The different like everyone that I know that's going I like I work with some people that are trying to go from like two, three to 10, five, six to 10, seven or eight to 10. They're all insane. They're all fundamentally broken in some way, shape, or form. I don't know if it's a good thing or a bad thing. Um, but I I'd imagine it's like at least the way I I chalk it up to and like my my like personal experience with these guys, love them all to death, is like it reminds me of like Van Gogh. Like tortured guy, tortured soul, but like produced some of the best art out of that. It's very similar. Like a lot of these guys are like really, really, really, really [ __ ] up in some way. It's like inferiority complex with like delusions of grandeur, whatever it may be, right? But like, you know, if this was like the 1700s, these guys would be waging war on Europe and like winning.

>> Um, like they're all like insane figures uh behind the scenes and they all have like one, all of them have one thing in common besides like being like insane to some degree. Um, and usually the varying degrees like they start off as like [ __ ] insane. Like that's like the starting point. It gets worse from there. But the one thing they have in common is they have such an unbelievable dedication to the outcome. And the outcome is like 10 million in this case, right? Um, and the outcome could be the craft, right? But they have like I work with Will, right? Love Will to death. His dedication to the outcome of a good video is absurd. Like I'll sit there and I'll analyze the patterns. I'll watch and I'll give like retention notes and I'll give my retention notes and maybe I'm a bad strategist. I maybe I'll have like 30 notes sometimes. He'll have like 300.

>> Right. And it's like, but he sees every [ __ ] detail. He's like, "This pixel's off. I I I [ __ ] missed that." Yeah.

>> It's like when you when you hear like these great um stories of these artists and these musicians that are like, "This is wrong," and you're like, "Well, it sounds great to me," and they change it, it sounds even better. Right? Like the old Kanye stuff. Um, or like the

>> Kanye being a genius is like that's basically the standard of what we're talking about here.

>> Yeah. Exactly. It's this dude insanity and genius is like it's the same exact side or it's two different sides of the exact same coin, right? And it's like these guys are like geniuses in the sense like they're [ __ ] great at capturing your attention, but they're also insane in terms of like the level of detail where it's like I've had clients who are like, "Dude, like I can't go to bed if like the video is not one out of 10. It's like I will just stay up like insomnia like looking at the dashboard refreshing it until it's one out of 10. If it's not like ruins my day. Like they get a 10 out of 10 video like that ruins their week. Like they can't get out of bed." Like that's how [ __ ] like that's the level of insanity we're talking about. To be fair, I think at any level where we're talking about the top 1% of the top 1% of the top 1%, right?

>> There's a reason for that.

>> The like with within I think you could say the same thing about any athlete. You could probably say the same thing about almost any like the amount of times where you see like a Tom Brady where it's like Tom Brady's not a chill person when he's competing.

>> Yeah.

>> If Tom Brady loses, I don't want to talk to Tom Brady after he loses. If Michael Jordan loses, like in order to achieve that level of greatness, you can't be a measured person.

>> Yeah.

>> What are some of the things that the average creator should be looking at when they inspect some of these bigger channels?

>> Um, it's a good question. Um, like what can I learn from Mr. Beast right now?

>> You can learn how to set money on fire very efficiently by watching Mr. Beast right now.

>> Um, I think Mr. Beast is a bad example. I think Ryan's a much better example right now. Ryan?

>> Yeah.

I love to death, to be honest. Like, Ryan Treyan has slowly become my favorite creator. He is. I'll put it this way. Here's the best way I can put Ryan for a lot of people right now. He's your favorite YouTuber's favorite YouTuber. Guaranteed 10 out of 10 times. 10 out of 10.

As in, like, every person that just wishes they could be making Ryan Treyhand videos. Yeah. I, dude, in general, dude, in general, like, in general, they all want to be Ryan. They want to be seen as Ryan. They want to be. Which is so funny because he actually had to delete his whole channel and rebuild it from scratch. I didn't know that. That's crazy. You talked to me about it.

What are some things that we should learn from channels like that? I think attention to detail matters a lot. So, here's, here's how I can define that. This can be maybe convoluted. If you are a creator under a million subscribers, you can [ __ ] up. And it can be noticeable, cannot be noticeable. At over a million to 10 million, there's no, there's no room to [ __ ] up anymore. There's no, like, this audio is [ __ ]. This is this, this is that, right? What you want to do at this point is you want to make edits and you want to make decisions in regards to attention to detail that, whether it be subtractive or additive, won't affect the viewer's experience. They won't know at all. Like, that is the hope. Like, if I were to edit something in a certain way or remove something, I don't, you should not know it was removed. There should be no continuity errors, and actually, it's better if it is removed and everything flows as good or better. That's number one. Number two, if I add something, I have to add something in the sense that if I add it, it's not going to stand out. It's not going to take away from what's being done. It just exists. And I think those guys at that level do that really, really well. Even Mr. Beast, to be honest, is everything is done with like a very clear decision that doesn't distract, doesn't disinterest you, doesn't take you out of the moment. It keeps you immersed. Like the, like the really, like, key word here is like immersion and like, probably relatability to a degree, or like approachableness, or whatever it may be. But like, every edit matters to such a degree where it's like, you wouldn't notice the edit.

I would, I would say, like, I think he also got really good at character development. Yeah. Which is just, that's a really hard thing to get good at, is making me care about someone when I'm only watching them for 30 minutes in a YouTube video. Especially someone that's not famous or relevant. Like, Dancing with the Stars, they take a whole season to get you to care about these people. But like, Mr. Beast is like, "I'm going to make you care about this guy in 3 minutes." In 3 minutes. Yep.

Um, what are some channels that you look at and you're saying, "These are things that, yeah, we should be studying from these channels?" Okay, here's, okay, here's something, here's something really interesting, right? It's not so much about channels, but this is a really good piece of kind of advice. A lot of the bigger channels stopped innovating. They're maintaining. They reached a critical mass and we're like, the amount of energy to expend to get to where they would like to go is just too high. Now, Mr. Beast, like, I, I don't know how many subs he's at, but like, dude, it's gonna be really [ __ ] hard. Like, he's in his lowest period of growth in the last three years. Like, I, I've seen that happen like time and time again. Like, Eric is probably struggling to gain like subscriber momentum. Even like, Beam is as well. Like, all these guys are like super dedicated to the outcome that are like, hyper, hyper-focused are struggling to get to the outcome. Mhm.

It's no longer like free subscriber land as it used to be in like 2020 to 2023. It's super interesting in the sense that as you get better, it gets harder to get better. Does that make sense? So, as the better you get, the harder it is to get better at what you're doing. And the same thing applies with viewers on YouTube as well. So, like, not only is it a skill thing, like you have to get better to get better, right? It's like hard to do that. But viewers will also, like, will stop watching you because like, they're expecting you to keep like the infinite growth graph of like, you getting better at making content and the content itself being better to go up and to the right, right? And then like, it takes longer and longer and longer to get to that position and it becomes untenable where it's like, it requires too much time, too much money, or too much effort to get to the point where you are getting better, and like viewers will taper off. So then it's about maintaining, and like, the name of the game at that point is to maintain. So I think Mr. Beast is like, maintain land. He's like, openly said, like, the videos aren't good enough, but like, my, my assumption is, like, first of all, the videos are objectively not good enough. I think they're actually like, kind of a step down in quality for whatever reason. Probably because of Beast Games is taking up time. I don't think he'd like to admit that, but I think it's a bandwidth issue there. I also think it's a bit of an ideation issue, but I know his next year of ideas, like, the back of my hand, like, I, I've seen them. They're pretty good.

So, we can see the, the views go up if it's an ideation issue. Right now, I think it is. Um, but I also think it's a growth issue. Like, I don't think, like, who the [ __ ] else could he acquire? Like, he's missing a lot of people, but it's like, most people have made up their mind. I'm either a Beast fan or I'm not a Beast fan, right? And I think that is, no one, there's not a single person in the world that doesn't know who he exists. Exactly. It's a criticality issue at this point. It's like, he can't get any bigger. Any, which is probably why he's going to Saudi Arabia because he's going to say, "Okay, I, the only difference between where I'm at, like, the reason Speed's able to grow so fast is because he went international first." Yep. Globalization. So he, that's a great example. Um, Speed is someone who's like, you're getting larger and it's like, you're not like necessarily getting better, but you're getting more exposure. Like, Beast has a lot of exposure. His thing, I think, is actually a skill deficiency at this point where it's like, I think everyone's caught up to him, number one. And number two, it's like, he also like needs to get better in the sense that like, he needs to figure out new innovative ways that are novel to tell stories and get people interested. I've seen all these formats before. I will, I will say, like, I think the difference is that he's trying to figure out how do I beat TV? Because that's the, because like, what he's, he's beaten YouTube. He's beat YouTube, but he's not beat that. That's why I think that's the whole Beast Games premise, is how do I beat, like, Fox, uh, NBC, CBS, any channel that could put any game show or any like Survivor out. How do I make sure that I beat that viewership?

I think he [ __ ] up. And I think like the biggest thing is like, he didn't trust YouTube and he like segmented it off to do Amazon to fund that project that should just live organically on YouTube and it would have just done as well for sure. I think, um, I also think there's a fatigue issue. Um, let's talk about that. Um, there's just like a general fatigue of things, right? In the world.

That's an interesting concept. I mean, I, I think the thing we're talking about fatigue makes a lot of sense. I think, I, I look at it as like, easy to root for. So, for example, like Mr. Beast, let's just use Mr. Beast for example. I think the reason that his come up was so quick is that first off, he was never, he wasn't winning. Yeah. At the time, PewDiePie was in the lead. Yeah. And PewDiePie had some people, you either loved him or hated him. But no matter what, objectively speaking, you were like, "This guy's the biggest guy." Markiplier, PewDiePie, you, those are guys, you can't beat him right now. Y. And you have this kid that is giving $10,000 away to people that are homeless. He's given houses away. He's having people put their hands on cars and then giving it away. Like concepts you had not seen before. And you, it's almost impossible to hate just because of how crazy it is. Yeah. And then when that becomes the mass market and that is the winner and he overtakes PewDiePie, that's where it's like, oh, there's nothing else for him to beat. Yep. So up until that point, like, it's easy to root for him. He's like, you have this channel, like, why in the world is he giving $70,000 to streamers? That's crazy. Do you see this guy's giving? Like, he's not even the biggest guy in the world and he's doing like, that's easy to root for. And then now it's like, oh, he's worth a billion dollars. Yeah. I kind of can just hate on someone that's worth a billion. Yeah. Back, back to what I said earlier. It's like, he's become an idea, not a person. Yeah. And it's like, I think when you divorce yourself from like, your humanity, not even like intentionally, but just be like, by like, how you're perceived, you're [ __ ]. Yeah. Right. Which is why I think like Will does really well. Is like, Will is a person. Yeah. Very accessible. That kind of stuff is really interesting to me.

I know it's probably not as accessible to someone that's just starting out in content. Uh, if you had like, one thing to say to someone, say that they wanted to achieve this, like, this is, this is, you know, a thousand subscribers. This is where I'm at. Yeah. This is 10,000 subscribers. This is where I want to go to as soon as possible. And I will speedrun this. I will go like, I'm going to bust my ass. I want to get this in three months. And then I want to get this in a year. I'm just going to put that out. I want to get this in a year. All right. What's one thing you want every person that's looking to create content to consider? Like, if they could look at you and they say, "This is the one thing that actually matters when it comes to becoming a YouTuber. No matter the niche, no matter what type of content I'm looking to make, what's the one thing that you think every person should keep in mind?"

Okay, there, there's two things. Okay, there's two things. Highest leverage thing, number one, bar none, without failure, is ideation, 100%. Like, I, that's my whole business model. So now I'm not showing it just because my whole business model is because I've worked with guys with zero subs. I've worked with guys with 10 million subs. The thing that matters the most is how good the idea is. It's number one. Number two is fear. I think a lot of people are afraid to click upload. I think a lot of people, more so, are afraid of how they're perceived and afraid of failure. Like, when you are, if you're at zero subs, when you're just uploading, there are so many things that are uncertain that are objectively against, not even that you perceive that are against you, not objectively against you. Who's going to watch? Is anyone want to watch? How do, how do I know if it's good? Is this even good? Like, where do I even start? Right? You have all these like questions, and like, every question that you have leads to like, a degree of fear, right? And it's like, you don't know until you upload. And if you just keep uploading and you push through it, first of all, all those fears will go away. And if there are fears, you can just confront them and overcome them. Mhm. And I think that's like, it's a mindset thing. I [ __ ] hate like mindset content. But for the guy at zero, that's more valuable than me telling you here's this advanced ideation formula talking about format interest, topic waning interest and surging of interests based that you got to apply this like viral vector, and we also have to do this modifier with like, in a time frame or like within a constraint so we can do like constraint-based ideation. It's like, that is useful for the guy at a million subs. The guy at zero is like, what the [ __ ] do I upload? And like, what if no one watches? Like, that's the big thing.

It's like, you don't know until you click upload. Go for it. Thank you. Appreciate you. Of course. Anytime. On to the next.