Transcription
In order to be successful, you need to understand that people have a limited number of slots in their brains for remembering others. You have to get into people's heads, and to do that, you need to know two things. The first is 7114, which we'll discuss, and the second is that your brain is very good at deleting messages. However, there are five things that will not be deleted by the brain, and the last two are the most useful.
The first one is: "I wish I knew this stuff at the start of my career." Daniel Priestley is a money-making expert and serial entrepreneur who has built several multi-million dollar businesses from scratch. He has helped over 3,500 businesses using the same frameworks for career success that you're about to learn.
The problem we face now is that we live in a digital world, but society is still structured around the Industrial Revolution system. This means we're playing by an old set of rules and going through a schooling system that prepares us for a world that no longer exists. As a result, people feel there are no opportunities and no safe jobs anymore, feeling like they're in competition with AI. This leaves a whole generation feeling completely wiped out before they've even started.
So, what are the new skills people need to thrive in this digital world? There is a step-by-step approach to this, including building a personal brand.
Let's pause there. Why does that matter? Because it's the key to capital, talent, and customers. It's not about becoming an influencer with millions of followers; being seen as a key person of influence is enough to make seven figures. Is that where your 5Ps come in? Yes, and I'll take you through all of those.
Then there's the entrepreneurial pyramid, which opens up a whole new world of opportunities, including side hustles and the two types of opportunities everyone needs to know about. I want to go through all of that.
This has always blown my mind a little bit: 53% of you who listen to the show regularly haven't yet subscribed. So, could I ask you for a favor before we start? If you like the show and what we do here, and you want to support us, the free and simple way to do that is by hitting the subscribe button. My commitment to you is that if you do that, my team and I will do everything in our power to make this show better for you every single week. We'll listen to your feedback, find the guests you want me to speak to, and continue to do what we do. Thank you so much.
[Music]
Daniel Priestley, how do you define and describe what you do with your content and your work? Through all the books you've published, what is the summary of what you do and who you do it for?
I have a massive passion for entrepreneurship. About 20 years ago, I started noticing a significant trend: entrepreneurs who could stand out, scale up, and make a positive impact in the world through business. I've built multiple businesses over the last 20 years and I'm fascinated by the predictable stages people go through to build successful businesses.
As I've grown my businesses, I've been writing about it in my books, mostly to document what I'm learning myself. I've also built a community of entrepreneurs who want to make the most of the times we're in.
Currently, we're experiencing massive change, similar to the transition from the agricultural age to the Industrial Age. New economic rules apply now that didn't apply before. In the Industrial Age, people had to gain skills, get a job, and find an employer. In the digital age, what works is building a personal brand based on your unique intellectual property and positioning that brand next to a scalable digital business model. Those who have figured this out are succeeding rapidly, and there's a step-by-step approach for doing that.
I was running in Cape Town when a young couple approached me after my run. They said, "Steve, we love your content. We've been listening for a while." You could see they were stressed, trying to figure out how to start a business. They were very young, around 21 years old, and asked, "What do we do?" I suggested they listen to an episode I did with Daniel Priestley, knowing he was coming on soon.
Through the lens of that 21-year-old, their world has changed. They're living in a digital world. Where would you advise them to start if they want to capitalize on the opportunities presented to them?
I'll slow down for a minute. People in that situation feel incredibly invisible. They feel stuck, believing there are no opportunities, no safe jobs anymore, and that AI is disrupting everything. This leaves a whole generation feeling wiped out before they've even started.
This feeling isn't exclusive to people in their 20s; I know people in their 40s, 50s, and 60s who feel the same way. It's a widespread phenomenon. People feel invisible, unable to connect with the right people, and detached from meaning.
We need to address this because you're playing by an old set of rules. The school system prepared you for a world that no longer exists. We need to start learning the new rules.
If I were advising 21-year-olds, the first thing I'd suggest is an entrepreneur apprenticeship. This is where you work in a small team of fewer than 12 people, having direct contact with an entrepreneur. Look for someone with a personal brand, say 5,000 to 50,000 followers on social media, and an elegant business model that inspires you.
You need to learn how that person builds their personal brand and business so it can scale. How do they communicate and sell to people anywhere in the world? You don't want to become an entrepreneur straight away; it's too big a shift. You need to be a number two first. I was a number two for two years, working for an amazing guy. We went from zero to six million in a year and from zero to 60 people in one year.
Once you do that, you can start side hustles and begin your entrepreneurial journey. But how do you know if it's for you? The rules are changing so fast that it's not like anyone is cut out for it. During times of disruption, signals get jammed.
The schooling system prepares you for a world that no longer exists. After 12 years of school, you're told how to get ready for an employer, but there are no employers. You're told how to prepare for a career, but careers don't exist anymore. You're told how to get ready for a job, but that job can easily be done by AI.
So, we need to look at the emerging world and reskill ourselves for it. When you mentioned the entrepreneurial apprenticeship, it sounded like a new form of education, a new university. Are there other ways to rapidly excel your knowledge and skills in preparation to become an entrepreneur?
Books are great, and YouTube channels are great. I didn't have any of that. Believe it or not, even books were hard to come by when I was a teenager. You had to order business books or go to a big bookstore with a business section. We didn't have Amazon, and anything like a podcast was expensive.
Now, everything is free online. However, you can't learn to ride a bike through books and videos; you have to get on the bike. The best thing to do is work for someone building a business. If you can't do that, become a co-founder with someone more experienced. If that's not possible, do small side hustles.
A side hustle is an open-and-shut business case. Within 90 days, you start something and finish it. When I was a teenager, I organized nightclub parties. We agreed with the club on a venue, promoted it, ran the party, and split the money at the end of the night.
I also sold roses door-to-door on Valentine's Day. I bought a few hundred roses, dressed up in a tuxedo, and sold them. That lasted about three weeks, from the idea to finding a supplier, selling the roses, and finishing at the end of Valentine's Day.
These are called side hustles, and the important point is that they're not ongoing ventures. They're open and shut, allowing you to reflect on what worked and what didn't.
Another thing I don't hear many entrepreneurs talk about during the preparation phase is the importance of writing. Has that had a profound impact on you?
Yes, my rate of learning increased significantly through writing. I made a commitment to myself when I was 24 to write a tweet every day. I would screenshot it and post it on Instagram. This was perhaps the single biggest hack in my life that I've never really talked about because of all the downstream consequences.
The first consequence was that I gained a million followers on Instagram by posting these quotes and ideas daily. Every day at 7 p.m., my girlfriend knew I would go off for an hour to think of something to say.
The second consequence was that it taught me how to communicate ideas concisely and effectively, understanding what people respond to. The third consequence was that it gave me a moment to condense my daily experiences into wisdom, a little piece of truth. Without that practice, those learnings would have passed me by.
What you're describing is beyond just writing; it's publishing. Publishing means making something public, putting it into the public domain. There's journaling, which is private, but then there's making something public. Entrepreneurs need to think about how their ideas can be valuable to others.
Publishing doesn't have to be tweeting or writing a book; it can be video, audio, long-form content, or short content. The essence of publishing is sharing your ideas publicly. This is a rapid way to get started.
An interesting fact: out of the billion people who use LinkedIn, only 3% publish regularly, and less than 1% publish weekly. So, while it seems like you're competing with a billion people, 99% are just lurking and watching what others do.
On YouTube, there are 2.7 billion users, but only 4% have an account, and only a fraction of those accounts are active. A tiny percentage of the world's population creates content; most people are consumers.
What you're describing is the shift from being a consumer to a creator, and entrepreneurs must make that move. How have you accelerated your learning? You give out many ideas from various reference points, and there must be an underlying framework you use to learn, process, and publish.
My background was in running an agency, where we organized events and had to write quick reports. I got into the habit of writing and saw its power. In 2009, after the global financial crisis, I was completely disrupted. I lost 90% of my revenue in one year.
During that time, I began writing about what I knew to be true. I wrote the book "Key Person of Influence" in 2009, which came out in 2010. I felt confident that the future would see a shift from business and institutional brands to personal brands.
Today, we see individuals with personal brands surpassing big companies. For example, Brian Cox has more followers than CERN, Richard Branson has more than Virgin, and Elon Musk has more followers than NASA. The personal brand has surged ahead.
I started this process without clarity, but through publishing, I became clear on the macro factors driving this change.
Let's zoom out 300 years. The agricultural age was based on feudalism, where lords and kings owned vast agricultural land. When the Industrial Age began, it didn't matter if you were rich; what mattered was your ability to organize labor and machinery.
The economic system flipped, and technology changed everything. The fundamentals of the economy are dictated by the technology available.
From 2000 to 2020, we saw general-purpose technologies introduced. Suddenly, everyone could publish videos, write blogs, tweet, and form communities on Facebook. The power shifted from institutions to individuals.
In 2010, 28% of the world had fast internet; by 2025, 70% will. This means the number of people available to connect with has exploded.
Unfortunately, many feel they're in competition with everyone in the world, which is terrifying. But once you transition to the new rules, everyone becomes a potential customer.
How do you think about defense against competition? In your businesses, where do you find areas to defend against that competition?
When I set up my businesses, I ask how many people we could take on and leave feeling delighted. For one business, the number is 600. We engage 49,000 people to select those 600 clients. Knowing these numbers allows us to play a defensive game, focusing on what we want to achieve without being dragged into anyone else's rules.
If those kids in Cape Town asked what industry to start a business in today, I would say consider the fact that 50% of the economy is owned by Baby Boomers. They're going through significant life changes and want to sell their businesses or move into advisory roles.
You could build a business that disrupts their current way of doing things or sell to that market, as they have time and money.
Every business could think about how to sell to Baby Boomers, as they represent a significant portion of the economy.
One opportunity is that every business will be disrupted by AI. You need to be the company that uses AI when others don't. For example, we created an AI bot that reads and understands our video case studies, making our sales team more effective.
Do you think AI is the current opportunity, similar to the dot-com boom?
Yes, we're at the early stage of AI. The power station has been invented, but we haven't yet created all the businesses that will run on AI. This will happen over the next 10 to 15 years, affecting every industry.
Every industry is going to have applications that run on AI. There are going to be new teams.
Do you know what happened just a couple of weeks ago? Nvidia launched a supercomputer for $3,000. This is going to be the fundamental basis for companies with just 10 people that generate a billion in revenue.
These are going to be entrepreneurs who crunch some data, figure out a little application, and because of that kind of compute power, they will come up with something that turns into a billion-dollar business with just 10 people on the team.
There will be a small healthcare unit that figures out how to analyze data and solve a really complex health problem. They will find a way to do it. That supercomputer for three grand surpasses what people used to spend $3,000 to $6,000 a month on.
Previously, you would have had to subscribe to that level of compute and spend about $50,000 a year just for the cloud subscription. Now, with one payment of $3,000, you can be anywhere in the world crunching phenomenal amounts of data.
Just that one innovation is going to totally transform industries. I would guess that 90-95% of people listening right now don’t know much about AI or technology compared to others.
For the 5% who do, what advice would you give to someone who could be a taxi driver, a janitor, or a university student studying philosophy? If you were the puppet master of their life and had to guide them toward this opportunity, what steps would you take to help them capitalize on something like Nvidia's supercomputer?
Yes, of course, it’s a pyramid. The schooling system taught you that the way to be successful was to turn labor into skilled labor. So, become skilled labor. Your time and skills are what’s valuable. That was the Industrial Revolution model for everyone.
We all went through that system and thought that was where the journey ends. In fact, if you want, you can go to university, become really skilled labor, get a master’s, and become super skilled labor. The whole goal is to sell your time for more money.
Sitting on top of that is this new universe—the digital economy. The first step above it is called intellectual property. Intellectual property is where, rather than learning more stuff, you reflect and create something.
You say, “Oh, over the last five years, I did something special with that client, and we got a great result. I can explain it step by step. I’m going to document that, turn it into a story, record a video about it, and create a little poster with a wheel that explains how we did that.”
Then, you just let people know about it. Now, you’re in the business of intellectual property. Intellectual property is anything written, anything on video, anything audio.
So, intellectual property couples with media. IP and media are the next level above skilled labor. The first step is to get out of the skilled labor model and into intellectual property and media.
Just making that step opens you up to a whole other world of opportunities. You must know the book "The Seven Habits of Highly Effective People" by Stephen Covey. He passed away ten years ago. He was not some special guy; he was a church leader in Utah.
He did some consulting with small businesses and churches, but he reflected on what he saw and a few studies he came across, and he wrote this book. He went from skilled labor consulting to intellectual property and media, which was his written word plus his book publishing.
That’s step one. Mind you, he sold 20 million copies and built a $400 million consulting company, but it was based on IP, not his labor.
So, that’s step one. Sitting above that is data, intellectual property, media, and software. Once we have IP and media, we want data and software.
Data is where we build a database, get email addresses, gather information about customers, learn more about markets, get people filling in forms, scorecards, and conducting surveys. We start capturing data that’s unique to us.
Then, software is the ability to turn our intellectual property into an engine that automatically delivers results. In that software bucket is the ability to create AI applications.
You have to move your way up that pyramid. The final top of the pyramid is the ability to create financial assets. Financial assets are where you sell your business for a certain amount of money.
You package all of that into a business that can be sold, and that business becomes a financial asset. The shares become a financial asset, and then you make a lot of money by selling a company.
You can’t jump straight from being labor or skilled labor to software and data, which is the advanced AI stuff. You have to go through intellectual property, media, data, software, and what you do with your money.
Everyone has a different finance strategy or investment strategy. What’s your investment strategy?
I’ve said before that I really trust the advice that you can’t outperform markets. Everything’s already priced into markets. For me personally, I put money into the S&P 500, basically things that you’d call a store of wealth.
I don’t think that’s particularly exciting. Sometimes I see people talking about what someone should do if they’re earning $50,000 a year to invest. Honestly, it’s not going to do much.
You should obviously do it, but I believe it’s far better to take that money and invest it into your key relationships. I think it’s better to take that money and put it into a startup—actually buy yourself some time so you can move into this new economy.
What excites me most is creating really valuable businesses. I have a group of companies now.
Let me explain. The economy doesn’t want you to become rich. It doesn’t want you to accumulate money. The whole economy is set up so that you can’t get money or keep it.
What people think you do to make money is that they think you take a little piece out of the economy and squirrel it away. That’s not how people become rich.
What they do is create something from their mind, formalize it into a company, and then get people to invest in that company. That creates new wealth in the economy that never existed.
That new wealth is called innovation and entrepreneurship. What happens is, and I’ll give you a real-life example: Bookmagic is one of my software startups. We raised £400,000 for 10%, which means £3.6 million worth of new value that never existed.
It’s just added to the economy. It’s this new economic asset called shares in this company. 10% of the shares were £400,000; £3.6 million is the other 90% that didn’t actually exist.
It was just a figment of the imagination. It’s called innovation and entrepreneurship. Very slowly, that becomes more and more real, and then bigger companies come in and acquire that, or people acquire those shares, and it becomes a liquidity event.
You get capital, and then you reinvest that capital into creating new things in the economy.
So, the way rich people become rich is not by squirreling little bits out of the existing economy; it’s by creating something new that never existed and slowly introducing that into the economy.
What’s the horror we need to warn people about if they decide to do what you just said? Everything in life has a cost. Starting a $2 million company comes with challenges.
I meet so many founders. I had one in the office yesterday—a great founder from the UK, a young lady. She’s done exceptionally well; she built a company that I think is going to make $35 million, and she’s going through a horrific time.
The biggest horror is that we were never trained for this. All of society is built for the Industrial Revolution system, and it’s not built for the digital revolution system.
We were told not to be disruptive, yet the disruptors are making all the money. We were told you can’t ask someone to do your homework for you, yet the people who make all the money get someone else to do all their homework for them.
We were told not to be attention seekers, but attention seekers make all the money. There’s all of this stuff we were taught about becoming standardized component labor, and that mindset always fights you when you’re running a business.
Running a new business is exciting, exhilarating, and creative, but it feels wrong. It feels like you’re doing something weird because you’re outside of the system.
There’s no blueprint. There’s no clear blueprint that anyone trained you for. You certainly didn’t learn it in school. In fact, the schooling system taught you everything wrong.
It’s the opposite. They wanted you to become standardized component labor, and over here you have to be unique intellectual property.
You’re also dealing with platforms that are brand new and a social environment that is brand new. I say that because, obviously, post-pandemic, the rules of work changed completely.
Zoom and technology shifted from geography to ideal customer personas and communities. Our entire economy is changing.
If you think about our governments, they’re struggling because they define themselves by geography, but the digital world isn’t defined by geography.
When the government of the UK says they’re putting up taxes, all the millionaires go, “Okay, we’ll leave.” Then they’re like, “Oh no.” Norway did this as well. All these multi-billionaires just packed up and left.
“Oh, we’re introducing a wealth tax? Okay, bye.” You’ve commented a lot on this over the last couple of months. What’s your position on this?
There’s been a lot going on geopolitically. The UK changed the tax system, and the US has Trump coming in. He’ll probably be in by the time this podcast is out.
My position is that we should collect the most amount of taxes we can, but the way to do that is with low taxes, not high taxes.
In a world where people can freely move around, you need to be an attractive place for people to come to. People say, “Oh, we don’t like rich people.” Well, actually, rich people pay a lot of taxes.
1% pay 30%. If you wanted to double the tax base, get a few more of these 1% people to come here. The UK was thriving when we used to have a £10 million entrepreneurs’ relief.
That made the UK one of the best places to do business.
For people who have never experienced entrepreneurs’ relief, can you explain exactly what that is, who it impacts, and when?
Essentially, entrepreneurs’ relief acknowledged that entrepreneurs are taking a huge gamble in what they do. They’re pouring time, effort, energy, and resources into their business in an unpaid capacity.
When they finally get a success, if they get a success, one of the ways of acknowledging that risk and making it a good decision is that you only pay 10% tax on the first £10 million of exit value.
Now, it’s on the first £1 million of exit value. If you’re paying roughly the same as income tax on starting any company, then for a lot of people, they’re just not going to start a company.
They’re not going to take the risk. They’re not going to innovate. Investment also slows down. If people can earn more money by just sitting on their capital and sticking it into property, they’re not going to invest in startups.
If you want an economy based on actual innovation, change, transformation, AI, software, and the new economy, you have to incentivize investors to do that.
It’s also a globally competitive landscape. As soon as you’ve got Dubai saying, “Hey, we don’t even do income tax,” it feels like a scam because you go, “Wait a second. Their police force, their hospitals work, everything’s clean, they’ve got no potholes, their buildings are amazing, and there’s no crime.”
The transport works; the whole place is working like clockwork. You go, “How are they doing this without collecting 45% of the economy in tax in the UK?”
45% of the entire economy is government spending. Are people leaving the UK? 10,000 millionaires left last year.
When I think about all the exceptional people I hired over the last 10-15 years, every single one of the truly exceptional ones that I’d bet a lot on—they all live in Dubai.
Some have moved to America; some are working in San Francisco. Even America, which has high taxes, starts charging the highest rate of tax at eight times the average wage. Here, you pay the highest rate of tax at three times the average wage.
They’re not letting anyone get ahead. The other day, Keir Starmer said, “We want to be leaders in AI.” Well, unfortunately, we have the most expensive electricity, so you can’t run data centers here.
We also have the highest tax rates, so highly skilled, highly talented people do not want to be here. I hate to say it, but everyone says, “Oh, we need to tax the rich.” Sorry, they can leave.
They really can. In this digital economy, with a personal brand, data, software, and media assets, those assets can be taken with you. You can literally leave with your phone and be fine.
I saw this narrative playing out over the last year, and I’m a skeptic. I’m politically apolitical. I don’t have a team. I look at these narratives and try to figure out if a certain person has an agenda they’re trying to push because they’re rich and want lower taxes, or if another person on the other side has an agenda because they want to tax the rich more.
Where I ended up landing, based purely on what I saw in my life with rich people around me and the decisions they started to make, is that a lot of the most successful people I’d want to keep in this country—especially those who don’t have a mortgage yet and don’t have a family—they are leaving.
The stats came out recently, indicating that about 10,000 of them have left. I know it’s triggering for some people because they hate rich people and think they should just stay.
But if you’re truly in the middle, you come to understand that the backbone of our economy is entrepreneurship and small businesses. With AI and technology becoming an even greater part of our economy, there’s a certain type of entrepreneur likely to build and succeed in AI that we really need to keep.
We are competing geographically with San Francisco, Dubai, and Abu Dhabi.
The other thing people think is that rich people are taking money out of the economy, but the opposite is happening. They’re creating wealth that pumps into the economy, and they’re creating it from figments of their imagination.
They’re building things that didn’t exist that come into the economy as new wealth.
Now, mind you, that’s not all millionaires. Some millionaires are horrible landlords who make their money by bullying people. If you live in certain locations, the only millionaires you’ve met are probably slum landlords.
That’s not who we’re talking about. We’re not talking about people who are rent seekers or bully people around. We’re talking about wealth creators—people who come up with new intellectual property and bring it into the economy to create jobs, wealth, and investments.
They make the world go around. One of the reasons we have wealth inequality is not what’s being talked about. Wealth inequality is because of technology and technology adoption.
Imagine we have two people racing in a marathon. One person is running, and the other is on a bicycle. The person on the bicycle is leveraging technology and is going to power ahead effortlessly.
It’s going to look very unfair. You say, “Well, this person works just as hard as this person. Why are they getting ahead faster?” It’s because the one on the cycle is leveraging technology, and this person is not.
When we go through these great shifts, we get people who are stuck in the old system and people who are in the new system. Charles Dickens wrote about this in the early Industrial Revolution.
There were all these kids on the street, like Oliver Twist, and there was huge wealth inequality. Some people were industrialists, and some were still in the feudal system and the agricultural age.
Some people’s income was linked to capitalism, and some people’s income was linked to feudalism. In the same way that was happening then, we’re going to see a very similar situation now.
Dickens had that famous book called "A Tale of Two Cities." It was the best of times; it was the worst of times. We’re going to have the same thing now.
It’s the best of times; it’s the worst of times because we’re going to have some people leveraging technology who live a life of fun, freedom, fulfillment, and financial success, while others are stuck in the Industrial Age, saying, “I work as hard as I can, and I can’t get ahead. I’m falling behind year after year.”
It’s because we have two systems operating in parallel.
The people who would counter you when you talk about the idea that these individuals leaving are wealth creators—what’s the counterpoint that makes sense?
There are some rich people I know who are hoarding a lot of stuff. They create opportunities for the economy, but they are in a hoarding season of life, stacking it up.
They’re not really giving it to many people, and they’re playing certain money games just to build wealth, not necessarily creating huge economic value.
So, we need nuance. We need to understand that there are poor people who are rent seekers, who are not productive, who are takers from the economy.
There are rich people who are takers from the economy, and there are rich people who are phenomenal wealth creators who create opportunities around them.
There are poor people who are phenomenally valuable to the economy. If we simply make no distinction by just the level of wealth or income, it doesn’t distinguish between, let’s say, a nurse earning $30,000 and someone who’s a drug dealer earning $30,000.
They might be economically the same, but they’re not the same types of people in the economy.
What we need to do is have some nuance and understand what behaviors we want to incentivize and what behaviors we want to avoid.
We want to make it hard to simply stick all your money in expensive assets and rent them out. We want to tax that.
We want to make it easy to invest in the new economy. We want to make it easy to bring down prices. We want to make it easy for wealthy people to invest in startups.
We want to make it easy for people to relocate here. It should be an attractive opportunity to build a business and create jobs here.
We’ve just stuck a 15% tax on top of employing people, so a lot of entrepreneurs have responded by outsourcing to remote workers.
I know plenty of companies that are now hiring people in the Philippines and South Africa because it’s 15% cheaper to hire someone overseas than here.
The government is making the wrong moves. They’re making it expensive to hire people here and expensive for talented people to live here.
The economy is going to suffer until they understand that we’re a globally competitive economy. We have to be globally competitive.
We live in a digital world, and it’s just going to get worse.
Is this partly because the political system is set up so that the prime minister or president has four years? They’re quite short-term.
I’m thinking of Keir Starmer. He says he walked into this deficit, and now it looks like he’s scrambling for money. The long-term play here would be to change the schooling system so that in 15 years, we have a lot of AI knowledge in our economy.
It’s not just that. In the Industrial Age, we created institutions that were appropriate for that age, and now they’ve run their course and are outdated.
Look at the name “UK government.” That means it’s a geographical border. The London City Council means it’s the M25.
Is the geography the British economy? Anything defined by geography already misses the point.
The point is that we live in a world where you can sell to anyone, hire anyone, pay anyone, and build a brand effortlessly from your phone. You can live and work from anywhere and create companies super easily.
The fundamental technology has shifted. It’s like saying, “How do we change the Duke and Lord system and the serfdom system?”
That was for the agricultural age. That was the system that evolved. We need a completely different system because we now have an industrialized economy.
Unfortunately, we’re going into a digital world, or we’re in a digital world, and the entire government is set up for the industrial economy.
National identity was a massive thing in the Industrial Age. National currency was a big thing for the industrial age.
Do you think Trump’s going to make good decisions? He’s certainly going to be a disruptor. He’s going to be an accelerant for whatever’s happening.
I think he’s going to break things that need to be broken, and I think he’s probably going to bring in some things that emerge as good.
We were definitely going in the wrong direction. Governments were becoming very authoritarian for a while. They were really policing different elements of our lives and speech.
All of that is going to swing back the other way. The pendulum is already swinging back. If you saw Mark Zuckerberg’s announcement the other day, are you bullish on America?
Oh, America is definitely the most bullish place.
This goes back to something I said earlier. If I’m an entrepreneur and I want to position myself where the opportunity is, where the capital is, where the mentality is, I need to be in the digital space.
You can go to Silicon Valley and see some of the poorest people living next to some of the richest people. It’s not a geographical thing; it’s a mindset.
The mindset is digital versus analog or digital versus geographical. The biggest economy, the winner-takes-all, is the US.
The US is in a very unique position. They’re energy independent, food independent, and they have massive natural geographical borders.
They don’t have to police their neighbors. They have one friendly neighbor to the north called Canada and one neighbor they can work with called Mexico below.
Contrast that with China, which has 17 neighbors to manage. The US has clear runways, the biggest economy in the world, most technology, and most universities.
We take our time when it comes to hiring at Flight Story because I fundamentally believe the success of a business is directly linked to how good you are at hiring.
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So, is there anything else that would be on the list of things that, if you were a 21-year-old Daniel Priestley in 2025, you would be doing?
I can guess a couple of things. You’d definitely be making content.
For sure. You’d be climbing the podcast pyramid to build more leverage and reputation, etc. Are there any other big moves?
The key is to build a personal brand next to an elegant business model. That’s everything.
If you build the personal brand, it doesn’t have to be massive. If you have 5,000 to 50,000 followers within a high-value niche, if you’re seen as a key person of influence in that niche, that’s enough of a personal brand to make seven figures.
If you have an elegant business model, you can sell to anyone in the world and communicate your value to anyone in the world.
Those are the two pillars. If you’re not financially successful or where you want to be at the moment, look at building a personal brand and attaching that personal brand to the right business.
Ultimately, if I were 21, I’d be trying to build my personal brand and attach that brand to a great business. That’s the key to capital, talent, and customers.
Every single person who’s succeeding right now is focused on just those two things.
Why don’t people do that? When they hear you say all of that, why is it that they still don’t?
I’ll tell you why. Years ago, I went to Bali and saw this massive mountain on the horizon. We decided to book a trip to climb it.
It’s called Mount Aong. They wake us up at midnight, and we get on a bus to the mountain. We climb through the night.
From 1:00 in the morning, we’re climbing with a tiny headlamp. Finally, we get to the top around 6:00 a.m. I didn’t even realize why we were climbing through the night.
When we get to the top, the sun comes up, and it’s glorious. The air is thin, crisp, and cold, which is rare in Bali.
I can see all of Bali and the glimmering sea. It’s beautiful. I’m taking it all in. We put eggs in a hole, and the volcano steam cooks them.
Then I look onto the horizon and see another mountain called Mount Rinjani. I ask the guide about it, and he says it’s on a different island.
I ask how to get there, and he says you have to catch a ferry. How many days does it take? Three days. How long to climb? About this much.
Is it higher or lower? I ask how much it costs and if I can book through him. He says, “Mr. Daniel, you need to appreciate the mountain you’re standing on right now.”
He puts his arm around me and says, “You need to learn to appreciate the mountain you’re already standing on.”
When I was standing on that mountain, I could see everything but the mountain. I was looking around the horizon, seeing all this, but I couldn’t see the mountain I was already standing on because I was too close to it.
The biggest thing people miss in today’s world is that they’re already standing on a mountain of value. They have so much value, but they’re distracted by the mountain on the horizon.
They think, “Oh, Steven Bartlett is so much further ahead. He creates podcasts; I could never do that.”
Or they see someone in their industry who wrote a book and think, “I could never write like that.”
Or they think, “I don’t have anything of value to share. Some people have floated a company for a billion dollars, and I’ve only just started. What am I going to share?”
What they miss is that every single person’s story is relevant. Your background is relevant. The people you know are part of the mountain of value.
Your relatability is part of the mountain of value. You’re losing your relatability because as you go higher, people just starting out can’t comprehend how to get there.
Someone in the middle is going to take a place you previously occupied because they’re more relatable. They’re only two steps ahead, not 20.
Every single person has this mountain of value, but the biggest thing at the moment is the distraction of all the other stuff.
You’re so close to your own mountain of value that you can’t see it. The first thing I love to do is put my arm around people and say, “Please learn to appreciate the mountain you’re already standing on.”
It’s so true. I was just talking to someone before you came in about my girlfriend. She’s a breathwork practitioner.
She’s got her own studio, B Breathwork. We spend a lot of time talking about making Instagram videos again.
In fact, I think a year or two passed, and she’s talking about it. She buys a camera, buys another camera, and so on, as we all do.
I realized that eventually, the reason she wasn’t starting was that she was a little too focused on how her first video might perform.
She never dropped the video. I was reading a book over the Christmas break called "The Courage to Be Disliked."
It talks about the possibility gap—the gap when you announce your intention and before you do it. You can live in this gap because there’s been no evidence to prove you can’t.
There’s been no evidence to prove you’re not good at violin or DJing. You can live in this realm of possibility.
You announce it, and people give you credit for it. There’s been no evidence to prove you can’t do it.
One thing that got her posting over Christmas was when I said to her, “Instead of trying to make good videos, let’s make the objective to get to video 1,000.”
She’s posted every day since then—30 videos on her Instagram.
The minute the goal became to get to video 1,000, she was off to the races.
The other thing that happens is that in an exponential world, every double eclipses everything that came before it.
When you go through a doubling speed, you’re doubling and doubling and doubling. Each double is worth everything before.
Imagine this: we put one grain of rice on a chessboard, then two, then four, then eight. Eight is bigger than seven that came before.
Then 16, which is bigger than 15 that came before that. It goes like this.
In an exponential world, just those first thousand videos might only get you 10,000 followers. It might be small, but then you get a breakthrough.
In that breakthrough, you get more than 10,000 followers from that breakthrough, but it was all of that that led to that.
It’s exactly what happened to me, almost to the number.
The really important part is that to go for 10 years at anything, you need to really love the thing.
As much as we talk about strategies and tactics, the overarching thing of how we get to consistency so we can start to compound is a consequence of love, passion, and repetition.
This is what we’re talking about—repetition.
How many times has Adele sung "Set Fire to the Rain"? How many times has Ed Sheeran done "Castle on the Hill"?
How many times has Metallica done "Master of Puppets"? All of the greatest that you admire do repetition.
They do it over and over again. No one’s talking about this.
Some of the biggest, most successful businesses—WD-40 was the 40th attempt to create a spray that does what WD-40 does.
For the last 50 years, they’ve just been selling WD-40. It’s their one product, and they sell it in a small can or a big can.
Tabasco sauce is a 150-year-old business, and they just sell Tabasco. Every house in the world has Tabasco.
Fender Stratocaster guitars figured it out in the 1950s and have made that same guitar ever since.
Porsche 911 has barely changed, but it’s the most successful sports car because they just get good at making Porsche 911s.
I love Swiss Army knives and Rolex watches. They’re all businesses that figured out what to do, and then they fell in love with the repetitions.
They just do it and do it and do it. You’ve done 421 episodes of the show, right?
I think you’ve done 421 episodes of the show. I would almost guess that the last 21 probably eclipse the first 100.
To say the least. In fact, when I was on the show last time, you just crossed 5 million subscribers. I think you’re coming up on 10 million.
We did 500,000 in December. This is called doubling speed.
You’re doubling and doubling and doubling. What will blow your mind is that you’ll go from 10 million to 20 million in the year ahead.
It feels like exponential growth. If you continue to do the reps, you will cross 10 million.
In the same speed that you went from 5 to 10, you’ll go from 10 to 20. You’ll have 20 million subscribers on the channel if you continue to do the reps.
When we crank the handle, we go through doubling speeds. You want to figure out what activity leads to exponential growth and just do it.
Do it again and fall in love with doing it. It’s really that simple in many ways.
If you’re playing the right game, it is.
I analyzed your episodes. By the way, of your last 117 episodes, what percentage are authors?
I’m going to say it’s a high percentage.
It’s very high—78%. Okay, 91 out of 117 are authors.
What’s interesting is that the ones who haven’t written books are typically superstars and mega stars in some other field.
But almost all of your guests have written at least one book. Writing a book is a good idea.
It is a good idea, and it’s a good idea for unobvious reasons that most people don’t think about.
It’s not necessarily to sell books. I have a book that’s sold pretty well, but I don’t think it’s made much money.
No, it’s relationships on steroids. It’s the ability to have a relationship with an anonymous person on the other side of the planet where they clock up seven hours with you.
What was once inside your head, word for word, is now inside their head, word for word.
You actually connect at a very deep level with people at scale.
One thing I recommend to all listeners is to have a goal to become an author, even if you haven’t done anything yet.
You can document your journey. You can discover that you’re standing on a mountain of value.
A lot of people think they haven’t done anything. I’ve had people write really successful books about their passion and vision.
I’ve had people who were very successful at selling as a small business, selling a corporate contract, and they wrote a book about how small businesses can sell to corporates.
That was based on maybe eight to ten major contracts they had won, but they documented the process. Now they have a whole business teaching small businesses to sell to corporates.
If you’ve done one little thing, that could actually be a massive business.
Bigger than one of our guys, Howard Tinker, who ran a successful restaurant. He had a successful process for building his restaurant regulars—people who come back.
He wrote a book called "More Bums on Seats." He gave it out to a thousand restaurants and said, “Here’s how I built my restaurant.”
Then he ended up building a massive coaching and consulting business teaching restaurants how to do their sales and marketing.
He had one little restaurant and turned it into a big thing. Gabriella, who I mentioned before, helped couples get pregnant through her fertility interventions.
She wrote a book called "Fertility Breakthrough" and now gives away 4,000 copies a year. Her business is massive.
On the point of sales, are there any frameworks for sales that you advise or give to entrepreneurs?
When they’re trying to sell to a customer or trying to sell to the CEO of a company some idea to change the company, or trying to sell downwards as a leader, is there a framework for selling?
You want to productize your sales. You want to productize the demo and the customer needs analysis and give it a name so that it feels like a product.
It doesn’t feel like a sale; it feels like a product. You feel that you’re getting something of value by seeing the demo and doing the customer needs analysis.
That’s one of the first things.
So, break that down for me. When you say the word demo, what do you mean?
The demo is explaining the value of what you do. You want to craft a demo. Crafting a demo is like—you want to be able to do the features, advantages, benefits, and the research that backs it up.
You want to show some data and have an emotional story that tells people how this product works and how it changed someone’s life or delivered a valuable outcome.
All of that’s in the demo. The demo shows how your product is the path of least resistance between the current reality, the desired reality, and the obstacles that an ideal customer has.
You take an ideal customer: this is where they are, this is where they want to be, and this is what’s stopping them.
Look at our path of least resistance that we’ve created. But it’s not for everybody. You have to do a customer needs analysis, so a survey or an assessment, and that tells you whether you need this product or not.
You want to productize it, give it a name, and create a landing page where people can sign up to experience the presentation and do the customer needs analysis.
I’ve got a picture here called "The Messy Middle."
The Google report—I’ve actually never seen this before. Can you explain to me? I’ll put it on the screen and link it below for anyone who wants to look at it. I highly recommend you do.
What this image shows is that we used to think of marketing as marketing funnels. Essentially, we would push people through a marketing process from awareness to consideration, through to trust, commitment, and purchase.
It was this marketing funnel, and almost all marketers draw funnels.
Then Google did some research to see if this is actually true. Is this still how people buy? They found it’s actually not how people buy at all anymore.
So, top of funnel, middle of funnel, and bottom of funnel has been replaced by a trigger, a totally random journey through a playground where we explore and evaluate randomly, and then a trigger for signaling intent, and then purchase over here.
What this might look like is I might see an influencer talking about her handbag, and I go, “Oh, I’m interested in that brand. I’ll give them a follow.”
Then I ignore them. I discover they’ve put some videos on YouTube, and I start watching a video on YouTube, but then I go do something else.
Then I see a review website, and I go on the review website. I find out that brand has created a waiting list for a new product, so I say, “Oh, I might join the waiting list.”
Now I’m ending up down here. I get on the waiting list, and they tell me they’re only releasing 500 of that product. Would I like one? Yes, I would.
Then I go and purchase. It’s no longer a funnel experience because customers have figured out they can disappear within three seconds if they want to.
They can just jump your fence, and the funnel feels dehumanizing for most people.
They don’t like to be funneled; they like to go on an adventure.
So rather than thinking about our marketing as a funnel, we want to think about it as an adventure or a playground.
We’re going to create things that people can interact with and play with. They could watch a video, listen to a podcast, take an online assessment, complete a customer needs analysis, watch a demo, get free access to a trial in a portal, join a community, or join a discussion group.
These are all things people can engage with or play with. We want to avoid feeling like a funnel.
We want it to feel like lots of value, lots of great experiences, and then at certain times, there are moments to act if you want to buy something.
If you’re the right person at the right time, this is the moment to act.
It’s a different way of thinking about marketing, but it acknowledges that we’re living in a very different world.
Funnels worked when people were afraid of not seeing you ever again or that they would miss out, but no one’s afraid of that anymore.
The people that came to you after our last conversation sent you messages and DMs. What’s the most frequently occurring question they asked you?
“How do I start when I don’t have a brand?” A lot of people say, “I’ve got a big idea or I want to launch, but I don’t have a brand yet. I feel invisible, and that makes me feel stuck.”
They know what they’re excited about; they know what they’re passionate about.
“I’ve got a big new product idea. I’ve got a way of expanding into a new territory, but I don’t have the brand.”
Is that where your 5 Ps come in for becoming a key person of influence?
Yes, the 5 Ps are: we have to learn to pitch. The entrepreneur journey is a journey of a thousand pitches.
One way or another, you’re either going to pitch an average pitch and end up with nothing, or you pitch a phenomenal pitch and end up with a $10 million to $100 million business.
If you’re Elon Musk, you’ll end up pitching your way to Mars. The entrepreneur journey is all about pitching.
We’ve got to have a great way of pitching the business so people are excited, whether in person or digitally. It could be video.
I’ve seen Mark Zuckerberg do hundreds of pitches over the last 20 years for Facebook and new features. Steve Jobs used to do it on stage, but then the video went out.
You can do it to video, to camera, on a podcast, live, one-on-one, or to groups. You have to learn how to pitch an idea and get people excited about something through your words.
The second thing is publishing content—publishing videos, podcasts, books, and publishing on LinkedIn.
It’s essentially taking the elements of a pitch and putting them into different formats.
The third element is productization—the product ecosystem. Too many people sell time and skills.
They have to sell intellectual property, media, data, software, or productized services. They have to have a scalable product—something that doesn’t require their time and effort to sell again and again.
Your time and effort as a founder has to be on the demand side, not the supply side.
We’ve got to productize. Raising profile is the next one.
Having your social media platforms, doing live events, winning awards, getting on traditional media, or third-party platforms—all of that is your profile.
The next one, once you’ve done all of that, is doing your first joint ventures and partnerships.
Big business happens when you can find the right partners. You might need a capital partner for investment, a distribution partner for sales, or a product partner who incorporates something they do into your product.
Packaging up through partnerships is key.
I always focus people on pitching, publishing, product, profile, and partnerships. That’s the role of the founder.
We call that the key person of influence role. Personal brand feels like this weird thing, or it feels like branding, or it feels like, “Oh, I’ve got to get up every day and photograph my breakfast.”
But if we focus on pitch, publish, product, profile, and partnerships, most sensible people with successful businesses say, “Oh, that makes sense. I like all of those things.”
Personal branding has a bit of a stigma. The goal is not to be an influencer but to be a key person of influence, and there’s a difference.
There are different types of personal branding. The best, most effective type I’ve seen is what I call idea promotion, where you’re promoting your ideas to the world, maybe in a particular niche industry.
It’s all about sharing your ideas. You can do that through books, podcast appearances, and other means.
Some people do deficiency promotion, sharing all the ways they’re flawed and building a brand around that.
The one people most object to is self-promotion, which is, “Here’s how great I am. Look at me. This is my lifestyle, my car, my abs, my dinner, my girlfriend, my boyfriend.”
All of that is self-promotion. That’s narcissistic and associated more with an influencer.
A key person of influence operates within a high-value niche and promotes ideas. They say, “Here are the big insights you need. Here’s the data you should pay attention to. Here’s the problem as I see it, and here’s some nuance around the problem. Here’s the solution or outcome that’s achievable, and here’s how you get to that outcome.”
They’re part thought leader and part entrepreneur.
You don’t need a huge following for this. Influencers notoriously can’t sell stuff. Many influencers have a million followers, and it turns out they can’t sell hoodies.
It’s very difficult to get anything sold. People look at them as entertainers, but they don’t see them as thought leaders or someone directing serious spending.
A key person of influence might have 5,000 or 10,000 followers, but when they say, “This is the thing to buy,” everyone buys it.
That’s what we’re going for. Can anyone do that?
Anyone can start. I’ve been working on this for 15 years with 5,500 companies.
We’ve got single moms with children who have special needs who have gone from struggling to multi-million businesses.
We’ve got people who have been stuck at five people for ten years, and then they go to 50 people.
We’ve got people in 50 different industries, from real estate to dentistry to medicine to IT services.
The world is open at the moment. Every single industry has a thousand different micro-niches.
Every micro-niche needs a key person of influence or two. Every micro-niche can have a book.
When we were stuck in geography, there was no point in doing all of this because you only had a 5-mile or 10-mile radius.
But now we can reach 1.5 billion English speakers online. We can reach 70% of the world on fast internet.
Your tiny little micro-niche could be extremely valuable to 35 people on the planet who each happily pay $100,000 a year.
We live in a world where micro-niches are incredibly valuable. Every industry has a thousand micro-niches.
Every micro-niche needs a key person of influence or two. There’s absolutely no reason why a lot of people can’t do this.
Can everyone do it? I don’t know if everyone can do it, but a lot of people can definitely do it.
What do you think is maybe the subject or question that I haven’t asked at this point in the conversation?
If someone’s feeling frustrated, stuck, or overwhelmed, there’s one thing that knocks out everything else for cutting through problems or cutting through things that get in the way.
That is this idea called “environment dictates performance.”
What that basically means is that we behave according to the environments we show up in.
If you’re in an environment where nobody’s doing this stuff, it’s going to feel impossible. If you’re in an environment where everybody’s doing this stuff, it’s going to feel effortless.
If you’re in an environment where everyone talks about money as evil, you’re never going to make any money. If you’re in an environment where everyone sees money as just a tool, you’re going to make a ton of money.
Many years ago, when I was in my early 20s, someone suggested I go to dancing classes. I thought it was ridiculous.
I can’t dance, and I’ll never be able to dance. Dancing is weird. I went to a dance class, and in that environment, it was normal to learn dancing.
Within three lessons, I was dancing really well. I enjoyed it. I did three years of dance classes and got really good at it.
It was one of my favorite places to show up, but nothing would have happened unless I made the commitment to get into a different environment.
If any of this feels really hard or difficult, it feels effortless for me because I’m surrounded by people who live this way.
Every single one of my friends is scaling a business and a personal brand. If you’re not in that environment, it’s going to feel weird and foreign.
The easiest thing people could try is to change environments immediately by doing a few following things.
If you feel stuck, find the highest place you can get to—physically the highest. Go to the top floor restaurant in your town, or a place that has a foyer overlooking the whole city.
Do whatever you can to go high up and see how the problem feels when you’re actually high up looking out to the horizon.
Just that change of environment will give you new ideas.
Go talk to someone you haven’t talked to in a while who’s two, three, or four steps ahead of you, but meet them in an opulent hotel.
Anyone can go sit in a hotel foyer of a five-star hotel. Go meet for coffee in a five-star hotel foyer with someone who’s three or four steps ahead of you.
Suddenly, you’re going to feel very different.
Enroll yourself in a course where everyone’s learning the same thing you’re learning. That environment means it’s normal.
Let’s say you’re afraid of public speaking. Enroll yourself in a public speaking course. Everyone’s going through the process of public speaking.
Suddenly, it feels pretty normal. Enroll in an entrepreneur accelerator. Everyone’s an entrepreneur in there. Suddenly, it feels very normal to be scaling a business.
“Environment dictates performance” is the big thing that changes everything.
What I’d love people to do who are listening now, on YouTube or wherever you might be listening, is if you feel a little bit lost and you’re working in a restaurant at the moment, working evenings, and you heard Daniel talk about AI and all these things, and you feel it might be a bit far away or you don’t have the people around you who can help you with that, let’s start a little community in the comment section.
It would be really cool if people detailed their situation, talked about where they want to get, and threw that out there in the comment section.
Who you are, where you are—obviously keep your private details to yourself, but as anonymous as you’re comfortable being or not being, throw the seed out there.
It will start conversations with somebody else. I see it all the time in the comment section. People start chatting, getting motivated, and jumping on a Zoom call with that person.
Right? Or a Microsoft meeting or Google meeting. See if you can randomly meet up with someone who’s aligned on values because they watched the same video.
Anyone who’s going to comment this has watched all the way to the end.
Exactly. So have a little video call with them. Jump on a Zoom call and say, “Hey, let’s discuss the episode. What are you up to? What are you doing? What are you taking away from that?”
That’s a change of environment. You’re putting yourself around a new person.
Just so you know who these people are that also got to the end of this and are doing this, if you could all start with a waving emoji, then at least you know you’re people who got to the end and saw this part.
If you could be friendly to those people and maybe reach out to them, talk to them safely.
Do your own process of verification to make sure they’re not a crypto scammer or something.
Safely connect with them on LinkedIn, verify who they are, and then form that relationship.
There are people in this audience that I know are searching for like-minded individuals.
By the very nature that they got to the end of a three-hour conversation, they are like-minded in some way.
You might discover you have more in common with someone on the other side of the