The reality of being able to wake up and go like this, and then a million people seeing that for free, is fucking insane. The Halloween is a ruthless system-driven content machine, an entrepreneur who reversed engineers' attention, scales the distribution with precision, and turns creativity into a repeatable business weapon. There are seven LEGO brick categories that matter. All you have to do is figure out what videos and creators are winning in your category, explode their best videos into those seven pieces, hold as many constant as you think our world class and improve on the ones that aren't. Re-stack into your own new LEGO formation and post. This LEGO brick framework is the sauce to content. This episode, Halloween, breaks down his system for how he scales short-form content and YouTube to become one of the biggest voices in marketing today. People make this mistake. The whole point is to find a game that you get to play forever. You don't want to retire when you're 40, when you're gonna sit on the beach. You don't have to work 12 hours a day forever, but there is no end to productive growth. So then when you pick your game and you're willing to die on the field, winning is inevitable. What are the biggest lessons you've learned as a full-time creator? Damn, so many lessons. I think volume negates everything. And I think Hormosi says that a lot. It's like volume negates luck. But that's the truth is the strategy is not actually the sauce. The strategy has commoditized once you know it. We'll go through in this episode the entire strategy. The sauces can you make one rep and then on the second rep iterate off the first one. And the distance of that iteration is really where all the sauce is. And so as a creator, when you get started, you think all I do is figure it out and then I'm good. But the figuring it out, the strategy is nothing. It's just doing it a sh*t ton of times and improving at increasing rates as much as you can is really the sauce. And so you don't really realize that until you make 10 to 20 to 30 reps and you're like, I should be good by now and I still suck. You don't realize it until then. That's when you have fork in the road. A lot of people quit at that point because they realize they look up and they're like, oh my god, this is going to take 500 reps for me to get anywhere close to where I thought I need to be. Most people quit at that point. So it's about the positioning of the strategy and ultimately finding what is the system that I could increase the velocity. System, but also it's like, how can I look at a made rep and break it down into pieces and then understand where my execution of those pieces was lacking compared to excellence in my knee share in my category. And then actually applying the learning to the next rep. It's a very hard skill like being able to look at a piece of content and say that looks cool. That's one thing. That's like taste will say, but actually looking at your own piece and saying, oh, the hook on this piece was a little bit too slow and the visual just didn't grab me. And I know that because when I look at the winner from someone else, it did grab me being able to identify a verse B and seeing the differences and then apply that change. That's where all the gold is. That's why it's actually really helpful to work with someone that knows what they're doing because they can help spot those things if you don't know what they are and then tell you what to do. Right. If you're when you're alone and there's so many unknown unknowns, if your brain doesn't work to compare things A verse B, it's very hard to improve. Let's get into it. So for any type of content to actually work, you have to stop and decide to watch. That starts with the hook. So what goes into a good hook. Yeah. So hooks and we're talking short form. There's really three pieces. This kind of became popularized when I said in this one video that went crazy. You've got the visual hook, which is what's shown on the screen. You've got the text hook, which is the text shown on the screen could be captions, but also I call it title text. It's like bigger text that's not captions. And then you have the spoken hook, which is what's actually said those three things have to align as much as possible. There's like a few principles that you want and we'll break down like of those pieces. But the number one is like, if your visual hook is not showing something that you're also saying in text that matches what you're saying verbally, you've got a huge problem. Because people hear a thing and they see a thing and it doesn't match in their brain. They get confused and then they churn confusion leads to churn, right? So the opposite of confusion is comprehension. So you need those to really be aligned. Now let's break down each of those pieces, right? When a video comes on the feed, the very first thing that happens is the visuals act like a stun gun. Now people may not be able to comprehend exactly what the visuals mean in that first second, but they know it's different from what they normally see. So they pause for a second. So the first job of the visuals is to stun you, right? Autrast. Exactly. People see the visuals before they can read words or hear what you say, right? Speed of light is fast and speed of sound. So you see it and see something before you start reading text. So that has to like jump out and we can talk about things that you can do. One is like a visual set, like the reason why your clips do better than most podcasts clips is because this scene, this set jumps out as different than the typical like you can picture like that those wooden slats with the tree in the corner that like every podcast has. That doesn't jump out anymore because people've seen that over and over. So if that comes up and they see faces, they don't recognize they bounce because they clock it as like not interesting yours stands out, which freezes them for a second. So that's like step one is just getting them people call it a thumb stopper like just getting the scroll to stop the next piece is really critical. You have to set the context in the first sentence, meaning what is this clip or what is this short or what is this video actually going to be about you can't the way the brain process information is top down. So it starts with broad context, then you can explain the how then you can give examples and then you at the very bottom you can extract out a learning that's like how the brain learns. So if you drop me in the middle of a funnel of that funnel and you don't give me context like you just say. Jumped was crazy like what does that even mean like who jumped how was the jump crazy what would they jumping over like there's so much context that's missing. That leads to confusion confusion is the opposite of comprehension when people are confused they bounce so the next like this is the second thing we're kind of going through the the pieces once you stop the scroll visually you have to add context on what's going on. Now you can add context with all three of those pieces the visuals can show a thing you can have an arrow pointing to a thing and visually people are starting to understand you could say the words that map to what you're seeing you could also write that in text but like context is critical. Then comes the contrast right so once I'm contextually aimed towards what you're talking about the way you really get somebody curious which is what drives attention is contrast all contrast is is the difference between what they expect to see or hear. Verse what you actually show them so if I have a video and like this clip for example like this real meta but like let's go through the example how do we use this clip to go how do we engineer virality out of this clip. The first thing you need to show is you asking the question what makes a good hook that's the context if you don't have that we're cooked right and you'll probably have text above like the zoom out shot of me and you have text above that says what makes for a good hook right so that aligned and clear as compressed as possible. Exactly speed to value is maximum and throughout this I'll just say like a bunch of terms and we can define them but speed to values like how fast you can actually get to value or tease value you want that compress as much as you can. So that's that's kind of context now how do we add contrast to this. If I said most people think the way to do hooks is this but actually the real sauce the real framework has nothing to do with what you've been taught it's this that's contrast. You can clip that for the intro also that we get but basically I was like it's getting too serious but basically. You want to lean somebody towards what they think to be true and then reveal something that is the opposite of what they think that will hold them and they'll get curious as to why the thing they believed was wrong right so. Typically people say like but or there you know but is the contrasting word but like if I just lean you towards everybody thinks hooks are actually this one thing. But they're not the truth is if you really look at the data they're the subject thing just me saying those two senses make you kind of lean in you're like. What's he about to say that's contrast and so all great hooks have those three things right visual stop context and contrast and contrast side I mean there's a bunch of different ways you can do it you could just be contrarian nature you could just say something. Absolutely wild get them looked in and you open up that loop and then they just stay in for the rest of the time yeah so there's two ways to create contrast there's implied and then there's direct so. We'll start with direct direct contrast would be kind of like the example that I just said which is. Most people think X I'm going to tell you why so I I lay out the common belief most people think X implied would be just asking a question or making a crazy contrarian statement without actually laying out the common belief so it could be like. Cars are driving backwards on the road and nobody knows why it's like kind of like a contrarian statement. But the problem with that is it requires the viewer to complete the puzzle and come up with what they thought should have been true like cars are actually going straight they have to like think of that so it's actually easier to establish more violent contrast if you say the common belief and then. Contrast to the exact as the initial context exactly it basically like imagine there's a spectrum of minus 100 to 100 and you're starting at zero if you don't actually lay the common belief they're starting at zero and they go to minus 100 at the most contrarian take that's only a net difference of a hundred. If I lean you this way to 100 and then I flip you to minus 100 that's a distance of 200 exactly what about on the text and the spoken side is any principles or kind of. Key rules that you do in those two buckets yeah so on this let's start with spoken few as possible words. Active voice instead of passive voice so like the dog jumped instead of the jump was made by the dog so it's like fewer words more direct. More clear like more clarity is it always fewer words because I'm all about respecting the audience this time and we aggressively shave down the podcast even though some of their two three hours. Yeah, you just think it's you should always air in the side of just respecting the audience this time. So you always are on respecting their time but. The most important thing is clarity and comprehension if you need more words to make it more clear you add more words. But typically people add fluff that's unnecessary to like it's it's not adding additional clarity so you need to cut it so KPI is clarity. Yes, whatever many words you need to do to get that clarity KPI is absorption rate that's the most important thing in content. And this is why I think a lot of my content does so well on YouTube because I can distill shit down to like a level where you can absorb a hundred percent of it. So if I say eight words do you understand all eight you can put them together in your brain and be like yes I'm a hundred percent sure this only means one thing. And I know exactly what it means that would be a hundred percent absorption. The problem is when people start cutting words like if you actually had a sentence of 10 words and you cut some. At some point the absorption goes below 100 because like you're missing a key word to add that clarity so number one thing is absorption rate and clarity. And you can get there faster by cutting fluff but sometimes you have to add a couple extra words to like make it clear. Interesting. What about on the text side and if you go a little more clarity what you mean by actually text are you talking about the copy and the short are you talking about text on screen are you talking about graphic overlays you talking about kind of the. Close captions type stuff over that's a perfect example so like the absorption rate of that point that I made was not a hundred percent right because I left it open where you weren't sure so I should have done a better job like that's a perfect example of why absorption is so important because you then have to ask another question. So I'm talking about the text on the video like overlaid on the video there's two really two types of text the captions which is the exact words that's being spoken oscillating every word or two words right there. Close captions effectively but like you style them I say a little CC logo yeah but then there's title text which is like big words that are they're not to be big but words that are not necessarily being said word for word. So if we made a clip hopefully we can get a hero clip about like the best principles of hooks the title text might be like stop making your hooks like this or. Three ways to 10 extra hooks right I'm not saying I mean I just said it but I'm not going to be saying that the clip that's going to be up at the top or at the bottom. The words I'm actually saying you might have as smaller captions and that's context and that's curiosity gap those those two kind of big things yeah is typically what happens is people will see the video the look at the visual they'll try to understand what the visual means if you have an arrow or circle on the visual their attention will go right to it but then they're trying to. Carrobarate that their assumption of what that visual means is correct a way to help them corroborate that is by showing them text that confirms what it is so if I say like. If I show on screen a robot that has like tendons and then I say this is the first robot ever to have tendons like a human and then I write in text artificial robot has human tendons that's perfectly aligned and then when you see the robot you can see the text and confirm that your assumption was correct that is like a click in your brain you're like cool I'm on track. High absorption now locked in and want to hear the next sentence and you should be under the assumption that through the visual the text that spoken it's very hard to make kind of one work isolated they all work in conjunction you want to use them they have to be aligned they have to all be aligned yeah so you don't have to use you don't have to have the title text on the screen if you don't want to but that's just one less vehicle that the person can use to get higher absorption right so that means your words that you say have to be really dial the visual has to be really dial because you're not giving them an additional surface to. To kind of like triangulate their assumption something that we've done that I think a lot of people miss they wildly underestimate is what I'm quote thumbnails are covers for short form yes or somebody likes one thing from your page and they want to go binge and look at all of them give them context yeah yeah just like you're saying to increase the absorption rate and let them know what they're clicking into yeah if I were to boil it down this is the most important framework in all of content it's called content minutes so in order to get someone to trust you and ultimately buy. They need to watch a certain amount of minutes of your content it's pretty obvious imagine every minute was one block. And so like if you were to map out get to get somebody to convert on email lead magnet maybe it takes four blocks watched to get somebody to buy a 97 dollar product it takes 12 blocks to get somebody to buy a $10,000 product it takes 400 blocks let's just say and the only way the blocks count is if someone actually watches it. So what you really need when someone discovers you for the first time is high binge ability you want them to go down the rabbit hole and consume a lot of your pieces at the same time to stack blocks quickly. Because if if it only takes eight blocks to buy the 97 dollar product if I can create a chain reaction to get them to watch eight in one session they'll buy so it's like what can I do to increase binge ability well one thing is you can make a series it's like this is day two of 10 this is day three of 10 because they'll want to go back another thing is you can just design the thumbnail covers. So that you're giving clarity as to what the different videos are so when they watch one from you hit your profile and they scroll down they actually have context into what else they might be interested in so it's like we can go into the content minister but that that is like a critical piece and also explains why short person long which I'm sure we'll talk about later guys we're going to get into it that is why you to is the chosen one there you go long form you to get a lot of that time under attack exactly so at the average YouTube video if it's like a 25 minute video. The ABD is like let's say 8 9 10 minutes you're getting 10 blocks every rep instead of a short 60 seconds in some the average time is 30 seconds you're getting half a block every rep so it takes 20 shorts of someone actually watching to get to one long form equivalent and trust the crew so versus YouTube to where it's very intent based to the actively chose to do it versus getting fed in the I'll go we'll get into that one more thing on the on the Instagram thumbnails this is another like super hidden thing people don't realize the virality comes from shares right to like the viral case actor is just a hundred people see it of the hundred three share it of those three that hits five one of those five shares it etcetera that's how the loop works shares mostly come from intra DM like in Instagram you share to your group chat or you share it out to a text group when that video gets shared in the DMs the video is sitting there with the thumbnail cover showing it's not looping so when someone opens the DM all they see to get them to click is the thumbnail now if you're sending it to a homey they're probably going to click anyway because it's like validated by you but wouldn't it be nice if you increased that if you had five people in a group chat you had three click instead of two and the way to get that happen is to design the thumbnail cover to be better or you know it's so crazy as my wife sometimes she'll go she'll binge and she'll send me like five or six like funny memes yeah if I'm like really busy I'll click like one or two of them I won't click all of them and I'll literally go up the cover yeah and if you if you people that is actually craze I do not use that sauce that's that's some random random sauce we're actually re-optimizing the next couple days I call them thumbnail but I mean they're covers coverage on Instagram just to give context of the different types of series and such yeah to button up on the hook side anything on the visuals any like big key principles or rules or things you've learned specifically in relation to visuals and hooks yeah high motion high color high contrast like the three attributes so podcast clips are notoriously tough to get to go viral why because if it's just us here there's not a lot of motion you could have high color like these are going to be colored sick in like the background but whatever you'll have high contrast meaning it differentiates from the feed and like if you were to compare to black and white it's contrasting well but there's no motion so you can add motion with like a subtle push in or you can like add a over there or something yeah you can add artificial motion but the best visuals have a lot of motion baked in why is this if you think about like pure psychology deer in the woods head down eating some grass off the ground when they sense motion out of the corner they pick their head up and look the brain is optimized to look for motion like look for changes in motion so if you scrolling through the feed and a lot of people like let's say you're on tech talk and a lot of people are just like in their bedroom or in their car they're holding the phone there's just not that much motion if the next video has motion immediately it will lock you on to it that'll that'll be that thumb stopper so the visuals just from like a principle perspective high motion high color high contrast the next thing would be like what looks interesting right now if it's going to be you on the screen you're either hot or not if you're hot that's more interesting than not so like that is you should plan to that if someone's like super attractive you should definitely plan to that but if you're not if it's not like human driven and you're using the B-roll visuals like what I use my tech videos I need to pick interesting looking it needs a high motion high color high contrast and be interesting looking and I think everyone interesting is kind of like a mushy word like it's how do you define that everyone knows what interesting is right when you see something you're like damn that that's pretty interesting right so you want to optimize for that we're actually doing that just based on like a taste perspective we were doing it based on strategy and kind of the stuff that you're backing into and now that I'm thinking about it there's a lot of motion in your videos a lot of things it's probably a little too much for but like my niche with the tech and AI shorts is pretty well optimized for like different niches are different levels of maturity in terms like the players actually know what to do tech and AI is pretty mature so like you got to be very dialed the visuals have to be very tight now if you're like dentistry for I don't know like for just dentistry in general it's bars low bars low so if you have a little motion or like you have a overhead shot on a on a grainy phone of like somebody doing a root canal that might still pop because it's just not that much else it's beating that relative to the to the benchmark yeah I definitely want to dissect a piece of short form content and I you know just go through all the different kind of key steps and levers that you need to pull to win at the highest level but I want to back up a bit you text about I don't know 45 minutes ago this new concepts about the five content games I just want you to go through that to kind of lay like a macro framework before we dive into each just so people have context in what should they should be doing yeah based on what their businesses yeah so most people will go to a guru or whatever and they'll be like what should my content strategy be and most of these gurus don't have the sophistication to be like well it depends what your businesses it depends what the offer is there's these different buckets these different games right so I want to like lay out every single person watching this is watching it because they're trying to get better with content either long form or short form we're going to cover both you need to pick which of these five games we talk about that fits you best and then adapt the strategies and maybe as we go I can like break them down so the first game is we'll call or the first two games we'll call the media game so one of them is entertainment so entertainment media the second one is education so education media the media games full purpose is to maximize views at all costs because you're monetizing via like CPM so like add YouTube ads and so like the TikTok creator fund or brand deals and brand deals pay based on views right so entertainment media would be like Mr. Beast streamers anyone who's like just trying to entertain at like the highest possible volume highest possible audience size education media would be like in the difference between education entertainment is just education videos you can watch them and then tactically apply something to fix a problem anything else is entertainment so technically like my tech and I videos would be like entertainment media you would think their education because they're like tech but actually most of my videos you can't walk away like apply something I'm more just telling you about something so that you have the information that's a nuance it doesn't matter but first game is entertainment media second game is education media those games need a shit ton of views to play so like there's a certain strategy around ideas around niching around how you actually execute the videos to get a ton of views okay so those those the first two the second two are about consumer products if you have a consumer product at the bottom of the funnel number three like the third one would be you know the first of the consumer products is if you have a commoditized consumer product and what I mean by this is like you don't need to educate the viewer on how the product works so like clothing or you sell couches or you sell hats like every person can look at a couch and be like that's a couch so you don't have to educate them on how it works however you need to get them aware so there's a strategy there less context yeah exactly you don't need any context you can show the couch and be like this is a sit couch or like just have a cool person sitting on the couch to be like yeah I fuck with that couch like that is clear so we can talk about the strategy but like there's a strategy for that then bucket four is like consumer products that do require education so this could be like a G1 a G1 is just a green powder in a box if you see that you don't really know what that is like that could be matcha that could be greens powder which is what it is like you don't know so the the viewer needs some amount of education to close the gap now they don't need a shit ton of education you can give it to them pretty quick but that's a different content strategy so that's bucket four bucket five is like everything be to be so that's like you're selling business services coaching info books be to be sass everything where lots of education is required right so those like the five content games you pick based on the business model right because everyone's being content is trying to make money like let's just be honest you pick whichever business model you want to play media media consumer product consumer product or be to be product and we can we'll break that we'll use that framework to explain the differences and the nuances of like at a play short form how to play YouTube etc but that is a critical first step you pick the game and adjust accordingly I think something really key to point out there is on those first two buckets of media talking about the entertainment and education first off blending both I think you get an asymmetric outcome from that if you can actually educate and also entertain and then also be very very careful there in playing that cpm game you want to also be playing the brand game I talked about this with samir column and samir about if you feed a very narrow i cp and you really audience match correctly then you can charge a premium for that and I think that that should be the goal of anybody in content you don't want it to be just a direct cpm game you want to be like hey I can charge more money because I'm positioned in the marketplace as such yeah I think the in general you'll make way more money playing the products services offers game then you will the media game a be within the media game agreed you can make way more if the audience value is higher c3 whatever whichever I said that media game is arming to zero that game is going to zero like AI content will run that media game over and we can probably get into that later but like the reason why all the mainstream youtuber like there was a tweet that went viral the other day most people watching this will have seen it where the the guy was like I'm a 7 million views a month and I still live my mom's basement that guy is an entertainment youtuber now he's not only making five grand a month like he's probably making 30 40 50 but he has a big team and so he's netting five or whatever the point is like the media game is a dumb game to start in 2025 2026 is just not the right game to play it's a losing game mr beast is one of the winners of that game netflix is playing that game the NFL is playing that game you will lose to mr beast netflix in the NFL and so my proposition to most people and like where where I specialize is the other buckets of like do you need a personal brand to accrue trust to sell something that would be like bucket five and then strategies within buckets three and four you have consumer products and you can you can build like these u gc swarms like these other strategies that we can talk about but I'm like not that interested in the entertainment game my tech and AI is that and that's where I started and I'm realizing that like oh shit that's a losing game so like that we can talk about that but that's for for more clarity though you can start in the media game i.e media entertainment or media education build a personal brand build a trust and then you flow into bucket three four five and you actually yeah sell a consumer product yeah so the most common so so the and this is a framework that I think we should talk about all business just boils down to is traffic funnels offers that's it just three things so you either start with an offer where you know what you want to sell and then you got to go get traffic to funnel to that offer or you start you don't know what you want to sell which is very common and you start with traffic and you're just like I want to figure out content and I'll figure out the offer later that's that's the path I took what most people end up doing is they either pick the entertainment bucket or education if they have no skills they're going to be an entertainment they do have skills they sometimes niche down into education but usually they end up in entertainment and they start making content and they get addicted to the views game and so they try to rev the views as high as possible to do that you broaden the aperture you expand the time of the ideas and you become less focused on one audience avatar what happens then is you're like okay I'm making five ten fifteen thirty fifty k a month whatever like you know varying degrees but you realize there's a cap and you realize that is going to decay over time as the competition the niche rises and as AI content comes out so you're like I need to build an offer service or product that I can sell to this that I own that I can sell to my audience and you start doing that in one of three things happens a before you even build the offer service product you start asking the audience what they want and you realize they're all over the place because you have a super broad audience because that's what was required to get a lot of views or you just pick a slice and you build it but when you go to push because you assume I have a huge audience I can push people to it not that many take it because there's not that many people in the audience that actually want that that offer and so what ends up happening is you're like shit I don't have the ability to sell through the audience I already have what do I do and one of two things can happen at that point you either stick and just keep playing the media game which is what a lot of people do or you have to rebuild a second audience from scratch narrow using the offer that you that you want to sell and that's exactly what happened to me that's why I know it so well yeah I mean for us for people out there listening we're almost at this part we'll probably end episode 20 is just like we may be serving too many audiences we might we might have too much variety of the guests on this show and once you have a massive audience you have escape velocity you're Joe Rogan you can talk to MMA fighters comedian scientists and Donald Trump yeah but if you want to win in the beginning I do think you got to go narrow with the SCP but that's the thing is Joe Rogan's playing the media game so he's accepted but it's a barbell though it's once you get escape velocity then you can play that game yeah there's just so much money to be made on just the cp apps yeah and then and even even at the beginning is like if you want to if you want to be a face you want to be famous you want to be like an influencer you want to be like a creator you can play the media game it's a harder road like we also need to give context for out there for the people listening I definitely do think that there's two sides of the coin listeners the creators and on the business side I mean there is a I mean you can have a a one or two three person team doing a million dollars and a million half hours and we've had our piano we're just talking about like if you want to make I don't know there's obviously allies but if you want to make five million dollars a year in profit ten million dollars in a year right like people that are playing the the media game that there's not that many people that are making well in the seven figures doing that right and that's and that's I want to demystify that piece of it right because I think a lot of people think being a creator when I say being a creator I mean the media side because really if you're the other side you're an entrepreneur using content they're like two two sides people think if you're a creator you're just like rich you're flush with cash it's actually very hard to break into seven figures as a creator like only the top 1% or 0.01% in the niche can do it but just to just to give context like I never wanted to be famous I'd never wanted to be a creator I'd never want to be an influencer I'm a savage entrepreneur that has identified organic content as the cheat code lever to fuel businesses so that's why I I started figuring out how does content work it the byproduct unfortunately was that I grew like audience and people kind of know me but like that was never my intention so I do think there's two buckets and and again like we said the five different business games there's two buckets here if you want to be a creator and you want to have influence and you want to be like at the parties and you want to be plugged in and tapped in the media game is the best way to do it because you get the highest views the most exposure and it feels like you're you're you're in that world right the other world is like entrepreneurs in the trenches that don't actually want to be known right these are two different buckets like the approach is different and so that's I think it's important for people to like self select into what they want right and then build a strategy accordingly I think another great thing to know too is on the former when you're playing that cpm and view game it becomes very very difficult on the the sponsor and partnership side because you're so wide yeah that you don't have these narrow products and services to sell into an audience it's a very it's just like you have 20 different types of people listening to your podcast yeah and that's that's actually a good a good thing for people to think about is like the reason the brands are paying you is because they want to get a return on the spend they think your audience avatar matches their buyer profile which is why they're taking a bet the wider your content ranges the wider your audience ranges the less confident they are that bet will pay off and the less they'll pay you to do it so it's like in a way going wider is antithetical to dollars not in a way the way like that is that is the truth so it's like the wider you go the harder it is to be like specifically valuable for a certain slice which is kind of counterintuitive but then it's also an ego game you're gonna get less views the more now you go the less views you get yeah the slower the game is yeah it's so funny too because for people out there listening we'll have context obviously in the trailer not only can was a former rapper guys we're gonna pop up right here his rap album it's actually really really good kind of like a logic sound like logic yeah a little bit but also your in management consulting and obvious rapper I think I think obvious rapper not not a pro I think it's good yeah we're gonna show so we're popping up we might we might stop and just like and play a song yeah I think it was good yeah I wasn't gonna glaze you either when you send it to me I was like yeah I was with my girls like nice yeah I was like this is questionable but it was good yeah it was good but yeah it makes sense to me that you're formerly like a management consultant like going through your content like there's just no way that you could know the stuff that you know without obviously having a business background yeah and to tie bow on that I just I feel like the future I'd obviously put myself in the same bucket as you it's like yeah I'm a content creator but I'm an entrepreneur and operator by trade I just see how this is going to play exactly into my future I think that is going to be the future I think that there's for entrepreneurs and operators out there it is a hard game is content creation game but there is asymmetric benefit and I think there is so few people in the arena there is so few people I mean we talked about like how many creators can come on here and really have a business conversation it's it's it's shocking how much white space exists like if you're if you're a young kid and you're ambitious and you have a little bit of this like analytical slant dude the game is wide open like the cost of building is coming to zero the cost of attention is coming to zero and you can use data and like a science based approach to out engineer anyone else who is playing the content game like by gut feel dude it is like it's open season it is so open in every niche it just doesn't appear that way from the outside because you see so much volume of shit I'm telling you it's wide open in every lane I'm with you on that man let's dive into how people get that awareness let's go a little bit into kind of like formats visuals and editing a bit first up anything you want to close on on that well what those five content games but the one other thing I want to say which is we'll be a framework to like the short form stuff everything I look at I try to break into Lego bricks this is like how I my whole world view works is like see a thing that doesn't make sense or feels complex break it down to the studs into like atomic units figure out the options that you can use for those atomic units those become Legos stack those Legos into a stack and then you can make whatever you need to make so for short form there are seven Lego brick categories that matter and I'm sure we'll get into this and for YouTube and I want to contextualize this now because we're going to talk about other categories within short form which is helpful to have this framework the seven Lego bricks for short form our topic angle hook structure and within the hook structure those three things we already talked about visual spoken text hook story structure which is the way the story is actually laid out you could also call this like video type so you could have like a case study a breakdown a list of goal us storytelling narrative whatever number five is visual format how are the visuals actually laid out on the screen are you doing split screen full screen are you in the little circle thing are you in the world are you doing a vlog POV there's a bunch of those six is key visuals so what actually what visuals are you actually using in the visual format a roll b roll graphics whatever and then seven is audio so an audio is music and sound effects those are the seven like categories of things elements that make up a short form video so all you have to do is figure out what videos and creators are winning in your category explode their best videos into those seven pieces hold as many constant as you think our world class and improve on the ones that aren't restack into your own new lego formation and post that's like this lego brick framework is the the sauce the content guys get at your pen and pets stop right now get at your pen and pair you drop in just if you're driving you are dropping all over right now dropping bombs right but that is really important to think of the world that way I think I would also say to a good way to look at that is when you look at those seven buckets and you look in kind of the cohort that you're playing in think about contrast to what can you do that's radically different exactly and the other people in there and you dissect each one of those seven what can you do completely different so to to give to give explicit context and direction to people if you're a beginner the reason you're struggling is because there's so many unknown unknowns you're there's a hundred things that you can't do and there's another hundred that you don't know what to do the easiest way to reduce the sphere of unknowns is to hold constant a bunch of them for what's already working in your space so when people say like just copy what other people are doing what they really mean is of the seven buckets topic and angle are probably going to change for every video but like hook structure story structure visual format you can hold those constant and replicate what's already working now some people say copy I don't really think you should copy but use like oh I see the split screen with the motion from the left to right is catching my eye I'm going to do that for my visual execution but I'm going to switch the topic this is what the beginner should do this now as you get better and you close the gap on some of those unknown unknowns then you can be like oh I'm going to invent the new visual format that people don't have the problem is beginners try to invent new shit because they're like I can't replicate what's already there I don't think that's the right way to approach it when your beginner close down the things you need to learn until you learn the fundamentals copy what's already working once you get better then go back to the things you were copying you're like can I do this in a new way that no one's ever done or can I borrow from this industry and remix it originally for my own space that's how to think about like stair stepping based on your skill level what about from when I look at these seven what about like formats like what short form formats do you think perform the best right now so when when you say formats you mean the story structure like the type of the video like case study breakdown listicle like the way the information is presented or do you mean visual formats so it's laid out you can chop it down however you want under those kind of seven buckets what what is working right now in short form if somebody is watching this in January of 2026 yeah so you can get any format to work in any in most niches I won't say every format in every niche the hottest thing right now is narrative driven visual storytelling that's like by far the hottest so Chloe Shia is a really good example maybe you get you guys can play this up is like she had this like 30 lessons in 30 days by age 30 and basically most of those videos where her taking an individual story from her life or her experience using like cool shots and visuals to make it whatever I call a visual storytelling but a lot of the narrative was like I experienced this problem here's what I try to do to solve it didn't work here's what I did do to solve it if you have a similar problem here you go it's less like you should be doing these three things it's more like I did this thing take it or leave it that's very popular right now this like personal narrative driven storytelling and I think the reason why or may have mentioned this I don't I don't know where I heard this but you go through the seasons of formats where like certain formats work and it really it really matches with the maturity of the platform so initially when Instagram Reels came out 2022 TikTok in 2020 the like lower effort more transactional formats worked because there's no supply so like you could say here's the five best AI tools for doing this list symbolistical or you could say let me break down how to like flip your camera setting to get this shot and this very like transactional information tutorials information based tutorial those became saturated because like the market sees it opportunity and fills it so then the next season after that was kind of like these case study breakdowns will say so it was like this person achieved this result in this way let me explain how still like a how to but adding more original context that you couldn't you couldn't do first one is like a reporter right like a newscaster exactly exactly the first one is very transactional anyone like you could argue AI could probably come up with five tips for whatever if not now they're coming up with it very right right so there was that season then there was like this case and I'm talking mostly educational content obviously entertainment's a different bucket you had these like case study breakdowns what's happened over the last five to eight months unfortunately not largely due to me but partially due to me is I open source the playbook for how to do these like transactional formats on my YouTube channel and a lot of people did it and so the supply really increased like between Orin and Alex Garcia and me and like a few others on YouTube the sea of volume increased on all these transactional formats like eyes no gatekeeper here no gatekeeper yeah the gates are open like like basically when when we explain the hook things are the how to make a hook are these three components people actually take that and then use it and then oh shit their hooks get better it's like there's a lot of people doing well now because of the last six to 12 months of education so now the re to close the loop on this the reason why personal narrative driven storytelling is working now is because it's more one-of-one it's like there is less of a formula like you could break down the storytelling formulas for the hero arc or like the avers B or like I tried this and failed and that like there's a few common storytelling patterns but the actual lived experiences are more one-of-one like Chloe Shuh worked I think at Deloitte for a few years and then struggled with her own stuff like she can turn that into a single one-of-one experience hard harder to copy those so that's why that's invoke what what is I think that is staying invoked you're going to say what's happening next I think that's going to stay invoked forever yeah because that is that one unique piece of sauce that no one can know what copy what's happening your life well by definition one of ones will stay one of ones right until you could copy them so and you won't be able to because their lived experiences so I agree like that will always be a mainstay format it's a lot harder to execute than people think to like write an individual story structure that maps the storytelling visually tell it well the way she does it's pretty cool like she shoots in the world but even if you didn't do that the motion graphics required to like keep the attention is pretty tough so it's just getting harder and harder and harder to cut through with the base shit like you need you need more unique individualized formats it's so funny because I did watch want to be your YouTube videos and I do know who Chloe is and we're actually doing our quote unquote like off site to really map out what next year looks like the next three four days and one of my like ideas and things I'm thinking about is like 40 under 40 like 40 lessons I learned before as 40 and kind of interweaving in obviously lessons through open residency my own personal lessons and then from an aesthetic perspective matching this aesthetic so we get kind of like a compound effect of what's going on here and then my own unique take nice yeah there's a guy a martial haaz you know who this is marketing master is going to introduce him he just sold his company was somewhere maybe yeah yeah it was the the staffing staffing oversee staffing company and he sold it I think he sold I don't know if he owned the whole thing but he sold 30 40 50 in yep so he's making videos now and he's not like a creator per se he's like he's more in this entrepreneur bucket but he's making these personal narrative driven stories but only he can make them right he's like these are my these are the eight cars I bought after I sold my company I have like the 9/11 the G wagon like that's more one of one like only so many people can make that video and so even if the editing sauce is a little bit less crazy those work better because you don't see that shit every day and that's that's the thing is if you're making stuff that is commoditized to where 50 other people could also make it it won't cut through unless you're the best out of the 50 at executing and or you have an existing personal brand which most people don't if they're starting right so for example like I'm going to take over marketing short form in 2026 like right now I have zero presence like my YouTube is top of the charts but I I have no short form presence for marketing intentionally because I'm building things out when I take that over it will be as if I don't really have a personal brand in short form for marketing so I'm going to have to put these principles to use and be like okay what ideas or topics do I have differentiated knowledge on that other people don't that'll be tough since I've given all that knowledge away and everyone now has it or what formats or personal stories or experiences can I tell to cut through so people will be able to follow that in real time like at Callaway Marketing on Instagram right now it's like a zero channel but that's a perfect example is like even I who have a pretty deep personal brand and one platform I've it's not existing in that vector on another platform and so I'm going to have to figure out how to cut through I'm doing for the 40 for 40 just so you know to there's not many people that got a DM from Rick Ross and then pulled up to Atlanta with a couple of his team members in this house we could show that video telling a story a lot of crazy crazy stories that have happened with the 10 years with iconic and I'm sitting before it's definitely going to do it you probably have the footage for it right we have all of the footage yeah that's that's the literally have three and a half hours in Rick Ross's house Evander Holyfield's old estate it's an hysterical story dude I have a zillion of those stories I'm doing it I'll be a case study for your for your format in relation to that too another big thing that I've seen and this is actually how my wife popped off was when you do those is the 30 for 30 the 40 for 40 is actually numbering them it increases that kind of like binge ability when you number them because then if you number them and then going back to kind of that thumbnail and someone sees the eighth one and they see on your Instagram two three four five that's how you get people to get that again time under attention as well too yeah exactly numbering them yeah I think the the human brain is based like a puzzle machine so if you say there's a puzzle in front of me like you need 10 pieces here's eight number nine and 10 I'm like holding in here everyone's like I want number nine and 10 like give me it so I can complete the puzzle so it's like if you create a series of 10 days of this or solve this problem in seven days and you're like here's day four I'm going to want to go back and see day one two three if I like day four so it's like it's it's only forcing the connective tissue so drive the binge ability now that the con of doing it numbered is that if you commit to daily and then you don't want to do it daily you'll burn out and you won't finish and then it will not meet the promise that you just stack you gotta just stack yeah exactly you guys if you're starting to pocket and you don't have five stacked and you're on on the treadmill yeah that's a big big mistake but that's but that's it's a huge hack to I think to do the series especially so Chloe Chloe basically combined the numbered series the personal narrative driven storytelling she executed it super well and and like there's a few other like visual pieces that she did to pop off when you stack those together it cuts through significantly a good kind of tie-in and question actually directly in relation to something like this is I guess the downfall of stacking is you lose out on kind of that like AB split testing and the learnings that you would get from video one two three four five yeah you're saying batching yeah so like how do you use like AB testing and outlier analysis to like find these these breakout formats yeah and that's to that point I don't batch and specifically because yeah when you batch you lengthen the iterations I can't says you disagrees okay continue well you see your I'll talk about a good baseline bro I got a good baseline a rip like five well the reason you can batch if you know what you're doing because then it's like you don't need the iterative learnings as much like the iteration distance is much shorter but when you're when you're a beginner the best way to do it is make a rep struggle post that rep see that it sucks because the data will be horrible look at that rep use the Lego framework that I just went through and be like okay the topics number one okay is this topic relevant to the audience that I want to build yes or no is this topic interesting have I framed it like there's like these checklist you can go through you want to then iterate think about what you need to change focus on a couple things one if you know one thing is best but like if you can do multiple and one that's great make rep number two do it again you need to in iteratively improve if you if you batch five in a row you don't get that data back until number five is done you've made mistakes from the same mistake from number one two three because you didn't get any learning so it's like a beginner should definitely go one at a time once you know what you're doing you need to build a system right so you can get to volume and that's what everybody wants they try to shift to volume before they have the fundamentals and they know what to look for so that's I'm going to say something that's going to blow your mind for people out there listening I think it's going to give a lot of people a lot of reassurance I've been following you a long time I remember not thinking you were that good in the beginning your annunciation you're in the beginning yours and yours in your shorts yeah yeah I was horrible that's crazy to think I remember the beginning I was like this guy's not that good I was like and then I started seeing you get better and better for people out there listening like you got to just start and yeah for beginners definitely one by one and everybody is asked in the beginning everybody because because of the unknown unknown so like there's a hundred things you know you need to do that you suck it and there's a hundred things you don't yet know you need to do and so you definitely suck at those imagine there's 200 things everyone to beginning nobody born is like yeah I'm you doing three hooks like no babies like I'm doing three hooks you don't have that knowledge so like you got to systematically close those gaps the people that are good are the ones that can close multiple gaps in one shot that are ego lists about the learning and that don't stop that's all you have to do because eventually those gaps are closed and then you have one video rip and then you have a chain reaction where from there all of your reps get better incrementally better so yeah if you scroll all the back to my shit it sucks like I'm super monotone well I still am but super monotone the pacing is slow the topics are not that interesting I don't even look like I want to be there because I probably didn't like everything sucks like objectively about those pieces but if you just have an urge to want to get better and then you are emotionless about the fact that it sucks in the beginning you'll get better guys you should probably binge my channel but you might want to avoid a couple of those early ones I started off a little slow on on the podcast I think I think the early episode one with D is good and then the next couple I was like a little I didn't respect the audience's time I just wish I could just go back and just edit a little yeah I wish you could edit and reupload a little more just in the beginning like no one cares about my caloric deficit and how many yeah as a protein I have well why don't you guys just this is what I would do if you really think the episode stands on its head take that cut the cut the stuff you would have cut reupload it just as like a you know you can call it like from the vault that no one's really going to remember and then just delete like first delete the original one so that because what you have to do is and I know this because that this happened to me if you have an old channel like let's just say with videos that you want to repost youtube's copyright system effectively has a memory of the video so you had to delete that video to like sever the memory and then when you reupload it it's like a fresh video so what I would do is just take those old ones delete them from the channel wait three days at least you can schedule whenever you want but at least three days chop off all the stuff you want reupload them as a new episode let it rip you can re-title re-package it there's no reason not to do that if if you're bummed about unless you want like the historical archive in order but I don't think there'd be a reason to have that all right let's just go see how much I suck we're just gonna we're just gonna leave that out and maybe maybe I'll do another episode with those people yeah I guess we're talking about there is editing specifically in short form what do you think is the most common kind of editing mistakes that people make yeah so editing is like my personally my worst thing I never wanted to be an editor so I have a bunch of editors I've trained them up so everything I say is like framework and fundamentals and like I brute force it for the first few hundred videos myself but if you want to really really become a master of editing there's probably other people on youtube to study the biggest mistakes are misalignment with the visuals which you talked about already you're using the wrong visuals at the wrong time they're not matching with the words the pacing is off either too fast or too slow so a good test for this is like the eyes closed test when you make video content after you have it like ready you should close your eyes and listen to it don't watch with the visuals listen oh you're bored it's too slow like the chopping is too slow so it that's an editing thing right the pacing how fast or slow you chop the actual senses that's a huge mistake I think sometimes people do it way too fast where when you close your eyes and you listen to it you're like holy shit I there's no way I could absorb this you got to add a little breathing room some people do it too slow where you close your eyes you're like damn it's so boring you got to chop it down a little tighter so that's that's one like small thing people are going to think this is on 1.5 this uh yeah kind of I talk pretty pretty pretty fast my mom says we got a slow down a bit but not a lot we're we're gonna keep the pace I'm trying to think what else from the editing perspective I think just like visual selection is really important at the end of the day it's like you got to think what is the best possible way to visualize this sentence sometimes it's no visual sometimes it's just you on the screen and that's fine but if there is a visual that will help add more absorption add more clarity add more comprehension you want to use that visual and if you use the wrong visuals at the wrong times it confuses and effectively comprehension is just a decaying graph so when you first hit the video it starts at 100% every word pixel sentence frame that happens that comprehension can only go down I can say the same or go down so at some point that comprehension hits a level where the the viewer is so confused that they bounce that's that's why people churn right they don't churn because they're clear on what's happening and they're interested they churn because they're unclear and or uninterested and so as that comprehension is decaying that's when they that's when they leave so you have to figure out how do I make sure the visuals especially in the first five 10 seconds are really really tight with what I'm saying so that comprehension stays high if they leave but they're clear on what the video is about well that's fine that wasn't for them right even a good video is going to have a smooth line going down yeah it's just don't want that like asymmetric hockey stick where it just they fall off a cliff because then you know exactly you can look at kind of each piece of it exactly you can look at the retention chart and see where the biggest it's going to look like this but you can see where there was like abnormally high bounce and usually that bounce is because they didn't understand what you're saying or the visuals didn't align with the words you were saying until they didn't understand the visuals let's talk about people bouncing on that retention looking at short forum that first block that I don't know what's called two and a half seconds is that hook if you're looking at let's just call it I don't know let's make it easy a 60 second video the first two and a seconds as a hook one of those like blocks that you look when you're analyzing from a retention perspective how could someone look at a block that that's short so there's there's definitely a bunch of metrics I don't actually look at the retention charts or anything I just go appear intuition so like when effectively when I watch it I go one sentence at a time and I ask myself am I clear on what the sentence is and what I should be taking away from it one sentence at a time if I'm not clear then there's going to be drop off so I don't actually I don't actually go data video I go video and just let it live but that's because that's obviously because I've baked that into my brain so for people who don't have that like muscle yet I think the the the stat on YouTube shorts which is the thing that really shows the retention the best is after the first three seconds you want the I think you want the viewer retention to be at 70% if it's above 70% viewers held in the first three seconds you're going to have a a banger if it's below 70% if it's like below 50 of a huge problem but the problem is like what do people actually do with that is why I don't like analytics because if you look at it and you're like oh that was bull it was 49% it's like okay yeah I should make the hook better so yeah no shit you should have made the hook better for the beginning it's like data is confirmatory it's a lagging indicator the the leading indicator is like just follow the principles that I'm saying when you're actually making the video and if you can't intuitively tell that's the beauty of content is you can watch it be like is this clear to me or not if it's not it's not going to be clear to them because you've watched 10 times right so it's like I don't actually use data as much as people think because I think the day people can get obsessed with the data and it it distracts them from what they actually need to do which is like make the make the video better pragmatic I just always picture you as like a data scientist that's actually very very surprising to hear but it makes a lot of sense just going sentence by sentence one framework on that too I'll say that I don't think I've talked about this anywhere the easiest way for short form to like that validate the story you write the first line the first line should open a question in the viewer's head based on whatever it is so if the if the first line which is context usually is like google just came out with Gemini 3 and it's a crazy AI model the question that should pop in someone's head from that is what can it do right if when I read that first line I'm not sure what the question should be or there's multiple questions at like about equivalent strength you have a problem you need to make it more clear so it's one question now whatever that question is answer that question in the next line that next line will pop another question answer that question in the next line if you just do that all the way through your story is perfect so like google just dropped Gemini 3 it's crazy model question is what can it do it's crazy because it can do that it up next question is how do I use it if you want to use it go to this next question is how much does it cost and if you go here you can actually get a discount like it's just logical thinking one question at a time that's the easiest way to audit whether you're kind of like the the story flow makes sense from a compression perspective to I'm just gonna keep using 60 seconds I'm always under the notion obviously within 60 seconds how many open loops closed loops can you do well broadly you can do like three story loops or like sections really so it's kind of like the intro piece that opens that first holy shit what is this there's the for me it's like the how it works or kind of breaking the breakdown and then there's the implication but that's that's more like story structure I'm talking specifically sentence by sentence it's just like when of when if you were watches the video what's really happening in their brain is that they're guessing what they think will come next and then you're either telling them or you're telling them something else like to to add contrast but that zigzag is happening in their brain the whole way down so if I say something and or show them this robot has muscles that look like humans paid off how are they doing that why are they doing that where are they doing that it's like that's the question of the viewer would have like if you have a conversation with that story you would ask those questions one line at a time yeah dude it's so crazy because me and Jake were talking last night at dinner about I'm not I wasn't like a couple podcasts but I'm starting to kind of consume more especially in kind of other niches to get more like ideas and concepts and structures and such and like dude I just I can't watch podcasts that just like they open it up and then they don't close it for like I was like 16 minutes into a podcast I'm like yo what are we doing here bro yeah I can't do that the easiest way to get the I gotta go on 1.5 x speed yeah you know what I mean so this is this is this is the speed that I'm that bro yeah this this is high octane for sure so like I have this framework that I don't know if I said it or not but it's basically like it's like the two dopamine hit framework if you can get somebody to two hits a dopamine before they churn you've got them locked if you can only get them to one you might have them if you get them to zero they're bouncing and so what is that what is a hit of dopamine for an educational piece of content it's like tell me something I can actually use that when I implement will solve a problem for me so in this episode you and I was talking all over the place I tons of dopamine coming in this episode yeah it's a dopamine casino in here hopefully hopefully hopefully I was kind of all over the place when I was doing the hook thing but hopefully when people watch that in the first minute or two there's at least one nugget that they heard that they can be like oh shit that's valuable now the thing I said I think that they got nuggets I'll see we'll see I think they got nuggets bro I'm pretty confident like the thing I said about the Instagram thumbnail in a DMs that's a guaranteed dopamine hitter like nobody knows that so when you hear that you're like oh shit I could use that boom dopamine released that we'll say that's number two hopefully they got one before that at that point you've got them locked in because they've heard two things that they didn't know that they can actually use and they're like I have to keep listening to this because there could be 20 more things you're giving you're not giving yourself enough credit here there was a way more dopamine hits than that that was like the rant that was actually a random dopamine hit for me yeah I'm sure that you found out because I'm like damn I'm going to do that right now I woke up the six memes this morning and I was like up I'm gonna pick two I left time for two yeah that's crazy guys quick break this episode is sponsored by universal ads a division of Comcast I have spent tens of millions of dollars on meta ads at one point it was 95% of my marketing spend that is super dangerous with one algorithm shift your whole entire business can stall a great option is layering in advertising on streaming TV I thought it would take weeks to set up and a big agency to maintain guys that took five minutes universal ads gives you direct access to a ton of premium publishers NBC Paramount Roku all the big networks 100% of your spend goes to actually reaching people not middlemen and the best part is there is no fees same workflow as meta upload your creative target your audience and launch I've already moved massive brand spending millions of dollars a year on ctv over to their platform I've negotiated ad credits for my audience plus free creative and measurement services if you're running ctv or spending six figures plus a month on paid email us at
[email protected] with subject line universal platform dependency is dangerous don't make that mistake link below for more hot some more dopamine hits you have tons and tons of tons of content set up what's your tactical process for planning let's just say a month's worth of social content yeah and this is this is somewhere I need to get better I don't really plan in advance right so I'm operating in like a just in time scenario which is not ideal for my life but it's because I'm a spread a little thin but for the tech and AI content basically I try to get to four to five pieces a week sometimes it's three I've got brand deals on coming in on one side I've got organics on the other side and maybe we can just talk about my operation like my team would be hopeful so I have two editors that are dedicated to tech and I've got what I'll call like an ideas guy so this is a guy that I hired he's technically called an EA plus how about one second on those two editors are those in-house that agency are they sourced on a per video perspective they're full-time dedicated to me from an agency yes from the Philippines they're both cracked like absolute out of the Philippines we back baby yeah so if anybody wants to get the editors that I use we're putting that link below yeah we can put the link below so I've got two of them each one of them can make a video a day or like a day and a half depending on like how long it is or how crazy the visuals are how rigorous systems and templates that you've embedded in these guys brand yeah so what I do is like because I'm not an editing savant I'm like in they are I basically tell them yo if we ever have an off day where I just like can't get to a video I want you to spend the whole day building templates and systems for the other one so that you guys can go faster so it's like I've embedded speed into the system for them when they're not editing when they are editing they're like trying stuff out whatever I've also given them virtual credit cards so they can sound up to any AI tool they want to generate the visuals faster so I'm like trying to get them to be both editors but also like proactively systematizing it's worked semi good but like it helps a little bit I have the same exact system I have a team in the Philippines and they are I just yesterday approved some new Adobe program for them yeah I love that they're correct yeah so I've got those two and then so if you think about the workflow for short form it's idea research scripting recording editing posting that like six piece loop you just loop it so that's what I just subscribe solves the editing obviously the recording is going to be me you could use an AI app it's hard but it doesn't say that much time so the recording is me so this idea research scripting piece is really where the time saving sauce is but it's the hardest part to automate away editing is pretty I don't want to say commoditized but like it's pretty clear you get an editor you hand him the footage they edit the footage based on a style like you can solve that pretty quick the hard part is that first part so I've got an ideas guy I call it a content operator he's also overseas but I basically cloned my brain into him so like effectively what I realized is as an entrepreneur you're just in the cloning business that's I'm just trying to clone myself as much as possible into people and then they can become me and they can do the things to a level that's like close to me so I spent like three to six months cloning myself into this guy so like what is a good idea how to look for ideas how to how to filter out good versus great ideas how to go develop those ideas what are the core pieces to make for good ideas in my niche what is this 180 page Google Doc what is this a lot of it was like live calls I find is good and looms so the way we have it set up is like he he goes and scans what I call idea pipes so it could be like other creators in the niche Twitter Reddit YouTube newsletters what for me it's like those are the pieces but there are different pipes for different niches he's trying to find good ideas what are things that are interesting and we're talking about for tech and AI what are things that are interesting that I can make a video about he then creates a short list and develops those ideas and by develops I mean he goes and finds visuals from either the company or Twitter or like we have live examples or whatever he's fine he's curating what he thinks is interesting what he thinks the angle could be for the video and what the visuals are and this is just a Google Doc each ideas a tab he puts it into he drops that stuff in each tab then once or twice a week we have a pitch call where he pitches the ideas to me like a showrunner would in Hollywood and he's basically like all right I have this idea I found this it's time sensitive so if you want to make it we got to make it the next 24 hours here's why I think it's good here's what I think we could do with it here are the cons for why we wouldn't make it what do you think now now I'm sitting there and I'm just like not it's too too too too too too small or visuals not good enough or oh yeah that's a winner and we filter out the shitty ones I take the winners and we have a short list that saves me so much time like I don't have to go scrolling now I'm like one step delayed and knowing the news but that's a trade off I'm willing to make because I don't want to be like scrolling all day so I outsourced all of that like idea process which is huge the whole thing is heading right now just kick around yeah this is this is a this is the main setting right now this is the system that I saw so for sure so we we do that then when it comes time to make a video the next piece would be if I could train the scripting sauce into him we haven't fully got there yet but we're doing that now I also have sandcastles we haven't been talked about which is my software for trying to automate this it's good but not as good as me off the dome yet so it's great for people that are beginners like level one to five one to six if you're a nine or 10 the scripting is not good enough when any AI platform to like place you is what I found so usually I will sit down I will pull the idea from the list and I'll write the script in 20 minutes then I'll shoot it hand it to the editor and then it comes back usually done so that like that system is what I'm doing and I'm trying to bucket it like we said before for the first 300 reps I was going one at a time because I wanted to get learning up now I'm trying to bucket it where I do two or three at a time eventually maybe with two five to ten at a time but that's kind of the the flow I have right now how long have you had this ideas person I had never heard of a quote-unquote ideas person until this a heal bloom episode he told me about it oh yeah I've always actually thought about the curation and the taste is what makes this this and I can't source that out but I actually love this concept how long have you had this type of guy I've had him for like six months I think so it took three months to I mean to to install my brain into someone is very hard like you can hear like I'm a psycho like like like I'm so deep in the weeds on this stuff that for anyone who doesn't want to be this deep could never do it and then for someone who wants to be this deep I'm like pulling you into it like the nuance that I go like the details crazy so it took a lot of time just to like first he's he's raw then it's like you got to aim him then you got to get him moving in the direction you want then you got to get him on the nuances then you got to have him do it and review him doing it so it takes like three to four months to clone yourself in this way but it's paying dividends because he's legit as good at finding ideas as I am and he has like the systemization to do it guys I'm hiring for this position email below yeah I call it I call it a content operator content operator it's the person that op is like the quarterback of your first half of the process right this person is not going to add it for you and ideally you can get them to where they find the ideas and write the scripts all in one and just hand you the script that's that's the dream which we're we're getting we're going to get there soon but yeah if you the way to find this person the cheap way is to go offshore and bring somebody up to speed but it's very hard the other way is like to find someone like you have with Jake or someone else who's like been doing this type of thing but like doesn't want to do it alone and is like it's hard to find a unicorn right this goes back to I talk about in the Mark Manson episode or he talks about it is like everyone has their own sauce and you don't want to hire yourself out of that sauce I think if you can duplicate yourself this is a no brainer that you don't want someone internally or to you want to find someone net new that's passionate about the topics and the podcast and you as a personal brand yeah you just tell them everything and they do all yeah the other thing I have which I hired very recently is and this is pretty much unique to the AI space but there's kind of two categories of things I covered there's like news and then there's the Gen AI tools like Higgs field drops some new model I have a guy on my team now that's dedicated to playing with the tools all day and when we have a Gen AI video he just I'm like yo make something sec and then he the understanding all the nuances yeah because so basically what what I realized is there's just not enough time to go down every rabbit hole so you need you need a rabbit like for each hole and like I can only do a couple and I'm in the more projects you take on the less rabbit holes you can go down some people love and I do love going down the rabbit hole like I love scrolling Twitter for three hours like seeing interesting shit but it's just not productive right so crazy you said that too because we'll have we're just now starting to kind of bring on more partners and sponsors and like someone will come you know that reach out it'll be interesting and like I have to go down that rabbit hole to see the use cases I have to test it I need to champion it or else I'm not gonna obviously make a partner or sponsor and then even for the ad reads is one of those overlays and b-rolls in conjunction with the product this person could just do all that exactly but basically the curriculum that I've made for short form and now youtube is essentially a manual for upskilling these people like it's also the playbook for anyone to actually use but like if you think about it from the other direction in theory I could hire any content operator raw give them my curriculum and they come out 90% upskilled without me having to do anything because I spent all the time to like codify the process so that's that's one of the things we did with my guy I had just made the curriculum for short form and really it was like skin for my style so he ran through it he watched every single video he watched everything I had on youtube and I was like spend two weeks and go all the way down like I want you to watch every single video I want you to take notes as as what I would expect someone to do like who's interested in this and he comes back and he's like using terminology that like his mind just by default knows all the weird nuance yes I was like it it worked like it worked now you you got to iterate that person because like I said the strategy is the easy part the iterative the iterative looping is the hard part so he has to go we got to go through hundreds of ideas and I have to yes no yes no yes no so he can learn what I actually think but like that's how you clone yourself damn so two editors the content operator the bunny going down the I rabbit hole that's on the short form side yeah anybody else no on short form well I have my manager Rikugo shout out Rikugo a us to yeah yeah yeah yeah there you go they bring the deals in obviously so that helps with like the admin on the email side but that's the whole operation for short form today I want to I guess that's a good chef let's get into YouTube why are you so bullish on YouTube well a lot of it is the content minutes thing so it's like if you want people to buy they need to trust if you want them to trust they need to watch a lot of stuff that's valuable and if you want them to trust as quickly as possible you need them to watch as much stuff as quickly as possible that's valuable YouTube allows me to compress the value I guess I wouldn't say compress it allows me to give more value per rep so it's like if I make a short and it's the best it could possibly be and people watch 45 seconds I'm really transferring like one idea if somebody really likes my YouTube I can transfer like 10 ideas in one video and get them to watch 10 minutes worth and they can also see it's cut fast but it's you can see my mannerisms you can see you can start to like understand me and like me and there's a lot of like x factor that comes with longer form and so for the combination of just the math that I need you to watch more minutes and the psychology I need you to like seeing the way I think and explain stuff YouTube's the perfect medium to get trust accruing quickly I also think it's a longer rope to like if someone is 19 minutes into our podcast I have a 90 second window where I can probably you know not be as compressed in in the conversation and they're not going to turn yeah but I mean people are going to turn on short form and fucking two and a half seconds yeah so it gives you more rope and kind of yeah bobbing and weaving in there the other thing is you kind of have to understand do you ever custom build a player in madden I have not now so like if you play any sports video games and you want to custom build a new player there's like attributes and they give you like 100 points and it's like split the attributes across like speed jumping agility whatever every person is like that in real life there are these different attributes and some people have a lot of XP and one and low and another so you kind of have to understand like where your strengths are I'm like off the charts at explaining shit I'm not that good at editing creatively so it's like short form rewards editing creatively disproportionately then long form long form rewards explaining disproportionately than short form so my unique abilities are rewarded at a compounding rate on YouTube it's just like better for me to explain stuff to get people to understand me so I prefer that and people prefer that as well if you're not good at explaining stuff and you're really good at it like the editing sauce short form might be better because it accentuates your unique abilities we talked about audience matching kind of before if you're looking specifically for YouTube I want you just to further go down that rabbit hole what do you think wins on YouTube what type of content wins now and will age well which game are you playing oh yeah give me like we're in the Caleb episode right now it's all about the positioning and what's the end game yeah and mostly just because if you're gonna do work you want to make sure you're walking down the right path so you don't have to come back and restart so if you have an offer a product you should be able to pick which game pretty quick if you don't and you just want to like a crew a personal brand in a category I think the high value niche based educational content where you have proof and credibility is the best positioning you can go after so for me I mean so just take me as an example when I started I had no skills I mean like I was management consultant but basically no skills I had no skills no proof and no offers and no audience and nothing context what year was this was like 20 20 there's like two and a half years ago probably yeah but I like lived as a professional for eight years so at least I could like talk and like write emails like I had some skills but no like actual real entrepreneurial skills no audience no offer nothing I love you I'm 32 right now Forbes 30 under 30s trip and we're gonna talk about this I didn't know if you had the slot to make it I wasted my 20s selling my time to a corporation but basically and this is where a lot of people are I think listening you have no skills no audience no offer nothing so the question is like what should you do right the first thing is not make content the first thing is go get skills like actually get a valuable skill that people will pay for develop that skill that to me the best skills right now are content related so it's like can you generate attention so it's it's it's almost like a self-fulfilling loop but like the best place to start is to get a skill where you can actually generate attention on demand that could be organic it could be paid although that's not really on demand but you pay for it it could be written so there's different formats but like you need to build a skill you could also build skills in product you could build skills and sales right there's like these core buckets that matter for business but in the day like I said business is just traffic funnels offers so you need a skill in one of those three offers is building building offers you just read hormones these book problem solved building a product is very tough so that's like either physical or digital that's a whole set of skills funnels pretty transactional you can learn funnels pretty quickly although there are people that have made a ton of money as like a specialist like your your many track guy he's doing really well he's like carved out a niche within funnels awesome or traffic so you got to pick one of those three buckets and build hard skills what does build hard skills mean do the thing and get the result that you would want to charge people to help them do so what I did at the beginning as I was like offers is not as valuable as traffic because you could have traffic and monetize without an offer but you can't have an offer and monetize without traffic so it's like traffic is the most valuable thing in this next era for business so I was like I'm gonna go become a weapon of traffic like that's that's what I'm gonna learn the best way to learn content is to make it and so you want to grow your own channel on something now this is where it gets like hard because you can't really grow a content channel on how to grow content without having done content it's like a self-fulfilling loop but people need to listen to that one yeah people shouldn't be giving content advice when they haven't actually mastered content and the way to master content is not to make content advice from scratch it's to like pick a different niche and learn how to do content in that niche so I picked tech and AI because that's what I'm interested in and I knew the brand deals will be lucrative but that's where I started you have to build a skill first so this whole question was like what what niche should someone pick basically or where should someone start on YouTube if you're gonna do educational and you're gonna build an offer at some point you need to have a skill that skill either has to be the products like I'm the best protein bar manufacturer in the world okay so now you can make the protein bar and go on YouTube if that's the right play or you need to learn traffic one of the two so that it starts there now assuming you have a skill you're like a really great tax accountant you're amazing at B2B sales whatever the best way to monetize that skill is with an owned offer either and there's many services agency info products coaching consulting there's a variety of different models SaaS build a personal brand around that expertise using high value content on YouTube what is high value non-obvious tactically implementable if I'm a tax accountant and I know a bunch of shit and it's vaulted in my brain can you say that shit in a video so that when I as a business owner who would pay you for services hear it I can actually make a change in my business and save money like get the result if true if that's true I will trust you and eventually ascend down the funnel if I'm like the right type of customer for you it is that simple I think we're going hyper niche hyper educational hyper value driven the non-value entertainment stuff will arb to zero there will be AI content that is more personalized like AI Netflix shows that are more personalized to me than something that a random person that doesn't know how to make content can make on YouTube so it's like you're going to lose that game so that that's a long-winded answer but so it's a race being an attention expert just back into building trust it's all just about right now is about building distribution and trust that's what it all backs into exactly you want you want one-to-one trust at scale as fast as you can get it and the way to get it faster is to have higher value density in your content and value like I mentioned is non-obvious tactically implementable things that can get someone the result let's five more into YouTube you say YouTube is a packaging game more than a content game yeah hundreds I agree in a big way why do you think that it's that well it's just like like blogs is like a headline game versus like the actual body right you need to get the click so the people actually get into the world and if they don't click in the video might as well be in a black screen and that's that's mostly like everything in the world I've used either math or psychology everything and so that's purely just math it's like you don't have enough eyes on the bit you won't you want to have eyes on the video if they don't click in right so it's like you just you have to focus earlier in the funnel which is the packaging so YouTube is generous enough to put your shit in front of people for free awesome but if they don't click it's worth nothing you know so that's why Mr. Beast and Mr. Beast figured this out pretty early he was like yo it doesn't it's not that has nothing to do with the video the video obviously matters but he's like if we don't over invest in the packaging and get people to the video all that money on the video that we spent is worth nothing so that's why you have to have a solution if you're going to play YouTube you have to have a solution for packaging titles thumbnails the actual idea itself kind of wraps in there and the the intro confirming that click we can talk about that but the the core difference between short form and long form short form the viewer doesn't have a choice the feed puts it up you don't need to do packaging the hook is the package but that's also part of the video it's way easier to win on short form because you should just get served automatically long form is a completely different game what percent of your time looking at the let's just call it idea pre-production all the way down to the click of the button distribution what percent of the time do you focus on prepackaging I don't spend any time personally because I hired that guy so my thing when you were doing yourself though pre six months ago I started with a team from day one I wow and I and I here's how I looked at it YouTube is like a professional sport short form was like fledgling it's getting to be professional but it's still like winnable by anyone so I thought if I'm going to play a professional sport and I don't have the professional skills I need to go pay for them from experts so I got to go get money somewhere else to fund the YouTube team so that I can have the a players from day one because I identified the packaging is critical and what is the packaging coming up with the idea for the video but most importantly titling and thumbnailing that video so that it gets a click there are savages that know everything about YouTube and everything about packaging that are out there selling agency services I was like I'm paying them immediately that are not that costly yeah they're not 3k a month and basically and I can walk through what they do and we can put it in the description if you guys want the same people I use but basically my YouTube team from day one was the ideas team the strategy team which does the packaging my thumbnail designer who just executes well he comes up with the designs as well but like they work in tandem and then my editor so all I do on YouTube personally is write the script and record it that's it what do you think is the most common mistake that people make when they're doing that title thumbnail outside of just not doing it well the most common one is they do it at the end so like we'll have just said it's most important thing and then they'll be like skip and then they'll make a video they'll spend like 20 hours because really the editing takes the longest time but it's the it's the least important thing I would say so we'll spend all that time they're burnt they're like oh my god it's two three days to make this video like I don't even know if it's good and they just do the packaging at the end like there's uh yeah I'll throw some like that is the worst thing you can do the reason they say make the title thumbnail first is both because you have to confirm the click in the first couple seconds but also you want to put the most effort when you're the freshest on the most important thing right so the biggest problem is they just do it out of order that's number one now that's obviously not tactics that people want but that's the truth you should do it first if you're designing the thumbnail yourself and you're titling the video yourself you need to get that solved before you waste your time on anything else because if you can't solve that the video is basically a dud what's good though is formally you could only absew test thumbnails you can ask absew test titles that does give you a little bit more malleability I do think they should be done beforehand yeah but I think understanding and knowing the macro identity and like a rough idea of what it is and then knowing how you're going to open and make sure it reflects that I would argue that we're moving into world where that works as well too yeah ideally you have it all done but as long as you have a good good idea of working and one of the key words you're going to use I think that's enough well we do is the titles are done but we don't have the thumbnails done before I make the video but that's because I know I have a guy that can execute it fresh so I make the script I record it and then I hand the finish script to my thumbnail guy and my editor at the same time separately they edit it he does the thumbnails comes together but the only reason I do the thumbnails after is because mostly from a systems perspective and because I know this guy is a pro if you don't if you're doing it and you're not a pro you shouldn't wait till the end right so that's that's how I kind of do it the biggest thing is that people don't trigger what I call a desire loop in the title so if you think about how the psychology actually works when someone's on YouTube you're scrolling scrolling scrolling scrolling your eye catches a thumbnail you don't know what it says yet but you like lock in that's this like first awareness angle the next thing is you read the title people look they look right below and they're like what is the title and they're trying to find key words that trigger awareness around what I call a desire loop so it's like you either need to you want to solve a pain or you're feeling phomo about missing out on having solved that pain or there's like a benefit or desire that you have right so I was looking at the one you did with orin it was like this is the most valuable marketing conversation you'll hear in 2025 right something like that phomo got it less like a marketer seeing that is foaming at the mouth because they're afraid they're phomoing that they're going to they're going to miss some nugget right so you create a desire loop there's a they have the desire to need to know that information the thumbnail then after they see that title they go back to the thumbnail that thumbnail needs to complement and amplify that desire doesn't need to repeat the words because it's just another canvas for you to increase that desire so if you would have set on the thumbnail marketing conversation that does nothing because you already said it's a most valuable marketing conversation what you said in the thumbnail is I figured out the cheat code or like I solve the cheat code which ratchets up that desire even more because now I'm like damn this guy must know it I have to click so if you're a marketer or a business owner who wants to solve marketing you're going to click on that guys is the dopamine more cheat codes in short thumbnail title thumbnail intro they look at the thumbnail first and the title yeah reaffirm and then they go on yeah and so that's how that's how it goes the most important thing to understand about YouTube is like the thumbnail titles job is to get the click okay once you get the click their job is done the intros job is to confirm the expectation that to confirm that desire loop immediately so if if you say this is the greatest marketing conversation of all time and I click I better be hearing in the first five seconds something about marketing to validate that you're not baiting switching me right so the intros job is to confirm that and then get you to the first main dopamine hit in the body once you get to that first dopamine hit it should come within like 30 to 60 seconds hopefully people will have forgotten what was on the title of thumbnail like the title thumbnail does not it's a discarded it's like a rocket you blast the rocket up the booster will shout out Elon but like before that the booster was just falling in the in the ocean discarded job is just to get the rocket up there same thing with the packaging the packaging job is just to get you to the intro the intros job is just to confirm the click and get you to the dopamine hit that dopamine hit hit is meant to tease you that there's value here you should keep watching but at the dopamine hit the title of thumbnail is being forgotten like I guarantee if you're watching this right now you forgot what the title was and what the thumbnail said I guarantee it and that's because we're I mean we're probably an hour and a half in but like your brain is like a durable you can't you're caching the information like every 15 seconds like you all like a process some of the ones in your brain yeah I would say too you said something there about a bait and switch like we've had that issue before where like the good stuff this is when we weren't doing it beforehand like the good stuff came 45 minutes in and we're like fuck we want to make it the title and thumbnail but then they're gonna think we're just reorder it bait and switching them this was early in the game where we didn't even realize that you can cut in that and reorder the thing is you you want clickbait you don't want bait and switch right you want to bait and then give that's like the whole people are like oh it's too clickbait he's like no you want clickbait I'm trying to bait a click but when when they click I want to give them the bait I don't want to switch right that's the whole that's the whole nuance that's a good way to put it when you're looking in YouTube studio what are those big metrics that you're evaluating so again with the metrics I try not to go too deep on the metrics because it's it's the same like logic around the inputs but overall there's really two ways to approach YouTube there's from a business perspective like I want dollars out and there's from the media perspective like I want views if you're playing the business game you don't actually care about views you care about on target views really you care about dollars per view if you couldn't make a metric that says I got 5000 views on this video and it generated $50,000 that's $10 per view this video at 300 views but it generated $300,000 that's $1000 per view I should make more of the one that got the most dollars right if you're a business owner that's how you should actually look at it the metrics in YouTube are not built for that right the metrics in YouTube are built for the media side because they want more views because they monetize off ad revenue so if you're looking at YouTube studio typically you look at the one of 10 ranking because you're trying to see like relative performance but that only matters if you care if you're playing the media game and you want more views so the reality is you're only as good as the tools you have and so for me like and for everyone you only have YouTube studio so when I look I'm basically looking at CTR click through rate which is how many what percent of people that my thumbnail is being shown to are clicking but that's a noisy metric like you could have that be high in the video do do worse you could have it below in the video do high it's not clean and I'm also looking at the one of 10 relative ranking and roughly like here's how I broke I'm breaking down my like analytics process if the video is it again for the media game if the video is a one two or three of 10 I'm letting it go right because it's like outperforming the relative ranking what I'm trying to do is study what I did in that one so I can replicate it again there's a lot of variables that go into a YouTube video like hundreds of things so it's tough to like isolate one change and be like that was the reason this one did better typically it's conflating factors so it's kind of hard to like extract that learning but that's that's like the the one path if it's a four five six four five six out of 10 like ranking wise so so the only thing I look at in YouTube studio is the one of 10 ranking and the one of 10 ranking is just like what rank out of your last 10 videos is this one relative to views but it's a very like I said it's for all the caveats it's a crude metric so if it's a one out of 10 that's the best if it's a 10 out of 10 that's the worst one two and three out of 10 signals that it's outperforming relative to the field of my own videos so it's the best apples apples metric you can you can get for your own channel if it's a four five or six out of 10 it's kind of like middle of the pack I'll I'll again still leave it but I'll try to figure out was there something different usually if it's a four five six relative to a one two three it's just the idea tam was smaller right so if I made a video about storytelling that's a big tam versus video about systematizing your short form contentian that's kind of a small tam so it's like if I see that small that six out of 10 I can't really hold myself like in too much content like negatively because it was a smaller idea so like it's gonna get less views so that's why that metric is kind of weak I think most people want to know what happens if you see a seven eight nine or 10 out of 10 like you see a low performer typically what I do is there's only one thing you can change in real time it's the title thumbnail you can always switch the title thumbnail so if it's seven seven eight nine or 10 I'll ask my ideas guy like yo this is not performing well do you think we should switch the title to this like usually I'll come to him with like a guess for why it's not performing well and he'll say yes or no and we'll repackage it or we just let it go and we try to say like what didn't work this time let's take that for next time it's so hard to get conclusive evidence for anything I mean if you do like a thumbnail test and you do three different thumbnails and like one of them is like I've seen as high as like 45% yeah compared to the other ones and it's still not enough conclusive evidence it's got to be almost over 50% yeah because they're like with all other things consistent so what you should do is once once one of the three is breaking out set that one as the winner and ideal you make two more that are closer to that one to test all three other government love that doing that I think another big thing and I mentioned it in the kale episode is forget if you're playing the media game one of those first two buckets but if you're playing the consumer game or the B2B sass game soft skills offline stuff understanding and knowing an example for certain episodes I get texts from certain people and the intellect of that human that text me saying they got a lot of value at the episode I mean I've got in one text from people and I'm like wow this person got value from this episode like you have to take that into account yeah under bucket 345 those things don't show up on the statute right so it's like the problem with analytics is there so many conflating variables on the analytics side and there's so many conflating inputs that drive those variables that really the best way to improve and I don't say this in a way to be annoying you want to find somebody that knows what they're doing that can objectively look at the inputs and be like this this and this we're not good look at this this and this as a better example and improve that way like you it's not it's not that you have to have a coach but like you need that's what mr beast had he had like three or four homies that were all about the same skill level one of them would make a video and the other three would look at it and be like not like these things are off and you have objective feedback at somebody at your level or one level above that's what you need because there's too much variability in the things that could change there's 20 variables that drive the performance nobody is going to be able to look on their own with emotion and be like yeah that was definitely like the hook was to they're not they're not going to take a motion out of it so you need somebody that actually knows what they're doing to give you that feedback that's the best way to improve period I have a very strong stance on this specifically to youtube I think you 100% do need a coach and an expert and I mean again we were I don't know two three four episodes in we paid money for very high-level people fuck I would have paid four times the amount of money that I paid for that so I definitely think that you can get from a I mean even listening to podcasts like this like you could really get to top 10% in the world understanding and knowing youtube you just put in the time up front yeah 100% I want to close up on youtube and move on to the next topic it's the last thing is I really want to touch on what are those like biggest kind of expectation mistakes that founders make when they're going on to youtube what do people fundamentally misunderstand about the platform so many well first first of all if you're a business if you're playing the business bucket you're not a youtuber you're an entrepreneur that's using youtube as an effective free traffic source so because of that you want to look at youtube just like you look at all other marketing channels which is iteratively testing with data like you would not go into paid ads and put one ad out there and be like oh man it didn't work and like give up you wouldn't you'd be like I'm gonna put a 100 out there and see what performs then double down like that's that's you would think of it with a science based approach youtube's the exact same way it's just people are more emotional about it because each rep takes longer and and really because they I guess they're romanticized by the idea of being a youtuber potentially but you really want to look at youtube like a series of iterative experiments you have to go through the process of making a video sucking learning what didn't work making a second video etc just like I did with short form you have to do the same thing with youtube the the shitty part about youtube is that every rep takes five days instead of one or seven days right if you're posting once a week so it's like the growth is just slower the iterative learning is slower so the expectations are a you don't need as many views as you think you'd rather have on target views that convert to dollars so that's great like you don't need a hundred thousand views you could you could a couple thousand I mean a thousand thousand a couple thousand views is huge you don't need a ton of views but you're it's going to take way longer than you think do not start youtube unless you expect to put three to five years into it like I've built this whole program that'll come out in the next month or so where I'm really trying to operationalize the playbook for youtube for business owners because it's really not out there a lot of the teachers are all like entertainment focused my goals that if you go through that in 12 months you can have a machine that's driving meaningful lead gen but that doesn't mean in 12 months you're gonna be a celebrity that doesn't mean in 12 months you're gonna have a hundred thousand views every single video like it just takes so much more work than people think so many more reps than people think so that's the biggest the biggest expectation mismatch is really the entire expectation of what how fast people expect it to go it's so slow yeah I mean the two other huge things that touch on there too is one is it's evergreen it lives forever yeah people can go back and binge our lives forever especially like the links in a description live forever and then secondly it's long form usually for the most part and you can disseminate that down to short form and cross pawn and all the other platforms yeah so it's like the best of the best as you get all this content you can just chop it up it's out there so you can even chop the videos into words and newsletter etc yeah the way I think of it is like every video is a sales agent if your content is aligned with your offer every video is a sales agent working 24/7 for you that at any moment and reactivate get juiced for free to all of the buyers which is insane shorts are not really that way shorts are a little bit more short term obviously like it's in the name then they only last for the half-life on shorts is 72 hours maybe five days and then if you really share one on a different feed you might be able to get a second life YouTube's evergreen unless you make news-based content that's time sensitive so I mean I can't emphasize how powerful YouTube is as an engine depending on the game you're playing of course as the caveat it's so powerful yeah and I think another interesting thing with YouTube is the tie-up bow on that too is you have the ability to repackage after the fact and title and thumbnail so you actually can revive right stuff I mean there's stories of videos that were left for dead and nine months later they changed the title and packaging and it goes crazy so you have way more at bats technically yep all right so let's shift a little bit towards distribution and growth you obviously have a massive following across a ton of different platforms I guess let's just start with what do you think is the biggest myth about virality I think the biggest myth is that you need virality I don't think you do I think this this this idea of like on target views versus total views is kind of the fundamental thesis that I believe and I I didn't always believe that because when I started doing the tech and AI which is fundamentally a media play I needed more views like the more views the more money so like that because I was the media says that's a media play right so brand deals brands will look at your last 10 videos and based on an average of the views the engagement and then you're following they use those three metrics to judge how much they'll offer for a deal and you can obviously negotiate it up but like that's you're the band that you can charge is based on that so fundamentally if you're playing the media game you have to have more views which means you're going for virality which means you're broadening the ideas you're broadening the tab you're making the more sensationalist more shocking there's a bunch of like tactics you can do to get more views but the myth is it like that's not actually where the money comes from in the media game yes but there's a cap on how much you can charge for brand deals like in varies niche to niche but the most these huge mega celebrity people that have 7 million followers they're not actually getting that much for brand deals because their audiences are so wide the brands now know they're not worth it or so but like the real truth is that dollar per view or on target views that convert to the offer is where all the money is that's where all the actual fandom like category level fandom comes from is depth in a narrower slice so that kind of applies to like myths around virality and positioning and strategy but I fundamentally believe that to be true for sure on long form and on short form you could make the argument both ways because of the way short form works so you could win short form playing the views game and you could win playing the niche game but YouTube for sure you don't want broad virality so subscribers and followers basically mean nothing to you and it's just a proxy to people that are uneducated for how much they should they should trust you but this is how the psychology works someone sees a video on a short form feed and they're either judge this is good or bad to them then they look to the right and they see the metrics the likes and the comments and the shares are the saves if those metrics are above a minimum credibility line and that line oscillates there's no like perfect number they will trust you more but if it's below a line they'll be like something's off here this should I liked it but no one else did because like the group thing kicks in they'll then click to your profile and if your followers are below the minimum credibility follower number they will not trust you they won't follow you it sucks but like that's the case if it's above they will so followers matters if you're doing brand deals it's one of the three attributes they they price on so it really matters if you're doing brand deals and if you're not it does matter in a binary state whether or not someone trusts you but the difference between 180,000 followers and 365,000 followers is nothing that doesn't matter at all so I only want an incremental follower or subscriber if it's on target to the offers that I'm selling yeah I think there's like a minimum amount of followers you need to have on each platform to be like quote unquote real I think Twitter it's a couple thousand I think Instagram over 10,000 you're real probably the next lever is probably 100 feel like with YouTube is probably 10,000 subs yeah so I think just racing to get to that minimum level where people can look at you and be like okay this person is doing something and the same goes for engagement and the blue check used to be a proxy for that even harder really than the number of followers but now that's gone gone because you can pay for it yeah the engagement stuff too is sometimes absolutely criminal like you see people with massive followings and they have no engagement yeah it's just like and the thing is an unsophisticated viewer would not know the difference and so if you're selling a commodity product you can pay for followers and not have the engagement and a sophisticated viewer might not realize but if you're trying to do a brand deal game where a marketer actually knows or a game a high ticket offer game where like fake engagement doesn't matter that's not going to help you what are those like key signals to the algorithm especially going into 2026 because obviously with all of this the more narrow and the better you feed the algorithm just the more reach you're going to get in general what are those key signals yeah so it all goes back to audience matching which is this fundamental principle like if there's if there were the three core frameworks that I would die the hills I would die on its content minutes audience matching and then probably like anti views will say like the on target first virality thing we just talked about so on the audience matching piece fundamentally the algorithms have one job it's keep people on the platform watching because if they watch they watch more ads they watch more ads the platforms make more money that's the only job of the algorithm so how do you keep people on you give them what they want to see how do you give them what they want to see you know exactly what type of content is coming from that channel so you can bucket it accordingly to give it to people that want to watch it so it's like if I make my first video about tech my second video about science my third video about basketball the algorithm is not really sure what my fourth video is going to be going to be about they don't know it could be any of those three could be a fourth thing now they're transcribing it in real time so you'd say okay well who cares what three previous ones were they'll transcribe it and figured out but they've built a sample pool based on the people who've liked your stuff before who've watched your stuff previously so in that sample pool a third of them watch like the basketball thing a third of them like the science thing a third of them like the tech thing so when they send out your next video the data coming back is weak like the people don't watch and engage with it to the level they would expect if the channel was focused and narrow on one topic and so and we can I can go back and explain that again pendulum you're talking about now too because if you're playing the media game and you want views you want to go wider from a topic perspective you're saying you always want to be within one topic but wider I mean like within the topic so if you make content about marketing wider means you could do a paid marketing you could do viral marketing you like like different sub topics you always want to say with a marketing you don't want to then go to like the NBA right those are like two completely different things so even if you're playing the media game you want to be within one slice you just want to be the most shock worthy sensational wide within that slice type of topics you want that's how you get more views if you want to be narrow to drive to a specific offer you don't necessarily need that right you can be way closer does that make sense or what about all those other different elements is it's specifically transcribing the audio to understand and know the the topic or is it formats from a visual perspective or is it audio only tough to know I don't think the AM models are good enough to be able to ingest a full especially for long form like a full video and really break down like a specific type of cinematography and and match that I don't think there's fiscal enough for that the main thing is they're transcribing in real time and trying to under get basically build a context mapping of what the video is about so in the video if you say terminology that's like more long tail keyword stuff that you say it helps contextualize what the video is about you're basically wow it's like SEO like you're tagging words in the back end the video the video is basically a long tail blog blog post effectively and so it's you and you could say it's using the hashtags and the keywords that all that stuff it might be using but that's like icing the cake is the transcription so what are you saying in the video it's building a contextual map on that now what it does because let me just double click on this because I kind of breathed over before this is how the videos are actually this is how the algorithm works is how they're sampling the videos first it builds a test sample pool if you have some subscribers or followers it'll be like some of your existing audience some of your new audience so let's just say 200 people you post a video the YouTube algorithm transcribes it builds a topic map of what it's about and it builds a 200 person sample pool some of subs some of new and it's trying to guess who would like this the most okay so it blasted the video out to those people now in YouTube are they clicking through the thumbnail to even watch it matters but like on shorts it doesn't matter based on that 200 person sample group it's assessing did they like and watch it more than usual about the same as usual or less than usual if it's more than usual they will build another sample group at one order of magnitude higher so like instead of 200 it's 2000 people but similar makeup because now they know oh shit of the 200 those people liked it more than usual we should go find more people like them but if the signal comes back the same or weaker it's not going to boost it to cascadingly try another will try another cohort of 200 to try and find a free or if it's neutral they may try another if it's bad they're going to throttle it pretty quick so that's why like bad videos on YouTube or shorts get like 200 views total the reason why it's because that first sample group came back shitty like the data was bad and they're like well nobody wants to watch this so like let's not risk like getting you know turning people off the platform and so knowing that what that should trigger in your mind is like okay I need my existing followers to be really targeted on what I'm talking about so that when the video samples them they like it and I need to be very consistent with the videos that I make the topic so that the same type of people like it over and over and over right so the algo can have like a consistent audience demo to then build those concentric circles when you go broader the only way to get a ton of views is for the circle to get mudnier and mudnier right as it gets bigger like if I make that storytelling video I made they got two million views the first group might have been my existing followers it just liked me then the next group might have been people that like storytelling then the next group included like script writers and like cinema it's hard to get muddy but eventually it'll run out of people that like it and the video will throttle down that's how the algorithm actually works so if you make topics that are all over the place and you build a following that came from those all over the place topics the sample data is going to be horrible on any video you post and you're just going to be consistently getting hit signal back and it won't boost you it's a lose lose you're not going to get the views of reply the media game and you're going to be too wide actually get people to convert a bucket three four five the consumer be the best strategy is pick one topic and hammer that topic until retirement makes a lot of sense what about from a content mix perspective like when you look at contents like an example like when Roberto is on he would try and have like an 80 20 or a 90 10 in relation to organic content versus paid what's your system on from an output perspective if you're putting out like 10 different posts is it like I'm going to do you know two on this microtopic two on this microtopic five paid one how do you look at your content output for short form yeah for short form so most people that attack short form have like pillars or buckets kind of like three to four groups I think orange talked about his specific pillars that's typically what most people do so for me on my tech channels I'll have like science sports tech kind of like lifestyle tech will say so those are meant to be bangers there meant to be million plus views meant to juice my numbers so you know random company Microsoft comes out with like a breakthrough on stem cells using an AI model let's break down what it is not educational at all just like tech related news meant for bangers the second one is gen AI tools so like higgs field just released a new model here's what you can use it for and I totally agree that like if you're listening you're like those two have nothing to do with each other I agree I'm not very well optimized on my tech which is why I'm I don't have millions of followers because I did the opposite of what I'm describing I can only say what to do in high tide yeah so like those those are the two main buckets and then the third is kind of like I like breaking down random thoughts on stuff that most people wouldn't come up with so for example Disney announced that they're going to have like AI short form content on their IP so you're going to see like snow white alternate endings that people can make wow with like AI generate yes kind of like an interesting thing so that doesn't fit any of those either those two buckets but I'm like I kind of want to like make a video explaining why I think they're doing this from a business strategy perspective that makes me one of one but it doesn't like fit so if you look at that strategically and you were starting tech from scratch you would never follow that model because it's very it's it's it's they don't really align very well news tech gen ai tools like tactical tools and then like we'll call it business strategy meets tech like those are kind of weird right but those are the three buckets that seem to work well for me and that I post an oscillate between so by doing that though one benefit is that I'll get brand deals from Abu Dhabi racing I'll get brand deals from f1 I'll get brand deals from gen ai tools Disney might even come so like it does provide a broader surface area for brands to be like hey I've seen you make two of these in your last 100 we don't care that you don't specialize in that we're interested in you just like doing it again but I wouldn't suggest someone follow this like super disconnected pillar strategy I think what Orin's doing is a lot more dialed within his like four different types of like topics and then he'll iterate every thing all two three months or quarter layer on it so I've tried to break into different segments but those three are the ones that tend to be like the ideas are the most interesting to me they perform the best and the brands also want to pick so it's like kind of like a good triangle yeah for people out there listening to if and when you understand and know how to create content that demands attention this f1 video it may or may not make sense on your channel but they may want to use it for their organic channels to get their views because they might have a different issue of the new and or use it for ads or for white listed or something yeah so they ask I could go elsewhere and I want to say like what I just described with what I'm doing maybe confusing to people because they might have listened to the principles and then heard my example and then like those aren't congruent I agree my short form strategy is not optimized I didn't realize what to do until after I was too far down the pipe on that if you look at what I do on YouTube it is hyper precise on just social media growth basically video content social media growth in the occasional YouTube growth hyper precise I only talk about topics in that exact slice and I can talk about the way I come up with topics for that but very very very precise and wouldn't you know I'm the fast growing channel in that space so this stuff really does work when you say really narrow on one topic you could argue like my tech channel should be at 800,000 million one point like I have tons of views on that but the following is not that big because people follow when you have topic consistency and a Disney AI to Adobe to like random sports tech they're not really related so is the future different topics different channels yeah so if I unlimited time I would have 17 tech channels one for robotics one for gen AI one for news tech one for science tech I would break them out topically and just go ham like very very very narrow and just hammer volume someone just started out they should just go super super narrow on one channel that's where you win because the way the way to think about term ownership like personal branding I think I talked about this in a YouTube video like in the last couple weeks people in their brain only have enough room for two to three hundred names generally think of it like the Dunbar's number but for the internet but as soon as you say a term you delete all those rows and you just think of the person that's associated with that term so when I say many chat you think of that guy Ganon yeah but I wouldn't think of Ganon as like one of the 200 people that I'm it's just like swirling around in my head he's associated to the term so the way you get notoriety and fandom quicker like cult category cult fandom is what I call it attached to a term the terms that are easiest to attach to are the niche terms that nobody it owns yet if I say business who do you think of no one yeah it's too big so it's like you want to find if you do AI robotic factory robotics if you own that lane well there's less brands that will pay you but the brands that are there will pay you a lot because you own that category so it's way easier to start way more niche wow shout out to the people that own those big macro terms yeah like Hormosi owns business you could say or like one of the people that owns business and shockingly the only person that potentially owned business before is like Gary V maybe you know it's attention I think attention yes the big word and so to say it's like bidding on keywords and on Google right like to say you could go from zero to owning the keyword business as a personal brand in like five years it's pretty insane but that's Hormosi did that I want to talk you talked a little bit about owning a word I want to talk about owning your quote unquote audience or community how are you moving people from your quote what least community social onto your own community like your newsletter other platforms yeah what are some key strategies there it's all lead magnets lead magnets are like the I'm just trying to think of a metaphor to getting real nerdy in my head yeah I was like leaving I'm still the hemoglobin that takes the oxygen as well we'll can that lead magnets are really the the most important like rails like if you think funnels it's all lead magnets right so I can walk through exactly what we do yeah effectively there's a few types of lead magnets and an all lead magnet is getting someone's email in exchange for free value that's all it is so you've got the one off pdf or doc so if I say here's my storytelling framework by the way I went through that really fast if you want a doc where it's written down the links below so that is a lead magnet where you're giving me your email for free and I'm giving you a doc that is like a template or captures by just said so there's that's one that's the easiest one number two would be like a three or five day free email series so it's like a doc but it gets delivered via email and it gets delivered on three or five succeeding days so that could be like if you want to learn virality I know there's a lot to learn so I don't want to just give you like a 20 page pdf I'll I'll tear it out for you over the next five days put your email in and I'll get it so we have one of those virality blueprint calm that's like our landing page that leads you to the five day email series that's a lead magnet third one would be a free community that you're getting their email on the way in so you can be like hey we have a free community there's a bunch of cool people in there there's a bunch of free curriculum in there we're in there if you want to join the community it's completely free give us your email that's pretty compelling because it's free and there's a lot of shit in there we have one of those called wavy world so that would be the third one fourth want to be like a landing page or a sales page where you have like a wait list right fifth one would be a form so like in the description of this video if you want our editors we're going to have a form in there you filled out I get your email so there's a variety of different flavors there's probably a few more but like those are the main ones that we use and the whole goal is can we use content to get you to email because if we can get you to email and you have a problem that I have an offer for I will sell you on it because people open email at crazy rates and they buy from email and they trust email it's like the emails the only place it's like not fully taken over by algorithms you're still like kind of control your own inbox even though you have a bunch of spam from like random brands 60% open right on our emails yeah it's crazy it's insane so all you have to do like like I shit you not you can build a seven figure business just doing content to a lead magnet that's ideally connected you give them a lead magnet you hit the email you put them in a drip either an automated sequence that goes out as soon as you get it or you send them once a week recurring and eventually you ask for them to buy the thing you have to sell if you just do that you could probably do eight figures in revenue just that Jesus and you are organically and authentically integrating this in any and every which way you can into any content on my podcast yeah on your YouTube on your Instagram anywhere and everywhere is there like a specific cadence that you do that is that the top of the mind I've probably done four of them already like because I talked about the editors talked about how crazy they're unlike if you want the editors to go below like that is an ad but we didn't have to pay for that ad and it's I call it a native embed so this is this is a actually yeah when you asked what are some common things about YouTube that people get wrong here's a huge one that we didn't cover native embeds when you make content the goal is to hypnotize the viewer into forgetting that they're watching your content like you you give you lull them into a delusional state basically that's how I look at it like on YouTube that sounds devious yeah well but yeah it's what it's only white hat it's white hat no black hat but basically it's like 20 minute video my goal is that you click I confirm the click I get you the first hit of dopamine I get you the second hit of dopamine and then I've lulled you into this hypnotic state where you keep watching because you like it and it's also helping you if you break the hypnosis for an ad that is the dumbest thing you can do oh so like if I have a video about storytelling and I'm like we'll be right back by the way if you want to buy this couch like that's the dumbest thing you bring someone back up to the surface and they're like whoa where am I and they realize they're watching a video that they don't need to be watching they should be doing work and they leave so it putting I call these non-native ads putting non-native ads in content is the dumbest way to make content the easiest way is to or the best way is make the video and then natively integrate the thing that you need to say like your own products or you're beginning paid to say in a way that does not break the hypnosis and the way to do that would be weave it into the conversation or set up the conversation so that the lead magnet is the answer is this a bad time to say that we're sponsored by many chat add no but no a perfect example would be I talked about Ganon right yeah so when I talk about that you should have been like and do you use money chat and then we talk about money chat for four minutes and we and that's it that's the ad you know many chat as a sponsor yeah I know yeah by the way and you didn't know that or did you know I did in the last episode but that's an example of like if you break away to a new clothes new scene new shirt because you're trying to like systematize it yeah that breaks the hypnosis I'm at a point now or like very very as strategic as we can get to they're not the authentically integrated but they're actual ad reads but I put them into the right part of the conversation yeah yeah like the many chat add read is going to go while we're talking about yeah which is the best thing you can do other than natively and best yeah yeah yeah no I can put the agree with that also one point on that if you see the AVD is like eight minutes you should put the interrupting non-native ad after eight minutes and like the branch should want you to put it before eight minutes right because like eight minutes would be the time where the average person leaves so if you don't want to break the hypnosis before that point so if you think about if you have your own native embeds you want to put those in as early as you can and then as often as you can without alienating any of your any your partnership responses I would also argue too if you're a partner or a sponsor and you're in towards the end obviously you're not getting the whole cohort of the viewers but anybody that stays towards the end it's that much more sticky and I think the conversion rate at the end is high yeah I think it's high at the end I think it's I mean it's highest right at the beginning but yeah like the people that you get the click they for 10 seconds they start the content they're like all right these are our sponsors like that's the worst thing you can do now if you have caught fandom on podcast you can get away with it because people would just skip the ads but still they want to listen but if you're just trying to grow that's the worst thing you can do well we do say that in the beginning and also guys do it now is make sure you subscribe to the channel I think there's 83% of people that listen that aren't subscribed make sure you guys subscribe back to the show last part on distribution and growth before we get into the future of kind of content and attention just tying it up what do you think is the number one biggest hack on short form the best hack is to look at your own content for winners so if you were to prioritize where to study to get new ideas the highest is hit you've made that has worked before make it again now if you don't have your own winners you want to look at the best people in the space with as much as many of those Lego bricks held constant as possible look at what they've made and remake it if you don't have those you should be using sandcastles because we can give you those that's really the hack is like don't go out on an island and try to reinvent the wheel before you even know how to bike go and study the people that have already won and look at what one for them and remake your own version if you just do that for the first hundred reps you will close the gap on a lot of the unknowns and you'll do well along the way yeah I think like from looking at those kind of seven Lego blocks from a quote-unquote first mover advantage I think you win on taking like six of the seven blocks are the winners throughout and then being first mover on one of those seven blocks exactly exactly I think that's what we've done in a good way on a visual perspective let's transition over the future of content and attention I want to just start with what major shifts do you see coming just in content and distribution I know we've talked about a couple of them I don't know if you want to riff a little bit more on kind of these new narrow channels and breaking down your identity and the kind of subidentities so AI contents come in like a wave title wave tsunami it's coming I think the more commoditized the content is the faster it'll be replaced so Twitter for example people are already building they already have AI content machines that's pumping out text-based written content via AI interestingly the counter to this is that I tweeted about this when people see that your content is made with AI it's almost like a soft cancellation like the new cancellation is being caught by using AI but the funny thing is everyone wants to use AI to go faster but you can't get caught that you're using AI or else you'll get soft canceled so it's it's hilarious this hilarious dichotomy right now but effectively if you map content from easy to hard in terms of how to replicate AI is going to come like a wave across the entire spectrum so the last thing to be replaced will be live streams like three hour uncensored uncut riffs with two people AI will not be able to replace that very easily without you being able to tell then long form is like the next best etc you walk all the way back until you get to Twitter so go hard and go unique actually what it is yeah again it all goes back to which of the five games you're playing because if you're playing the media game you've got to go broad big sensationalist capture as much attention as possible and siphon the dollars because in three years that's dead I wouldn't recommend starting with that game to be honest but like if that's the game you want to play because you don't know what the offer is and you don't want to be an entrepreneur that's the strategy I argue it's two years to I don't think three yeah maybe two maybe three if you're want to go the other route where you're trying to build a business that can endure this like AI wave you want to go niche you want to own a term as fast as possible you want to go signature and one of one what what is one of one what unique experiences credibility proof or or like lived yeah lived experiences do you have that you can storytelling around that you can make content infusing into that can't be replicated by a beginner that's where I think you want to play I think you want to you want to get really good at a skill that is AI proof the issue is most skills are not AI proof so fundamentally no matter where the AI ball lands until humans are not the buyer attention will always matter the thing you sell them the product will always matter like a human brain will still decide to buy stuff at some point maybe that won't be true and like a B2B perspective it might just be agents buying from other agents and in that world all of the fundamentals about traffic and offers completely change but like let's assume that world is like five to 10 years out I think for the next five to 10 years you want to understand psychology and attention as much as possible every company is a marketing company every company is a content company so that's where I would like invest all my time in understanding and to have a moat it's all the things we already said signature one of one hibernish yeah and coast as it really good talk talk talk said about future proof and he talks about understanding four things marketing sales writing and speaking and I completely agree and content and copywriting is like kind of like a a big thing that can kind of drive all four of those I love to know like how do you leverage AI just in your world and your business AI tools anything and everything you use on AI side yeah well saying castles dot AI that's my tool I use that a lot that's meant to be like a content workflow tool so it's not necessary it's called AI the writing is AI but not the whole product is not AI so I use that a lot for content we can talk about that if you want I've actually used chat gbt clawed Gemini honestly I love Gemini I think Gemini is overtaking chat gbt in terms of like natural normal day-to-day lm activities wow just like searching never I don't use Gemini TVs cracked it's sick I've moved from chat gbt to clawed yeah so clawed and Gemini are my two favorite chat gbt's like a distant third right now to agreeable chat gbt yeah to agreeable I think in general they're hurting we don't need to get into this but strategically they're gonna have a problem because they don't have a cash cash machine like the others but I think Gemini and clawed are the best too so I use those for like daily tasks and then on the gen AI image and video side I don't use it a ton certain spots will use for like certain use cases all my editors use it a lot and they have subscriptions Higgs field is my favorite for AI image and video they have a basically Higgs field it I hope Higgs field doesn't clip this but no free ads Higgs field is doing to AI video and image what Instagram filters did to photography so the way Instagram use filters to allow the average person to make their photos presentable usable creative feed Higgs field is doing the same thing by templatizing AI image in video creation in a way that's very intuitive so I really like Higgs field free pick is the other one that we work with a lot they have this cool like node-based editor called spaces so to give you a sense maybe we can show this on the screen right now I've got my my gen AI guy building a workflow where we put in one line of a script or one image and it spits out like five to 10 AI-generated videos that are all in an aesthetic that match our brand that could represent that line in different ways and so at scale my editors can just drop in the lines of my script and then get assets made all automatically and it's like a it's like a visual workflow node-based these are assets used for what like B-roll yeah B-roll in shorts so just like in there might only be on the screen for one to two seconds but like just to have more assets if we can't find them from the brand is huge so we're using that but I don't use AI tools a ton even though I am one of the like top AI guys and I think the reason why is because when you have a really particular way you do stuff especially on the writing front the minute I can sense a quality loss I won't trade off quality for speed when it comes to writing and ideas and so there just aren't that many like AI is very bad at generating new thought it's very good at compressing a shit ton of stuff down so if you're making a YouTube video and you have a hundred page document it could be amazing at turning that into an eight page script but if you're like what are the six best ways to do hooks and you're trying to come up with novel ideas it's not good at generating novel ideas because it's trained on what already exists right I think compressing combining but not ideating combining is another really good one to is I like taking random stuff PDFs videos this that then just kind of yeah throwing it all together and just cleaning it up for me the interesting thing is you would think someone like me who is willing to try anything I'm I'm obviously emotionless when it comes to like winning you would think someone like me would just all day be in the trenches with AI tools trying to figure out like a better mouth trap but even me I don't enjoy a task that I know how to do well in 10 minutes I don't enjoy taking an hour to do it worse I don't enjoy that in like that's where the AI bunny rabbit comes in AI rabbit is figuring it out exactly and until he can get it to one or two minutes exactly not lose the quality I think we're in this weird like this weird inner in between period where the tools exist to where people that spend all day on them can get marginal gain but they're not good enough to wear an average person like let alone me who's deep on this stuff can get 10x output with like the stuff I would need content writing etc so we're in this like weird middle ground where there is an arbitrage if you can spend time learning how to set up these systems yeah but today it's not an overwhelming amount what do you think is the next like major platform you think anything do is gonna pop up or just iterations off the current ones I think we'll see a zag for human only content against the zig of AI content I made a video on my YouTube channel breaking down like how I think AI content will play out and there's like four paths all paths lead to or like how the social platforms will treat AI content all paths lead to them allowing it for their interests so I think there will be a zag to that where they'll be like the Etsy of human only human verified whether it's like biometric or whatever content I don't nest that doesn't mean that's gonna be the popular platform because typically people like junk food so like if the AI gets better than the humans which it will just from that math perspective people will prefer to see personalized stuff that's like amazing versus human-made stuff that's whatever that's where the block jam will come in and be super useful potentially to really really verify yeah 100% we'll have that for sure that'll come I think once we have AR as like a primary vehicle so like the smart glasses you'll have another native type social experience to that like it makes no sense to wear those glasses and scroll like this with it in your eye that makes no sense to have a feed so there'll be a reinvention of whatever content looks like in a AR world and then eventually like a VR 3D world and I'm sure I'm sure someone will come out with a new mouse trap but the reality is these Instagram got caught flat-footed on TikTok and they won't get caught flat-footed again so whoever innovates on anything that's even remotely popular the big boys will rip it so I don't think we'll see another like chat gbt or open AI try to make Sora to like the feed of AI generated content but there's actually a and a lot of people using it but there's a pretty violent community against the like AI slop niche you see those in the comments yeah so maybe maybe Sora to become Sora 7 and that becomes amazing at like like netflix on demand type content so I could see something there but I don't think there's going to be a huge new thing that comes out of nowhere that's not what I just mentioned I guess the big question to put a pin on that is someone that understands content marketing attention in a big big way how much longer do you think we have for this content distribution arbitrage where people can get from zero to a hundred thousand followers in three four months how much longer do we have until this is over so there's there's two questions there there's how much longer do we have of being able to do it and then how much longer do we have of it meaning anything because if if today there are fifty thousand people with over a million followers and tomorrow there's two million accounts because a lot of them are AI generated then the value of having a million followers goes down right so I think we have the read of five years probably two years on the short form platforms and then closer to five years on the longer form before AI content is indistinguishable but actually so and is accessible to enough people that are not experts to be able to actually flood the feeds rough guess I mean the this is what I want to say this era will close like the the same the same way people would probably thought in 2020 like the zerp era where they're like I should have got it then because like I had a two year window in it closed this like free distribution at scale for free or I said free free distribution at scale from let's say two thousand seven or eight to probably twenty twenty eight RIP 20 year window you you had never coming back it's never again that's ever you had a 20 year window where you could make shit and have free amplification to infinity and you could argue okay the two thousand eight to like 18 era the tools were worse and like there were not four u feeds so let's just say the four u era is this gen three of social or whatever from 2020 to 2028 eight year window if you didn't eat during that window you're never getting that back and so what does that look like after 2028 maybe it's paid a play which is basically just paid ads maybe there's a bedrock of AI generated free content that is so competitive and so data optimized it like you just can't cut through via human and so the only way to cut through is that platforms will sell you a ten dollars per post option to cut a cut above it that's probably that's one very legitimate path where we end up and I guarantee when people are paying ten bucks a post they're going to be pissed that they didn't go harder during this era I'm like I couldn't be more pounding the table like you have about three years to just go ham and because the because of the supply-demand dynamics and the way for you algorithms work you can you can do serious damage in three years you could build a fifty million dollar business in three years I mean you've had many people on here that have basically done that so now's the time guys we're going to give 15 seconds of silence the pop of video of the attention guru the attention Yoda Gary Vaynerchuk let's just watch him for 15 seconds because you just sounded exactly like him and he has so many fucking good things all right this last thing what is the biggest difference between quote unquote telling stories and telling stories that convert for a business yeah that's a great question well conversion comes from trust trust comes from proof and/or demonstration of ability so I would say that's the right question is not the difference between the storytelling it's more the topic and then what you actually cover in like the meat of the video itself storytelling is just the way to preserve attention throughout it's just like the connective tissue which is still contrast setting up stakes making it relevant like these things we can talk about but the difference between conversion and not is just giving someone a hit of something that they would get if they bought the thing right so if you're selling like a G one it's showing the transformation that some people get by getting it if you're selling an agency service it's demonstrating your ability to get the results that the person is paying for make sense any type of kind of like tactical process or systems that you use to go from a raw idea to a finished script yeah any advice you can get the someone out there on storytelling and that first thing is to try to figure out what's interesting about the topic and I call this the angle so what is interesting it's either shocking from an entertainment perspective or useful for an education perspective so the angle needs to be one of those two depending on the type of content you're making what you want to do is think through what do most people believe that I disagree with which is kind of goes back is like a full loop on what we said at the beginning around contrast so what I try to do is say there's a piece of the story a fact a take some implication that I have and I try to rank on a scale of zero to a hundred I call it a shock score how shocking would it be to reveal this thing and the shock score is usually out of a hundred people in a room how many would have thought that previously which is getting to the same idea of like common belief versus new reality the whole deal with storytelling is figuring out what you can say that most people don't believe but then they can believe pretty quick once you say it that like aha moment that is contrast and that's what gets people curious to keep listening so if I say prince charming is walking in the woods the common belief would be he's going to keep walking but if a dragon pops out of the woods you weren't expecting that so out of a hundred and now we've ever seen Disney so like maybe a few people would say that but like agnostic of Disney out of a hundred people how many would say a dragon's going to pop out not many so it's like that's pretty shocking now there's new stakes new information so people's new reality becomes the prince and the dragon so it's like what do you think's going to happen most people think they're going to fight maybe this one I say okay they do fight so I give them something they would believe it's just zigzagging down the path of being like what do most people believe what do you believe that it's not true that you can prove quickly and then do that in succession talk a lot about contrast what about conflict how important is conflict in the story use that in all of your storytelling conflict is basically a form of contrast right so like conflicting beliefs would be like contrasting beliefs I kind of think those are interchangeable usually conflict has to do with stories that have subjects right a lot of the stories I'm telling in content maybe the subject is like Google but there aren't like people it's like hypothetical versus yeah exactly but it's still contrast like sense what about the payoff how important is it to have to pay off at the end what happens if you don't have the payoff I think people don't like being bait and switched and when you don't have a payoff that's what it feels like because again and this goes back everything really ties together it's all the same really but like if you establish context on something and you bait them they need some fulfillment of the bait could be different bait or the same bait but they need bait to confirm if you switch and you take the bait away and you're just like yeah in the story ended they're not going to be very interested in that right people hate being bait and switch so you need the payoff to kind of close the last loop that's really what the payoff is need the bait but not the bait and switch all right we're just gonna quick strike a ton more questions before we close up this has been amazing this is dopamine on another level nice hopefully valuable it definitely is I guess let's start with what's the single most important system or workflow change that has allowed you to go from kind of sporadic content to true content machine so on short form it was getting the content operator the idea guy to offload a lot of the because because ideas are a bottomless pit you could spend infinite time so getting that off the plate is critical editing is not a bottomless pit it's tight right so you want to get that off the plate but like there's a fixed amount of hours on the YouTube side it was starting with the a team from day one love that biggest learning lesson from interviewing Mark Zuckerberg he's actually a dope guy like I think he got a lot of bad bad publicity like during the Senate hearings and stuff but like he's actually sick like he's like he's a cool guy he's chill he's really locked in like he can task switch like no one I've ever seen but he's actually like a cool guy she's got a lot of big problems he's got to deal with he can't be flawless I mean yeah yeah running one of the biggest companies in the world he's just a normal guy right like that's the thing what is the biggest regret in your professional life waiting too long to go into the entrepreneurial game the entrepreneurial game how old were you when you started well I've been launching I built my first company when I was 20 but it failed and then I've been launching stuff in my 20s but I was half and half out so like my biggest regret is just not going balls to the wall sooner I do think you need I think Sean from Ridge said this you need to go into a real job to like get your teeth kicked in and actually build some skills like you need some ability so I think it's it's not the right advice for someone who's 18 to just go into entrepreneurship without any skills or backing but very quickly once you're like I have that dog in me you want to go and go all in yeah for me looking back and for my future because definitely not going to college just developing the skills earlier and then being able to start in the entrepreneurial journey early because I feel like people go to college and then they develop the skills through like mid to late 20s and they start then yeah I rather just start that in high school so it can be entrepreneurs at 21 to build off that it's basically I didn't realize that it was all skills it's all skills and when you're in a job you hate you try to resist learning skills because you're just trying to sneak around to keep getting paid but you're just delaying the reality which is you need skills if you want to win on your own so you want to start that and it's going to take five to seven years to actually build fundamentals so you want to start that clock as soon as possible what's the biggest learning lesson from interviewing Spotify founder Daniel Eck he was also super chill I think the learning lesson zooming out to like compare the two because I have only interviewed those two and like no one else has light flex only the two interviews in this whole tar like those I never want to find Facebook's yeah it's kind of crazy they're very different though so I think the learning is that you can win big in a variety of different ways there's infinite ways to play the game infinite attributes that help both of them seem very locked in and present on what they're doing that's the common I mean there's many commonalities but that was one that being in the room with both of them physically they can lock in so quick like task switch but then be like a hundred percent present I think is a real skill yeah I feel like they're like there's very few people in my life where it's like a lot of it's 15 minute meetings sometimes I do 15 minute meetings but he's locked in from three 30 to three 45 with that three 46 he's onto the next exactly definitely yep what's one question you wish people asked you about social media but don't I wish people came to me holistically and we're like I have this business I have this these resources what is the strategy to win the game I will do anything to tell me what it is I wish more people came with with like a more open mind to me solving it for them instead of close mind like I have this one singular problem is like well let's actually like zoom all the way out that's not the right problem right people get very fixated on what they think the wrong the issue is so I wish people came to me with a more open mind sooner about and just let me lay it out for them love that if you had to go from zero to one million dollars in a year how would you do it today first thing I would do is build a high ticket high margin so it's one million dollars revenue a profit let's say profit let's go profit yeah okay first thing I would do is build a high high ticket high margin if I have no skills I'm going for a done for you offer but if I have some skills I'm doing like a done with you offer somewhere in the five to ten k range and then I'm making super precise high value educational content on youtube and I'll be at a million in a couple months love that how do you use the common strategy to drive discovery yeah so comments are actually a super underrated way to get virality again might not be after virality but if you have the right people commenting it actually can trigger on target virality comments are just another surface for people to be entertained by whatever you're you're making so if you use the script effectively to drive a certain question that people can debate you want like contrarian debate in the comments you create these like little cyclones where people are fighting with each other in the comments that actually boosts engagement a lot so that that would be one way the other way is use the comments to get like to get people to trust you more by like respond actually responding taking the time to respond to everything yeah you know it's so crazy too it's so weird because in their burdo next in episode rpn great episode guys the views on one of our shorts went absolutely bonkers like out of nowhere and that was because the CEO of instagram sorry yeah liked the asset nice and apparently I think certain people certain likes are disproportionately given more push through the algorithm I didn't know that the other I call it super shares but I'm assuming it happens with likes to is like 500,000 followed account shares your video is gonna be worth a thousand x what like a normal person would be I assume the same thing is true with likes he liked like two or three and they went absolutely bonkers was crazy maybe he has the the super flip super switch in the back end it looks like it's got that a hundred x many double taps all right when I ask you these last four questions I ask everybody favorite book or podcast them why so good one I actually don't read that many books I should read more but I prefer listening to stuff and I just don't like consuming other content to be honest I might use my thought but favorite I love this pod this is a great one what else I listen to I think sweat equity with Garcia and Brian Blum if you know that one I do they're good smart guys columns my homie calme johnson I just you talk to him I like him yeah he's great yeah so I listen to his sometimes charming charming accent too yeah group chat sometimes I'll listen to if I'm really trying to like just disconnect they talk a lot about L.A. which I can't relate to so I always speed through I took a I took a random trip on group chat like six and I was fun yeah I heard you yeah yeah it's fun that was when I heard that and then I went to go DM you and you had DM me that's that's when that's when we connected so shout out D yeah shout out I haven't talked to him for a minute he actually just messaged me last night I don't know the master connector I listen to like a random Chris Williams in episode every now and then but I'd I really I usually go based on the guest whatever I see on the YouTube that goes back to that ICP game and about staying deep and narrow he obviously has escape velocity he's huge I mean he's having a very very different type of people yeah so obviously he's dominant once you get once you transcend the algorithm which I would say dire CEO Chris Williams in Rogan then you can you have carte blanche but I think it's harder and harder to get to that point and only a few people have ever got to that point guys if you're listening it's been three hours maybe two episodes of an hour and a half each that means that you really fuck with this podcast if so please say in the comments topics guests who do you want to hear from because we're in the midst of going through a lot of these cane exercises currently it's been a shot to the face understanding and knowing this yeah entrepreneur or brand you want to get flowers through and why nice there's so many why I love George he didn't I love rap episode one absolutely yeah one crazy yeah listen to that I'll have to meet him sometime I think like on the creator side there's a lot of my homies brand and Wang you know heard of this guy brand you know he's sick I really like creators yeah good taste I love I was about to say that I love creators with good taste like I think Alex Garcia the way you ship that his visuals is sick orange got great taste Roberto's the homie Roberto's like the best in tech by a mile he's so sick York is another guy in the family I just had a crazy crazy crazy conversation you're like a story but I don't interrupt you know I don't I don't this guy's fucking story bro he was doing like live streaming and people were paying him like 30 hours chalk this beer people were like paying to like he was like few and I said well it was he had the craziest life of the craziest turnaround yeah he's a great guy Steve will do it into rock yeah literally it's it's a crazy crazy it's wild I'm trying to think who else I shout out a few with the pod as well yeah those are those are the I mean there's so many more but those are kind of lists like freshman double XL classes is kind of how I think of creators is a bunch of people like in my class I think Roberto or in Garcia Riley Brown calum like these guys are we all started around the same time and we're all it's cool to see like everyone's winning but they're all doing different stuff love it last question I'm kind of gonna adjust it a little bit what a success look over here where's king gonna be in let's say five years what a success look like what is this a successful king cowboy look like in five years it's a tough question well the original my original goal was to figure out how to do a million a month in profit so that was like pick a mountaintop and then play the game to kind of figure out the mountain so climbed up about a little bit away come all the way down back up rebuild back up I think I have a path now that I'm pretty clear on to do it but that's like not success it's just like the money goal I don't know I think I want to be I want to be doing something obviously want to be doing something I care about I really like being good at stuff as most people do so I want to be doing something I like that I'm world-class at that has an impact in the business world I love playing the game of business like the macro game so I'll be doing something in that sphere right now I'm trying to be like the best in the world at attention so whether it's short form video or long form video like I'm trying to build the rail so that any business owner could come in one side and out the other comes dollars and the the the factory was attention and video basic content so I'm trying to like completely productize that whole process right now so that's going to be my focus for the next few years mostly because it's a fun game it's very high impact and and yeah I leverage but I think there's I have a few more seasons to me beyond that so my initial goal is like build a machine that can build machines and that's what a content factory really is but at some point I'll have to shift and start building machines right so we'll see dude I think you're well in your way an amazing time bro why don't you tell everybody where they can find you all the socials all the URLs go crazy awesome so if you're interested in the social media marketing YouTube stuff which you probably are Callaway Marketing at Callaway Marketing is my YouTube channel I have a newsletter called content dot game I have a software tool for short form growth it's I think it's the best best in the world today going to be the best in the world compounding called sandcastles so that sandcastles dot AI if you want my help on the short form side I have a program that I really do not push or advertise ever this is the first time talking about it here short form dot academy is where you can find that I'll be launching the YouTube equivalent which is basically like the world class information with group calls and me helping you on both short form and YouTube so short form dot academy and then the YouTube one is not out yet so we'll I don't have a URL for that but just look in the description I'm sure we'll put it in there that's all the like marketing stuff I do if you're interested in the tech stuff at Callaway or at Kane Callaway on TikTok and Instagram you can find me amazing guys hope you enjoyed sweet what's up guys if you guys got this far in the episode I would assume that you enjoyed it if you got any value it would mean the world if you hit the subscribe button give it a like post a comment tell a friend we could keep going bigger bigger gas bigger locations more value see you in the next episode
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