The New Rules of Marketing, Building an Audience, and Digital Entrepreneurship in 2026

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Most of the businesses that fail to scale that I work with are unable to get to like a million dollars or even a few million dollars in business is they have too many skews. They've got too many things that they're trying to sell that this one makes a little bit of money. This one makes a little bit of money and it ends up just pulling them in all these different directions. They're trying to make Instagram work, they're trying to make LinkedIn work and they're running ads on Facebook and they've got this pick one channel, one way to attract, one way to convert and one way to serve. It is very easy to grow your audience right now. It is very easy to grow your distribution. If you get a flywheel in place and you're putting stuff out there, what kind of marketing funnels are you seeing work the best right now? If you are, how would you 1-1-1 it right now? You pick one platform, one avatar, one form of content and you should be driving people to subscribe to your email newsletter where they can go deeper in what it is that you have. If your time account gets shut down or your YouTube account or LinkedIn account or Facebook account or whatever, you can take your email list, you can put it on a SD card, you can move to any country in the world, you can plug it back into your computer and you can start over. If you were in 2026 deciding, okay, this is the year I want to get a new business off the ground, what would you do different than you perhaps would have done starting this 10 years ago? Most people do not stick with the thing that they're doing long enough in order to see results. The paradigm to optimize for is sustainable, not scalable. Ryan, I actually found you because of your newsletter that you're writing to, which I am a huge fan of and you said something in there which really stopped me in my tracks and made me rethink my entire business model and it was around the mid-tier products not working anymore and I have a signature 3K product and I was like, is this the end of my 3K product? What does this mean? And so I went down a rabbit hole of your work and I just was blown away in consuming so much of your content. I'm so grateful that you're here. Can you start there? Is my product dead? Well, look, I would say that there are exceptions to every rule, right, but what's happening in the world right now is what I describe as a great bifurcation. So we have AI that's accelerated the trend toward the infinitely scalable, which has pushed the vast majority of what it is that we do to being free. The expectation in the market is this should be free. And at the same time, we have value migrating to the extremes where we have a very small segment of what we do that can be positioned as being ultra premium. And this mirrors what's happening generally speaking in the world in terms of wealth inequality right now. Since you and I have been alive, we are at the greatest point of wealth inequality in over 100 years, meaning you've got a smaller and up number of people that have a greater concentration of wealth in their hands and greater purchasing power than ever. And you have a larger segment of the world that's struggling. So at the top of the market, in your market, in my market and anyone who's listening to this right now, you've got a segment of your market that's very much price insensitive, meaning they'll pay $10,000, $15,000, $20,000, $25,000 to them. It's effectively the same amount of money. It's not impacting their purchasing decision. But then you have the vast majority of the market that you serve right now that may be struggling. Credit is really tight right now. People don't have the same purchasing power that they once did. There's a lot of fear and uncertainty about where the world is going, whether that fear or uncertainty is warranted or not. So what that means is the middle is hollowing out. And it's what I describe as the void to avoid in the middle, where you do not want to be is in the middle, trying to sell something that doesn't have the margin at the ultra premium side of the market. But at the same time is really designed for the masses or the mass affluent in your market. And you and I both grew up really in the same paradigm of having a mid tier two to $3,000 or sort of bread and butter offer that's the core of what it is that you do in your business. And I see hundreds of businesses, and I can tell you right now that the middle is hollowing out. So interesting. We have definitely seen similar to we're seeing low ticket just absolutely crushed right now. And then we're seeing our high ticket mastermind do really, really well. And I'm still fighting for that middle because I know I have so many women that need more support than the low ticket, but they are not ready for that mastermind. So I'm in that middle place of trying to figure that piece out too. So I'll report back, but that brings me to what I want to talk to you about today is the new digital marketing playbook, because for anyone that says their marketing is working the same way that it has been for the last five years, they are not probably telling a truth, things have changed. So before we dive into that, I want to get into a little bit of your journey because you're very well qualified to speak on this, even if someone is new to your work, they are not new to your work. They have been through or created a quiz funnel. That is what you've created. You've generated over a hundred million dollars doing this. Can you tell me a bit about your journey? Yeah, sure. So 20 years ago, I was working in corporate, and I had this dream that I wanted to make $10,000 a month in passive income on the internet. That was kind of like my someday maybe dream, and I thought, okay, I could quit my job, and that's all I ever want to do. So I started exploring going into these different niche markets. My first business was in a totally random market. I was teaching people how to make Scrabble Tile Jewelry, which is a business my wife found on Etsy when we saw that there was an opportunity. This is like in 2006, and so we built that business to a few thousand dollars a month that took off and it collapsed, but it kind of gave me a bit of experience to understand how to figure out what your market wants and give it to them. So then I followed that same process in the market care market and the memory market, and at that time my dream, my vision was I said, okay, if I can build 20, half a million dollar of your businesses, I'll have a $10 million empire. So I did it in three different markets, and I quickly realized that was a really bad idea. But I learned a process along the way that was the only way I was able to enter these markets, and it was to use what was a very primitive form of what has come to be known as a quiz funnel. And along that time, I had businesses that start to see, and here what I was doing, I started doing a bit of speaking, and I had big companies that wanted to partner with me to bring this into their business. So I partnered with about a dozen companies. I went into the golf market and partnered with a company, ended up selling that company to NBC, the golf channel for nine figures. I went into the business funding market with now known as a quiz funnel to build a business funding assessment effectively. We sold that company to PayPal for over a hundred million dollars. And so I got very small pieces of these exits. I wasn't the majority shareholder, but it showed me that there was a real power in this process. So then I started teaching this, and I wrote a book, my first book called Ask, which surprisingly went on to be the number one best-selling book in the country when it launched about 10 years ago, a little over 10 years ago now. And it served as a cornerstone to build a seven-time ink 5,000 fastest growing company, build a training and education company, then later build a software and technology company, and then later sold that business, and kind of served as the first really 15 years of my life in the digital world. And I'll talk a little bit about why I sold the business when I did, why I exited that space when I exited, and what I'm seeing sort of evolved in what's different today than what was true maybe even five years ago. So let's get into that then. Are you seeing right now in 2026 that is very different to the last couple decades of doing this? Well, I'll tell you right now, Adam Aceri, who's the head of Instagram, did a keynote. And he had some words that I thought was really, really, really interesting. And it's that we spent the last decade trying to figure out what makes something perfect. We're going to spend the next decade trying to figure out what makes something real. And I think that really underscores certainly the thesis of my most recent book, and really what I've spent the last two plus years of my life really diving deep into, is that what the market is craving right now more than anything else. And you can look at this in all sorts of different ways is not more that the market is craving is what's real. They're looking for real people. The market wants real food, real ingredients. They want someone that they can really trust. They want to exist in the real world, not just in this digital synthetic abstraction of what life has become. The world is craving what's real. So if we go back in time, 20 years ago, when having a website was new and novel, having an online funnel was new and novel, those were competitive advantages at that time. If you could reach your customers in this automated way, that was a competitive advantage that made a lot of sense in a very different time and place. Today, what's happening? happen, like most things, like fashion and many things in life, is that the pendulum has swung back in the opposite direction. Where we no longer trust those automated sales processes online, the fake personalization at scale that I've used myself, like I'll be the first to admit. I've used a lot of that myself. The market's very jaded around all of that. And now with the advent of AI, there's this level of distrust that exists, where people no longer trust their eyes and ears, when they're experiencing something online. To know if it's real, is it a deep fake? Is it AI? Or did this come from a real human being with a real beating heart? So what's changed, and the competitive advantage today, is to build a business that demonstrates that what it is that you're creating, is real. It's not just about the what you're doing, it's about the how and the who. It's about your process behind what it is that you make. And it's about the person you are behind your products and services, and why you're doing what you're doing. So that's sort of a, I know, shot across the bow, not necessarily totally invalidating the first 20 years of my career and everything that I've done in the digital marketing space. But I think what we need to recognize, to your point that you brought up earlier, is that we are living in a very different time and place today. Then we were even just a few years ago. And the faster you can accept that and recognize that, the faster you can move forward and make the pivot necessary in your business, to survive and thrive, what's coming next. I really agree with you, and I'm curious your take on this because I feel like right now, it is very easy to grow your audience right now. It is very easy to grow your distribution if you get a flywheel in place and you're putting stuff out there. And right now, you pretty much can't assess whether someone is real or fake on Instagram, or you can get a sense of it, we can kind of spot some of the AI tells and the avatars, we can definitely spot the AI writing. I don't think that's going to be true for too much longer. And I think the people that are building the brands now and are building their own distribution are doing something really powerful because five years from now, someone more question is Ryan real is not really real. They know we are. Right. But if you're building your brand five years from now, I do worry that the window is closing because it's going to be so hard unless you're running events unless you're in person with people which I think is going to really take off. I worry that it's going to be hard to know if you're a real person. I'm curious how you feel around that and the building of distribution and personal brands right now. A million billion percent. I mean, look, you and I are having this conversation virtually, but a little kind of behind the scenes. I was slated to fly from my farm in Vermont to California to be in person to record this interview and I got three hours into my journey when my flight was canceled. And there was no way that I could make it in time for our interview so I had to turn around and take a four hour journey back from Boston to my farm in Vermont. And the reason why I was committed to doing that is because I believe wholeheartedly in this thesis that we can talk about this in different ways. But like I'll introduce a neuroscientific perspective, which I think is helpful and then we'll talk about how to practically implement this in your business. So my background, before going into business, what I studied in school was neuroscience. I taught and studied neuroscience at the Ivy League level. I thought at one point in my life, I was going to go into medicine and pursue study of the brain. So it's always been a passion and interest of mine. And if we look at digital marketing through the lens of neuroscience, the neurotransmitter that's gotten all the headlines, the last decade plus is the neurotransmitter dopamine. We all know about dopamine loops, right? We get these addictive product loops that people keep coming back for more. The problem is there was a time and place for that. But what's emerging in the world right now is that there's a new neurotransmitter that's more important than dopamine and that neurotransmitter's a neurotransmitter of oxytocin. Now as a mom, you probably know about oxytocin as the love hormone when a mother gives birth to a baby, there's just this flood of oxytocin that creates a lifelong bond and love and that's uncontrollable and it's what bonds are human species. Now the thing about oxytocin is it's also the neurotransmitter of trust. An unlike dopamine, which can be triggered with like a shade of red on an alert on your iPhone, oxytocin requires physical presence, touch. It can be listed with something like a hug. From afar, it can be elicited through story. So I believe in this post-AI world to answer your question on a more tactical level, what is the opportunity, whereas the competitive advantage, I believe arguably speaking that the most valuable post-AI skill to really get good at is telling stories. Stories that create emotional response in your readers, in your listeners, in your viewers because they can create this bond and it can fill this void that most people don't realize not only that they have, but that the neuroscientific mechanism behind it, that the isolation, the disconnection, the loneliness that people feel is actually a deficit in oxytocin in their body. Like we need psychologically speaking, some are between four and eight hugs per day. Like actual hugs is not a metaphor. Like we really need that many hugs and if you got young kids because you got two young girls. Yeah, two girls, yeah. Yeah, so you got two young girls. I've got two, I've got a preteen and a teenager, both boys. You're getting two hugs probably right now? Yeah, yeah. So I'm like, I'm kind of getting out of the hug window with my kids. Like, you know, they're like, yeah, dad, I'll give you a hug, but, you know, not like when they were really, really young. And so we need this. We need this around this. Now, okay, so you might be saying, okay, I'm a digital marketer, I sell courses. Like, how does this even relate to me? Well, what it means is we've got to rethink what it is that we deliver to our audience. Dopamine has gotten all the headlines. And so we've largely built businesses that are designed to create these dopamine loops. That was the last decade. What's in front of us right now is what I describe as this global oxytocin deficit. You touched on one element. People are craving in person connection. So maybe in the past where we shied away from building an in person component in our business, we thought about building a digital course and, you know, serving people over Zoom and doing all the things that we could do, so we kind of shied away from having an actual physical event. I believe in person events should be at the center of any transformational educational expert-based business. And if you're not doing that, you're missing out on a huge, huge opportunity. Our newest products have gone from idea to sales page in under a week. That speed has completely changed how we launch. We don't bet everything on one big release anymore. We test more ideas, more pages, more designs, and our audience tells us which ones to keep. When I started, I couldn't work that way. One website was such an investment that every single launch had to be absolutely perfect. 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I didn't, but the store owner did probably back in October, probably on fair. So fair is a wholesale marketplace connecting independent retailers with more than 100,000 unique brands worldwide, home, apparel, beauty, food, and more, over 700,000 retailers already stock their shelves there. And if you are the ones stocking those shelves, the timing is on your site because eligible retailers get 60 day interest free payment trims. So what you order this month isn't actually due until December when you're already selling. Your first order with every brand also comes with free returns. So if you run a shop now is the time to prep for the holiday season, and I think fair is the perfect place to find unique high quality products chosen for your exact customer. You can sign up today and get 50% off your first wholesale order up to $100 at F-A-I-R-E.com/BossBabe. That's F-A-I-R-E.com/BossBabe, terms may apply. I could not agree more with everything you said. I've been keynoting a lot recently and there's one thing I keep sharing that I really believe that I can really see resonating because a lot of the people in the audience are selling expertise in some way. I'm talking a lot about the changes that A-I is bringing around is people are less willing to pay for your expertise now, but they're paying for your experience. Your expertise, for me as a postpartum mom, I went and trained a Claude Biohacking Brain on the best researchers and research and thought leaders in the world on biohacking in postpartum. And I can get that expertise anytime. What I cannot get is someone to coach me through what I'm really going through as a postpartum mom. It's not about just going to the gym and making sure I do XYZ. Actually, it's about all the emotional pieces for me. It's about leaving the kids. It's about the body changes. It's about so much more than make sure you're going to the gym and you're hitting these muscle groups and you're getting the creatine and fill in the blank. And I always give that example to say for those of you that are freaked out that, you know, if you're a postpartum coach, fitness coach, you're going to have no clients. That is a perfect demonstration of why we are going to continue to choose the human as long as you lead with your experience and not your expertise. And what you've just said there just totally clicked that into place for me because I'm so much more likely to buy from that person. If they tell me a story about themselves going through a postpartum or a client versus just giving me a laundry list of benefits and things. So I love that and it's so interesting though because storytelling is how we have evolved as human beings around a campfire. It's always been the heartbeat of marketing. Yet I feel like a lot of people are outsourcing that first. You know, with AI, the first thing they take off their plate is copywriting. And copy is the way that you communicate your story. It's the way that you actually get in front of your clients and actually have them feel something through your words. And so I think it's a huge mistake. What is your thoughts on the fact storytelling was one of the first things we did as human beings to connect and it's coming back again. Do you see more things like that happening? How are you piecing the two together, especially within neuroscience background? You must find that fascinating. - Well, I'll say a few things to that. So yes, there's a tremendous amount of data that we have around the connection between oxytocin and storytelling and the connection that it actually creates between us, the bond that it creates, between us, the writer and the reader or the creator and the viewer. But I'll speak just from personal experience. So I'm not, you know, preaching from the mountaintop is the person who made no mistakes. I've made all the mistakes in the book. And so two years ago I actually sat down and I wrote an email that I titled the Embarrassing Confession and in this email to my audience, I basically said, I've an Embarrassing Confession to make and it's this. For the last seven years, every single piece of content, every single email, everything that you've seen with my name attached to it was actually not written by me. It was written by a team of writers and more recently AI. And over time, I became increasingly uncomfortable with this. I just didn't feel like it was right. Now, when you're in rooms like you and I have been in before, it's a pretty typical path. You know, the team of writers, they write in your voice, they learn how to write your brand voice. It's signed, you know, Natalie or Ryan or whatever at the bottom of the email. And that's kind of generally accepted. But it got to a point where I'd open up my email inbox that had my laptop open. I'd read an email that we sent out, had my name attached to it. And I would want to slam my laptop shut 'cause it was just, it caused me to cringe. And I kind of just put it aside. I thought, okay, this is the cost of scale. I built a company. I had 100 people working for me at one point between both our software company and our training and education company. So big team, I'm a CEO, I'm running this company. I don't have the time to sit down and write these emails. I've got too many jobs that I need to do. But I reached a point where I was so bothered by it, I wrote this email. And I said, here's the deal. People can tell the difference between the watered-down version of orange juice that comes from a can and the freshly squeezed variety that you get at Sunday brunch. And people are craving the freshly squeezed variety of you. They can taste the difference and what they're craving is that real version of you. And it ended the email. I said, can you tell that this email was written by a real human being with a real beating heart? Can you feel it? Your audience wants to feel your beating heart too. And they can tell the difference. They really can. We can tell the difference. And you've probably experienced this before where you've experienced someone's brand, someone's writing a social media post in email and you can just tell that it rings hollow. There isn't, it's not a lie. And I think that's the word that I would describe that what people want to feel more than anything else is they want to feel that something is a lie. And the challenge is, is we've been sold this story as business owners, as CEOs, as entrepreneurs, that the thing that we should hold at highest regard and everything that we do is answering this question, does it scale? How do you scale it? But here's the thing. The things that don't scale for you, don't scale for anybody else. And so therein lies the competitive advantage. So when I wrote that email, the embarrassing confession, I had no idea what was going to happen, but I had people, it was an outpouring of response. Some people praised it, some people ignored it, a few people tried to exploit it. People will weaponize shame and guilt to coerce you to crumble. They will try to shame you into feeling a certain way because it's a reflection of the stuff that they're going through themselves internally, but it gets projected out to you. But you stay strong in those moments. And I decided to stay strong. And the next week I wrote another email and the next week after that. Well, at the time of this conversation, I have written a weekly email by hand personally myself, oftentimes two to 4,000 words, deeply researched, with depth and nuance and damning admissions and mistakes made and the pain that I've gone through, 115 weeks in a row. And I have no plans on stopping. And yes, it takes time, it takes me a day, almost every week to do this. It's a commitment. I've had times along the way where I had every excuse, not to do it, coming home after a late day of traveling, nine o'clock at night, have to get it out the door in time for the next morning. But I like to tell my kids, I say, choose your hard, otherwise your hard will choose you. And what's hard for you is going to be hard for everybody else. And so yes, the things that do not scale inherently represent a competitive advantage in your business. And I would even go as far to say that the best things in life don't scale. Like if you think about like a, how do you scale a hug with one of your girls? - Yeah, you don't even think about that, right? You think about savoring that moment. And yet we somehow think that the rules of business are immune to that truth in life. So it's not to say that you're not gonna scale everything in your business because you wouldn't have a business. You have to pick and choose your spots. But I think the big mistake that people are making with AI, so I know we want to bring the conversation back to AI, is that there's a rush to use AI to AIify the parts of your business that touch your customer. - Yes. - And that is the mistake. We should be using AI to automate the back office of our business, the parts of our business that are as far away from touching our customer, not our social media content, the emails that we write, the videos that we produce, the few points along the way where we actually get to touch another human being on the other side of the exchange. Those are the moments that we should inject ourselves, those are the moments that we should keep human, 'cause that ultimately is what the world is craving right now. Not to mention the AI witch hunt that we're experiencing and living through right now, that if you're not an entrepreneur excited about AI and in your business, the general consumer in the West right now has a level of contempt and disdain toward all things AI. You should be distancing yourself, not even from an ethical or moral standpoint, but just from a purely pragmatic standpoint, if you wanna be received in the market, you should not be touting the fact that you're AIifying everything in your business. That will actually alienate most audiences. Again, unless you're selling to other CEOs and entrepreneurs who wanna AI their business, but the world that large right now is not infatuated with everything becoming AI. The world right now is deeply craving the opposite of all that. So, I mean, I could, I'll get off my soapbox, but I have some strong views on this and I have the data to back it up. I have an audience of people that's never been more receptive. I have email open rates that have never been higher. I've had more opportunity come my way in the last six months than the last six years as I've injected more of myself in the business. Yes, it's hard. Yes, there are nights where I say it would be so much easier to just use cloud or chat GPT to hit the, hit the, the send button on the email and just write it. But I also know that it's hard for everybody else and most people will not do it. They will cut corners and that's the opportunity for all of us who choose to hold the line. - I really agree, but it's so interesting for you as someone that has spent decades scaling to the end to agree. To now say, actually, what's working right now is doing the things that don't scale. So I'm curious for you if you were to start again in business, if you were in 2026 deciding, okay, this is the year I want to get a new business off the ground, what would you do different than you perhaps would have done starting this 10 years ago? - That's such a good question. I came into, I think I'm 10 years older than you. 34 yeah, I'm 45 I just turned 44 so I'm 10 years older than you. And I got into this world about 24, right? So I was at that point where I graduated from college. I'd worked a few years in finance and I wanted to start my own business. And so I was a young guy in his 20s. And this was sort of the advent of modern digital marketing. Google AdWords had just become a thing. Facebook ads did not yet exist. And so I cut my teeth in Google AdWords. That was like the big opportunity right then that just completely changed the game. And I think if I was 24 today I'd probably be diving into AI. Like I would probably be diving into AI in some way shape or form. But I've also got 20 years of wisdom under my belt. And a lot of scars and a lot of lessons learned. And I think I can, I'll share a few things. What I've learned is that there is a right size for every business. And I'll use a metaphor to explain that. So we live on a hundred acre farm here in Vermont. We raise and grow our own food. We raise cows and pigs and chickens and maybe huge garden. And I've got hundreds of apple trees and fruit trees. And we tap our own maple syrup. And we raise bees for honey. And it's a big big thing that we do here. But there is the right size on this farm where when you go from the right size to too big, it goes from being a regenerative paradigm to an extractive paradigm. Meaning if I tried to, you know, I can raise 10 cattle head of cattle on this farm. But if I tried to raise a hundred head of cattle on this farm, it would be a mess. We'd be extracting fertility from the ground. We'd have to be importing fertilizer. We'd be bringing hay in to supplement the feed. We'd probably destroy the water table. There'd be all sorts of problems. We would destroy this land if we tried to make it bigger than this land supports. And every business has an appropriate size. And I know this is an unpopular thing. There's a lot of people who teach scale. And there's a lot of smart people who, you know, you get from this level to that level and level one, two and three and four and five. But not every business is designed to get there. And I would also go on to say that knowing what I now know, yes, you've got to scale that mountain top, prove to yourself, prove to the people in your life that you can do it. I had to, you know, generate $100 million, you know, get, get to the top of the mountain top, all of those things. But when you get to the second mountain of life or third mountain of life and you start to realize, okay, well, I've been there done that. It's not making me any happier. Nobody really cares. And the quality of life that it brings you is not that much better. I mean, I hang around 100, 100 millionaires, 100 millionaires. I've got friends that are approaching $1 billion in net worth. And I can tell you, it doesn't matter what level you get to. There's, there's a huge segment that spends their entire life just chasing the next thing. You know, they're worth half a billion dollars. And, and they could not imagine not becoming a billionaire, like their entire life mission is designed around that one thing. And so for me, I realize, you know, you're scaling a company. I've got two boys, window of time that is so short. Like with your girls, the window, and you know this because you're in it, it's so short. Well, I'm in the thick of it. So it doesn't feel that short. I know, and like these nights are going to last forever. And I know those days, I know I remember those days of the sleepless nights. And you're like, can you just sleep through the night and all those things? I'll tell you, I've got a 14 year old boy, Natalie, who is leaving for boarding school. In less than a week, this boy was in my arms. What feels like a heartbeat to go. So, so this may not be a hardcore digital marketing, like how to scale your funnel, whatever. But, but like we can we're at the end of the day. Why are we doing what we're doing? Right? We're doing it because we want to have a meaningful and fulfilled life. And we want to leave a legacy. And we want to leave the world a better place. And all the reasons that we want to do it beyond just the money that we that we make. And I can tell you right now that the paradigm to optimize for is sustainable, not scalable. It's can you keep doing what you're doing and not lose yourself in the process or make sacrifices so that you don't see your kids or your family. I was just hosting a mastermind where my heart broke a woman in her 60s was presenting in a hot seat. And one of the things that she said is, you know, when I was in my 30s and 40s, the biggest thing that I regret is that I was working so hard in my business that I did not see my son grow up, that my husband was stayed home and was the one that was doing all these things. And her biggest regret is that she could go back in time in the time machine. That's the biggest thing that she would do differently. So, you know, I would say a business that does a few million dollars a year that provides a great lifestyle for you and your family is in my experience of, you know, perhaps more aspirational than a 20 million dollar your business. That forces you to be in scaling mode where you're just working all the time and that's your life. But you almost have to experience that. Like it's easy for me to say that. I've been in that season of life. And I know the person who hasn't experienced that is like, yeah, it's easy for you to say. But I can tell you, like, I would move back into a tiny home. I started my business in a 400 square foot apartment with a $50 week grocery budget. We had no furniture at a launch, two launchers in the living room and a mattress on the floor or just me and my wife. Like, I would go back to those days and a heartbeat because, you know, ultimately, that's, that's, you know, for me, what's most important. When we planned merch for our boardroom mastermind, I wanted something people would actually wear, not something that ends up in a drawer. So we went with Quinn's sweatshirts and the reviews have been phenomenal. How soft they are, how cozy, how thick the material is. We put our name on them and that's about the strongest endorsement I can give. Quinn's makes everyday essentials in premium materials, organic cotton, Mongolian cashmere, stretch denim, priced 50 to 80% less than similar brands. They're 100% Mongolian cashmere sweaters started around $50. And as it gets colder, there are down jackets, cashmere scarves and gloves around at the season. 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Go to drink AG1.com/Boswaybe and for a limited time get a free immune support bundle including a bottle of Omega 3 fish oil and a bottle of Vitamin D3 K2 with your first subscription order of AG1 next gen or AG1 Pro. That's drink AG1.com/Boswaybe. I agree. I wrote a book recently the Freedom Based Business Method talking about the exact thing and it took becoming a mother for me to realize that because I spent my whole 20s building just in this constant mode of scale, grow year after year and when I had my daughter, I went through a really difficult postpartum and it really encouraged me to look at your building a business with this Silicon Valley playbook that you have no desire to ever exit. What are you trying to hit these goals for? It resulted in me actually buying up my co-founder. I tried to exit the company but it was my face. I bought up my co-founder. I've been the whole thing down and I rebuilt it in a way that actually feels really good for my life and I will really agree with you. There is a right size for a business in the right season. For me, I know exactly how much revenue I can generate and still keep my priorities the priority in this season of life and what's great about that is when you know your revenue at that point, you know your take home at that point, you know what the inputs are that are required, you get to then, if you can keep it that size, if you can have the discipline to keep it that size, you'll get everything you want, but it's also quite challenging for the person listening who maybe isn't at that phase who still feels like they're building so hard and really need to push to pay the bills. It's hard for them to have any of that hindsight that you kind of get when you get to the mountain and you realize, oh, this mountain is great and that gives me a lot of choice. Now I have the choice to stay home with my kids. So what would you say to that person that doesn't yet have the choice, but ultimately knows what their priorities are? Yeah, that's a great question. You know, so if I take myself back to what I call the the ramen noodle and baloney sandwich season of life, you know, we've all had a good old ramen. Exactly. You know, it's, so number one, you can cut your expenses to the bone. Like I can't tell you how How many people had, you know, they've seen what I've been able to do, like tears of mine, friends of mine from when I was much younger, they could not let go of the trappings of life that held them back from taking the lead. So you know, car payments, mortgage payments, like for example, all the success that I've had has always been, and this may be controversial, but I'll just, I'll tell the truth, when I started my first business, we were living in Asia, I was living and working in Shanghai, my wife was in Hong Kong, and she was doing a PhD at HKU, and I was working in finance in Shanghai. We'd see each other on the weekends, so we'd like fly to see each other, when I ultimately quit my job to start my business, we moved to a tiny island in Hong Kong, S-A-R, special administrative region where there are no cars on the island, you have to take a ferry to get there, and the reason why I did that is because I found that I worked well isolating myself. When I put myself in the like, when I was in Shanghai and everyone's going out to bars and fancy restaurants and spending all this money, and like, you feel the pressure to have to like, keep up, and so I started my business in that tiny little island, and that's when things took off. When we moved back to the United States, we moved to a tiny town in South Texas on the Mexico-Texas border, started a business there, then we moved to Austin and things scaled, and here I am in the green mountains of Vermont, middle of nowhere, in a hundred acre farm. And for me, I've always found that when you take yourself out of the pressure of having to keep up with the Joneses, and I know this is counterintuitive because most people say, you know, the five friends you spend the most time with will, you know, you're the average of those people. I disagree on that. I disagree on that. You get caught up in it all, and you feel like you're in this game or you're behind. So it's a, like, run your own race, you're not behind, wherever you're at right now is fine. But pragmatically, cut your expenses down so that we don't have all of these, like, this overhead that's putting a lot of pressure on you, because that's going to free up more of your mental bandwidth and your time bandwidth to go all in on your thing. And then you focus on one, one, one. You focus on one way to attract customers, one way to convert customers, and one thing to sell them. That's it. Most of the businesses that fail to scale that I work with that are unable to get until like a million dollars or even a few million dollars in business, is they have too many skews. And it ends up just pulling them in all these different directions and the same thing with marketing channels. They've got, you know, they're trying to make Instagram work, they're trying to make LinkedIn work and then they're running ads on Facebook and they've got this, take one channel, one way to attract, one way to convert, and one way to serve. And do that until you get to a million dollars. And then once you've done that, then you've got some options to expand your business or keep it where it's at. Oh my gosh, we are so similar and so many ways and the things we talk about so similar. And I just want to echo that to the keeping up with the Joneses and I talk about that openly on the podcast. You know, I was in LA, I'm from the UK, but I was in LA for five, six years scaling my business and I started to notice the lifestyle creep in me. My husband was like, this is not what we want, we do not want to be playing this game. And I was young at the time and I found it very hard to not do that when I was in LA. So we both packed up, we moved for the suburbs in Austin and it's interesting because I would say I built my business in LA, I built my wealth in Austin. And we decided to move back to Orange County, our communities here at more in a beautiful home. And I'm not living in the same way I was in Austin. But all of that is possible because of the five years that we spent in Austin. Heads down, focused on our family, our businesses, legacy, wealth, what that looks like. And practicing that discernment of being able to really cap our expenses, stay true to ourselves and not allow that to creep. And only when we felt like we could come back, we always wanted to back California. We love it here. That's why we moved from the UK. But only when we felt we could move back and not play the game, the state, I have a sub-star called status games when we could move back and not play status games would we come back. And it's great to be back in a very different mindset of, no, I don't want to go to every networking event. No, I'm not looking at every house thinking that'll be my next one. I'm in a house that I think I'll be in until my kids leave and then we'll downsize. And that feels really great to my nervous system. And I was just talking at dinner with a girlfriend the other night. She lives very much the same way, you know, on paper. She's a multi-multi-millionaire. She's, you know, top of her industry. And she was like, my rent's a few thousand dollars a month. I have no desire to move out of my apartment. But most of my peers can't understand why. And she was saying that's my superpower because I take the swings. Most people can't afford to because I have that security. And I think it is such a non-sexy thing that actually really moves the needle. So I'm all in on that and I love talking about that because it truly does make a difference. So coming back to that one, one, one, I talk about this to you. I made my first million dollars with a $29 product and I sold it one way on Instagram. So I had a $29 product sold on Instagram through a webinar. That was that scale to a million doing that exact thing. And I haven't added all that much since. We've went through many seasons. I've made lots of mistakes. But I really, really come back to that one, one, one. I think it is gold. So for someone right now, though, the one, one, one, what would you say are the biggest opportunities in terms of what kind of marketing funnels are you seeing work the best right now, if you are, what platforms do you feel like are exciting in a way that someone maybe knew to building audience could tap into? And then if you did, just have to say, you know what, if I was starting a new product, I was creating a new product, I think this kind of framing would be a slam dunk. How would you want, want, want it right now? Yeah. So I believe that the center of every business should be email. And that may be a provocative statement, it may not be. I think there's been the last 20 years, as long as I've been in this industry, there have been calls that email is dead. It's not what it once was emails dying, but I can tell you that son that I mentioned, who's going on to high school next year, one of the first things that they gave him when he chose to enroll is an email address. Yeah. Emails not going anywhere. Like email is still like the place where people get, you know, health records sent, financial records sent, password reset sent, like email is not going anywhere. It's not going to replace by telegram or WhatsApp or Slack or a signal or any of these other messaging platforms, email is here to stay. So I want to build my business on solid ground. Okay. It's at the same time been more challenging to not only get someone to give you their email address, but to build a relationship with someone where they will actually open up your emails. So I believe in what's called a single source of truth. I believe that email should be at the center of your business and you should write a weekly email to your audience that comes from your head, your heart, it's not outsourced to AI. And you use it as an opportunity to express what I described in my book, return to real as your category of one. So express what it is that makes you different, you unique by not shouting from the mountain tops by writing about your life and your perspective and your point of view in a way that bonds your audience to you. By weekly, every week, you create a creation habit, every week, you create a consumption habit. And if you think about the habits that you have in your life, there's basically two options to create a habit that sticks. One is daily, like you brush your teeth every morning and the other is weekly. You go to church on Sundays, like there's a reason why like those are the primary habits that we have. So don't try to do something crazy like once every 10 days or whatever daily is probably unrealistic for most people. So a weekly email, that's the center of your business. Everything that you do should drive people to that email list where you write that weekly email, where you are constantly soft selling that one product that you sell, whether it's a mastermind, a coaching program, working with people one on one, an agency service, whatever it is that you do, you're soft selling that. And then periodically, you are running campaigns to launch and relaunch that one thing. As far as how you build that email list, I'll give you the exact playbook. This is exactly what I would do, this is exactly what I am doing. You take that email that you write every single week and you take the content from that and you pick one channel that you're going to take that content and repurpose it for that channel. On a channel, take Instagram, for example, what you'll find is that most channels, you will get traction when you focus on one ICP, one avatar on that channel and create one type of content on that channel. What that does is it signals to the channel not only who you're for, but who you're for in that content format. So, for example, I've got a colleague who took an Instagram challenge, basically what she did. She was stuck at 20,000 followers trying all the different things on Instagram, doing quote cards and short form video and carousels and all the different format stories. And she said, okay, I'm going to get really good at one specific content format. It's basically the same thing over and over and over again. Punchline in stuck at 20,000 followers for years, and less than two and a half months, she went to over 350,000 followers because she trained the algorithm on Instagram to find people who are interested in not only that type of content, but that specific format of content. And it makes your life easier because you're not trying to juggle all the million things. So, you pick one platform, one avatar, one form of content, and you should be driving people to subscribe to your email newsletter where they can go deeper in what it is that you have. I mean, I can go. I could go on but this is basically I believe the playbook. It's a very simple playbook. It's a focused, concentrated playbook. If your Instagram account gets shut down or your YouTube account or LinkedIn account or Facebook account or whatever, you can take your email list. You can put it on a SD card. You can move to any country in the world. You can plug it back into your computer and you can start over. It's not like you've been completely de-platformed when you're building an email list at the center of everything that you do. So I know it's maybe like old school advice. It's not like you know TikTok shop or you know something that's like you know new within the last five years but I truly believe that that I mean that is exactly what I'm doing in my business and that's exactly what I'd advocate anybody do. If you want to build a seven figure business that gives you the freedom and lifestyle that you want to live. I agree. We did the same thing with quotes. We just posted full quotes a day for a decade and that built the entire brand. We didn't deviate and it was simple. We wrote a weekly newsletter and it worked and it was simple and I didn't get distracted by TikTok and all the things that were shiny and I think that's the hard part in all of that is it's so easy to get caught up in all of the distractions and anytime I have it hasn't worked. So when it comes to the product, do you feel like courses are dead? I put this way. I think Evergreen is dead and I'll tell you why. Evergreen is the most easily abdicated to AI form of content and form of funnel that exists. The key thing is that AI does not, AI can ingest every piece of content you've ever created. It can take your book and take the entire manuscript and put it into a platform but what AI cannot do is it cannot anticipate what you're thinking about right now. It cannot anticipate what's happening in your life tomorrow. And so what I like what I do in my email, I have an email that I write every single week. It's a publication that I titled the digital contrarian because it's a lot about analog and how you incorporate that into your life. And I write about oftentimes what happened in my life that week. Like literally two days ago, I had two pigs on our farm they got loose and I spent probably five hours that day chasing them down in the woods and eventually I found them they were with the cows and I caught this really great photo or one of the cows and the pig are like basically looking at each other and I snapped it and I made that the focus of my news. I said I was supposed to send this out to you yesterday but just so you know the reason why I'm a day late is because this was happening and I was able to weave a business and marketing lesson into that story. That's really happening in my life and your audience will follow along with what's happening. If you write about evergreen topics that could have been written, published and created at any time, why are they going to follow you? Like I can just go to chat GPT or clawed or grok or Gemini and I can get that that information. I don't need to read your email address but if you tell me about what's happening in the news right now and the shift that's happening with the law that affects your industry or the latest form of technology that's just changed the game and some way shape or form. Well I'm on the edge of my seat because I want to know what's coming next. So you have to make what it is that you write about and what you what you sell to be timely in some way shape or form. You've got to connect it to what's happening in the world and what's happening into the life of your customer. And if you don't do that, if you try to sell the same old course that you've been selling for the last 10 years, I can't tell you how many of my peers and your peers as well call these avars whose businesses have gone the way of the dinosaur. So we can't so we can't have an evergreen funnel. We can't have like one ad that we just keep running over and over again. We can't have one product that's just sort of the same old same old. We have to keep it new and fresh. We have to keep it top of mind. We have to keep it new and fresh and relevant to what's happening in the world right now. So I read a weekly email. I post that content on social media and what I'm incorporating into my product is how to deal with what's happening in the world right now. It's not something that you can just go to AI and get the answer to because AI is great at being able to figure out what's happened and what's already been written, but it's not great at figuring out what's coming next. And what is your one product right now? So I have a book. I have a book that I spent the last two and a half years writing by hand, my head, my heart. It's a thousand hours that I've put into this book. It goes deep into the thesis behind why I believe real is the last human advantage in an age of artificial everything, from the food we eat to the content we consume. I have a tremendous amount of data behind why the market is craving this right now. Signs that show that there's a huge opportunity for businesses who jump in on this. There's an interesting historical lens that anytime we've been in a period of dynamic change and technological revolution like we're experiencing with AI, there's been a counter revolution that's shown up in the world. So like the industrial revolution gave rise to romanticism in Europe and then in the United States to transcendentalism, which was a response to that. In the 1980s, globalization gave rise to the slow food movement, the digitalization and the early 2000s gave rise to the digital detox movement. So there's always been this counter revolution that shows up that we can predict what's coming next. So the book goes deep into the thesis behind it. Many, many examples tactically and practically how to incorporate this not only in your business but also in your life like how to be happier by incorporating this not only in what it is that you sell but what it is that you do and marrying those things together. So I'm all in on this book right now. I sold my company in 2024 and ever since selling that company, I've been really deep in this process. And otherwise I'm a dad, I'm a farmer, and I'm a guy who writes books. I love this so much. I think everyone who's listening would get so much out of reading that I'm going to link it below. But I'm curious, is that your monetization method because it's very hard to make money from books or you just not focused on monetization right now? Yeah, you know, so on the on the back end of it, what I'm doing at this moment is I have a small, a small mastermind that I run, a peer group that I lead. I do a bit of CEO advisory work. So company and CEOs that have, you know, I've built a seven-timing 5,000 fast-scoring company, 100 million revenues, sold to companies. So I advise founders, entrepreneurs and CEOs who are kind of on that path. So I do a bit of that right now. We bring people to our farm every year, which is a lot of fun and give them like a farm to table experience where they actually get to eat real meals from the food that's grown right here on this land, which is just very rewarding for me. So I have a few ways to monetize on the back end. I'm an investor in a number of businesses and, you know, partner with businesses in that way. So I'm in a season right now where I am very happy with life. And I have to be careful not to dive back in full-feed and just focus on growing the next big thing because it's, it's easy, I think, to slip back into old patterns in, in all ways, in life. And having to like check yourself and ask yourself, is this, do I want to spend the next 10 years of my life building the next 100 million dollar company? Or am I happy doing what it is that I'm doing right now? And maybe mentoring younger entrepreneurs, being an advisor, younger entrepreneurs, maybe taking not necessarily the the pilot seat, but maybe the co-pilot seat, or, you know, the mentor seat instead of being the one that's flying the plane. And so far right now that that's feeling pretty good. That's hard to do though. I'm sure, especially as a marketer, you know how to market, it could be very hard. I imagine when you've got your book and you're going to get so much traffic push your way to say, you know what? No, I don't need to do everything with every click. It's, when yeah, it's hard to resist the temptation to not maximize everything. And, but I think there's a lot of, there's wisdom in that. Like life is short, but life is long. You know, I think an earlier younger version of me would have tried to, like, I'll give you a perfect example. And I think this is a good, like, tactical thing to anchor your, your head around, all of us to anchor our heads around. I think there's this misnomer that we're taught to maximize customer value, try to squeeze as much value as we can money from our customers in the shortest amount of time. And it is an extractive paradigm. It is akin to, like, for example, we have laying hands, chickens. And you can do certain things to get your chickens to lay more eggs more quickly. So you can get more eggs faster. But generally speaking, a chicken will have a certain number of eggs over her life cycle that she'll be able to lay, whether they're in year one or over three years. And what's happened is if we build this extractive paradigm in our business, that's trying to squeeze as much money as we possibly can and leave no stone unturned and, you know, maximize customer value, is that the chickens run out of eggs. And then you're having to replace your chickens constantly. And I much would, I would much rather live a life where I can do life with the same set of clients and customers over the next decade. And maybe I'm making the same amount of money serving those customers over a decade as I would in maybe a year or three years. And I'm okay with that. I'd rather do life with the people that I really want to spend my life with, the clients that I want to serve and earn, you know, the millions of dollars over a longer period of time as opposed to trying to squeeze everything. last drop. So yeah, you leave sales that you could have otherwise gotten. You don't burn the midnight oil every night to get that one extra email sent or that one extra sale. But so be it. So I think that to me as a much more sustainable paradigm is focused on generating value over time, serving over time as opposed to max squeezing every last drop, trying to maximize customer profit in the shortest amount of time possible. I think that's such a beautiful analogy and I had a podcast earlier today too, which was really powerful around in Tony Robbins as this too, but thinking in decades and not feeling like just because you're prioritizing something other than your success and achievement in one decade doesn't mean you can't do it in the next. There's always going to be opportunity just because AI is the thing right now. Doesn't mean five years from now, ten years from now, there's not going to be any opportunity. But I think that's quite hard for people that are in it to maybe this is the first big window they're seeing of change that feel like if I miss this boat, I've missed the entrepreneurial ship forever. Do you see that? There's always opportunity. I mean, there's a FOMO is always going to be a thing. Like it's always absolutely going to be a thing. The grass is always going to be greener. You're always going to feel the temptation to say what I'm doing right now is too hard. I'm going to try this other thing instead. It's just as hard. It's just a different heart. I can tell you that with confidence. And most people do not stick with the thing that they're doing long enough in order to see results. And I'll give a real life example. So I wrote my email newsletter for 104 weeks before my first email that I wrote that we would repurpose and post on substack and post on LinkedIn and post in other places when completely viral. I wrote this piece titled The Shape of an Shedification. And it's been since shared across the internet millions of times. But it was called again the shape of the shape of in shedification. Basically, it's a piece that exposes that there's a difference between AI writing and human writing. And what we're seeing play out right now on social media, there's some second and third order facts that I don't think people are really aware of. And it's the first thing that I ever wrote that went viral on every platform I posted it. It went viral on substack, LinkedIn, Facebook, Instagram, YouTube, every platform. That had never happened to me. I'd done things that had gone viral like on one platform before. But this was just across everything. And when you see that, it's like, okay, yeah, sure. You're Ryan LeVec, you've done these things. But what people don't see are the 103 emails I wrote before that posted on substack that got 10 likes or 30 likes or 40 likes or whatever. They only see the one that's gotten a million things. So people do not stick with things long enough in order to get to that point. And so I would say that, you know, to anybody who maybe is in the season of it right now, like, you know, it's a little bit cliché. And maybe your girls are in the age where you've watched this movie a thousand times, but in finding Nemo, it's the line, just keeps swimming. Like, just keeps swimming. Like, you just got to keep putting one foot in front of the other. You don't have to get it perfect. You just have to get it going and just remind yourself that, you know, if you get stuck, shrink the size of the step that you're going through right now to be so small that it's impossible to fail. There's always a way to shrink down what it is that you're doing into some micro step that's so small it's impossible for you to fail. And you just keep doing the impossible to fail step over and over and over again until you get to your goal. I love this so much. I've loved, loved, loved this conversation. And just before we wrap, I would love to hear about the farm. I'm so curious how has it been moving to a farm and having 100 acres and trying to balance that alongside parenthood and marriage and business. I'm sure is a huge responsibility. How is it all going? Well, in 2022, after we took our company to market, I received a life changing offer for the business and then the offer fell through. And it fell through for a number of reasons, most of which were macroeconomic. But I kind of slipped into the state of like, all right, this is not how the story was supposed to end. The story was supposed to end. I build this company and sell it and yay, a Hollywood ending. And so when my kids were at summer camp, one summer for a few weeks, I had an opportunity to travel from Austin where we were living as well at the time to Vermont to live and work on a farm. And I know this is maybe going to sound insane when I say, but living in a tent, bathing in a pond, and learning how to raise and grow food. And it's there that I earned my permaculture design certification. But it's also there I had this awakening that I felt like this is where we're meant to be as a family. So we thought about selling our house in Austin. You probably remember the Austin real estate market was super hot. Yeah. I texted my wife who's back home. We lined up a real estate agent already said, let's do it. Let's just put the house on the market. Let's see what happens. And we put the house on the market. And the first couple that went to see it made an offer of cash full price and they wanted a 14 day close. So I had to get my butt from Vermont back to Texas. We sold our house, sold one of our cars, put everything we owned in the storage, road trip with a family from Texas to Vermont. We had nowhere to go. Like no plan, just a dream in a vision to find our farm. We spent the next year bouncing around from Airbnb to Airbnb. At one point, we found ourselves in the shopkeepers apartment of a tiny little general store in like a granola small town in Vermont. And after a year, we eventually found our farm. So this is a long journey in the making for us to get there. And our dream was to raise and grow 80% of the food we eat as a family. And we achieved that after our first year on the farm. So as I kind of alluded to, we raise cattle. We raise pigs. We raise meat chickens, meat turkeys. We raise egg laying hens for eggs. We raise trouts. We hover upon where we raise our own fish. We raise bees for our own honey. We tap over a thousand trees to produce maple syrup. We've planted over 500 fruit trees, nut trees, berry bushes. We have a huge production garden where right now, as we record this, we literally get like five to ten gallons of tomatoes every single day. And it's buckets of tomatoes and cucumbers. It's just so much food. We can't even, we have to donate a lot of it, frankly, is what we have to do. But to answer your question, you know, for me, there's a line in the book that I borrow from a great thinker that if you work with your mind, you should sabbath with your hands. And what that means is, if you spend time as a thought leader, as an expert, as a marketer, as someone who works a lot with your brain, and you spend a lot of time in front of a screen, I think it's important to find balance in your life by finding something that allows you to rewild yourself, to get connected back to nature with your body, to be reengaged with the analog. You ask a question that I think is relevant. And you said, if there is a billboard with one message from the book, it's what's written on the back of this book, which is, if you are not analoged by design, you will become digital by default. And I think that's the risk of our modern era, is that it's very easy for us to slip into a life that is digital abstraction. We're in front of the computer screen. We're connected to our phone every day. And being on the farm has been my antidote to step away from the computer. We have no internet outside of our home. We have Wi-Fi, but as soon as you step 10 feet from our home, there's no internet. So to be disconnected, to be rewilded, to have hands in the dirt, so to speak, has been the counterbalance. I think that's not only grounded me, but it's made me a better entrepreneur, it's made me a better marketer, it's made me a better storyteller, it's made me a better communicator, then to be living a life that is experienced only through the screen. So as I recommend in the book, the path to real is a very personal one, and finding what's real for you is a path that requires balancing death and danger, meaning death of your old self, your old identity, that old season that you were maybe exiting out of, and it will not be without danger, like anything in life. But the struggle is the solution. Leaning into that difficulty is ultimately what's going to get you to where you want to go. So that's a little bit about life on the farm and how to balance it with a business that you require the internet to make work. That's amazing. I love that so much. Thank you for sharing. So return to real is out. I'm going to put the link in the show notes and where can everyone sign up for your newsletter too, because I am loving it. Well, I appreciate that. Yeah, the book is return to real. You can go to return to realbook.com and a whole bunch of different cool stuff there, different formats, different bonuses, all that good stuff, depending on when you're coming to check it out. And the email that I write is a publication called vdigitalcontrarian, and you can go to vdigitalcontrarian.com, well over 100,000 readers read it every single week. Some people say it's the thing they look forward to more than anything else. I do put my blood, sweat, and tears into it and try to make it as absolutely as valuable as possible. So those are the two places to go deeper. Yeah, you can tell. And if you, I love the news a lot this much. I can only imagine how much I will love the book. So thank you. I'll leave all of those links in the show notes as well. Ryan, thank you so much. This was a great conversation. Absolutely. It's been my pleasure and I really enjoyed it. Thanks, Natalie.