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We've been working with them for over a year, and the feedback from our fellow members has been fantastic. Rise Up Media is here to take your marketing to the next level. They'll even perform a full audit of your online presence, giving you the good, the bad, and even let you in on what your competition is up to that you're missing out on. And the best part, there's no obligation, no catch, no pressure. If you decide to work with them, their contracts are month to month. That's right. It's long-term commitments tying you down. So what are you waiting for? To learn more about how Rise Up Media can transform your firms, visit RiseUpMedia.com/MaxLaw and Rise is spelled with a Z. Hello, everyone, welcome to the show. Thank you so much for having me. Well, thanks for being on. We were having a nice little chat before. It was funny because I noticed we were starting to get into some things. I was like, "Oh, I think we want to talk about this on the show." Yeah, you're like, "Hold it, hold it." Yeah, let's hold the good stuff. We've been doing this since 2016, and there was like, I learned early to not chit-chat too much before, because you lose a lot of the good conversations. It's like, that originality, you can't replicate it. Sure. It's like, you're watching those shows, those reality shows, and they're acting out what had happened before, like, story wars and all that, and so you can tell it's fake. Oh, totally. Yes. But I do want to start with the queen of content, because you're known as the queen of content. So what's that about? It sounds kind of cringy, doesn't it? Did you give yourself that title? No, I did not. It's usually that way. That does it. Yes. I have been called that by both the New York Times bestselling author Rory Vaden and Sean Kelly is a podcast host of the Digital Social Hour here in town. And it's kind of a play on, as far as I understand it, the multiple areas of my life that have just somehow magically come together from me being an accidental beauty queen to accidentally getting a billion organic views on social media to becoming a chief content officer for a learning platform, now helping personal brands and entrepreneurs through my company attention ears create short form content and other types of content that people care about and want to consume from keynotes to books to courses and really focusing on how do we take the personal brand strategy and everything I know about the psychology of attention and bring it all together. And I used to wear a tiara, so I guess it fits in a lot of ways. So I think you probably know what I'm going to ask next, because everybody listening and watching want to know, the accidental beauty queen, tell us about that. Yeah. So I got my degree in psychology. I thought I was going to become a clinical psychologist. I wanted to get my PhD in body dissatisfaction, eating disorders and go into academics. And I was the number one graduate from UNLV. They had a special award for me called the Outstanding Graduate. They even have you stand up amid the sea of all the graduates, they do a special ceremony. And then I went on to be the proud owner of 14 rejection letters from every PhD program that I'd applied to. I even had one rejection letter. I think I still have it that wasn't addressed to me. And the name was crossed out and my name was written in and it was misspelled. You're kidding me. So you want to talk about feeling low already and then like I'm not even worth a reprint of or even to have my name spelled correctly. That is wild. So I hold on to it because it was such a low moment in my life. And I didn't know what I was going to do. So I took off to Nicaragua like you do. Yeah, then that's the normal reaction. The normal reaction. Yes. Yes. And I started a travel blog. And in fact, I had this trip booked. It was to go to a surfer treat. Why Nicaragua? Wait a second. Why? Yeah. So I had found this woman. Her name was Holly back. She's a professional surfer out of Palace, Verdes, California. And she runs these retreats. And at the time I booked the trip when I was interviewing in Albany, it was January or February. And I was like, you know, this is going to be great. My last hurrah before I go to grad school. And then it turned out to be this, what am I doing with my life trip? So I met these amazing women and it was the first time in my life I was the youngest attendee on this trip where I wasn't in direct competition or I didn't feel like I was in direct competition. And I really learned the lesson of I didn't have to be everything to everyone. And in fact, if I just surrounded myself with the right people, I could actually go farther and I could really just live in my zone of genius. And so on that trip was when it was proposed to me by another one of the attendees. You know, why don't you just travel and write for a while? And I was like, that's not a real job. No one's going to pay me to do that. But I started doing it anyway. And I would come back to Vegas. And what year was this? Oh, gosh. 2012. Okay. So this is interesting because like this is like at the beginning of like all this, like all the influencers are stuck, all of that. So you're at the very beginning. It's really early. Yeah. Because I want to make sure I set the scene for that. I graduated in 2010. So like we're right after the crash, we're in the midst of the recession. And that was part of what I heard afterwards from these doctoral programs was part of the problem, right? Because for PhD programs, they won't take you unless they can fund you. And so I would be up against the same 70 people all over the country. And you also saw a new subset of people interviewing, which was people that already had their masters and were practicing psychologists coming back to get their PhDs because there was no work anymore. And so I got phone calls from some of the professors saying, Hey, we loved you. You were our number two or our number three candidate. We only had funding for one or we actually ended up not getting any funding this year. So please apply next year. And it was so devastating at the time that it seemed like and also so out of my control, right? I had done everything right. I had done everything that I was told to do. And now the American dream that I was promised was no longer available to me. And had they known the fact digital media would have on people's psychological well-being, they probably would have had more spots open up. Yeah, probably. And so it was a really wild time and I had to come back and work some crappy job in retail or whatever. And I would take off again and I'd continue to write about it. And this weird thing started happening where even though the details were different, right? Because my story of I was in college and then this wasn't working out for me, there were echoes of the similar sentiment, just different details all over the world where people were in agreement and especially in America that like the American dream was no longer a guarantee. And so now what? And what do we want our lives to look like if this isn't the path forward anymore and doing A, B and C doesn't get you D? So I accidentally or over the course of this next year built a following in 120 countries and it was really amazing I'd go to different countries and I'd meet up with my readers and they didn't know each other. And so we would all go in on an adventure together in Sydney, Australia, our cans or wherever I was. Sounds terrible. It was awful. Yeah. Yeah. And I, but you know what's funny is, again, I'm in my early 20s and I was so set on what my path should look like, I was kind of mad about it. And I look back and I'm like, gosh, I wish I would have just enjoyed this more. But I was so focused on needing a real job and still not thinking that blogging was it. And like, I just really want to be with now with a real paper and have a real position with it. I'm really a journalist. Those things are cool. I helped you though. It was a little bit of fuel for it. Oh, sure. Yeah. Absolutely. Do you think that if you didn't have that you would be where you are now? The ambition and the drive to keep moving forward? Yeah. No, I think that I've always been a very ambitious person and constantly looking at how can you pivot and change and I think the part that I don't do as well is enjoying the moment while continuing to strive forward. And so finding that balance I think is really important in life. It's like, how can you be really present and grateful and happy to be here and get the most out of this while also striving for the next thing? And I think people typically fall better on one side of the other and we have to learn to do the other one in our lifetime. So it was a really interesting time. So I'll fast forward the story a little bit. I had just-- No, I'm enjoying this. Take me to your time. There's a lot in this. Yeah. So along the way, I got invited to live with the Firewalker Tribe in Fiji. And what's this? The Firewalkers claim to be the originators of the practice of walking on hot coals. In fact, Tony Robbins, if you're familiar with him, he learned firewalking from the tribe. And it's an interesting dynamic because you cannot get to the island Ducky Benga where they live or go to the village where they live without an explicit invitation from the tribe. So I had a lot of sociologists reach out to me about why I was invited and how that all came to be. And how was the exile? The same question. Yeah. So one of the girls that I met on that surf trip, her name was Talé, and she was Phijean. We were cabanamates. We were the two youngest on the trip. And she was actually the one that suggested that I start just blogging and writing and traveling the world. And at the time, she was living in Australia, working for a Chinese company. Her father was British. Her mother was Phijean. She spoke like six languages. She was the most fascinating woman I knew. And we all left this trip. It was like taking her advice to heart. And a week later, she was killed in a car crash in Jamaica. It was her final stop. She had been on the six month journey, traveling the world, and it was her final stop before going home. And she'd actually had a Zoom or a Skype call, I guess, at the time with her mother debating whether or not she was going to go. And she went because her best friend was going, and I remember the story correctly, or what the news articles correctly, I think everyone in the car passed, but her best friend. And it was just, they were hitting a head on collision, middle of the night, terrible. And it devastated everyone that had known her, and especially us in this group that I just met her and spent this time with her, and also knowing that she had sacrificed time with her family in order to get to know us and spend that time. So I sent her brother, I found him on Facebook, stories, photos, videos, anything that I had, and thank them for sacrificing that time so we could get to know her and share in her essence and her beauty. And about six months later, I was, I just quit another retail job, and I think it was right around the new year, going into 2012, and I was like, man, I really don't know what I'm going to do now. This doesn't feel right. And he sent me this email saying, hey, thank you so much. I know I haven't been in touch, but just wanted you to know in case Tali didn't tell you what she hadn't, we are one of the three chiefly families in Fiji. So the Fijian clans have split up all of the islands, and there's three main chiefly clans that oversee the rest of these islands, and we belong to the fire rocker clan. If you're ever interested, we'd love to have you out to come to Fiji. And at the time, I was like, oh, that's really nice. If Fiji is for honeymooners, that's not all too expensive. There's no way. And I looked at flights and they were astronomical. And so I said, okay, if they just for whatever reason happened to drop below this price point, then I'll think about it. Two weeks later, I just get the urge to go check and magically that was at that price point. So I booked a trip, and I ended up doing a two week layover in Australia on the way and did some meetups. It was really fun. And I get to Fiji, and I think I'm there for three days, and we're currently staying in Suva, which is the capital city, getting ready to go over to the village and her father dies. Oh, my gosh. And so I am now terrified because I met their daughter right before her death. I met the father right before his death, and now I'm just really worried that they're going to see me as some sort of harbinger of death, especially in a culture where I don't think cannibalism was abolished until 1988, they're so enshrouded in mysticism and spirituality and have so much tradition and heavy culture. I was like, gosh, how are they going to look at this? And I was prepared to pack my bags and go home at that point, and Talley's mother sat across from me after the police had come and everything in the corner. And she said, you know, there must be something about you that's very comforting in times of trauma and death. What a wonderful perspective. Yeah, I was completely floored, and her viewpoint on it was that Talley had waited to come take her father until I had arrived. And what I had kept saying in the three days was they were like, well, what do you want to do while you're here? And I was like, I want to just really soak in all of the culture that I can and how the most rich experiences and learn more about your heritage. That's what I want. And she said, you know, there's two things that we do that are more culturally important to us than anything else, and that's weddings and funerals. So and it just so happened, I had 30 days left in Fiji, and the funeral services for Fajean's were 30 days. And she's like, you will perform all of the rituals and rights that you will do be the stand in for Talley. And that's why she brought you here. What an honor. It was. It was very emotional and an incredible honor and just so heavy and also very beautiful in a lot of ways. And I couldn't, I couldn't have asked for that experience. I couldn't even have known that that was going to be a possibility on this trip. And it was such a blessing to be able to do that for them and to be a part of that and to allow them to want me to be a part of that and to see that was just very, very special. So that family and the tribe are still very near and dear to me and my heart, even today, many, many years later, in fact, I just reached, the brother just reached out to me a few days ago. And so it's lovely to still be in touch and be able to share her story as well. So I had this experience and there was a lot that happened on the island, which just like continued to reinforce for me how wide the world really is and how much we don't know about the world and I come back to the States and I'm trying to just assimilate and integrate all this information and I'm having a really hard time being back in American culture and being back here in Vegas. And now it's around the 4th of July, a friend has invited me to her 4th of July party. I was house sitting at the time and it was just one of those eerie things where the universe God however you want to look at it was telling me not to go. I couldn't find my keys, I broke a glass, I stepped on the glass, I couldn't find the clothes I wanted to wear, I know you can totally relate to this, but I ended up wearing the super uncomfortable bra that I didn't want to wear. Totally. Yes. Yes. Absolutely. I had a feeling you'd understand. And I go to this party and they purchase these fireworks from an Indian reservation outside of town and so they're larger and bigger and they're flashier and I've never been weird about fireworks, but I just decided, you know, I'm going to stand over here. I'm going to, I'm going to sit and eat this hot dog and you guys get it all set up. It's fine. They light off the first firework of the night and the fuse goes up, but nothing happens. Oh no. Yeah. So everyone gets quiet because we know there's something wrong. I'm an injury lawyer. So everything I look at and touch and think of it's like, yes, I'm always looking the danger. Stay away from it. Yes. Yes. So we all wait and it's a live firework and then it explodes, but not in a pretty way. And the fuse, which is on fire, is traveling through the air and I'm watching it and this all happens in the span of, I don't know, two and a half seconds, but it feels like lifetimes and it's flying through the air and it curves around and then it curves around again and it hits my sunglasses and goes down my shirt and I end up suffering second and third degree burns to my chest and my stomach. And thank God that I had that super annoying push up raw because it just ate through the whole thing. And if I hadn't been wearing that, the damage probably would have been a lot worse. We ended up trying to go to three different ERs. Of course, most were closed because it was 4th of July. And as I learned, the chest is the slowest healing part of the body. Doctors didn't know what my healing time would look like or if I would look normal. And I suddenly had to stop everything I was doing. All my travel plans got canned and I just holed up and spent the next six months healing and it fell. It took six months. Wow. Yeah. That's terrible. I mean, I'm very grateful for everything I know about burns and the severity of them. And depending upon how much of your body, it could have been a lot worse. I'm so grateful for that. And there was also a lot of struggle around femininity and beauty and would I ever feel beautiful again or confident in my skin and. Which is your background? Yeah. Yeah. So it was interesting to now be fighting all that. And then having this weird wave of embarrassment about having this accident happen even though it was completely an accident. And so I got to the end of the year. I was hired for a modeling gig. It was like a James Bond theme, something or other. And I put on this black dress and I was super excited about it and I turn around and I could just see my scars in the mirror and I just break down about it. And I was totally done with feeling this petty party. So I told myself, okay, it's time to move on. And how am I going to figure this out? How am I going to find a way to get past my self confidence issues? And on my blog, I talked a lot about putting yourself in uncomfortable situations, finding a way to make them comfortable and through that finding self growth, specifically through travel, which was how I focused on the blog, but it could happen with anything. So I just started asking myself, okay, what is the most uncomfortable thing that I could think of? Nothing sounded more uncomfortable than being on stage in a bikini and having someone judge me based upon my appearance. So I signed up for a beauty pageant because of that. Oh my gosh. And then I accidentally won. So I was telling you beforehand, one of the things people struggle with is actually getting on camera and actually recording themselves because they don't feel comfortable about it. And so it makes me think a lot about that and that's incredible, congratulations on your win. Thank you. I guess what advice would you give to people that are I was a big thing, right? That's way bigger than just getting on a video and recording yourself talking about legal stuff. So I guess what would you say to people that are hesitant to get on camera? Something that my mentor and good friend, Roy Vadon, says all the time is that I'm going to totally butcher it now, but there is no fear when the mission to serve is clear. And I think what happens, especially on video, which I know we're going to get into my background and why I even talk about this, is that we tend to self-focus and in fact, psychology will show you that we believe that other people pay 33 to 40% more attention to us than actual reality. And so the first piece is that no one cares as much as you think that they do, but it's also can be very terrifying with video because it lives forever on the internet and you have keyboard warriors that tend to just find that nerve and that wound that you're trying to heal yourself as a person and they just like to poke at it. And so that can be really terrible and hard for people, especially when you're starting out any time that we put ourselves into the unknown or into a space of uncertainty and we're trying something new, we all feel very vulnerable. And then it's very difficult in a visual medium like social media or getting on camera where even on Zoom, right, we, there's so much body dysmorphia that it's increased with the use of Zoom meetings and just social media in general because of how often we're looking at ourselves and that's not normal. So for one, I would just accept and embrace that it's, it is a normal feeling to have. And then look at why are we really doing this? Is it about you needing to look good or is it about someone else needing your advice, your help? Who are you actually trying to serve here? Because if you can get clear on that, what are you really trying to do and what is success look like, then you're able to put some of these other things aside. I don't, I don't personally think that there's a world where you can go in and immediately have confidence in a situation like that if it terrifies you. And we know that public speaking in general is the number one fear that people have worldwide. So the only way to get to that level of confidence to just keep doing it is to build the competence, to do the skill and the repetition and to show your body that you're not going to die. And there isn't a woolly mammoth chasing you even though it might feel like it, right? Every time you turn on that button and you know, when I work with clients, we like to talk about who's your avatar, who's that person that you're trying to say. And we give them a name and we give them a background and it's like, okay, I want you to talk to Joe and I want you to tell Joe what he needs to know right now or I need you to talk to Cindy and you know that Cindy is struggling with this thing. And that's what makes the messaging even more powerful and allows us to get out of our own heads to put it to the side. And so in my situation with the pageant, I had so many days I would wake up with nightmares of me getting on stage naked and like tripping over wires and cords or answering on stage question and having nothing to say. And it was really having to just walk through each piece of the puzzle and be like, okay, you didn't, you didn't die this time. And in fact, that was a lot more pleasant than you thought it was going to be. And remembering like, I'm just doing this to get over, I'm not here to win. I'm really not here to compete. I'm here to get over my own stuff. I'm here to write a blog article and I'm here to tell others about this experience. And that's what that's the game. So being able to lower the stakes a little bit, I think also helps. How do you come up with that avatar? I think some people struggle with that a little bit where I'll give you an example because personal injury is a good example, really good example where people say, well, I don't know who my avatar is because I represent anybody that got in a car crash. And like, so we're like, we're very specific with ours, like ours, ours is a, she's a surgeon. Her name is Mary Green. Yeah. She's 50 years old. She lives in Chesterfield, Missouri. Yes. All these things. Like she has insurance, all that. Yeah. But because we know that those are the highest value cases, but a lot of people do struggle with that. We're like, well, I get a bunch of cases from this community, even though that's not really what they want to target, they just get a bunch from that community. So how would you help people come up with that avatar? So first we would figure out who do you want to target, right? If you could have a hundred or a thousand of a similar type of case, what would that look like? Who is that person? Where do they come from? What do they care about? What kind of house do they live in? What kind of car do they drive? What are they watching? What do they like to wear? What kind of family do they have? So we want to look not only at the demographics of, okay, they're between the ages of 35 and 45 and Caucasian or whatever that looks like, and they live in this particular part of the country. But then also those psychographics of what matters to them, what do they care about? Are they watching Joe Rogan? Are they watching Oprah, right? And the more that you get to understand them as a person, the better you're going to be able to communicate with them. And it's not about a lot of people get afraid to create that kind of relationship or personality or persona because they feel like it's going to put a limit on who they can work with. And all it does is allow your message in the way that you communicate to come across stronger. And so I like to think about it as dropping a pebble into a lake, right? So instead of you're just blindly hurling something out in the middle of nowhere, you're able to say with the size of this, this is who I want and then there's going to be a ripple effect out. And so you're still going to get those other cases, you're still going to impact other people because you're actually talking to someone now versus just a blanket, you guys or everyone, right? It makes it, it makes it more unique and impactful. And they can tell when you're speaking to someone directly. So I would start with that of looking at, okay, first of all, let's just look at some of those hard numbers, age, race, part of the country they live in, how much money they make, what's, what's the problem that they have that you can help them with? And then what do they care about? And what does their life look like? And if you can paint a little picture for yourself, I've had clients that will print this off, they'll get a photo from some stock imagery online or it'll be an actual client that they work with that they love and they will post that up in their office. They'll have everyone on their team be like, we are doing this for Mary, we're doing this for Scott and they keep bringing it back to that whenever they take on new ventures or looking to offer new business models, new products, because it's really important that they're serving that person. And again, it helps them to get out of their own way when it comes to making content. What do you think about the idea of like you visualize yourself as someone that you're not? So you see an actor that you really want to kind of be like, so you want to be perceived almost as that person. And so before you step on the camera or for lawyers, maybe before you step into a courtroom, whatever, you kind of perceive yourself as that person to maybe give you that little bit of boost of confidence. I think it's interesting with your background. I don't know, is that detrimental or is that something that is beneficial? You know what's funny? I had a brand for a while that was all about red carpet confidence and my perspective, which is a little bit different than the common belief system, is I don't believe in fake it till you make it. I don't necessarily think it's going to be helpful. It can in some circumstances, but if we think about confidence on a continuum and let's say you're at this ending, like, okay, you want to get to Angelina Jolie, Brad Pitt level of confidence or swag or whatever that looks like to you, it feels like such a big jump. And so you could probably fake it and be like, okay, I'm going to come across in this persona. And that might work for somebody, but I think for a lot of people, especially very emotionally intelligent and highly intelligent people, it feels like you're faking it. And then it's like, okay, well, if I'm walking into a networking room with this persona, am I getting these introductions and having these great conversations because people like something about me that I'm not? And now there's almost a question of, do I have to keep putting on this persona that I'm not? And it feels like a big jump. That's interesting. This is, yeah, because that's the part that I was worried about. So that's interesting. So I want to hear a lot more about that part. Yeah, so to me, it's not about, you want to create the longest bridge possible so that if you then do want to do that, it's just a small step versus taking a giant leap. Because then what happens if you try to take the leap and it doesn't work, that's going to push you right back down the continuum. Maybe worse. Maybe worse, right? Because now you feel like, well, I tried to fake it till I make it. And then I didn't do that. And so now I really do suck. And that's going to put you into even more of a spiral. So I don't believe in that, and in fact, one of the first things that we teach people when it comes to content is how to do that authentically. And I really hate the word authenticity. I feel like it's been overused a lot, it's worn out. And as someone who grew up being a people pleaser and trying to morph herself into a lot of environments, I don't understand what it means when someone just says, go be more of yourself. It's like, what does that actually mean to be more of myself? So we had to create a formula, actually, for how to measure whether or not content was aligning with who I believed I was as a person or how I wanted to be perceived. And so the authenticity formula is very simple. It's your values multiplied by your voice. So your value is what you care about, right? If you care about sustainability, if you care about justice, if you care about proper representation, if you care about empowering your clients, I would expect your content to resonate with that and to have a lot of topics that cover those things that you care about and the more that you're able to showcase what you care about or what your firm care is about, the more that's going to align with potential cases and people that also care about those same things, because not everyone cares about the same types of values. And then your voice, right, think about that as the personality of your brand, right? How would you want people to talk about you? Oh, he's the best friend that you never had. He's the cool, fun uncle. Maybe like she's the serious kind of aggressive and can sometimes be a brat, but like she really knows what she's talking about. Maybe she's, you're the tough love person, right? What is, you think about all these big name brands, these personal brands, you could put a voice to them very specifically. Or Cuban has a very different voice from Elon Musk from Mr. Wonderful, right? You could put some different characteristics on this to describe them. And I think when you are able to put those two components together, if you're valuing your voice, it becomes very easy to know what types of content align with you and what types of content to stay away from. We'll often get phone calls from people, like, okay, I want to try content, but I don't want to dance. I'd be like, great, don't dance, because if you're trying to dance and you don't want to be dancing, everyone's going to be uncomfortable, right? The world of social media, especially in just digital consumption, users and viewers are so clear about whether or not something that's happening is real to that person or someone's uncomfortable on camera, that it's better to just stay in your lane and what feels good to you because that's going to then transfer to the end product as well. I think that it's really important that you point that out because you do hear people like, well, yeah, you should be funny in your videos. You should do this. And it's like, yeah, but if that's not you, that just doesn't make sense. It just seems like you're just being fake and it just doesn't, it just never really made sense. So I think that's important. I want to go back to the values. It's really values times voice. That seems really simple. How do you come up with those, but then also how do you, I'm thinking about like, sometimes I'll post something on X, right? Yeah. And it has nothing to do with anything else I've ever posted before. Is that like, so I kind of then maybe view that as a mistake because it doesn't fit within a set set of standards or values, right? So when you talk about, so like when you're talking about like those values, like, are you saying you should only post about those things with those values or, or you might miss understanding? I want to make sure I understand. Well, I think when it comes to understanding what feels authentic for you, if some people feel lost on what kind of content they should try or how they should show up in a courtroom or how they should show up at a networking event, that can be really powerful. Oh, okay. What are the values that matter to me the most in my life right now? And there's a ton of resources online where you can just, you can go Google top hundred values and you can pull them up. Pick your own. Yeah. Pick your, essentially. Yeah. That, that, that is the point, right? It's like pull 10 to 20 and then pick your top three to five. And it doesn't mean that you never post about anything else. In fact, the umbrella really, which for which you should be posting under is the problem that you solve for people, right? And if you're, if you're sticking to that or you're sticking to the audience that you're solving it for, then you can talk about anything as long as it goes back. I mean, Dave Rams is a great example of this, right? He has seven steps that he's been talking about for 40 years and for him everything is about finances, but he can talk about anything that he wants in through that lens of helping people to get out of debt. And so he will talk about politics. He will talk about current events. He will go beyond the scope of just his seven steps, right? Because it all still falls under the same lens. And so I think that's where people can get a little tripped up. It's not that you never talk about anything else. And it's also a great idea to experiment and to put on that experimental hat and then let the data drive because what you think might be the thing that your audience cares about. We want to use that to get the navigation started, but as you start to get feedback and or like I like to liken it to setting a ship off to sail and like, okay, you've got a heading, you've got, you know where you're going, but then there's going to be storms and there might be icebergs or a passing ship and so you're going to probably change your navigation to either continue to your destination or slightly shift your destination as well, depending upon the feedback that you're getting. So we want to utilize these as a kind of our rudder, but still be open as we go. So as far as, you know, trying something that feels completely out of the, out of the blue, but that still probably falls under your, if you're posting about it, you probably care about it in some way or it's a reflection of you and your personal brand, wouldn't you say? I'm ahead. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Could be that too. Which that's, it's not like I just throw like random things on there, you know, but I, I try to be as consistent as possible, but like sometimes you, you have kind of a random thing. Yeah. For example, I'll give you an example. And I guess I could have made it more related to like personal injury, but I saw this shopping cart driving around Vegas yesterday. Oh, wow. It was like a big vehicle. Have you seen these things? No, it's a shopping cart. It looked like a monster truck, but it was a shopping cart and they were like rows of people sitting in it and I think my, like, I think my post is like, why does this exist, right? Yeah. So I saw something crazy and I could have said like this, this seems really dangerous for whatever, because of, you know, what I do, but like something random like that. I was like, what the, what is this? Yeah. Like, so like things like that is what I'm talking about really. Yeah. Well, and when it comes to content, we often say an X is kind of a different animal, you know, use your, your reels, your posts to help showcase what you do. Like that's, people are going to find you on their discovery page on their four U page from that information. And then the stories can be anything about you personally. Those are people that are already bought into what you have to say. And so that can be even more personal and like, yep, we're here in Vegas and here's my coffee and here's the shopping cart and here's this random thing. So I don't think there's anything wrong with that. And especially if that ends up getting a lot of traction, it'd be, it'd be curious for me to see how you could in each city find something very random and be like, we're here, and even if we're just drawing the through line of where he'll hear filming in a new city, here's this random thing I found that that still would create enough of a narrative connection where it feels just fine. Interesting. There, I do struggle a little bit with the branding of the firm and me as the person, right? So that is something where like, and I, here's like perfect example, right? So we've got, we haven't, I think we have an Instagram for the firm, maybe not. I don't know. I don't run it. But I have my own personal one. Yeah. Do we have a TikTok and the firm in for me? Yep. And I almost feel like the firm one's a waste. You know, so what is your advice to, there's, I mean, lawyers all over the country that are doing the exact same thing I'm doing. So it should just be one, should it be both, what are your thoughts? It's as much as you want it to do or much as you want it to be. What the truth is, is that personal brands, people will always resonate more with people than companies. It's very hard to get a company account to do well. And if that company account is doing well, it's usually because they have found a way to extrapolate the voice and values of the company and find a way to make that relatable or in types of content that they're putting forth. I like to utilize the example of Ryanair. If you're familiar, they're like the spirit airlines of Europe. I know I've heard of Ryanair, I just don't know why I know Ryanair, but I've never experienced Ryanair. Yeah. So Ryanair decided to create a TikTok account for their company and they are super low budget, low, low budget flights. And instead of trying to compete with Virgin or any other luxury airline, I just said, let's just lean into what we are. And so we provide you cheap $40 flights from Germany to the UK. You may or may not have a seatbelt, but you're welcome, right? And so they gave their brand, their plane, the answer for more flights, their plane to just be the sassy, almost like the Wendy's Twitter account or your tax account, and people love it. People love to be roasted by this plane, and it's got millions of followers and so much more brand awareness. Duolingo is another great example of this language learning platform, a very not sexy topic. Not at all. Not at all. It could be like take their original Rosetta Stone, very boring. Very boring. That's infomercials, right? Not a sexy topic. And they decided to lean into their values, which was disrupting the language learning space and create the voice, which was super sassy. And they have this costume, this duo bird. It was probably left over from some conference activation. They spent $0 on this. And this bird just terrorizes people in their office every day. And people love it. And it is now the number one most downloaded language learning platform in the world. And what's interesting is they never talk about their product at all. They are never promoting the brand on any of their social media posts. They trust that the user is going to come for the content and then bridge the gap, go to the link in the bio, and then download the platform, which is exactly what's happened. So again, going back to if you're able to really lean into the values and the voice and find a way to present that to people, then that's great. It's a lot of work. And this is not everyone's full time job, or they don't have the ability to finance a full team, in which case people buy from people, people learn to trust people. And in fact, there's a number of law accounts that we reference and talk about with our clients. And it is a singular lawyer that is giving the information you're building trust by having that familial, that face-to-face connection and allows people to do that. For professional services, for lawyers, what types of content, and I understand completely the formula, but are there specific types of content that are performing better than others, more like case studies, more people day in the life, sorts of videos, funny videos? Are there certain things that are doing better than others? The theme, there's a lot of different ways to portray the content, right? And I think about that as styles versus topics, and I know we'll get into why I'm even the person to be talking about this at some point, but we're so good. There's some other things I want to talk about, yes, exactly. But I think about, there's different styles of content, right? So I look at that as skits, man on the street, a green screen, looking at that as a joke video, a straight-to-camera would be a style, and then you have topics of content. So that could be what to say to the cops, how to contact a lawyer, all the different topics that you might want to discuss with somebody, what's, you know, first steps if you get into an accident, yada, yada, yada. And then we have a content matrix where it's like, okay, what could we do, how could each of these topics or the subtopics of these topics then turn into any of these styles, what would make sense based upon your voice and values for you to do it? The type of content that I see working the best really is educational, and there's a lot of different styles. I'm actually surprised by that. I'm very surprised. Yeah. Well, it's, it's, people want to feel empowered to know what they need to know when it comes to legalese, when it comes to being in a situation that they're not familiar with, especially because we as humans, right, we tend to want to avoid pain more than we want to go towards pleasure. So if you're able to help them avoid a situation, then that piques their interest. So there's a great account called "Law by Mike" if you're not familiar. He does a lot of entertainment, funny, skits, fast transitions, but everything that he's doing is teaching people something. So a lot of his content will start off with great hooks like, here's what to say if the cop says this. Here's what to say if you get pulled over about this. Here's what to do if you get a subpoena, here's what's, and it's just providing people with information, especially that's helping them to overcome fears that they might have about a situation. And I see that work across the board, whether it's someone just speaking it directly to camera or someone doing it in a very fun way like he's doing it. And that really comes down to the personality, the voice and values of the lawyer that wants to make that content. Okay. So I'm going to come back to this in a second. Yeah. Because I want to make sure that people, we do get to this because it will be like ten minutes left and we'll get to it. I'll get to it. Oh, by the way. Why is it? Why do you know what the hell you're talking about? So how about that for a question? Why do, why am I here giving people bad news? So I, after I became a snavata, I went on to work with USA Today as a journalist for a number of years. I produced for E-News, I had a short stint as a songwriter in Nashville, I then went on to be a personal brand strategist, work with everyone from Victoria's Secret Models to billionaires to help them craft their personal brands. And then I was also an on-camera host, did a lot of red carpets, award shows behind the scene interviews. I covered the Grammys, the Billboard Music Awards. I've had the pleasure of talking to Ringo Starr and Mark Cuban and Dolly Parton and conducting a lot of these interviews. And then 2020 hit and all the revenue streams dried up. And so at the time, my partner was like, gosh, what are we going to do? He was a professional touring musician. I had this background in hosting. And I was approached by an acquaintance of mine who happened to run the largest network of Facebook watch pages in the country. So at the time, Facebook was a lot like a record label where you couldn't monetize unless you had a publisher. And so he had these pages, collectively his creators were doing about 60 billion views a year. And we're like, okay, this is great. This is highly viral content, so think hacks, pranks, recipe videos, feel-good, gifting videos, crafting. I've done hundreds of articles. I've built this following, this blog following. He had a billboard charting song. We clearly understand content. Let's just make sub three-minute videos. This will not be hard. Turns out it was very hard, actually. And we spent about nine months banging our heads against a wall. Well, thanks for being honest with that too, because I sometimes be like, you'll have someone come on, like, oh, I was killing it from the beginning and here's how, you know, it sounded bad. Yeah, it was so easy. I just opened an Instagram account and everyone came to me. No, it was incredibly frustrating. And we knew so many creators that were killing it in the game and we would try copying what they would do and it wouldn't work. And it just felt so frustrating. It felt like no one wanted to hear from us. We were so smarting it. We couldn't figure this out. And it was demoralizing. And so we finally hit this point of we either have to turn this around or we have to move on, because now we're losing money trying to be viral video creators, which is just very, when you're in your late twenties and early thirties is just very demoralizing, right? Yeah. Yeah. So the narrative that I had in my head, which was just feeding the frustration, was like, man, like these kids are just so lucky that they just pick up their phones and they just hit record and they start recording something and then just post it to the internet and it gets accidentally gets a million views. And I was so angry by this narrative that I was telling myself. All lies probably. Yeah. Well, mostly. Yeah. So I had to, I had to reframe the question, what if everything that I thought was accidental was actually really intentional? What if there was a way to engineer content and I just didn't understand the formula? So we took a weekend and we watched thousands of viral videos. I do not recommend doing this for your mental health. Sounds absolutely terrible. It was. Yeah. It was not a fun weekend. And we watched videos across every genre, every industry and every platform from Facebook to TikTok to Instagram. We really wanted to understand based upon the most viral content, what was working, what wasn't working, but we didn't know what factors mattered. So we took a very experimental approach. We created a spreadsheet. What was happening at second one? What was happening at second three? What was happening at second five? What were they wearing? What were they saying? What were the hand gestures? What were the camera angles? How are they cutting? What were their trending audio? Was there some sort of viral challenge happening? What platform was it on? And after our eyes stopped twitching and we were able to come out of the matrix for a couple of days, it was almost like, oh, what's that movie? John Nash in a beautiful mind where the patterns and numbers started to merge and like come off the wall. We're like, okay, this is interesting. Outside of platform, outside of industry, it looks like from our research, certain things need to happen in order for people to want to propagate the video. So we took those learnings. We applied it to our next video. Mind you, up until now, it's been nine months of maybe our best video got 1,200 views. That's a kit. That's it. Right. Yeah. For like, so we up until that point, nothing. Nothing was taking off. This next video did five million views. The video after that did 10 million views, and it's not to say that everything that we touched turned to gold, but roughly one in every four of our videos did over a million views, one in every 10 to over 10 million views, and we went from no views the first nine months to over a billion organic views and the following 12 months. We built my TikTok following from 0 to 400,000 followers in 40 days. It's now well over double that. And we've since helped clients at attention ears to 250 X their results on their content through the same system, we've had clients go viral, we've had clients get more clients. And really, we've given them a system from which to think about how to engineer content, to get it to do the thing that you wanted to do, which is get people to care. So we essentially learned this system, and we were full-time viral video creators for a number of years. And then we knew so many people in the personal branding space that in the service, professional services space, and companies, we just saw them struggling to figure this out. And they had a message to give. They had a mission that they were on. And so we liked to joke that we left the dark side and came over to the light to help people to actually get their messages out there. Because at the end of the day, yeah, you can spend a lot of money to promote posts and do ads and sponsorships. And that's fine. Like anyone can pay to get in front of people now, but you cannot pay to get them to care. And you cannot pay to get them to consume the content, and you certainly cannot pay to make them share it. And so how do you get the right behaviors, understand the psychology of attention, to then get the people to love the content enough, to want to keep propagating it for you and become an evangelist for your message? So I'm glad that people do know that you're-- Have the context, yeah. Exactly, yes. Just a girl that talks about Instagram. Because we definitely were jumping around, but I want to circle back. So you can get the views, right, you can get the followers. And so what I would like to know is how do we connect the dot from the views, the followers, and then clients? So there's probably multiple steps in between those two, but I do wonder like how do you do those? Because that's ultimately from my investment in it, I don't care about views, I don't care about followers, I care about clients. And so how do we do that? And that is the right way to think about it. When we first start working with a client, that is one of the first questions we ask. It's like, what does success look like to you? Because if we don't know what we're going for, it doesn't matter what I'm going to do for the client, they are going to be unhappy because there's a lot-- again, there's a lot of fear that goes into this. There's a lot of unknown. The social media and videos in general are the Wild West for it. We don't have a lot of strong metrics that people can lean in a ton of decades and decades of saying that this works, right? It's very new, and it's a risk for some people to put that kind of time and energy, especially when they don't like being in front of camera. So it just gives them an excuse to say, no, I don't want to. So the first metric is what actually matters. Is it getting a new client? Great. Then let's back into that client journey. How are they going to find you? What is that page that they're hitting on once they decide they want to leave your social media profile to go? And how are they booking? Is that experience like, because I can help you to get the eyeballs. But then if that piece isn't set up correctly, then we're going to lose them anyway. So there's a lot of these components that keep working backwards. Okay. Then who is this person, right? We go back to that persona. What are they looking for? What do they care about? Great. Now let's look at what types of content we would want to create for them. And then let's engineer that content in such a way based upon everything we know in our formulas so that you can actually get the eyeballs to begin with. And then if you're finding on the organic side that that content's working, then if you want to put marketing dollars or spend behind it, we also can show you based upon the data and what we measure as success when it comes to content, which isn't views, it isn't followers, it isn't even engagement, what you need to be looking for to then decide which videos you want to promote. And so it's helping to create really a system for how we're going to do this that takes that personal, that precious feel out of it, especially when we're trying something new it's really easy to want to pull the plug and pull the plug too soon. And so we got to just like any other part of the marketing plan be able to commit to, okay, now let's be able to figure out how we're going to execute this so we can objectively then look at what's working, what's not working and continue to iterate. How long do you give, let's say you're trying something to do, how long do you give to test it out? I mean, I would say three to six months minimum, especially depending upon the types of accounts that you're working with. If you have bad page health, which most people do because they've either done nothing with it, they post it and consistently. What was it? And bad pay, what? Bad, bad page health. Okay, bad pay. Got it. So, so think about this. I like to attribute it to your body, right? If you come to me and let's say you're overweight, you have some sort of autoimmune disorder, you had not been eating well and you're like, well, I want to have a six pack and, you know, be on the cover of Sports Illustrated. Okay, great. Well, we've got if depending upon where you're starting, we have a long way to go. And so, if you're expecting a certain type of result within a short amount of time, right, that's an, that's an unfulfilled expectation to begin with or a high expectation that's going to be unmet. So how do we look at what can we do and what are going to be the metrics, again, of success so that we can easily say or show that this is working or not working and, and then over time as the page health increases, right, then we can see more and more traction. And sometimes it's even easier just to start over depending upon on the page and what's going on with it. I've never heard of someone call it page health. So I think that that's, that's really, I love that, I love that phrase and I like the way you put it with like actually working out and all that stuff. Yeah. What do you, what are you looking for when it comes to good page health? Well, number one is the engagement ratio to the number of followers that you have. And what typically happens is people want to buy followers, which is fine. We're now in a space where I think anyone can go to a page and if you have a hundred thousand followers, but you're getting a hundred or a thousand views, it's very clear that you've bought them. And as long as you're okay with that being the look, then that's fine. But also now you have a bunch of people that are sitting there that are not engaging with the profiles. So engaging with the content, which means the algorithm isn't going to help you as much. Like the game that we were playing when we were viral video creators is how do we bat above our average? And we would, on average, only have 10,000 to 30,000 followers on our Facebook page. And we were getting five, 10, 50, 70 million views because we were able to leverage the algorithm to help say, oh, interesting, something is happening here. And the people that do follow this page are really engaged with it. So let me find more look like audiences, more people that look like this to see what they think. And so if you can keep the people that you have, even if it's small, they're engaged, that's going to help you to grow and grow. The one metric for success that we look at, which is the only metric that I can control, is watch time. How long are the people that are watching the video actually sitting there and staying three dollars? The average watch time of the video, which is if the video's three minutes long, it could be the average is 130, it could be two minutes, and then there's percentage watched. So. Which of those? Which ones are more important? They're both equally important because here's the reality, right? Let's say that you have a watch time of 10 seconds. Well if you have a video that's 10 seconds long, that's a great watch time. But if you have a 10 second watch time for a three minute video, terrible watch time. So what you're looking for is you really want both. You want both of those to be high. And that's what we can think about when it comes to engineering content because the reality is, is depending on what's happening in the world, an election season, Taylor Swift drops a photo of her cat or a new album, doesn't matter what the rest of us are doing, everything is going to be focusing in one direction, right? So I can't control the number of views that I get. I can't control the, I can do things to try to increase engagement, but I also can't control my number of followers. What I can control is of the content I'm creating, how long are the people that are actually seeing it watching it? And if I put my effort there, then everything else will naturally increase. So how do you make sure that that happens or what are the best practices to make sure that that happens? What we found is there are three things that every great video needs to do. I love how you, you have, you have an answer for everyone is fantastic. Thank you. Let's hear. I love, let's, what are the three things? Yeah. So there's, there's three things that need to happen. You need to grab attention, spark an emotion and create a curiosity gap. The grab attention feels almost like a no-da Hillary. Of course, we need to start a video off. We want to grab attention. But this is very important for a couple of reasons. A lot of people don't understand, one, that 20 million videos are being posted to social media every single day. That's incredible. 20 million. That's wild. And with AI, that's only going to increase. The average person sees between six to 10,000 ads every single day. We're spending roughly 187 minutes every day on social media, a movie's length worth of time. But we're not doing it all in one go. What was it like a year or 10 years ago, like, you know, 10 years ago, I don't even think we had the metrics on this, without it just been Instagram, right? And maybe my space. I think Facebook. Maybe YouTube, I guess. Who's just coming on the scene. Not the short form. Not the short form. Because I do wonder how much it's grown, how much is growing each year, do you know how it's changed? I know it's exponentially grown. I don't have those metrics. For sure. I do know. That's a specific number I'm asking. So I know it's tougher. I know our attention spans have decreased 25% in the past 17 years. Wow. So, and that's only, I think, going to increase, or it's going to continue to go down rather as the use of short form content goes up, and the average person when they're on their phone is spending 80% of their time watching short form video. So when you think about that excluding calls and text messages, that is where people are spending their hours. So we're taking a lot in at any point in time. So people are becoming very discerning. They will give you zero to two seconds when you're scrolling to decide if they're going to watch. And then when they decide they're going to watch, they're maybe going to give you another two to ten seconds before they decide if they want to keep watching. So you get that emotion, right? That's where you got to kick in the emotion, right? So what do you, what's the best emotion to target? It's a great question. Well, it depends upon what you want them to do, or how you want someone to engage with it. I will say there's six core human emotions, right? We have joy, love, wonder, surprise, anger, sadness, oh my gosh, why can I think of the last one? It's going to come back to me. But the media is really good at leaning into the negative three. And everything kind of spirals out from there into an emotion wheel, right? Again, going back to what we talked about, our brains, our lizard brains, we are more primed to avoid pain than to go towards pleasure. So anything that helps us to avoid pain, we are going to engage with more. Like our brains want to know, how do I keep myself from losing the house? How do I keep myself from being involved in World War Three? How do I make sure I'm prepared in case there's a doomsday, right? There's a lot of those click-baity headlines that media will use, and that's also the reason that fake news spreads six times faster than truthful news, because people are too busy being outraged or in their limbic system brain, then they are to be able to engage their prefrontal cortex to have rational thought and say, okay, wait a minute, let me fact check this before I share it. I did not know that, Stant. That is wild. Yeah. It's sad, actually. That's a better word for it. Yeah. But even just knowing that, okay, we want to avoid pain. That can also help you when it comes to setting up content, right? Now if you, people are more likely to share something, if it puts them in an emotional, feel-good state, they're more likely to become keyboard warriors if they're angry. We used to do things purposely wrong in videos. Like I would hold a hammer upside down. We'd include weird problems. Well, I've noticed that in videos, it drives me nuts. Yeah. Yeah. And it almost compels you to want to say something about it, right? So there's ways that you can leverage that to help increase or encourage certain human behaviors. But at the end of the day, the point is, what is the emotion that you want someone to primary emotion you want them to feel? Because then everything else in the video can help you support that. And then even going back to the grabbing attention piece, we would spend more time focused on the first three seconds of a video than we would anything else because it's a lot like the title of a book or the title of a podcast episode or the trailer for a movie. If you don't get that right, people aren't going to watch. They're not going to pull the book off the shelf and buy it. They're not going to keep watching the video. So you could have the best message. You could have the best ending. You could have this crazy plot twist and this great script, but if they never get there, it doesn't matter. So what's working now? Well, to me, I am all about the sustainability of what the evergreen pieces that you need. And then there's always going to be challenges and trends and things that come and go and different types of music and what have you. But my belief is that if you focus on the core, you will always find more success. So at the end of the day, if you want to follow a trend, that by definition makes you a follower. What do you mean by the core? Folks on the core? The core three, the spark and emotion, grab attention and create a curiosity gap. If you build your content through that piece, then you can play with styles that come and go, but we used to create the viral trends and then we also would exhaust them very quickly and then you have to pivot. So in my opinion, if you get too focused on this is the thing that's working right now, that puts you in almost like a day trader mentality of constantly having to check the market, which no one has time for when you're in professional services. So the more that you can stick to the core, I think, and the three things that matter the most, I think that's where you're going to get the most traction. So I want to come back to number three in a second, because I want to ask you about tracking. And I do wonder, so you had that original grid that you created and it comes to your content matrix, and I'm assuming that has changed over time, right? Like the things that were working five years ago are not working anymore or they've adjusted a little bit. So how often do you revisit that? And I bet you're not doing a weekend of watching videos, it's probably on a more regular basis. So I do wonder how often that changes. Yeah, well, there's things that change, there's things that never change, right? And so with the core concepts of what makes a great video, that never changes. And because that applies to content in general and how we as humans are attracted and captivated by content. Is that the core three? That's the core three. Okay, so I think that that's what most people need to hear, right? Yeah. Like do these things always. Do this always, if you do, if you start to do all those three things, you will see more results than if you're trying to chase a trend or you're trying to, and the reality is if you get really good at that, then you can experiment and say, Oh, interesting. I'm seeing a lot of content like this. And if that aligns with your voicing your values, then try. And if it doesn't, then give yourself permission to not do it, right? I think a lot of people put so much pressure on themselves that they see other things working that then they feel like they have to make it happen. But if that doesn't fit with your authenticity, it's not worth it. Just dare to pass, right? Dare to pass on that. I will say when it comes to the content matrix, right? Like the topics that you might want to talk about, those can always be changing, the styles of content that you see, those can always be changing. And you could even take the same great idea, the same video concept, because that's where we use that for as a way to come up with a never ending stream of ideas. And we could take the same idea and do it a dozen different ways. And if it worked for you one way, please redo it a dozen different ways. There's no reason not to. What are your thoughts on reposting the same video? I'm for it. I would put some time in between it. But we certainly see that content can get a resurgence. We've had numbers of cases where content's been stolen from us and posted on people's platforms or profiles that had no followers, that had massive existing. I had one video, and this just goes to show you that sometimes it's not the content. I posted it on Facebook. It didn't do anything. I was really sad about it, because I had a feeling this was a great video. It was the worst ones. You're like, "Ah, this is going to do well." Yeah, I love this video. I'm like, "Oh, damn. No one loved it." And this guy ripped it, and he posted it on his TikTok, and it got 40 million views overnight. What? And he blew up. His following, he gained 100,000 followers in a week. It was on international news. I had no attachment to it. Now, we also had rights protection, and so we were able to go in. I could track everyone on Facebook and these different platforms that had pulled and posted my video. What was really fascinating is I think in the span of three days, 30,000 different profiles had posted the video, but only maybe 10 of them or 20 of them had gotten over 2 million views on the video. There was also this interesting, depending upon the time and the audience, and maybe some random luck, determine the scope of who got the views. Now we pulled all of them down because by the terms and conditions, you cannot post my content without my permission for your product. How hard does it do, though? You can report it, and the platforms are very serious about it, and then the T's and C's when you sign up, everybody agrees that if you upload a piece of content that doesn't mean repost, it doesn't mean share. If you're using a feature within an app to alter it, to increase the thought leadership, that's fine. But if you're taking someone's video and uploading it originally, you're then saying to the platform, you have the right to do that. In fact, we actually got that guy's profile taken down. Good. They should give you all his followers. I think that's the next step, is I would like the followers, I would like the monetization, but all that to say, it's just depending upon the time and the season. We also see videos that'll come back around, especially at their seasonal, or different types of content, people care about it, different types of the year. With Halloween just passed, for example, people are more interested in scary types of content. Going into Christmas, people love feel-good types of content going into the new year, and in January, people want more motivational types of content. Just depending upon how we feel. There will be seasons of people just wanted rageful, justice videos, people are really into food over COVID. Depending upon what's happening with the current events, we'll also shape the types of content people are most interested in. We would see research in says where certain videos would come back around during certain seasons because of the thematics of it. Let's go to number three again. Let's go back to that. Let's go back to that. The Curiosity Gap, which I like, it's similar to something I had heard from someone else about. I came here the third thing that they talked about, and this is not for social media. This is just about a person remembers something when you're telling a story. I think the first part is you're telling the story, you use an analogy in the story, and then you create a question in their mind. I wonder if that's what you're talking about, that last part. What's happening in these three different stages is the viewer is unconsciously asking different questions. In the grabbing attention, the question they're asking is what's going on here. Their brain is trying to answer this for them. If you're not clear about what's going on in those first few seconds, they're going to keep scrolling. They need to clearly understand the scope of what they're getting into. Then once they understand what's happening, the next question their brain is unconsciously asking is, "Do I care?" Because it may or may not care. That's fair. Yeah. If they don't care, then they're going to keep scrolling. If they do care, they're watching, and they may not know why they care, but they might. Then the Curiosity Gap gets them to ask the question of what's going to happen next. The Curiosity Gap, I think, is the piece that people struggle with the most. This is purposefully leaving something out at the front of the video, either visually or phonetically telling them that you are, and then answering that. It can be a question in the form of a question. It can be utilizing numbers, the five best tactics, the number one biggest mistake. Here's what I learned. Here was my biggest mistake on this journey. Here's how I got my client, X amount of money. Here's how I went from blankety, blank to blankety bank, right? You're creating a gap in the knowledge that you're then going to fill, and that's how you increase the watch time. You utilize the attention getting to get them to stop the scroll. You utilize the emotion to help them engage and share, and want to propagate the message, and then you use the Curiosity Gap to increase that watch time. If you put all those three things together, then your video has its best chance of going viral, of spreading to the right audience. Being here in Vegas, growing up in Las Vegas, I like to attribute it to I can walk into a conceit of floor. I can't just pull a lever and magically make a million dollars, but I can tell you which slot machines have the best odds. I can tell you which ones not to play, and I can tell you that that little old lady has been sitting over there all day, and she just got up to go to the buffet, so you should go use that machine, because that one's about to hit. It's just increasing your odds by engineering things in such a way that people want to engage with it. Can we do a little exercise and create a video kind of? Sure. Yeah, we can totally do that. I want to remind you I want to come back to what you said about how do you keep on top of trends and what's working, so I have a great job for that, too. Okay, cool. I'm glad you said that. So I came back with a video as you're talking. This is the worst kind I've ever had. Ooh. I thought it'd be kind of funny if you want to catch their attention. So then, where do we go from there? So I kind of give... Well, what's the story? All right, so I'm trying to think of the next kind of thing, like, rapidly, like, what is the worst kind I've ever had. It is, let's see, I've got to be very... I can't be too specific, you know, but I can be specific enough. You know, I can generally tell you... A human being. No, not this, no, no, I love my clients. Usually, the ones that don't, I mean, be more general, the ones that will, they know everything and will not listen to us, like, those are the ones which we've had, you know, multiples, though. There's lots of know-it-all. So like, there's one in particular that he thought that he could do a better job handling it on his own and then... So he ended up firing us, which never happens. We never get fired. Wow. And then he ended up doing a terrible job and selling it for the exact same amount that we had on the table, which we could have gotten him more. So... Yeah, it probably wasn't my worst client ever, but that's when the first came to my mind. Okay. So you could do it that way of... Here's how... This could be either one of the worst clients I've ever had, here's the time I lost my client money, right? And then the answer is really, it doesn't make you look bad. It's like, well, he decided to leave and then he got the same... This is why we ended up winning for him is because he fired us and then turns out, you know, it didn't do any better than we were planning on doing and then we were going to do beyond that. But the immediate idea that came to mind was the top three reasons, or top three ways that make a difficult client or the top three characteristics that make a poor working relationship. This is the ugly way of saying it, right? Yeah. Or the top three characteristics that make bad clients. Okay. I like that. Yeah. So now... So we've got an attention-grabbing hook that's kind of in their face. The bold statement, as well as we're including numbers, people love to complete things with their minds. And then so they need to know the three, and it's not just one, they got to sit through all three to figure out, and they may be having a reaction to you about this, right? And the way that I would expect that you would present it is like, look, and here's why this doesn't help your case. If you number one, people coming in thinking they know it all. If you know it all, that's great. You probably don't need us. But if you're here, it's because there's probably something that we can help you with that you don't know. And in fact, in the situations where we've had clients that have taken this attitude, here's what's happened. Number two, insert here. And then finally, last but not least, dah, dah, dah, right? So that would be the way that I would set up that piece of content. So where do I create? What's the gap? Like how do I... The curiosity count? Yeah. So this is where people can over-complicate this, because the gap needs to be clear but not complicated. So for me, the gap of the video is the title. It's the three ways, or the three characteristics of bad clients. So getting from one to three, essentially? Yeah, it's like what happens next, what are the three? The question that three characteristics of bad clients gets you to ask is what are the three characteristics? Interesting. Okay. So the original one that I presented, which I like years more, but would be essentially like what made them a bad client? Yeah. Okay, gotcha. Yeah. So you don't give away the goods at the beginning. Make sure you give it at the end. Yes. And you want to take them on that story arc, right? Because we want to elongate that watch time. And we never want to do filler as much as possible, because people will just scrub through. But how can we continue to engage in that story? I mean, think about this, these are all miniature stories, whether eight seconds long or three minutes long. That's what you're doing is you're creating a story, you're telling a story to people. What is the optimal length? And then we're going to go circle back to what you're talking about tracking. I haven't found... Personally, I haven't found... I've had people say about 30 seconds, 40 seconds, but we've had content that's been three minutes and five minutes long that's done very well with content that's eight seconds long that's done very well. It really just depends on the content itself. I'm a big believer in as short as you can to get to the subject, but as long as you have to, to cover the subject. And if you're able to balance those together, then that's very helpful. Script and no script. I believe in scripting, because I believe that a great post-production strategy is a great pre-production strategy, and especially for professional services or someone where this isn't their full-time job, but even when it was, you want to be as efficient as possible. There was one month that we filmed 189 videos. We'll never do that again, but you have to be super organized in order to do that, just like when you're... If you want to film a podcast, it's better to try to batch content, because if you can batch and do certain things at certain phases, or maybe you as a speaker, you want to write out your speech and practice it. Some people can go off the cuff, but at the end of the day, how can you be as efficient with your time as possible? And so if you know ahead of time what you're going to say roughly, that also then takes the pressure off your brain in the moment, and then you can be experimental, and then you can say, "Oh, let me try this. Let's add in this. I don't know. Let's bring in this prop," versus like, "Crap, what am I going to say today?" And the more you can get into that mind, and again, reset your nervous system, so it's not so fight or flight when you turn on the record button, I think that's where you win. And at the end of the day, you cannot out-strategize bad videos. So the more you can do on the front end to make great content, the easier it's going to be while filming, the easier it's going to be while editing, and the better the post production is going to be. It's a great line. Thank you. That is a great line. I love that. We got to clip that part. You can't out-strategize. You can't out-strategize bad content. I love it. All right. So you had the idea about tracking. Yeah. A lot of people get nervous about how do they know what someone else is doing on social media. My suggestion to them is to take three to five minutes, it can be once a week, and just pick your—everyone usually has two platforms. Pick your platform of choice and just go and consume some content, but do it from a place of an observer of your own behavior. What do you stop on? Why did you stop on that video? Or if you have a contemporary, go watch some of their content. What are they doing? Why did you stop on a video of theirs? What kept you going? When did you scroll away? When did you start watching and then say, "Never mind," and the more you can even just make those mental notes, if not physical notes, on those reasons, you're going to start seeing a lens into human behavior itself, and you could do this with your kids, you could do this with anyone that you want, your spouse, to get a better understanding of, "Hey, why did you stop on the video?" "Oh, well, I like the title," or, "I like this how to animal," or, "I like that it was colorful," or, "And we'll run this exercise with clients, and even in our boot camps," and people will usually have very similar answers, and so it's a great way without any money, without needing a sample-sized population, or needing to do any deep dives for you to understand human behavior, just by observing your own or those around you. I like it. So there's a quote from a lady named Sally Hogg's head, which you may or may not know. Yeah, she's a braining specialist. And she talks about, "Different is better than better," and I really like that, but if I'm listening to everything you're saying, it kind of sounds like if you do what most other people are doing that are successful at it when it comes to the videos, that is better than doing something different, or maybe I'm misinterpreting it. So I wonder what your thoughts are, and different is better than better when it comes to social media. Sally is so amazing, and I believe this came from the whole idea of knowing your uniqueness is what really matters here. And so to me, that premise and piece comes into the authenticity formula, because at the end of the day, people are selling similar services. If I own a gym, there's a thousand other gyms here in Las Vegas, there's hundreds of thousands of gyms across the country, and we're all selling a similar result, right? But the experience is going to be different. The how we get there is going to look different. The environment, the types of people we serve, the workout methodologies, am I a Pilates studio, am I a kickboxing studio, am I a P90X gym, am I the guy that has- Do they have those gyms or P90X gyms or things? Yeah, I guess. I think so. They have hot yoga, they have regular yoga, they have yoga outside, they have regular gyms. The guys that park the Ferraris in the gym, you could go work out there, right? So depending upon the experience you're looking for and who you want to have it with, and the way you want to get the results, also really matters. And so that's where what you value really comes into play, because a lot of people can get you the results that you want, and of course, expertise comes into play here, credibility comes into play here, and that's what you're building with the content. But I would say that they're not separate, that you need to know how to- why people are engaging with content, why they're consuming, what they're consuming, and how you can leverage it. It's just a major understanding of marketing, and then it's knowing your uniqueness in the space and blending those two together. Yeah, so we had Justin Berry on, I don't know if you know who he is, but he does social media, and for Ryan Pianna- Awesome. He was talking about how, it was interesting because we were talking about sort of in relation to the election, where the celebrity endorsements did nothing, the influence of influencers is starting to kind of wane, and he calls the new breed sort of personalities. And I wonder what your thoughts are on that, because he was talking about how creating content of the person has a personality. That's why lives are so popular as opposed to like, yeah, an influencer can talk about things, but just doesn't have quite the effect that it once did, he doesn't think so. So I wonder what your thoughts are on that whole concept of like celebrity versus the influencer versus like personality, because I was asking them the kind of the same questions about like, yeah, you can get a bunch of views, but like what about like getting clients? It was a very similar conversation in that. So I wonder what your thoughts are on those tiers of celebrity versus influencer versus like a personality. We're the personalities, we're getting more engagement. Well, I'd say that what has been true and continues to be true is that smaller influencers, micro influencers, as they've been called normally, they tend to get better engagement. They tend to get better conversions because you're building credibility, trust in conversion with a particular population. And so they're able to get a lot more out of that particular audience. And from my understanding, a lot of big companies will try to focus on the micro influencers. Of course, everyone wants Kim Kardashian because they know if she's got, I don't know, 40 million followers, let's call it, I'm sure it's more than that, that if they reach one to 3% of that population, there's going to be a massive conversion for them, right? Money is great in the sense for brands in that the familiar faces create trustworthiness for people. And there's always going to be some conversion for that. I think maybe the tiresome feeling that we're experiencing around influencers in general is because of the lack of the uniqueness in the space, right? It's just influencers being popular potentially because they're popular, right? It kind of goes back to maybe even high school, like, why do we like this person? Why is this person or homecoming queen? I don't really thought about this before having this conversation, but I would imagine that maybe we're kind of re-sending or recalibrating what we actually care about when we're consuming content, especially because there's so much to consume now, and there's so many ways in which we can do it and different types of people we can do it from, we really want to align with creators that share our values, really want creators that share what we care about that are going to post about things that matter to us, even me, as a former full-time viral video creator is now spending a lot less time on social media because I'm trying to protect my piece more, and so I am very intentional about the accounts that I follow and who I engage with, and my algorithm reflects that, right? So the algorithm is also going to determine what we get shown, and we are not actually shown content by people we follow. We're shown content by people we engage with, so it doesn't surprise me that personality content or micro-influencers as it were are having a moment, and this is also the reason why I don't believe that you have to have a massive following to get successful because if people are searching for content like yours, the algorithm will help them find you, and so this is where professional services can win as well. I wonder if you think that we're going to start eventually, and I mean by eventually like fairly soon, yeah, like fairly soon, over the next few years, start to see a decline if not a rapid decline in social media usage because I'm very similar to you where I've been using far less social media, it's weird because I'm still on my phone, but less on social media, because I don't want that distraction, and so I wonder if you're going to start to see that, or if we're just like the exception. Yeah, Goldman Sachs has predicted that by 2030, oh my gosh, I'm going to get the number wrong, essentially, we will have quadrupled the amount of money in the creator economy than we've done in the last 17 years. So the predictions are that it's only going to increase, that it's only going to continue to replace typical television, entertainment, cable, radio, what have you, and I would assume that we might be the exception, especially considering that by 2026, Gen Z is going to be the prominent population, and they have grown up on technology. I'm a young millennial, but I consider myself a nice millennial, I come in peace, right? I'm going to wear a millennial. I categorize on the upper end of a millennial. Oh, you're an elder millennial, I'm an elder millennial, I never use it, but I don't appreciate that. Yeah, yeah. No, you're whizzened, right? Whizzed millennial, yes, yes, yes. But as Gen Z is coming into the marketplace and going to be the primary consumer population, they've only grown up on digital content, and so they expect that companies are going to interact with them that way. That is TikTok is now a bigger search engine than YouTube and Google. It's wild. It is wild. And so that's also something to be under the consideration for is that user behavior has shifted dramatically. And so I think we are more likely to be the exception, but I do think that there is more of a call for mental health and boundaries. And so again, we're opening up the apps right now on average six to eight times a day. So it wouldn't surprise me if we walked that back, but maybe we make that time more intentional. But right now, our lizard brains kick in and time just flies. What are you doing with AI that you're excited about, if anything? Yeah. Well, at attention here is we have a video AI genius script writer and idea generator bot that we're working with that we've fed all of our information, all of our teachings, all of our tactics to help come up with never ending streams of ideas, come up with never ending scripts for straight to camera style videos. And I love utilizing those as well as chat GPT to help me hone other pieces of content and material. I think that there's a lot of, if you know how to ask the right questions, if you know how to work within the scope or learn that or have the capacity to, it can really shorten the learning curve and the resistance to certain parts of the process. There's even lots of AI tools for editing, like Opus AI is a great one that's out there that you can feed in a video. It'll automatically cut it up for you. So I think we're going to see a movement more and more towards either AI generated, AI edited, AI supported content. And with that, and we're already seeing a trend towards this, which is people are craving more humanity within the content. So there will always be a place for people. And there's also going to be a place for us to utilize the AI to become more efficient. So when do you think we're going to have realistic videos from people that are AI? So you take essentially a clone of me, right? And I'm creating a bunch of videos. We create the video that we just talked about, about the bad employee. And we've got the chat GPT script. It looks like me, sounds like me. Like, when are we going to start to see those realistic videos? And do you think that's going to get people the humanity that you're talking about? You know, this language learning app that I support on the content side, they're actually doing-- there's a number of companies that exist within the United States already that's doing this. Where you go in, you'll film yourself for 15, 20 minutes. They will take that and turn it into an AI version of you. They call it your clone. And we're also playing with those for localization languages and being able to then change your facial features and your mouth expressions to-- and then your voice as well to be able to say different things. I think we're relatively close. It's very terrifying in a lot of ways. And it also means that global access is an accessibility to content is just growing magnanimously. Yeah, I think there is probably going to be-- you know, we often would joke that content, digital content right now is very much in the Napster days of music-- You probably, yeah. --melt from 20 years ago. And so I'll be very curious to see as AI content continues to flourish and become even more prominent. I think maybe a year out or two years out from that being popular, easy to access technology. But I don't-- I can't say that with any sort of confidence except that I see the usage of it now. It's a higher ticket product right now. But I see the usage of it now and it's very compelling and it's kind of scary. How compelling it can be. So I-- I can't read the software that you're talking about because I think I use that software right. I'd uploaded some videos of me. They cloned me. But they couldn't clone the voice yet. Yeah. Like it only cloned the actual physical appearance. And so I had to put some other voice on it. And although it did match up, it was so creepy. It was so weird. Which voice did you choose? Like Arnold Schwarzenegger? I chose a variety of voices so more like-- felt like they're too squeaky, so I went too deep. So it's just like nothing matched. I'm like, I'm never going to be able to pick the right voice for my face. Of course, right. Because I'm going to be so critical of it. But it was just such a weird thing to look knowing I had not said any of that stuff. And it was not my voice. And I think I had posted it in our Facebook group about like I showed it. It was like a year ago. It was so weird. But that was a year ago. And if you think about Chad GPT was the end of 2022 or-- yeah, it had been end of 2022 that it came out. Just the rapid success of the adoption. Yeah. And look at all the different models that have come out since then. So I mean, we're going to see just a massive proliferation in videos over the next few years, maybe the next year. It's going to be wild. So I wonder what-- does that scare you at all with what you currently do? Scare me how. Like any fear that the amount of work that maybe that you'll have, the number of clients that you'll have will be reduced because no, none of that. No, I-- you know, if you played around with Chad GPT too for ideas or skip writing and what have you, it's a great framework. But at the end of the day, it's not a person. And even as someone that used to be a full-time journalist, I remember even being in conversations with like, OK, can you adjust this for grammar? And it would send me back. And it's like, what-- show me what you did differently. It's like, oh, actually, I didn't do anything different. It's like, oh, OK. So we changed not-- these are the-- or why did you do this? Isn't this grammatically incorrect? It's like, yes, that is true. So I think maybe in a couple years, it'll be bulletproof, but I doubt it. And I think at the end of the day, just like with content, people are always going to want humanity. And of course, things might evolve. I don't know where my career is going to be in a couple years. What I can tell you based upon how my career has evolved over the past 15 years is that it's always going to be shifting. And the way in which people need the knowledge that I have or you have is probably going to change a lot. But it doesn't scare me. I think more of what I'm scared around is the deep fakes of it all, right? And like someone else being able to take an identity. And how do we protect against that while still being able to have this type of content, so? Yeah, you've definitely shown resilience. That's for sure. Thank you. That's a really incredible trait. I have sort of a question that I've had for a long time, and I don't know if anyone has a good answer. Okay. Do you think that... So that would also be, by the way, a really great hook. Oh, yes. I have a question I've had for a long time. I don't think anyone has the answer, and I'm like, well, maybe I have the answer, right? That's interesting. Okay. I like that very much. So there you go. Just teaching moment. Go ahead. Do you think attractiveness matters for successive videos? I think it's one of the things that can help and support. Of course, we see that very attractive men and women do better. But it's not the only reason that content as well, and you don't have to be. Just in general, and there's a lot of statistics around people, even babies, to look at what we would... And I don't know how you qualify this. This is all very subjective. Well, I've seen the objective metrics on it. Oh, how do you? The width of the eyes, the position of the nose of the mouth. Oh, the more like gracious. There is a... Interesting. Again, here's the thing. Someone created that. Right. Kind of like AI data. They put in their own inputs, which affects the output, so who knows? It's one thing you don't know. Well, model women are always going to have an advantage when it comes to content. But their content probably isn't going to be the type of content that your clients are looking for. Right? Yeah. So there's a difference. I think, again, it goes back to who are you trying to target? What do they want? What do they need? And there's a lot of people that would have very distrust or a lot of distrust of a super attractive type of person. I don't think one way or the other, it should hinder you from doing what you want to do. And, again, I was a former Miss Nevada, and people have called me a lot of names on the Internet, and there's a lot of days that I don't feel attractive or pretty about myself. And I think, at the end of the day, if we're using that as a reason to do or not do something, then we've already lost. Right? And this is more about, again, the message, and who do I want to serve, and what is my measure of success, because there's going to be a lot of opinions from other people telling you how to do something, or why you should or shouldn't have the space on the Internet. And if we listen to them, then we will never get the traction we want. Yeah. So there was this guy, and since you were a reporter, I think you'll have an appreciation for this. There was this guy and his wife, they had this company, and I don't know their name, the company or the name of either of them. But this was, man, this was like back in like 2014. I'd gone to this conference. It was put on by Infusionsoft, it's called Icon, and I'd seen them at a couple of different conferences where their whole shtick was getting people on local TV, or sometimes national TV, but usually it's easier to get on local TV. But their thing was, it was that, but then also getting you looking good for TV. So it didn't matter what your looks were, but like, so your suit might be too saggy, so maybe take some paper clips and fix them, they're actually like, when you're going on TV, you go out there, you make sure they look good, but you also give them tips and stuff. Yeah. So I, my question is like, how important are those little things? Like, yeah, you may not be attractive, but, and I don't want to focus too much on that, but I want to focus more on this, like presentation part of it, like the way you present yourself in these videos, do you have any tips on how, like one, is that even relevant, does it matter? And if it is, like, what are some tips on making sure that you present well for the camera? It's very great interesting questions. I'm going to back it up and give you kind of a divergent answer, but I think it's more important, which is, for me, it's not what you do, it's how you do it. And the creators that I've seen have massive success, they aren't necessarily a misuniverse or, you know, bodybuilder type, but their energy is captivating and, and they're beautiful inside and out, right? And it's because it radiates out of them and you can tell they have joy and fun and they're, they're enjoying the process. And the reality is, is you could look perfect, but your energy is saying, I don't want to be here. This sucks. I'm terrified. And people will be like, wow, I don't understand, but this video's making me very uncomfortable right now. Right? So above anything else, it's like, how can you get yourself into the energy of being excited to be there and to have that expand out? And to me, that comes back from being authentically yourself. Now, I think services like what they provide are really amazing and powerful because they help people to feel more confident. They help people to feel more like how they want to present. I think that matters and that can help expand the energy. Confidence is so important. And I agree with the energy, the confidence so, so important and eat. But then you have, you have like the darling of TikTok, which is, oh my gosh, I forget her name, there's, there's so many creators that wear sweatshirts and hairs in a bun, no makeup and people love it because that's authentically who they are and it's relatable. So I don't think perfection is the answer. I think it comes down to, how are you going to show up, what is going to make you feel in your most expansive energy that's then going to translate to the next person that you want to see it? Yeah. I think that's taking action, like you definitely have to do that, you have to get the videos out there. And I don't want to create a bunch of excuses for people. I'm just more, I'm trying to create like some solutions, like so they, like some work around to some of their objections that they have. I mean, there's a lot of them, I, I, I don't believe that you need, if you don't like wearing makeup, don't wear makeup, if you don't be, but if that's going to make you feel better to do it, then do it, right? So I'm a big believer and do the things that you need to do in order to feel better to do the thing that's scary. Yeah. So how did you, like, what did you do to kind of build your confidence up whenever, like you who went and did the beauty competition? So you had to, I know you're not into the fake it before you make the kind of a thing, like you, you weren't a great state of mind probably. So like, how, like, how did you convince yourself, I'm going to do this. I've got the confidence, like, like, cause you can't just go on to a beauty contest and have, and not have the energy. You've got to get it some way and, and you're going to believe in yourself and you got to believe that you're going to do it because they're going to read you. People are going to read you. So how, how are you able to do that? So the first thing that I had to get clear on again was what was success for me, which was doing this, going, getting through the swimsuit preliminary and being able to express myself in that way. And just, that was the win of, like, getting on stage and doing, get an easy win. Just doing the thing. Right. So just, but just showing up and doing it was the success. But of course, I'm a highly competitive person. I had a 3.9 GPA in college. I really like to win. So it wasn't just going to do that. All that was the goal and the measure of success, I still would love to have won. It's still would have been nice to come away with a crown. So I looked at, in order to help me feel better about the experience, because I had no pageantry back down, I was competing in swimming that I've been doing this their whole lives. I looked at what was actually required to win. And so in my competition, there were four phases of competition. It was swimsuit, evening gown, on stage question and interview. So everyone freaks out about swimsuit. Everyone's going to look good on an evening gown. If your score is talking, I was a state debate champion and impromptu speaker, it's like, I can do the speaking part really well, and it turns out that's a majority of my score. And they probably, they didn't look at that, didn't prepare as much for that part. And so you had a huge advantage. That's great. I liked the way you picked it up. I came in for my interview with a business plan as to how I would run my year. Because it's like, look, if you want me, here's what I'm going to do. This is why I'm here. Here's all the organizations that I'm currently working with. Here's the organizations I'm going to move forward with. Here's my platform. Here's how I'm going to attack nationals. And one of the judges came up to me afterwards and was like, you know, because there's a lot of really amazing, intelligent women. They all come in with a purpose. They all know why they're there. And she's like, we just believe that you're going to do the things that you said that you were going to do. And I did. I did like 300 appearances my year. And we ended up tripling the number of entries the following year to a much more diverse group of women. We had lawyers. We had business owners. We had publicists. Exciting for me to see that women could see how they could utilize that as an opportunity to really monopolize and expand their businesses as well as their personal brands and do all this other fun stuff as well. So I think for starters, it was, OK, what do I actually have competence in here? What am I really trying to do with this? Where is the competence? What actually is required to make this happen? And then let's try it and see what happens and leave space for the magic to come in and for it to be fun. Again, I didn't try to be a beauty queen or someone that had competed in hundreds of pageants. I really leaned into my uniqueness. I was a travel blogging, lion taming, burn survivor, turn, Miss Clark County that was here with a message of you don't have to be flawless to feel beautiful. That was what I was here for. And they either wanted that or they didn't. And if they didn't, that was fine too. And if they wanted another competitor that had a different story and a different platform, OK, I was going to win or lose based around who I was and what I knew I could bring to the table. And so I think that applies to anybody. If like, don't try to compete on their terms, win where you know you can win and you do better than anybody else. And that is actually Sally Hogg's head's fascinating core principle, right? I like different is better than better. I don't have to be the best or the better beauty pageant contestant, long term beauty pageant contestant. I need to be the different, the only beauty queen lion tamer. In fact, I would go on to say that a lot my year of like and probably the only journalist, lion tamer, burn survivor, turn, Miss Nevada that anyone knows. And I'm OK with that. So the Miss Clark County and the Miss Nevada, were those the only two you ever done? Oh my gosh. Well, and Miss Clark County was an at large title, so they didn't have local competition. So my first pageant was the state pageant. And then I went straight from there to nationals. OK, so then I'm going to get into haters. I can only imagine the what people thought about a newcomer winning. So how do you because a lawyer see this, you get you get success in your area and everyone's hate on you because you're getting all the clients. And so how do you deal with haters? For a while, I didn't deal with it very well. You know, being a former paper pleaser and a recovering perfectionist, it's really hard for me, especially people that don't know me, to make those types of judgments. And in fact, it really wasn't until I became a viral video creator that I really recognized and understood that any judgment that someone else has on me comes from their own rules about life. And my rules and their rules are probably very different. And so any time you get a piece of hatred, really, it's just a window into their belief system. And if you can understand that, then you can always show up with compassion. It's like, oh, wow, it must really suck to being your head for this to be the thing that matters so much. And I'm a big believer and there's no one above you that's busy hating on you, right? Yeah. I remember when I started working for USA Today, I went in my Sash and Crown. It was the same idea of let's grab attention. There's hundreds of reporters, we're all smashed in like sardines. All I have to differentiate myself is this little mic flag that has the USA Today logo on it. You've got all of these celebrities, all their handlers, all the bodyguards, what's I had no relationships. I was brand new to the industry. I didn't know it into the publicists. I didn't know any of the managers. I didn't know any of the talent. How could I get them to come to me? It's like, well, my uniqueness being here, isn't that I'm the most tenured reporter? Isn't that I've built these relationships in hundreds of articles? It's that I miss Nevada. So let's see what that gets me. And it was like moth to flame and all of the celebrities wanted to come over to talk to me because they were so curious to see me standing on the other side of the carpet. They would take photos with me. And it was a lot of fun and it created great rapport throughout the year, allowed me to build the relationships and show my credibility and get past that initial inertia. But a lot of the journalists were very upset about it. And some of them even accused me of not being Miss Nevada. I was like, okay, well, I don't particularly care what you think about me at this point in time. It's tough, especially when they're peers. But I think it goes back to if you can understand that they're operating from their own belief systems and getting that compassion, then it just kind of becomes a hater block at that point in time. I heard someone say recently about if someone posts something really nasty on a comment about, let's say they comment about your video or something like that, or just a post anywhere. And they're not a follower. You've never seen them before. They don't know you. They're attacking you based on their own imagination. So they're really just attacking their own imagination. And I like the way of thinking about that because it can suck when people post something that's negative. It can get to you. But I love the way, I'm like, no, nothing would bother me now. It's like, no. What are you talking about? It's just their own imagination. They're the one that's got the problem. Yeah. And it ends up hurting you or hurting me as it does. It's always been a great opportunity to say, oh, look, I still have a wound there. They're hitting on something that I need to go heal with in myself because if I were to say, oh my gosh, you're a purple elephant, you would probably just laugh at me because you know that you're not a purple elephant. But if I was to say, man, you use really terrible at these types of cases and you'd be like, I can't believe she said that. How could she? How does she know? And so it just goes to show that unless we're carrying that wound, unless we have somewhere in our own bodies, our brains, our belief about ourselves, then it doesn't matter to us. It's a great opportunity for you to say, oh gosh, okay, there's something that I need to look at because I'm clearly still attaching and calling this in versus the comments that were so clearly out of left field were easy to overcome. It also, depending upon-- I mean, at one point, I had to hire someone to start responding to comments because it wasn't good for my peace of mind. Other times, I would engage with them myself and I would allow my voice and values to shine through and how I responded to people. And it actually picked me up more followers and more engagement and more support from other people that would see how you can handle that. So there's ways you can use it in your favor and it's also ways that you can try to just work around it so that it doesn't impact you because at the end of the day, the people that win are the ones that keep going. And Beyonce has haters, Taylor Swift has haters. Anyone at the top of their game has a subset population of people that are just waiting for them to fall. So if you don't have haters or you don't have people that are pushing back, it probably means that you're not doing anything remarkable enough to keep them from commenting. And I don't think in a world where if you want to be seen, that's where you should live. And it's scary for me, too, right? The last thing I want to do is post something I care about or something I've spent time on and have people tear you down, especially because they are more likely-- they tend to be louder than the ones that are there quietly supporting. But if you're able to zoom out a little bit and see the bigger picture, you can muddy through it enough to understand that it's the consistency of keeping going that matters. So I want to wrap up with this. Yeah. I think that was a great message. And I almost ended on that. But I do want to ask you just this last question, your career is about helping brands earn attention, right? It's all about helping them earn attention. And with the legacy media that seems like the cable news and all that seems like, it's kind of-- I don't know if it's going to go away, but it's decreasing as every year goes by. But you do have many different channels of media. So back in the '90s, you get advertised on TV and reach a lot of people. It's going to probably start to get more and more difficult as more and more channels develop. So looking forward, what's your advice to people about making sure that you're still able to earn attention? You've been able to adapt. It's the whole tiara thing. That's brilliant. You're able to stand out. So what are some things that people should focus on in the future to make sure that they're able to stand out? I think one being open to the fact that platforms are probably going to change. They've changed in the past 10 years, right? Rest in peace, my space, or rest in peace, periscope, rest in peace, fine. And we will always be engaging on different platforms, but the way in which people engage and why they watch what they watch at a core level doesn't change. And so again, if you focus on the core tenets of what makes great content and you're putting your time there, that is going to help you to weather the storms of the different platforms, the different trends. I think just in general, video and short form video is going to continue to skyrocket over the next five years. I don't think that's going away. I don't know what platform is going to stick around and which one's going to go on the next one that's going to rise up. But if you're focused on utilizing and leveraging the psychology of attention to make great content, you're going to have much more success than anyone else. Well, thanks Ella. Yeah, thanks so much for having me. This spring, we're taking the maximum layer mastermind to Maui, the perfect setting to reset, refocus and recharge. April is a pivotal time to assess your law firm's progress and fine tune your strategies to ensure 2025 is a year of unparalleled growth. Our Maui mastermind is designed to help you identify opportunities, overcome challenges, and take bold steps forward. This today event lends high impact business training with transformative hot seats. 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