And so, dude, thank you so much for being here. I know, I don't know if you know this, bro, but I've been trying to make this moment happen for three and a half years. And I call it pleasantly persistent, but I just keep asking, man. So thank you for making it happen. - Oh, thank you for pleasantly being persistent. - Yeah, man. Yeah, thank you. I did it for you, bro. It's for you. - Yes, sir. So, here's the deal. Is your chair shaking right now, bro? Or is that me? - I think it's the walking. - Oh, okay, got it. I was like, dude, is something wrong with me? It's like, all right, so in the past 40 months, Alex, you talked about, you've built a 7.8 million fan audience across all these platforms, two billion impressions, 35,000 pieces of content. You spent $4 million across that time period. And I was thinking that the thing we could do to bring the most impact today is how everybody here wants to build a powerful personal brand. They want to grow their business. And can you first, before we get into the all the tactics, we have so many things to share with you guys today, but can you first define personal brand and why you think it's so important for everyone? - So I think personal brand is just the things that you choose to associate with. And so you have ideals, some sort of business that you want to associate with, people that you want to associate with. And it's just curating the things that, just as much what you want to be seen and thought of with, as much as what you don't. And I think one of the big things that happens early on is we want to say yes to everything, which is kind of tough because sometimes you're like, I don't really like this person that is asking me to be on their podcast. It's like, well, everyone's going to associate you whether you like it or not. And so fundamentally, brain doesn't see a negatives. It only sees in positives. They say, don't think about a pink elephant. We also think about pink elephants, right? And so you can't like unbrand. You can only positively pair things. You can't despair. And so it's really by avoiding things, kind of like pruning a garden, that you can make a really nice brand. So a lot of branding is about choosing everything you're not going to associate with and then seeing what's left. And then that becomes the brand that becomes pure and stronger. And so I think, especially as everyone here, what I would dissuade you from doing is, one, talking about things that you haven't done or pretending to. And that's like 95% of people here, not you, everyone else. And the other, so one is pretending to be something that you're not, 'cause that's one of my people like, man, I have imposter syndrome. It's like you have imposter syndrome 'cause you're lying. - Yeah. - You're pretending to be something that you're not. If you don't pretend to be something you're not, if you state the facts, you tell the truth, there's nothing to feel like you're an imposter about. If you made $5,000 and you made this many mortgage sales, that's what happened. Someone can hate you or love you, but that's the, you stated the facts and told the truth. And so I think that has always been our North Star for everything we do is, and if that's not compelling, then make the truth more compelling. Like do more shit. And then when you talk about it, people would be like, "Wow, he made 35,000 pieces of content." Okay, then maybe I'll listen to it because of that work, independent of whatever output happened. So if I had zero people who followed me, well, you'd be like, I know how to post 35,000 pieces of content and get zero followers. Let me tell you how that works. Like it'd be still interesting, right? It'd be like, here's all the things not to do. - Yeah, and so you even said this at a presentation years ago, I remember you wrote, you're like, man, this is my big strategy. Do shit, talk about it. Do bigger shit, talk about it. It was like very simple. It was just like do the thing and then talk about it. And so one of the things that I think when we get into content strategy that people struggle with is education or entertainment or edutainment, as you called it. You know, and I look at like, all of us look up to these accounts on social media that have the biggest followings and their entertainers. And you know, I feel like we look to them for content strategy. I don't think that's a good plan for people in the industry who wanna go to their brand. - Yeah, so I didn't know. And so I'll very much like, let's see. And so we widened our scope in terms of our content with the intention of, or at least the theory behind it being, if we got more people to see our stuff, then if we catch with a bigger net, then there's still gonna be more in absolute. So relatively fewer people in the audience are going to be business owners for me, but a larger absolute amount will be business owners if I go wider. And that wasn't the case. And so after we did that for, I think it was like three or four months, we just kinda went pretty wide with the content. I made a college video, I made a relationship video, I made a handful of videos on like philosophy stuff that I'm into. And what happened was the actual objective metrics of the business, our opt-ins went down, book sales went down, but we got more views and more subscribers. And so it's really, really tempting to start getting into the vanity metrics of views, subscribers, followers, whatever. But I never did this to get famous, I did this to get rich-er, to be very clear. And I always wanna, like, I never want like, I always like to be very transparent about that. And so making content has always been a means to an end. And so if you're in business and you're making content for the means to an end, which is like, you want to be able to price in more premium, you wanna convert at a higher percentage, you wanna be able to get free customers inbound, all those things are benefits that come downstream from building that personal brand, which is really just the pairings and associations that your ideal avatar finds positive. And since the thing is, when I, it's all the story, but I had a business under front of mine, it does about a million a month, smaller business. And he came in and he was talking to me, and he was like, yeah, off-handedly. It's like, you know, yeah, I stopped listening to your stuff a few months ago and I've been listening to it for like five years. I said, he's like, I guess I'm just not really your avatar. And I just like, you know, it's like, dude, you 100% are my avatar. And that's when I just, I went down to the team, I was like, we need to change it all. Like we have to just talk about business. And so back to business became the whole theme and if for those of you who have seen my content, that's what we focused on. - So what was the result of making that change? - Yeah, so once we went back to business, my average views for video dropped in half. But as a result, we could, we didn't have to have nearly as heavily produced stuff. And so it's very much just like me talking to the camera, maybe with a whiteboard, whatever. And we got more, more opt-ins on the site, more book sales, which are the two kind of like leading indicators for me downstream for portfolios. And yeah, I mean, like all the, and for me personally, I like business. That's all I like talking about. So me talking about other stuff is actually like not fun. I have to like get AMP to do a Mosey meals thing. And I'm like, who cares? It's lunch, you know? They're like, they want to know. And I'm like, I don't think they do, man. (laughs) And so it was a good experiment, but I will tell you, I think the algorithm is getting so good at serving niche content to people who consume niche content, that you have to be okay with something that has, you know, 19 views. I'm being dead serious about it. Like I've had so many businesses just in the last couple of months that I've spoken with that, you know, I talked to an art dealer that's doing a million dollars a year with a 1,500 person email list. I'll talk to a person who's super niche down and registered dietitian, who helps people bill, registered dietitians, bill insurance more accurately. That's her business. Like talk about a niche of a niche of a niche. And she has 5,800 followers. And she told me she made her first sale when she had eight people on her email list. Eight, I was like, is it a list at that point? Or are you just like, email eight people? You know what I mean? - Yeah, it's outlook. - Yeah, right. She sounds like you just emailed friends, right? - Yeah. - But she was doing just a hundred million bucks a year with 50, and I looked at her reach on her account and it was like 2,800. - Wow. - But if you're registered dietitian and you want to make an extra hundred grand a year by billing insurance under all these different codes, you buy her thing. Like that. And so I give the example that I consume a lot of niche gym manufacturing content. And so I like welders and metal fabs. It does matter, but it's like really niche gym content. And so these guys are terrible marketers, but they show their pieces of equipment. And so my news feed is just like comedians and metal fab shops. And they're not like the viral cool ones. They're just like, hey, we made a new row. Look at how it works, and then they do it. And so I say that because that guy has somebody in his ear saying you should be making stuff about like, you know, whatever viral meme stuff is. I don't know, falling out of a cliff or trying punching a stranger or whatever. You know what I mean? Ask 10 gym owners how many pieces of equipment they want, whatever. But it's not that. They just make sure that the content that you have is the association you want people to have with you. And so I don't think the whole going really wide is the idea, if you want to get views, which the thing is, is like if you listen to Jim, Mr. Beast, and some of the other guys, their primary revenue stream is ad revenue. And so that's how they make money. But, and they're brilliant. Don't get like, they're brilliant at it. But if you're trying to have a niche which most businesses do, then make, if you make more content about the stuff that your particular customer likes, they will like you. And if you make it about stuff that they don't like or care about, they won't like or care about you. Period. And so I would just say like just don't fall into the trap of the vanity metrics. And like it's hard because you want to see that. Now, the way that we controlled this is I like having paired metrics with any business. It's like you have speed and you've got quality, right? Just as an example, like you want to go as fast as you can, but you also want to make sure the quality's there. So once you know that you're getting the right people who are consuming your stuff because you're making the right content, then at that point, then you jam the views by all means. But you just have some sort of metrics. So for us, it's like we want to make sure that our CPMs on our views are really high 'cause I know business owners are very expensive. So it's like, okay, if they're really high, then I'm getting the right eyeballs. And if that's true, then I absolutely would love more subscribers that are business owners. But that has to be true first. And so having something whether it's the opt-ins, your applications, book calls, just site visits, whatever, well, site visits is tough. But something that you can track that gives you some sort of quality metric on the traffic that you have, then you can use all of that gusto of like, now I'm gonna go get views and stuff. But I've got this control here to make sure it's the right views. - Yeah, and I noticed one thing, just a side note real quick. If you ever want to know how rich someone is, it's based on how they refer to Mr. Beast. So Alex said, Jim, if you ever hear someone say, Jim for Mr. Beast, they're rich as fuck, okay? Like that's it. (audience laughs) 'Cause I don't even know Mr. Beast's name, bro. You know what I mean, like, okay, so just side note. Cool. All right, so one of the things I noticed though, when you start your videos, and I feel like we, you know, like you'll say to people that the viewer is watching social media and they're saying, why should I watch you, right? So we're trying to educate people. And some of us have done things. Some of us haven't done things. Maybe people in this room have been doing real estate for 20 years. Somebody else in this room has done it for two. I talked to a lady yesterday, she just got a license, okay? So just everyone's on a different path. But when you're talking about this, like, do you think that everybody should insert that frame into the beginning of their video? Like why they should stick around if you're gonna be educating somebody? 'Cause I noticed you do this on almost every video. - Yeah, so-- - On YouTube. - Yeah, so if you're doing longer form stuff, then we looked at, so I'm a big, like you said spreadsheet thing. Like I just look at the data and then I say, okay, what stuff work, let me do more of that. What stuff didn't work, let me do less of that. And so when I looked at the top 100 or whatever YouTube videos I had, the ones that were the top 10, all had proof promise plan, all embedded into them. And so that has been our little mental easy framework. Like what's the promise? What's the proof that you can deliver on that promise? And then okay, now I'll listen to your plan. Here's the layout for the video. Here's the roadmap, here's the framework. And so that's been our kind of like three piece. But if I had to wait them, proof is number one. And so the reason that not to get into like high YouTube, but a lot of the like the high-end creators like Mr. Beast, there you go, Mr. Beast and those guys, is they talk about confirming the thumbnail as soon as humanly possible. And what they mean by that is that when someone clicks, they want to know that what they clicked on is exactly the thing that they wanted. And so the way that you do that is make it as congruent as humanly possible in multiple ways. So based on what the headline is, versus what the person says in the first few seconds, also what they see, what they hear, you want to have multiple different ways of confirming the thumb as fast as possible. And so the thing is, is in entertainment, if I say, hey, I'm going to go smash this Lamborghini and toss it off a cliff, then you, as soon as you start the video, you want to show the cliff, the Lamborghini and say, this is what I'm going to do. And you want to say that as fast as possible. So they're like, oh, this isn't some click bait, whatever, this is what this guy's going to do. In education, how do you approximate that they're going to get what they want to get? It's different, I can't show you the result. I have to give you proof that I can help you. And that's at least how I think about it. I think proof is an approximation of the likelihood that they're going to get what they click to see. And so if you click a video that says like, the best investment advice in the world, and then the first five seconds, it's like, my name's Warren Buffett and I own Berkshire Hathaway. And it's like me 94 years to worth $100 billion. Here's eight things you probably want to consider. You're like, okay, I'll listen. If you're like, hey, you know, I'm a teacher and I will give you great investing advice. It's like, well, you can't be that good. (audience laughs) Right, so there's this big obvious. It's like the big obvious is almost, is the problem 99% of the time. A lot of like, a lot of people who are making content are looking for like 100 little hacks. But like, it's just the big obvious thing. Like I'm not, I'm not a delusioned or disillusioned by the fact that I get a disproportionate amount of attention because what I have done, not because what I'm saying is necessarily novel. And so like, Jim Secrets was a podcast that was around before I sold Jim Launch. And none of y'all listened to it. And it was fire. (laughs) But it was only after we sold Jim Launch that people were like, oh, shit, he knows what he's talking about. Okay, now I'll listen, right? And so obviously there's, the stuff has to be good, but the frame in which you consume, the frame in which people consume content is the messenger. Like the messenger is inextricably linked with what they are consuming, with the message itself. And so I think not enough people are paying attention to who they are and what they have done when they are claiming that they can help someone and trying to focus way too much on the stuff being said. Like Gary's here, I think they're doing what, $350, $400 million a year in Vayner, right? Like if he didn't imagine to erase that and then everything else is the same, no one cares. He's just a dude talking about social media. How do you know? How do you know that what he's saying is true? He has no proof. And so like I wrote this down the other day, I didn't write this down, excuse me, I yelled it at someone. I was trying to like make myself sound better. Proof, motherfuckers, proof. Like that's what matters. Like if you get one thing out of all the stuff that I have to say here, it's proof. So I'll tell you a quick story 'cause I think it'll be relevant. So I recently did a big review. This'll be a common theme, by the way, is that I just look at a bunch of data and then I'm like, let me see if I can find two interesting things. And so I looked at 2,000 ads that Jim Launch had run over four or five years 'cause I was helping their marketing team with something. And of the top 50 ads, 40 of them were not me. It was just proof. It's all it was, proof. 10 of them were educational, which I see as an approximation of proof. If you're very good, people are like, oh wow, he knows more than me. That's pretty smart. Okay, he must know, right? So then you have to, basically someone has to reason that you're good versus just showing them that you're good. And so with that, what's interesting is that of the 2,000 ads, 80% of them aren't proof. Just 80% of the top 50 are. So what should I be doing? More fucking proof ads, right? And then the question after that is like, okay, well, there's not like, oh, I have proof 'cause that's the next thing I would hear from the audience. Like Alex, I have proof and no one believes me. No shit, you have terrible proof, right? And so proof exists on a continuum. So you have on one end, so let's say I'm selling teeth widening just as a hypothetical extreme. If I have yellow teeth and I swish this stuff around and I spit it out right now in front of Neil, not at Neil in front of Neil. And he looks at my teeth and he's zooming in the camera, you'd be like, holy shit, this stuff works. The next question you have is, is it permanent? Will it damage my teeth? Like how long will it last? Whatever. Those are buying questions, but the likelihood that it works is no longer a question in your mind. And so that's an extreme version of proof. That's live, in-person, raw, unedited. And there's a big checklist of proof that we have, but that's this extreme. On the other extreme, now, and if I were, let's say, if you're an Asian girl, if you're an Asian girl, and I'm an Asian girl, then you'll believe it more, right? If you're an old black guy, you might not believe it as much. Whatever, like everybody's, like, the more relevant you can make the avatar who's getting the experience, it becomes more analogous for them. They say, oh, that person looks just like me. Therefore, I can take that experience and say it would also happen for me, which is fundamentally why we have different avatars when you're trying to show proof. And this is like customer success stories for us, seem to be doing the best. So it's the proof. Yeah, and on this extreme, the worst one would be something that's, instead of visual, it's descriptive. So instead of showing you the teeth, it talks about the experience, and it would be not visual at all. So it's not video, it's text. And it's of a person that is not like the person is reading it, and it's five years old, right? And so it's like, these are degrees of proof. And so if you give yourself kind of a proof audit, which is, I had an ad, I remember a few years ago as one of the top ads, I just had made a post in my community of Jim owners. I just said, how much extra money have you made since you've been here? I was like, just answer. And then all I did was I recorded my screen and I just scrolled. And it was five minutes of scrolling. That was the ad, and it crushed. It made me a lot of money. Wow. Yeah, it's just like, I noticed when we share customer success stories, it's one thing, would you just say it? That's better than nothing, but when we show it. So in the real estate niche or in the mortgage niche, when we show the real numbers that somebody saved or that we show the result, we got our clients. It seems to work really well. And so I would encourage everyone here to just really double down on that. And I've always been wondering why it works so well. And Alex just explained it perfectly. So that was a great analogy. So one thing I wanted to kind of clarify for everyone here is, you talk a lot about content strategy and then a lot of it relates to YouTube, but then you do a ton of short form as well. Which do, for someone building their personal brand, where should they start? Where should they double down? Or is it all of the things? Where should they kind of focus? So I think it's helpful to think like, okay, what is advertising? Advertising is just letting people know about your stuff. And so as many ways as you can let, as many people as possible know about your stuff, great. So then it comes down to return on resources. So if, 'cause like, take it to the natural extreme, if you only did shorts and you were amazing at them, you would make a lot of money. If you only did longs and were amazing at them, you'd make a lot of money. So it's not which one is it, then comes down to the person of what's my return on effort? You may be better, naturally, or have some head start in one of these two directions. Or you might not have the resources right now to make good enough long form videos that you get stuff, maybe shorts a little easier for you. Then in that case, if you look at this much effort that I'm gonna be putting in, then you do have an absolute AB answer of like, no, shorts is what I should do because given these resources, I'll get a higher return on it. And so that's very much between your resources and your skill sets. But we started with shorts because I could put out more of them and I did them once every 90 days. So a team would fly out, I would sit there, I'd record 101 sitting, and then that was it, and then I would go back to work. And then people will watch them and have to make more. - And then, yeah, so that's how money of us discovered use through the shorts. And then we found your long form and all that stuff. But I think like people don't have that budget, that big budget to get started, or maybe they do. - I mean, time budget too. Time budget. - Time budget. - Yeah, when I see resources, yeah, sorry. - Yeah, same thing, but it's like, but I noticed when I recently attended one of your workshops, business workshops, and we talked about the constraint, finding the constraint in your business. And for people who are trying to build their personal brand, their constraint may be content distribution, or it might be editing, or it might be getting this stuff out there. And I feel like we make investments everywhere else, and we know that content works, and we know that doing more content would work, but we don't do it. And why is it that we spend resources and money and time on the shit that doesn't, like, I even got this realization sitting in the workshop, like, what the fuck am I doing, bro? Like, there's something that works. Why am I not doing more of that? And then I'm wasting my time over here. Is it like, are we all like, do we have like an internal defects, like that makes us go this way? - No, I think it's short-term reward, that's it. Like, fundamentally, like, if you can delay reward, if you can actually just work without needing to see some sort of cookie immediately, you can beat everybody. Like, and it's not even like you have to wait that long. You just gotta be able to wait longer than most people. And most people can't wait ever, at all. And so, to Neil's point, one of the issues is, especially within the entrepreneurial community, is that we're rewarded very early on in our careers for switching. You were in a career that you hated, you were in a job they didn't like, you were in some circumstance, and you decided to start a business. And so you changed, you took a massive action, you changed your conditions, right? And then you got rewarded for that. And the problem is that you need to do that once and then never do it again. Because once you're in, now, you're like, you've made the big change. Now, the big change is inside that you have to make, which is you have to learn to persist. And a lot of that looks like facing the unknown and having no idea what you're going to do and taking steps anyways, under the faith, that with each step, you will learn a little bit more and get a little bit better and you will be able to see one step ahead. And that's all it is. And that has not changed my entire entrepreneurial career. People ask me what my five year plans are. I'm like, I don't know because five years from now, I have so many options I can't see. But I know that today, I need to do this. And it's the same thing I had to do yesterday. And I will keep doing it until we get to this point, because then that will open up other options. - Yeah, and so finding that problem and focusing on it, it may not be the most fun thing is what I found. It's going to be really hard to find that person. We haven't tried, we've gone through people, it didn't work. And we've had to fire people and bring them back and do all these things. And then that part, though, is where we're going to see the most growth. It's the difficult shit that nobody talks about. - Yeah, most of the solutions that are required to grow a business are not novel, interesting, or fun. It's like, okay, so I'll give you an example. Like we bought a company, it's a big chain, it has 30-something locations. And so we're like, okay, so we spent four hours redesigning the sales process at 5X, Dell TV. And I was like, all right, roll it out. Like retrain the entire staff across all the companies or all the locations. They're like, that's going to take like six months. And I was like, yep, we're not going to do anything else. That's it, that's all we're going to do. But what about, what about content? What about ads? And it's like, why would we care about any of that? Like if we 5XL TV with this new sales process, that is all that matters. In terms of all the resources we have, is there anything else that's going to 5X this business in the next six months? No, then go away, shush, like, just do that. And so a lot of you guys have all of these go away, shush ideas that you need to tell yourself, like go away, shush, like, I don't need to do that. Like if you have 10 sales guys, and those sales guys are doing X volume for you, then tell me why we can't have 100 sales guys. Like explain to me the physics of why we can't have 100 sales guys. Or is it simply that like, you don't know how to recruit higher in train, which is a skilled efficiency and solvable? Or is it that, okay, well, after we spend a certain amount of money on ads, we, you know, our ROAS stops dropping. Okay, then your ads suck. Yeah. And so yeah, go ahead. You said something like, you're not, it's not unscalable, you're just unskilled. Yeah. Yeah, it's not like harsh truth, but. Yeah, no, no businesses. Like, I get this question all the time to like, am I in the right vehicle? And I sometimes, I wish I hadn't made that video. Because I feel like you gave a lot of entrepreneurs permission to like jump out on things that are completely legitimate, find businesses and are just hard. And it's stressful. And it's always stressful. It never stops being stressful. So like, stop seeing stress is a bad thing. Sorry, this is a side rant there. Yeah. But most, if you simply frame the thing that you, that is blocking the business as something you do not know how to do. So rather than saying sales guys don't work for my business, say, I don't know how to get sales guys to work for my business, right? Instead of saying, Facebook ads don't work, say, I don't know how to make Facebook ads work, all right? There's very, there's a big, big difference. And fundamentally, first off, if you're in a business where there's other players in the marketplace, if someone else is doing it, it obviously can be done. And the funny thing is, is that to develop the skills that are required for some of these things like Facebook ads or hiring a sales guy or writing a script, like it takes like 20 hours tops. Like Facebook is a gazillion dollar company that had all of these really smart engineers try and make it as easy as possible for you to make money on Facebook so that you would pay them more money. Like a lot of these tech platforms and people are so afraid of, it's like, they spend so much money to try and make this easy and you're still a pussy for not trying 'cause you're afraid of looking stupid to yourself when no one's watching, which is ridiculous. - Clap it up. (audience applauds) - And so, you know, if I could be honest with you, like, I remember seeing you speak at Bradley's office in 2020 and bro, like I was lost, man. It wasn't that it was boring. It was just, I just got lost. I didn't know what you were saying. (audience laughs) So I noticed like people here who like see Alex now, they're like, man, this is amazing, but what, but I feel like you had, you were still of a similar intellect at that time as you are today, but now you become like so much better at presenting and teaching and all the content. And so I feel like it's, is it the reps? Is it something that you really focused on? Did you get a coach? Like how did you go from having all this knowledge and throwing it up on spreadsheets that no one can understand to being able to present the ideas to where now millions of people in the country learn from me as their teacher? - So the process that I outlined in terms of making content better and finding ads that worked is probably the single most repeated process I have in my life, which is I do a ton of volume. And then I look at the top 10% of that volume. And I see what does this have that's different than this other 90. And then when I see, ideally if I properly identify what the difference is between that 10 and 90, then I cut out the stuff that's in the 90 and do 10 times more of the 10. And then I do it again. And that has fundamentally been how I've approached everything. If I wanna look at like, how do I improve a sales script? I listened to all the sales calls. I looked at the ones that were like these calls are pristine, they're awesome calls. Like look at the looping, all the stuff that's involved and we're like, okay, what was different about these calls for the others? Okay, we didn't talk about this thing. We didn't ask this question, but we did add this question. And so then the script gets pruned and it gets cleaner and it gets tighter. And so when I looked at the content that was doing better, it was content where I didn't use big words, where I didn't talk about complex topics, but or rather I talked about complex topics in a simple way. And so I was like, oh, so one of the big, one of my first early videos that hit was, which now has come to haunt me, how to get your wife to go where you wanna go to dinner, which is, you know, you wouldn't be opposed to go into GCA factory, would you? Which now everyone asks me if I'm opposed to doing podcast, I'm opposed to doing experience, whatever. But the thing is, is that it was a sales technique, but it was applied in a way that could be more accessible to other people. And I see that as kind of like the best of both, is if you can, like I'm not against getting a viral video, as long as it's about business. And so that was a video that talked about a really powerful sales technique, but did it in a context that many people are in every day, which is figuring out what you wanna eat for, what do you wanna eat for dinner? And so that was a great crossover. So I was like, okay, what was in this video? I was like, well, we had big brand names. So that was something that people recognized. I was like, I use simple words. I used an experience that happens to many people all the time, but it was tied to something that could make money. So it's like, these are all the things. And so then when I'm making other concepts, it's like, okay, is there a brand that we can draw into this? Is there an example we can pull in? Is there, and so it's fundamentally doing that process of the first step that everyone skips, do a shit ton. Then look at the stuff that worked well and then do more of that. And I know that sounds incredibly simple. And the only thing simpler is just not doing it. - Yeah, that's true. And so this is part of the pre-work sometimes you talk about. So it used to be that, and I'd done this too. We would just go in the studio. We gotta make content and shoot from the hip. Turns into like a nightmare afterwards. We have to clean it all up and figure it out. And then sometimes I thought that was the easiest 'cause I just didn't have that time. But you've talked about a process recently where you switched to doing more pre-work. Can you tell me about that? - Yeah, and we have a little saying is, was it an ounce of pre-is where the pound of post? That's our little, all the media guys are like, please more pre-work 'cause more stuff they have to do on post, otherwise. I will say this, have you ever, who here makes content? Can I get a hand raise? Okay, so keep your hand raise if the content, if you've had a piece of content you made that you like really prepared a lot for it. You don't, not all of them, like you've had one that you really like took some time on. Okay, did that piece outperform your normal pieces? Okay, well some of you suck at making content. (laughing) The thing is is that when we prep a lot for a video, we know that it's going to do better in general. And so there's those and then there's the equal opposite which is where I'm fired up about something. I'm like turn the fucking camera on, like I'm tired of this. And so then it just becomes a rant. But like those are kind of the two polar extremes. The middle is where it kind of sucks, right? Where you're going in, you're punching the clock, like all right what are we going to talk about today? Like you might as well not make it. But fundamentally if you have each video that you outline with what is the promise for this person, right? What is the proof that I can deliver on that promise? And then what's the plan that I'm going to walk them through? And you want to get that, all that done in like eight seconds if it's along. Like we're experimenting right now, I'll tell you guys a fun experiment we're running. We're trying it, we're trying a no intro video. Yeah, it's going to be really weird. We're going to see what happens. But like I'm so convinced that just the more and more we shorten this intro, people like think about you or you consume a video. You just like, you just, you skip past it. You just want to get to the meat. And so I was like, all right, well if we have, you know, 13 ways to create a monopoly ethically, we should just make it like, all right, so the first way is and just go right into the video. And so, and then have a lower third that edifies me and covers some of the like, who is this guy? And so anyways, that's stuff we're experimenting with. But just to give you an idea of how much I really want to compress that. And that's the stuff that we will obsess about. And in ads for example, and I'm going off but the first, if you run paid ads the first half second, it's tiny, it's tiny, tiny. Like you have to obsess about it. And I've been running ads for a long time now. And I've been making content for a short time. But in both of those, all I can tell you is that it's been unidirectional in terms of my obsession with the first moments. It's all about the first moments. And so some of you do have amazing videos that you spent a really long time on, but it took you 45 seconds to get to the point of the video. And you lost everybody. And so if you can just get to the point faster and say as much as you can with as few words as you can, you may like, you don't want to make a 45 minute video if you can say it in five. And so it's about value per second, not seconds of value. And that by the way goes for everybody who's in education. So if you help people, if you train people, you do whatever, it's about how can I distill this in as few words as seemingly possible? And if you've never done this before, take your words, put them into Hemingway or any writing app that gives you a grade level. Keep beating it up until you get to third grade. And then look at what the language looks like. If you start speaking in that way, people will understand you better. What you're not gonna do is people are like, "If people can't understand me, I don't want their business." It's like, "Well, I do." Their money spends the same. So what happens is if you make it simpler for people to understand, more people will, and the people at the top will simply enjoy it more. Because it requires less mental effort for them to consume it, which by the way, part of the reason that being an authority and having proof that you can do what you say you can do matters is because it's actually more efficient for the listener. If you're a teacher who says they can help me to invest, you might have information that's better than Warren Buffett's. But I constantly have to appraise what you're saying in real time to decide whether I do think it's better or not. If the richest man in the world gives you investing advice, you actually don't have, you turn that part of your brain off. You're like, "I'm just gonna listen and take it as fact." And so it's actually lazier consumption to listen to an authority, which comes into whole ethical things around persuasion. But fundamentally, that is why demonstrating authority is so important because it actually makes it easier for them. It's less effort for the consumer. Yeah, and so for that looks like for so many people here, it's like, "Hey, in the last 12 months, "I've been able to help this many clients do this result "or show one of those results." And then now we're watching it. The viewers, the average user watching saying, "I don't have to decide if this guy's full of shit." I could just listen to the video or watch the video. So I love that. And so you talk about TTV in a business sense when we have our products and TTV times are time to value. Is this the same concept in video? 100%. Okay, so like, you talk about value per second. So a lot of the people in the room who said, "Let's do this 'cause I think this is really helpful "for people here and watching this." The people that said they spent a lot of time on that video and they thought it was gonna be a banger and it wasn't. It bombed. It got like 13 views on you too. And it got eight on Instagram. And they're like, "They DM me at 11 o'clock at night saying, "Neal, I know you're in the featured content, but it just "doesn't work for me." It was probably because of this. It was most likely to be 100%. 100%. Well, there's two extremes. If you're that person, right? So if you're that person, I'm talking to you. So you have two options. One is you can say, "I will never do content again." I mean, that's like taking the logical stream. Like, that's it. I will never try again. I am so fragile that me putting an hour into a video and not working out, that I will forever forgo a free form of advertising that could get me customers. I'm like, that's what you can do, right? Like, that's an option. Or you try again. Like, that's it. Like, you try again and you make 10 videos that you spend an hour on and you just look at the one that did better of the 10. You say, "What did this one have that the other ones didn't?" And then you do more of that. And you, over time, we talk about having... So, and I was just knocking on what you were saying. It's no silver bullets, only golden BBs. And so, the things that create excellence are never one big things. If it was one big thing, everyone would do that big thing. And realistically, if there ever are silver bullets, everyone immediately starts doing them and the whole industry moves up and then it becomes baseline again. And so, it's all the details. It's the 99 golden BBs that matter. And so, if you don't already have checklists, live by checklists. Like, because you can't keep it all on your head. It's like, okay, I have to have the interest, I have these four things. And I also, like, just have it in front of you. And you're like, okay, let's make sure. And one of the things I would encourage you to do, like, I wish my team could, like, nod their heads right now, we will sometimes go through an entire video and finish it. And we'll both, and I'll be like, I think we can do that one just again, but better. And they're like, let's run it again. And so, we run it again. And so, we get at the end, we're like, I feel like we could do it better the third time. It's like, all right, even though I've just said this same thing for the last two hours, because I just did an hour-long video, took it again, hour-long video, took it again. And then the third try comes out, perfect. And then it crushes. And so, like, one of my favorite things in training is awesome, again. Like, you're training a sales guy, you're like, awesome, again. And so, when you're training yourself, you just have to think of yourself, like, awesome, again. - Yeah, yeah, and I love that because it's like more reps, but also being intentional about the process. Like, he talked about success leaves clues. Why did this piece of kind of do better? How can we go deeper on that? And I love the idea of just having a checklist. Like, really simply what you have to go through to make each video. - What are all the elements of proof? Does this thing have it? What are all the elements that made this the one proof video that I have really good? Okay, well, it started with a painful experience. All right, let's make sure that all the ones we have start with painful experiences. Not saying that's what it is, but I'm saying hypothetically, that would be one of the things that you could have. - Yeah, and so a lot of people are concerned about AI and, you know, deep fakes and all these people making content and stuff. And AI is gonna take over the content generation, but you talk, you did a piece of content recently about how to create AI proof content. Like, I'm not proof in this case. I'm just like AI proof, like, it's where immune from that. What is that? - So, unless AI lies, they can't talk about what it did in the real world. So, you could talk about what you've done. - Yeah. - Simple. So, yeah, it's like documenting the stuff that you've actually done in the world. - So, like, you do shit and talk about what you did, then no one else can talk about the stuff you did, because only you did it. - It's very simple. I love that. And also, if you keep doing things, you'll never run out of ideas for your content. - 100, like, I often get that, like, where do you think of content ideas? I'm like, I don't, I have 100 other ones that I could probably make, but I just, I look at my calendar, and I look at all the conversations that I had over the last week, and I think, huh, this is kind of interesting, this is kind of interesting. And guess what, when you look at real life experiences, you have examples, 'cause they're real, right? And so, I would, and I'll tell you for myself, for all the content that I make, it's very rare that theoretical content does well. Like, if you wanna teach a concept, it's like, concepts are, you know, a dime a dozen. Like, giving people examples, making it real for them is what they value, because they wanna use it in the real world, in their lives. And so, the best way to know that it will work in their life is that you told them that it worked in your life, and hear so, right? And so, that's fundamentally, I think if you, that's what we call one of zero content, which is something that only we can make. And so, everybody here can make content that no one else can make by simply talking about the stuff that you've done, that no one else has done. - Yeah, I love that. And this is interesting when we talk about people in the room who talk about it. - One quick, I wanna one quick add on that. So, there's two ways that you can show proof, right? So, if you're advanced, or you've been doing this a while, then you wanna show proof of results, period. As many as you possibly can in the format I've talked about the most believable way. - Great. - If you're newer, you can show proof of effort. So, I could have said, I've made 35,000 posts. That's still enough work that people are like, well, I don't wanna do that work. I wanna see what he learned. And so, fundamentally, when you're making content, one of the easiest frames to use is how can I give someone time back? So, people wanna buy time at a bargain. And so, if you can just say, look at, this took me, I took 1,000 sales calls, right? Like, for me, even when I was saying this now, I reviewed, it took me four hours to review 2,000 ads. You're like, well, I don't wanna have to make 2,000 ads and take four hours. I'll list, like, what's the thing that you learned, right? Like, that's the idea. And so, you can do that by just looking at the stuff within your business. And so, this process of look back, see what worked, that is how you create content. It's how you solve your own problems. And so, whenever you make a little framework for your team, just tell other people about it. And for those of you who are like, another team's gonna use my checklist. Lots of teams use my checklists. Hasn't made me last money. - Yeah. You even said something recently where somebody said, hey, I came up with the closer framework and no, you're like, no, I came up with that. Or, you know, like, how did, like, did you explain this really quick? - Yeah, sure. No, I had a guy who was like, hey, I really, like, he saw me walk around in public, was like, I actually hate you for a really long time, man. And I was like, cool. Like, he's like, I don't need more. I was like, thanks. Yeah. And then he DM me afterwards 'cause he followed me or whatever. And he was like, hey, it was 'cause you stole closer from me, but I've gotten over it and I'm fine with it now. And I was like, bro, I don't know the fuck you are, man. Like, like, no. But the thing is, is like, do you think it's possible that closed the word is something that many salespeople have talked about? And it's got five or six letters in it. So it's kind of easy to make an acronym that has a process around it. There's probably more. And you know what? There's another guy who's like, oh, he stole that one from me, right? Like, there's always gonna be things that people feel like you're stealing from them or that whatever. First off, if he were better at teaching it, everyone would notice his. First off, second off, I've been doing it four years before him. Thirdly, even if, who cares? - Yeah. - Does he own the concept? Like, do you think Snapchat was like, Instagram, you took stories from us. Deal with it. - Yeah. - It's competition. It's how it works. I remember I had a, I went to a lawyer when someone copied my ads, word for word. And they were like, yeah, that's just competition, man. They're like, this is an IP. They're like, this is what makes America. He's like, now you have to get better. And I was like, well, shit. (audience laughs) - Yeah. 'Cause I, people. (audience applauds) People complain that, you know, this guy stole my content. This guy, it's like, these are just concepts. Many of us, so many of us are in the same industry in this room, and you don't own the concept. And I think like, that's so kind of a freeing thing. Like, hey, I can just talk about my thing and not worry if I'm copying or not copying somebody else. - And the second, so one is, even if you leaned into it and said, yeah. And, what are you gonna do about it? You gonna make more content? Beat me. Like, it's, beat me. Like, like, everyone wants to, like, they threaten you with some sort of moral imperative. And you're like, oh, I can copy your content. And, what are you gonna do? You gonna cry to mom? What are you gonna do? Beat me. You know what I mean? And so, we have this, I would never, it's like, it doesn't even matter. I think it's stupid to copy content because you're copying somebody else's life, which is dumb. But like, for that to be the argument, what a waste of time. - Yeah, 100%. And so, I wanna get into, like, a few things about the con, like, actual content strategy. And then, as we wrap up, one of the obstacles that everybody in this room faces, which is they tell me they don't have time for content. Okay, so, first things first, calls to action CTAs in your videos. Could you give us some guidance? Like, where do you feel about this? Like, what have you seen works? What doesn't work? Where should we put them? How often should we put CTAs in content? - Yeah. So, I think, this is my two cents. So, we try and put, I used to put them in the end middle. We now do, like, 30-ish percent through the video, 'cause you just get more people who are gonna see it. So, about a third of the way through is where we do our little integrations, is what we call them. I never have, not never, but I try not to put pre-recorded CTAs in. I try and relate it to the content, 'cause then it kind of flows more naturally, and it doesn't seem weird. And so, we'll also think, like, right after we do a video, we're like, okay, what's the right CTA for this video? So, if you have the same thing, like, I don't wanna have the same CTA, like, you wanna have different lead magnets, different kind of problems that you can solve, that you can direct people. So, it's like, it's a video about starting a business, and I'm like, hey, you should check out school, right? It's free. And if it's somebody who's, you know, if it's about private equity and, like, debt, I'm like, all right, we should check out one of the workshops at Acquisition.com, where you should apply to become a portfolio company. Right, so it's like, I wanna make sure that it's relevant. And if I'm talking about, like, offers, or, like, a really tactical lead thing, I'm like, oh, check out my book. Like, it's, I have a whole thing on that. And so, it's just directing where I think it makes the most sense, and I think, number one, that's, number one. Number two is, okay, how do you make CTA's? I think the problem is less about CTA's. I think it's more that there's not enough value in general. And so, it's like, if you make the video in half of its CTA, there's just not enough value. You haven't, like, deposited enough to create motivation for somebody to take action. And so, as long as you, like, as long as you have a bang in video, like, you can put CTA's in. I, I've, it's just don't take up a huge amount of time. Let 'em know, like, what is it? Why is it important? How do they get it? That's it, and then just move on. And just keep it very simple. - So, these are, like, 30 seconds in the middle? - Oh, I think they're even less than that. I think mine are, like, eight. I mean, they're just like, hey, if you like this, and you're trying to grow your company, I was like, we just started acquisition.com's, workshop division. It's like, so if you're, you know, one to 20 million, I was like, it's probably a good, good set for you. You can check it out, see you there. And that's it, like this move on. - He just did one for you, here. - There you go. - There you go. So, this is the thing. People tell me, oh, 'cause they're like, yo, bro, I don't have time. Like, I got the, I'm putting up fires here. I'm doing this, I'm doing this. And you did a concept recently where you talk about how you create content versus how you manage the business. - Yeah. - And you call this maker time. - Yeah. - Can you explain? 'Cause I think this really helped me in terms of, like, I was trying to do both at the same time, and it fucks it up. - Yeah. So there's, you know, there's tons of research on switching costs between different tasks. Like you're like, you know, three times less efficient on both tasks by switching. And so, fundamentally, you have time where the objective that you have is to make as many decisions as you can and have as many meetings as possible. And so, I call that manager time. And so, there are blocks of days, which is usually a half day or more, where this is manager time. And so, I stack as many meetings as I possible can, and you want the meetings to be as short as you can, as targeted as you can, so you can make as many decisions as possible. So that sounds painful. - Well, I mean, I tell the girls, I'm just like, I'm like, just destroy me. Just put everything you possibly can. And if someone's like, hey, do you got a second on Tuesday? I do mine on Mondays. It's like, yeah, next Monday. And they're like, no, but like, this is how urgent is the business going to end? No. Okay. So, it's not urgent. All right, Monday. And what happens is, in the beginning, there are people who are going to want to interrupt you, but very quickly, they're like, oh, Monday's the only time that I can talk to them. Guess what happens? They start preparing to talk to you. And so then they think ahead of what are all the things that I'm going to need, you know, looked at this week, so they can make decisions ahead of time. And so you can be way more efficient with your time. And so, fundamentally, it's knowing that for me, the things that have moved the business forward the most, when I look back on months and quarters, it's the stuff that I did in maker time. The manager time just occurs. And so, you need to make time for maker time. You need to make time for manager time. Manager time happens. And so, it's really just fencing off where all of your distractions go into. And when I start those days, I know I'm not doing anything productive. And for some reason, for me, I'm like, I give today. Like, I offer today the sacrifice to my business. Like, bother me, distract me. Tell me the 100 things that you, you know, want. Yellow or pink, I'm like, I don't care. Like, pick one. Yeah. That makes sense. And so, this is like, when you're in maker time, nobody's bothering you. You're just working on this stuff. And you talk about using maker time to do the one thing. And what is that one thing for you? And like, how can we relate to this? Because I think that's the part that people are missing. And that's why I talk to them five years later. And we're in the same, we're having the same conversation. Nothing's changed. If you don't know what is contributing your business, you are the constraint. And what I mean by that is like, your lack of knowledge. And so, ignorance is the biggest debt we all pay for not knowing how to do the things we should. And for me, having absolute clarity on the one thing that's holding my business back means that every waking hour I have is dedicated to solving that problem. And sometimes that solving that problem might take a year and a half. Sometimes it can take a month. Sometimes it can take a week, right? If I want to write a book, 'cause I think it's, it would be important for my brand, that's not like, okay, I'm gonna write a book this week. It's like, no, but it's gotta be a good book. Oh, that takes more time. And so, it's like, but if I do this thing, then it will make the other goals that I have shrink into a relevance or occur as a result naturally with less effort. And so, we spend a lot of time trying to find like, what's the kill shot? Like, what's the one big domino? I think Tim Ferriss calls it. Of like, if I just knock this one thing over, everything else becomes irrelevant. If you were to build the largest, you know, real estate mortgage personal brand in the space, would that make all of the other goals you have kind of happen anyways? Maybe, I don't know what your goals are. So, for me, when I started this whole journey with acquisition.com, I was like, well, what's the most valuable thing for an investor? Which is proprietary to a deal flow. Which is deal flow that only comes to you that's incentivized. And so, I was like, okay, well, if I just built that, then I can make up for the fact that maybe I'm not the best at picking companies. Maybe I'm not the best at, maybe I don't have more capital than Blackstone. You know, like, what are the distance, but if I have this, then that's something that I can, I can compete, right? And so, trying to be really clear, like, what is that thing that I can pour all my effort into that realistically, you don't know how to do yet. And that's what maker time is. 90% of the time is figuring it out. It's figuring, like, the job of the maker is to do something that you have not done before. And by doing that, you get better. And so, sometimes it takes two weeks to identify and ask the right question. But then once you ask the question, then the answer becomes clear, right? And so, I will say, though, to be clear, if you're in a smaller business, your maker time's gonna have to come outside of business hours. So, it's the nine to five, you're doing your job, but it's the five to nine in the morning and the five to nine at night, which is where you're gonna have your maker time. And if you're like, man, that sounds like work. Welcome to the world. And you're like, well, I'm not willing to do that. That's fine. I'm not saying you should. I'm just saying somebody else will and they'll beat you. - That's it, simple. Yeah, it's like, I feel like a lot of people are talking about putting out fires and even talking about letting fires burn and building your teams, but if you're not there yet and you haven't gotten to a position where you could hire a bunch of people because you don't have the revenue or whatever that is, then you need to do it. And so, I spent so much time at night just doing content and then for years until I could actually afford to be able to do it during my work hours. - So, four hours is what I recommend for everybody. So, if you're not at three million a year yet, so it's about three million a year where you can start moving some of this around, but four hours a day is what it takes in advertising to keep letting people know that you exist 'cause no one cares and they have forgotten about you already. It's four hours a day of just reminding the world that you exist. And so, you can do that via content, you can do it via paid ads, you can do it via outreach, it doesn't matter. But four hours, if you do that every day, you will never go hungry. Because it's really hard to do something for four hours a day for a year every single day and not get pretty good at it. It's tough, like it's really hard to do. - And most people won't and that's why you win. - Right. - That's it. - And simple, not easy. And most of you guys already know that. - Correct. - Now, as we wrap up here, Alex, like, by the way, has this been helpful for you all? (audience cheers) So, I believe you talked about us making priorities and doing these things. I feel like many of us in this room, there's some young folks here, but a lot of us are older, like myself, right? You're 40 years old. I wish I would have learned this when I was 20. I wish I would have learned this when I was young, like you, bro, but I learned it in my late 30s. And now I'm just starting in my 40s. And I feel like a lot of people tell me, is it too late? You know what the fuck is it too late? And so, what words can we give these people who are like, bro, I've been working on the wrong thing for the last 20 fucking years. Yeah, I'm 50 years old, I'm 48 years old, I'm 52, or whatever. Like, what can we say to these people who are like, and to actually say, man, it's not too late, how do we move forward? - No, I would. - It's fucking on the right shit. - No, I'd give up now. (audience laughs) - Yeah. - Bro. - Just accept that you will never, never win, and that there's nothing in your control, and no one has ever been in a worse circumstance than you, and made it work better. Like, you have insurmountable odds being in a room that you paid hundreds of thousands of dollars to be in, in America, access to technology, and you're right, you won't. (audience laughs) (audience applauds) - Yeah. - 'Cause what's the alternative? Like, what option do you have? So I think the amount of effort you should be putting into deciding whether you should do it or not is zero. Like, I have, I have so little, so little energy to convince, and so much to educate and support. And so I think that for you, like, if you know what you have to do, then all of the space between knowing what you have to do and doing it is your competitor's opportunity. And so if, the thing is, what are you gonna do? You have, you have, you're 45, okay. So you've got, so 20 more years, you're just gonna say, well, I guess that's it. It's like, well, then die now. (audience laughs) Well, you're pretending like you're dead. So you might as well just do it. I'm being purposely hyperbolic here, but I'm saying this because some of you have to get slapped in the face with reality. It's like, what are you gonna do? What else are you gonna do? Like, what are you gonna do all day? And so fundamentally, I think, like, what does this change about my behavior? So rather than having all the, like, what if it doesn't work, what if people laugh about me, what if it's like, if more people know about my stuff, I will make more money, period. If more people know about my stuff, then more people will buy. Okay, if that statement is true, then what actions do I have to do on a daily basis to let more people know about my stuff? If I make more content, make more calls, I do, I run more paid ads or I make more ads every day, then more people will find out about my stuff. Okay, well then, unless I'm complaining from the fact that I can't handle the number of calls that are coming, which is one of the problems that I've always had in my whole life. I usually out-market my ability. Like, usually I have to just, like, sit on my hands and be like, just let me know when you want more leads. But until you get to that constraint in the business, then you are the constraint, you need to make it rain. It's like you wanna be this big successful business owner, but you're not willing to say, like, I started late. So did Sam Walton. So did Colonel Sanders. You know what I mean? But like, again, it's this fallacy of the perfect pick that you wish you could choreograph your entire life from day one so that you could, what, be number one in this space for a few years and then somebody else will be number one. Like, it's completely irrelevant. Because I think the big thing is that we have this external goal that, like, this thing that we want to achieve, but like, who knows who the top 20 richest guys in the world were 30 years ago. Bunch of Japanese guys before the Japan economy crashed. No one remembers. It was that guy, those guys' whole life goal to get there. But even if you're number one, even if you're basis, even if you're musk, you touch the top for a few seconds. And then you're gone. And so like, the idea that you wouldn't begin on something that's uncomfortable, that's going to make you better, because you don't think you're going to be able to touch the top, which also isn't going to be relevant anyways, means that you don't think you're worth investing in making better at all. And I think that that's, I mean, fundamentally, I've seen the purpose of my life as to grow, to get better. And so if I have opportunities to get better, then I'm excited. Like, cool, let's do it. I don't know how to make content. To your point, I mean, everything's relative. I start making content when I was 30, whatever, right? Like realist, like trying to actually do it. And there's like, these Gen Z motherfuckers are getting able to do it at, you know, whatever. But then, but you know what? They got a different set of problems. They're going to have AI that's going to hit them way sooner than us, right? We actually got to, you know, establish, you know, a foothold in the world. We got a little bit of financial, you know, support, whatever. And so it's like everybody's got problems. These are yours. And only because you deem to call them problems. But either way, what are you going to do? How is it going to change your behavior? And is there a world where you don't want to become the best version of you? Where you say, because I can't be number one, which only one person can, only for a specific time period, because I can't have this completely ephemeral outcome, I choose to be nothing to no one forever. - That sounds pretty dumb. (audience applauding) Guys, give it up for Alex. [BLANK_AUDIO]
