 Well, Brennan, I'm so glad that we've got you in studio today. I came across, God, I think I want to say it was an Instagram post that I saw. And being completely honest, you know, the first time, you know, I thought it was like this like gimmick, you know, I thought it was a clickbait thing. But I still clicked, right? So you got me. And I started going down the rabbit hole of content. And then I come across your story. And I thought, man, this is really, really interesting, not only to me and selfishly for our business, but I know we have a large audience that is entrepreneurs that are trying to scale a company right now, and are living in this new, this new digital world that we live in with with social media. And so I want you to talk about how you got to a million followers in 30 days. How did that start? What made you want to do that? And then how did you get there? Well, the first place was that I've spent probably 15 years in the digital and technology and social space from the very earliest stages. I can remember being in college and exploring Friendster. And one of the first technology platforms I have built, looking back on it now, I didn't realize at the time was the first ever influencer marketing technology built on top of MySpace. And then that progressed into working with movie studios and celebrities and professional athletes. And from there, I would always get a lot of questions or statements. Oh, it's great. You worked with a Taylor Swift, or it's great. You created something for Michael Strahan or worked with a Jason Statham. But what about the rest of us? Can something be done? Can something be created from scratch? And I spent about three and a half years developing the methodologies that I used to generate a million followers in 30 days. So it wasn't a matter of if I could do it. It was a matter of why I should do it. And that's really what plays into my second book of a hook point is like, how do I grab attention? Because the world that we live in today, there's over 60 billion messages sent out on digital platforms each day. Yeah, that's billion with a B. It's insane. And I firmly believe that because of that, we're no longer competing against our direct competition. We're competing against every piece of content out there. So like it or not, we're competing against LeBron James. We're competing against Kim Kardashian. We're competing against Netflix. And you have to have a hook to get somebody to stop. Like I firmly believe the biggest asset that you could have today in the world is mastering the art of grabbing attention. So when I thought about myself, I thought about creating a book or sharing my knowledge and what I wanted to really teach people, because that's what I'm really inspired by is helping other people pursue their dreams. I knew I needed a strong hook. And when I was thinking about it, I just had this idea is like I had been creating these campaigns and having success for these big athletes and journalists and celebrities. And I saw the potential and I knew I could generate a ton of followers. And I thought, well, what if I generated a million followers in 30 days? Could that be a book? Could that be a hook to bring people into a larger conversation? So immediately I called a literary agent that I knew that's represented over five billion dollars with book sales. Like he represented the four dummy series, he's Eckert Tolle's manager. And I said, if I do this, will you sign me as a client? And can you get me a publishing deal? And he's like, yes. And then I was like, okay, I'm going to go and do it. And that is the real reason that I did it, because I knew I needed that hook to teach people what they really need to know, what they really need in order to be successful with social media. Now, how are you that confident that you could do that? Because I got to think that you're thinking to yourself, okay, these are celebrities that you're working with, they kind of have fame already working on their side to get attention, right? Like the names that you just dropped, there's many people that would, you know, follow them just because of who they are. Here you are, you don't have that kind of fame, and you have the audacity to say that I'm going to get a million followers. How did you know you could do that? I think it was two elements. One, I had tested so much with the client. So I had a good system in place. And two, I think one of the valuable lessons I learned is when I was working with Katie Couric, I had worked with her for two years, like reverse engineering the art of the interview for digital platforms. And over those two years, I did about 220 interviews with her, ranging from like a Joe Biden to a Jessica Chastain to a DJ Khaled to a Chance the Rapper, like all across the board. And it was interesting because through those 220 interviews, I tested about 75,000 variations of hooks. And I saw the data and the trends that told me it's not in the world that we live in today is celebrity helps a little bit, but it doesn't mean you're going to be successful. It's really about the content that's really going to grab. What is the hook? What is the message that's going to get somebody to stop that's going to get you to pay attention? And also I have a lot of friends in this space that have a lot of success. And one of my friends that I, I went to high school with the move to LA with created a company called Juke and Media. And they became like the getty of viral videos, like people doing tricks and like they have fail army. They have people doing awesome things. They generate three and a half billion views a month without celebrity. And that just showed me is the world that we live in today, as long as you position your content, position yourself, it honestly doesn't matter if you're starting from zero or you're the biggest celebrity in the world, you can still gain attention if you know how to structure your content properly. Brandon, from the outside, when you're trying to build a business and through social media, it looks like it can look like sometimes luck or extreme talent. I can't do that. There's no way I could do that. That's why that has a million views or, you know, they got it, they got shared by somebody with a lot of followers and that's how they got so much attention. That's what it feels like from the outside. But what you're saying is there's a formula. What are some specific things that you see? You're talking about a hook. Can you give me some examples of what that would look like and, you know, how a hook is so important or, you know, why that would be the most important thing? Absolutely. And first to, to speak on what you just said is sometimes there is luck involved and some people just hit it. But I can tell you that those people that don't really continue to hone their craft, they don't sustain. And that's like in the, in my first book, the people that I interviewed that are at the highest levels, it's a reoccurring theme. They are constantly testing. They're constantly learning and seeing that. But going back to the hook is with social media, especially today, now social media has evolved dramatically over the past five or 10 years. And 10 years ago, much easier, less competition, less content. But today, again, 60 billion messages sent out is just imagine if we open up Instagram right now, we open up Facebook, we open up YouTube, there's probably a thousand pieces of content that the algorithms could see to you based upon all the people you followed, all the people you subscribed to, and all the content you've engaged with. The algorithms have a very, very difficult job because obviously they can't see the thousand pieces of content to you. So they have to determine based upon this individual, what are the first 10 or 15 pieces of content I'm going to prioritize that are going to keep you on the platform longer, because that's how they make money. So longer that you spend, the more ads they can serve you, the more that they can monetize your audience. So thinking through that, what are the algorithms looking for? They're looking for two primary things is one, when people are scrolling through their feed or if it's on YouTube and it's suggested videos, do they stop or do they click? If they don't do that, then the algorithms know your content's not good. And that decision of whether I'm going to stop or click happens in the first three seconds. It happens right away because there's just so much content that people know that they can consume. So the first part of it is how do I get somebody to stop in those first three seconds? And I'll get into a little bit of the mistakes and the things that you can focus on. The second thing that I mentioned is how long are people engaging with that content? Okay, now once I have them stop, are they only staying for three or five seconds? Or are they staying for 30 seconds, five minutes, 30 minutes, two hours? That's the second part of the equation. So let's go back to that first three to five seconds. Let me start with the mistakes that people make with those first three to five seconds. One, they try and do too much. They try and almost vomit up everything about them, about their product, their service or everything they want to say when you just got to get them to stop. Just focus on that so that you can win the next part of the conversation. You don't have to do everything in that first three to five seconds. Secondarily, another mistake people make is saying the same thing in the same way as everybody else. So let's just do an exercise right now. Let's say we're launching a meditation app or a meditation retreat. Now, meditation has been around for thousands of years. If you type meditation into Google, there's probably five billion results that come up. So most people will say the same thing as everybody else in the exact same way. So it's meditation is the key to success. Meditation is the key to stillness. Meditation is the key to happiness. So if I'm scrolling through my feed and I see that as a meme card or a headline, I'm going to keep, because I know what it is. It's not that this person is invaluable or their message or their app or their retreat or whatever is invaluable. I already know what it's going to say, so I don't have to stop. So how can we flip that? So one of the tools that we use for hooks, and I'm not saying we use this all the time, but in certain circumstances, we use it as a pattern interruption. And we talk about pattern interruption a lot is you've got to interrupt that pattern of the scrolling of somebody just watched LeBron James, somebody just watched Kim Kardashian, somebody just watched the Netflix trailer. So how are you going to interrupt that pattern and get them to stop? So one of the tools that we use is called subverting expectations. So applying that to this meditation app, it may say, meditation is a scam. Because most of the time you don't hear that. Right. Yeah, exactly. So what I'm doing is I'm interrupting that pattern, I'm getting them to stop, so then I can win the next part of the conversation. Now what I'm not suggesting clickbait here, because in order for like a hook or a hook point to be successful, there's three core pillars is the hook of getting that pattern interruption stopping. Second, what is the story that we're going to tell now that we have the attention because we have to retain them going back to the second part of the equation of having success in social media. And then the third is do people trust what I have to say? Does it feel authentic? Do people believe me? So let's go back to that example. So the headline is meditation is a scam. My story would be is have you ever felt that meditation is a scam? Well, I really feel your pain because when I first started out, I just didn't believe most of the information because I tried it. People were telling me I need to sit still. I need to clear my head and I could just never figure it out until I stumbled upon these three strategies that I'm about to share with you. So what I did is I did the pattern interruption, got them to stop, then I told them a story that applies to the hook. I'm not clickbaiting. And hopefully, because it's a real experience that I've gone through and recognizing that most people struggle with meditation, they're going to believe that and thus increase the likelihood of them taking the action, downloading the app, signing up for a call for a retreat or whatever that may be. Do you find also the people that use that technique, if they don't provide good enough substance behind that, it's going to fail massively as well, like a bait and switch? Yeah. First off, you have to have something of quality. We're taking, you know, I take the assumption that most people have product market fit when we're talking about these things. If you don't have product market fit, you don't have a good product or service, like there's very little, I mean, yes, you can probably hack it, but it's not going to be like long-term sustaining growth. You need to have something of substance. Most people I think fail. It's not that they don't have the substance. They're kind of trying to hack it through clickbait just to get somebody in and their message isn't congruent with the thing that brought them in. You know, it's interesting as you're talking, I'm thinking back to things that have gotten me more views in my like Instagram stories, for example. And I noticed that when I do very plain text, that'll do better for me than when I have like a nice image with a bunch of writing on it or whatever. And it makes sense now what you're saying because it's very simple and it gets their attention right away rather than having too much on the screen all at once. Yeah. One of, another big problem is people try and make things look too pretty. They try and be branded. They try it. They, there's a lot of talk in the brands we work with of production quality, production value. Oftentimes that'll work against you. Like look at Nike, for example, they have, they have some of the top end creative yet they get killed by other content creators that don't have a fraction of the budget is because people smell it. People smell stock or they smell high production and that's not what they're looking for. They're looking for a connection. They're looking some, some type of value. Now there are certain things that Nike does that will work extremely well because it's very story based. It hooks you in. It gets you ingrained with the story that they're telling. So I see that all the time and it, me and my creative director see it all the time when we do consults is people are like, well, I want my, I want my Instagram to have a consistent theme, a consistent color, a consistent branding. And it's like, well, how can you go that way when you don't even know what works? It's like they're just trying to go after a color palette or something like that before they even found what people want to interact with. And oftentimes the biggest mistake people are making is they're designing content for themselves. They're not designing it for, for the audience. And the minute that you can make that shift, it makes it a lot easier to become successful. How do you, how do you, because this is something we've talked about and interviews I've heard you on and you talk, you touch on in your book is how do you know what is working? What are the metrics that you look at? I mean, off the top of my head, I would think this, you know, image got more views or likes than this one. Are there other metrics you're looking at? Like, how do you test things out? It's a great question. So first, it starts with what are the goals of the business? And it's amazing to me, how many people don't really go into social media with, why am I doing it? Like, am I going in to generate revenue? Am I going in to generate traffic leads? Or am I just generating awareness? It's like, first start with what is my goal? Why am I using social media? And then you can pay attention to the metrics that drive it. So let's talk about a few examples. So if we're talking about, I want to drive virality. I want to drive more growth around my brand. Each platform is a little bit different in terms of the metrics. So when we talk about Facebook, Instagram, LinkedIn, it's kind of, and Twitter is similar. When we look at, we do a lot of work in video because we see a lot of potential there. One of the metrics that we really pay attention to and it plays into what we've been talking about is the view to reach ratio. So first off, a view is typically not counted until the three second mark. And that happened a few years back when advertisers were up in arms that they were getting charged at a one second view because that doesn't show any intent to view a video. So one of the key metrics we look at is, what is our ratio of views to reach? And typically it has to be a minimum of 30%. If it's anything lower than 30%, what that's telling us is, is the hook isn't working and people are scrolling past. So in other words, 10,000 people reached at least 3,000 views, 30%. Yes. So that's the first metric. Now, that's the bare minimum. You want to get it to 40, 50, 60%. If you're there, that's like over 50%, that's when you can start really to generate that virality. And if you're not, that's telling you that your hook, your first three seconds isn't working. So that's one of the key metrics that we look at. Now for Facebook, we'll also look at the share to view ratio and the share to reach ratio because that'll then tell us, okay, how good is our content? Is it compelling people to share it with other people? Then what we look at also is our retention graph. Okay, if we get them to stop, how long are they sticking with the content? Because again, going back to our two main things is can we get them to stop? How long can we get them to stick around for? So we'll look at the retention graph to see how long they're sticking and we'll even see on the retention graph where people drop off. So if we know where people drop off, that can advise us going forward how we can fix creative or extend the time people spend with us. For YouTube, for example, it first starts with the click through percentage. Most people think it's more search space, but suggested video is generating a ton of traffic for YouTube. So we've got to see what is our click through percentage on our thumbnail and headline, first and foremost, which is very similar to the scrolling and getting somebody to stop. Then when somebody clicks through, then we're looking again at the overall retention. Is how long are we retaining them? Where are we losing people? So those at a very high level of the core metrics that we're really paying attention to. Now you gave us, I love that you gave us a specific percentage to aim for. You said 30% of views to reach and then you talked about some other metrics. Can you give us numbers that are good to aim for for people listening where they can view their own ad or their own post? It's 30% view to reach and then what do you have numbers for the other metrics you just mentioned that are good to targets? It's a bit different. YouTube, I don't have it off the top of my head. My team primarily handles it, but I believe the click through percentage needs to be over 20, 25%. But again, I want to check the accuracy on that. Retention on each platform, it's different because of the consumption behavior. So Facebook and Instagram is much more short form consumption behavior. So getting somebody to stick around for 45 seconds or a minute and a half is a win. YouTube, it's how do you get somebody to stick around for five to 10 minutes, which is a win. So also that's a big misconception is people don't understand really the pros and cons of each platform and the real psychological behavior that happens with each one. And everybody should really understand that social media and the reason social media platforms are so successful is it's all behavioral psychology. It is not luck that Facebook and Instagram and YouTube and LinkedIn are successful. They are using behavioral psychology. They have behavioral scientists that are engineering all of these things. I don't know if you guys saw the social dilemma. Netflix documentary talks about it, but it is behavioral psychology and I'm not going to get into the efficacy of it or the pros and cons, but if you want to be good at it, you need to be good at human behavior. You need to be good at psychology. So everything that we focus on is really entrenched in understanding the subconscious, understand why people make certain decisions or why they don't make certain decisions, how people perceive the world in different ways. Well, it goes back to you brought up goals, right? Initially, like what are you trying to do? If you're trying to gain a million followers, what's the reason behind that? And I think that if you want to highlight that from a business perspective, how do you look at using this platform to really convert instead of just being popular? A hundred percent. A lot of people reach out to me today and they'll say, well, I want a million followers. And I was like, why? Because I want to generate, I want to sell more t-shirts. I want to close more clients as a trainer. And I was like, okay, let's take a step back. How about we just create some advertising campaigns first, bring some revenue in the door immediately, and then we can grow the follower base because why would I A, try to get somebody to follow me? And then after that, try and sell them a product or a service versus let's just sell them the product or service first, create a sustainable foundation, generate revenue, and then we can focus on reinvesting in the brand. And there's this misconception that, oh, if I gave you a million followers tomorrow, all of a sudden I'm going to be a millionaire. First off, there's a lot of people with a lot of followers out there. Can you make money? Can you make millions of dollars off followers? Absolutely. But you need to have the right strategy in place. It's not just people are going to start handing you checks left and right, the minute you have followers is like, for me, generating a million followers in 30 days, it was not about how do I generate a million followers and then start selling them products tomorrow. For me, it was leveraging it for offline opportunities, for larger opportunities. So as I mentioned, I closed a literary agent, got a publishing deal, speak around the world in front of thousands of people. I get on big podcasts like this, television shows, radio appearances, and all of that collectively has generated millions and millions of dollars in revenue. I'm not suggesting that every person takes that approach, but there's different ways. And we work with clients. You had all that in mind going into it. Yes. And you're reminding me of the story of that girl who had, there was a story, famous story, she had like millions of followers, then she went to sell a t-shirt. I think she sold like eight t-shirts because she didn't have a super humble bike. I actually, I mean, we've talked about this. I think we've mentioned on there, we definitely talked about off air. I think that was one of the most interesting things that I found as we started, when we first started this podcast, we started to interview bigger and bigger people that had larger and larger followings. I actually would say that it was more often that we would meet somebody who had a small following, few thousand or 10,000 followers, but had a multimillion dollar business. Then we would find somebody who had millions of followers and then also had a multimillion. Many times the people that had millions of followers had an okay business and were having maybe little or some success. And then the people that had great business models sometimes didn't have that big of a following. So they don't go hand in hand. A lot of kids that are coming up now, they see these people that are famous on social media and they think that that's the formulas just get popular and you're going to have a business. And I don't think that's true at all. Well, Brendan, I want to bring it to our space because I know we have a lot of fitness enthusiasts and trainers listening to the podcast, people building businesses with social media, whether it be virtual training or selling fitness programs. And in the fitness space, I know this is how I felt when I first got into it this way. You think you either got to look really sexy or be super ripped. Otherwise you're not going to get attention. And the bottom line is most people don't look like models. You can be very fit, but you're not going to compete with someone who's a model. How would a trainer who's trying to build a following through social media to build their business? How would they compete against the super good looking person who can pull up their shirt and look ripped and get attention just because of the way they look? It's a great question. And that goes down to your hook point has how do you differentiate yourself from other trainers? Because as you guys all know is trainers, it's a very oversaturated market. There's thousands of trainers in a specific geolocation. So what is it that makes you unique? What is it makes you different? And again, going back to the meditation example, you don't want to be saying the same thing in the same way as everybody else. Otherwise you're just going to get lumped in and people aren't going to pay attention. So there's a few different ways that I would go about it is one of the things that I really focus on from a psychological perspective is understanding the difference between what people want and what people need. And oftentimes people will, especially with like trainers, they know what people need and they will try and sell them what people need, but they may not necessarily want it. So what is the hook that can play to what they want to get them what to what they need? So for example, with my first book, One Million Followers, I teach follower growth in the book, but it's really the mindset. It's the testing methodologies, the process that you go to be successful. If I started with that as my hook as like the art of AB testing for social media, or like the social media mindset, it would not garner the same attention. So really as a trainer, understanding the difference between the two. Secondarily, I did an interview in for my hook point book with a friend of mine who's one of the top copywriters and really sold over a billion dollars with the products in the health and wellness space online. And one of the things that he says that's so brilliant is the minute that you can articulate somebody's problem, somebody's pain point better than they can articulate it to themselves, you win them over. So think about the challenges that the clients have that you want to solve for them and how can you articulate it in a better way and understanding them. And again, it's just as a trainer, it's not just about getting into shape. It's not about getting ripped. It's not about just the overall fitness of it. What are the underlying subconscious drivers that are causing that? What is the real reason somebody wants to get into shape? Maybe they've been told by a doctor that they don't get in shape, that their health is going to deteriorate. Maybe they want to get their next boyfriend or girlfriend and that's driving them. Maybe they went through a hard breakup. Really understanding deep down, why do people want to be healthy? Why do they want to get in shape? And then contextualize that around what makes you different than every other trainer out there. Excellent. Brennan, you also have experience in, for lack of a better term, like old media, I'll say, because you didn't work in Hollywood helping movies get promoted or whatnot. And now you're obviously deep in this new media space. What are some commonalities between the two and what are the major differences? Because to me, it looks so different, like the way we used to look at ads, the way we used to get popular, have people notice us versus now with all these new platforms. What are the big differences and is new media that much more powerful than old media ever was? Well, I think that there's a lot of similarities in the fact that they're all playing the same game as whether you're doing it online or offline or doing it on podcasts versus Instagram or YouTube or a print billboard or newspaper ad. It all starts with, how do you win attention? And I'll give you an example with Movie Studio. It was about four or five years ago. They started cutting a three to five second trailer before the trailer starts. And they started doing it for social media. And now they do it on TV spots. So for example, if you watch a Tenant trailer on Instagram or Facebook or I think they were even doing it with the TV spots, they'll have all this flashing stuff happen in the first three to five seconds. There's no narrative. There's explosions. There's people upside down. There's things like that. Why? Because they're doing the pattern interruption to get you to stop. And if studios have to do that, after spending, I think I don't know what the Tenant budget is, is probably $200, $250 million. That just shows you that world that we're living in. So I would say that that is one of the biggest similarities. Now, one of the biggest differences is, let's talk about television, for example, is if I sit down in front of my television, I have more time to dive into something. So I'll give you an example. When I'm watching new TV shows, even if they're recommended, I'll give the first episode 10 or 15 minutes. And if it doesn't hook me, I'm done. On social media, I'll give you three to five seconds. And if you don't hook me in, I'm done. So understanding the mindset, and it's the same with newspapers or magazines in the physical space. If you're sitting on the train and reading a newspaper or sitting on a plane, your mindset is completely different. So you may have more time to kind of get people involved in it, but it all, again, goes back to that three to five seconds and capturing that attention. Now, you have a ton of experience, and you've acquired a ton of knowledge over all these years of working with famous athletes and movie production and now social, old media. What were some of the, like, aha moments for you? Can you recall back when you first were learning all this, like the first, like, big epiphany of, like, whoa, that makes such a huge difference? Can you remember and recall some of the first ones that were, like, major game changers for how you presented content going forward? Yeah, there's two that come to mind. The first one is when I was working for a movie studio, I was working on a film called Crank with Jason Statham. Oh, I love that movie. Yeah, the directors are amazing. They're good friends. And I was, it was a much smaller budget. I think the budget was like $12 million, which sounds like a lot of money to the rest of us, but most action movies are 100 million plus. And we didn't have a big budget to work with. So I was tasked with, okay, how do we get it out there? Because I had zero budget to work with on it. So this was 2007, 2008. And this is when YouTube was really starting to come around. And the word influencer didn't exist. It wasn't a term. And I was just seeing these people on YouTube that had millions of views and had this big audience. And I was like, well, why aren't we talking to these people? Because they have a huge audience. So I just started, I messaged like the top 100. And I said, Hey, how would you like to interview a movie star? And again, remember, this is before influencers exist, before brands are reaching out to them, paying them ton of money. And I think I got like four or five really big YouTube influencers to say yes, one was Ryan Higa, who's still pretty big in the space. Another one was a founder of a company called Maker Studios, which sold to Disney for a billion dollars. Another guy was the evolution of dance guy. I don't know if you remember back in the day. It was like the most viral video at the time. And I just said, Hey, do you want to engage with a movie star? And the response rate was super high. And it was really successful. And that really sparked an idea in my head. And it also went back to when I was looking at, when YouTube got acquired for, I think it was $1.7 billion in less than 24 months. Is what did they do? They created one of the first embeddable video players. They put it on MySpace. And then when people saw their friends had a YouTube embeddable player, everybody else wanted one. So they cooked the YouTube logo. So what I learned from that experience is when you're starting out or you're looking to scale, go where the traffic is. Don't create it from scratch. Leverage other audiences, leverage strategic partnerships, leverage other platforms to drive that growth for your business. And it's a lot of work that I do with people that are looking to scale their business or scale their revenue. As I look at, from a hook point perspective, what are the strategic partnerships that we can hook people in to drive revenue massively and quickly? The second one was when I got introduced to Taylor Swift and working with her and her team. And the fascinating thing that I learned from that was she was the reason for her success. She didn't have millions of dollars in marketing budget. She didn't have a huge record label behind her. It was her pure genius and her brilliant strategy of understanding the power of brand advocates. She understood with each comment that she responded to online, each autograph she signed, each photo she took with a fan. Not only did that fan become a fan for life, somebody was going to buy her merch, her concert tickets, but somebody that was now going to share her music with the world. And that's what made her grow so successfully. And even more brilliantly, it became to a point where it didn't scale. I remember she did a 13-hour autograph signing session for one of her labels because 13s are lucky numbers. She ended up staying for 17 hours. But obviously, that doesn't scale because you can't reach all those people. So what she did to the next level that just shows her brilliance is then she started showing up at fans' weddings. She started showing up at fans' doorsteps with Christmas gifts. And then those were turned into videos that were then generating tens of millions of views. So now the fan, even though they're not the one that's being approached, they see that Taylor cares about them. They see that Taylor really appreciates everything that the fans represent in her world. That's brilliant. I didn't know all that, yeah. Brandon, since you know so much about these different platforms, what are some of the strengths and weaknesses of each? In other words, if we compare Instagram to Facebook to Twitter and then maybe even podcast, YouTube, yeah. Because one of the challenges or questions I get from people all the time is, which one do I start on? Do I do them all? That's so much work. Can you go over each of them a little bit in terms of strengths and weaknesses and that way people can maybe figure out which one to start with for themselves? Yeah. So I'm going to start with the last part of that because you hit on something that's really important is what platform do I like? What platform do I use every day? Because the key to success on any platform is, are you a student of the game? And that doesn't mean because you use Instagram or YouTube every day means you're a student. It just means you're on the platform consuming content. And that's a lot of the work that we do with people is helping them understand how to dissect these platforms and content and look at content that does work as well as content that doesn't work and reverse engineer it. So that's the first place is what platform do you actually enjoy? Because you're going to have to be on that platform as a student of it. So beyond that, then you look at the differences in the consumer behavior because again, everything goes back to human psychology and human behavior. So when you look at Facebook, Instagram, LinkedIn, Twitter, short form consumption behavior, you look at YouTube, podcasts, long form consumption behavior. Obviously, you can tell the difference like a podcast spending an hour and a half with somebody that gets them more indoctrinated with your brand and connected. And you guys were expressing before the podcast, how much that has helped your business grow. Obviously, getting people into longer form content is a little bit more difficult to scale. But once you hit that scale, it's very beneficial to a brand. Facebook, Instagram, Twitter, LinkedIn, it's a little bit easier to reach that scale. But again, it's much more short form consumption behavior. You're looking at 30 seconds to three minutes tops. I'm not going to say there's not people over that that get that, but that's typically the range of that. In addition to the content doesn't really live forever, it's like you're always in this endless cycle of creating, creating more content versus YouTube, there's a longer shelf life with it. Podcast, there's a longer shelf life with it. Now, between Facebook and Instagram, Facebook is a more democratic platform in that it's based around the share button. It's one of the few platforms that really is built around sharing. So if you can hit it right and you share your content to a certain audience and they like it, and they click the share button, you can exponentially grow outward. And that's where you see like Prince Yade that wrote the four of them for my book has generated billions of views. My creative director has over 40 billion views under his belt, reverse engineering around shareability and shareable content. Instagram, interestingly with growth, we've seen that it's more about syndicating content out under channels and driving it back. Now, Facebook's algorithms are a lot more difficult to tackle right now because there's so much content and Facebook is truly a global platform. It's 2.2 billion people. People always say Facebook's dying. You don't see that in the data. Instagram, it used to be the engagement rate was much higher, but you're seeing the engagement rates drop because there's more content on the platform. Although stories, as you pointed out with the test, can be a very powerful tool to drive engagement, drive a more personal connection, and have calls to actions. So that's kind of high level from an organic perspective. If you look at it from a paid perspective, Facebook and Instagram's ad platform is one of the best on the planet. It's very frustrating at times because there's constant changes in anybody that's advertising the platform knows. They're always changing things, but we always start with Facebook and Instagram because it's the hardest to master when it comes to paid because you're pushing. People aren't looking for your product or service. You're pushing it to them. I wanted to ask you about the dark post. I know you got that up on another podcast. Could you explain that and what that is? Yeah, so whenever you create an ad on Facebook or Instagram, it's automatically created as a dark post. And what that means is it's just not on your main feed. So it happens behind the scenes. And the beauty of that is you could test hundreds of variations of an ad. You can take one piece of creative and test it hundreds of different ways to see what combination actually works. And I always recommend doing that because when I look at other media buying agencies or social agencies, they kind of have this set it and forget it mentality where, hey, let's just create one ad or we'll create five ads and we're just going to push budget to it. And whatever happens happens. If it doesn't work, it's the product's fault. If it doesn't work, it's the content's fault versus, hey, let's take one video or one image and package it as many different ways as possible, which gives us more chances to win. And it gives us more chances to learn. So that's the value of a dark post and the power of that. And going back is like, again, cold traffic, which means people aren't searching for your product or service, you're pushing it to them is the hardest to master. But if you can master that, A, the scale is enormous. And B, if you've mastered that, you've mastered the hardest thing. Marketing on any other channel is going to get far easier because you've cracked the code for a cold audience that will convert extremely well for a warm audience as well. Now, because of that, we have a somewhat, I think, unique strategy. And I'd love to hear your opinion on it because converting cold traffic on Facebook is extremely hard. I remember when we first tested this out years ago, and we were excited like, okay, we're going to get into this. We have a little bit of a budget. We can spend money on Facebook. Let's try and sell our programs on there. Let's advertise and sell it. And it was just an absolute flop. Trying to convince somebody with all the noise that's out there, why they should spend X amount of dollars on our program just completely failed. It just didn't make sense to do it. What it looks like today for us now is we actually pay to give people free stuff. So we advertise free guides or free content that we've put a lot of time, money, and effort into building. So like a free program or a 30-day free coaching or something that we've put a lot of time and effort into that maybe a lot of people would typically sell. We actually run that as an ad. And all we're hoping to get is your email. And then we are going to hit you with more value ads over a sequence and then hopefully get you to convert. What are your thoughts on advertising on Facebook that way? And do you think that's a smart strategy? Well, first I want to say I know some people that have had a lot of success with that strategy so it can work. I choose a different approach. I would rather take those free programs that you have and see if I can sell them for five bucks or 10 bucks. And the reason is even if you can get somebody to pay five dollars or ten dollars, whatever it is, they've pre-qualified for themselves. Now they are a purchaser. So they're going to justify that purchase, even if it was five or ten dollars with more purchases, to back what the decision that they made. So that's what we do with our books is we have two different types of funnels. We have, hey, we'll give you the book for free, you just pay for shipping and handling, or you can buy the ebook for five bucks. Because again, what we're doing is we're pre-qualifying people, even with a microtransaction, that it makes it much easier to progress them to higher price points, higher programs, higher consulting and things of that nature. So there's kind of a psychology around it. And there was a case study that researchers did that kind of proves that that's really fascinating. And what these researchers did is they went to a neighborhood with a six-foot sign. And I can't remember what it was. It was like support some type of cause. So they went around and asked, hey, well, you put this six-foot sign in your yard to support this. And I don't remember the exact numbers, but I'll just give you kind of rough numbers to prove the point. I think it was like 30% said yes. So what they did is they went to another neighborhood and instead of a six-foot sign, they set a six-inch sign. And I think it jumped to like 50% or 60% said yes. But what was interesting is two weeks later, they went back to the same neighborhood with the six-inch signs and said, hey, can we replace a six-inch sign with a six-foot sign? And like the acceptance rate was like 70 or 80%. Because they already said yes. Yes. Because they're justifying the decision that they made. And we can all relate to that with our friends and people is once we put our stamp of approval on something or we stand by something and somebody challenges it, we're going to push back on it. We're going to push forward with it. So it's the same thing with a buyer's mentality is just how do I just get them to put their credit card down even if it's just like a small amount of money so that I can progress them down the journey. And of course, I would assume with that small investment that they make, you still want to provide a ton of value. Oh, 100%. You're not tricking people. I mean the book, Hookpoint, I spent two years putting that book together. One million followers were like on the multiple versions of that. We put a tremendous amount of time and energy and effort to it. It's not a shortcut. You need to provide real value and real information. Otherwise, they're going to buy this and be like, this guy's full of it or this guy doesn't offer any value and that will work against you even if it was a five or $10 purchase. Do you have a favorite platform personally? Let's say you were going to sell a new product, not one of your books. You're going to sell it. If you had to pick one platform, is there one that you have a favorite that you think would be the easiest for you to convert into a business? It depends on the business. There's funnel builders out there. There's click funnels, drop funnels, Kajabi, all of them. I'm testing them and I've had pros and cons with each one, so I'm not going to stand by one. And then there's other, if you're just selling merch or things like that, there's Shopify and other things. The amazing thing about the time we live in today is I remember building technology 10 years ago and you had to have developers and custom develop everything and it was crazy. Today, you can create stuff off the back of open source stuff or people that have built these platforms for you. I think for people that are just starting out, don't overthink that. Just get started with something. Get it to work and then you can look at the next one. I think so many people, and I use this analogy all the time and this was a mistake that I made when I first started out building technology. Everybody wants to build the Death Star from day one and they don't want to launch anything until the Death Star is done and that just paralyzes you. You spend all this time building this thing, you launch it and it falls flat. And all these rebels come and destroy it. Exactly. And you talk a lot about testing and that would be part of testing. Put it out there, see if it works. Do you recommend when someone puts something out that they make several iterations of it, put it all out the same time and then compare or put one out, test that, wait, put the other one out? What's the strategy with testing? Well, first, we take testing to a whole different level and I don't expect people to do that, nor do I want them to do that just going in. I think the first and foremost is just getting into the mindset of publishing an ad, publishing an organic post and tracking the performance. It could be a simple spreadsheet of I'm going to track the view to reach ratio. I'm going to track likes, comments, shares or with an ad, I'm going to track what is my click-through rate or cost acquisition on this ad for another. It's amazing to me how many people go in and just keep posting the same stuff in the same way and they're expecting it to go viral. And then when it doesn't go viral, they either say social media doesn't work, social media doesn't work for me or I'm going to fire my agency or I'm going to fire my content creator instead of just taking baby steps. I don't know if you guys are familiar with B.J. Fogg. He's a professor at Stanford that runs a persuasive technology lab and he has a program called Tiny Habits and he just published a book around it. And I studied under him for some time, again, from a psychological perspective and understanding human behavior and he started this Tiny Habits program that basically said, okay, we're going to, you're going to choose two habits to start with for seven days. Now, these habits cannot take you anything longer than 15 seconds. So let's just say the habit is flossing my teeth or I want to start exercising. So what he says is you're going to just floss one tooth for seven days and then you're going to celebrate that success because what it does in the subconscious, it gives you success momentum to move forward. Same thing with working out. We're just going to put the shoes by the door for seven days or we're just going to put our shoes on for seven days because what happens, you guys know as a trainer. No, we teach, we speak to this. It's a brilliant, brilliant strategy. We always, and there's research to support that when you create a new habit, if you pair it with an anchoring. Yeah, exactly. The success rate is tremendous. So we talk about this. I've never thought of making it that simple, right, where it's like a 15 second. I love that. I've done that with clients in nutrition. Like, okay, you're going to read one page out of the nutrition book a week. Let's just start with that and then, okay, now we're just going to drink one glass of water. Very successful. Yeah, it works very, very well. Because the reverse side is whereas fitness propped up on New Year's resolution, people sign up for a gym membership, they go to the gym the first day, work out for two hours, and the next day they are sore, and then they never want to go back. And that's also an interesting thing that the BJ Fogg talks about in a lot of work that we do is the behavioral model is and trainers should really know this or any business really should know is there's a big trade off between motivation and an action taking place. So when there's a very high state of motivation, you can make somebody do something very difficult and it'll result. If there's a low state of motivation, you've got to make it dead simple and quick to do in order for the action to take place. So I'll give you two analogies of it. Instagram. Prior to Instagram, creating a cool little photo with filters, you had to use Photoshop. Big pain to do. It takes you hours just to figure out how to use it and then takes a bunch of time to do it. So what did Instagram do? And the founders of Instagram actually studied this under BJ Fogg at Stanford, made it dead simple. With Instagram, it's just click of a filter. And that's why the action took place. If it took hours or even took 20 minutes to edit that photo with Instagram, it would have never taken off. Now on the flip side, going back to New Year's resolutions, how do gym memberships get sold? New Year's resolutions, New Year's. Why? Because the motivation is super high. So what happens is people do something difficult. They go in the car, they go drive to the gym, they sign up, they lock themselves into long-term membership, and that's how gym memberships work. So that's where trainers can learn a lot about motivation. That can be in their initial contact with them in the assessment, is like where their motivation level is and adjust your conversation according to it. Have you dived into the podcast space? Because when I look at platforms like Instagram or Facebook, I can see things going viral and podcasts don't really have platforms necessarily like that. I know Spotify and iTunes, but have you dived in to seeing how someone starts a podcast and say they have a good podcast? How they can get in front of a lot of people? Yeah, 100%. I've done a lot of research on it. I worked with Katie Couric, not just on her online content, but with her podcast. And again, it starts off with hookpoints. And that's where when I looked at, when I took a step back and because I had no experience in interviewing or journalism prior to meeting Katie Couric and the first meeting I ever had with her is she signed this new deal with Yahoo, a digital first deal. And she had 25 years of TV experience. And I first had to kind of look at the difference between the two mediums. As again, the behavior of television is you sit down, you turn on the television. It's a habitual nature that's formed is every morning I would wake up and making breakfast or taking the kids to school. And I'm going to watch the Today Show. No matter what content is there, I'm going to tune in and watch it. Versus digital first strategy, you're fighting against 60 billion messages. So I had to take a step back and look at, okay, well, how do we win this battle? Because Katie was saying, well, I'm over at Yahoo. Nobody's seeing my content. And fans are coming up to me on the street saying, Katie, we love you, but we miss you. We have no idea where you're at. They didn't even know she was on Yahoo. So I sat down in this meeting and I was like, okay, she was expressing this to me. And I was like, when is your next interview? She's like, it's actually two hours from now. And I was like, oh, perfect. So I've got, I've got 10 minutes to come up with a completely new strategy from scratch and knowing nothing about journalism. So I said, okay, well, who is the interview with? And she says it's with Elizabeth Banks, the actress. So I was like, okay, so Elizabeth Banks, she's in the Hunger Games franchise. She's in Pitch Perfect. And she's a strong feminist advocate. So what I'm going to do is instead of asking questions, I'm going to look, I'm going to think about the outcome, the end outcome of the pattern and eruption that I'm looking for. So instead of designing questions, I'm going to develop my hook points. I'm going to develop what is the title of this interview? What are the individual clips that's going to create that pattern and eruption on social platforms that people will stop, consume, share, and then want to watch the rest of it? So I did just that. I was like, okay, Hunger Games fans, we're going to create hook points specific for that audience, Pitch Perfect fans specific for that audience, feminist advocates specific for that audience. So we did that. We worked together on the hook points. They went off, shot the interview, came back with a 30 minute completed interview. And then I proceeded to cut out each of those hook points and they ranged from like 30 seconds to 90 seconds long. And then what I did is I contextualized that in different ways. So I would take each segment of the audience, Hunger Games fans had like five or six hooks, Pitch Perfect fans had five or six hooks, feminist advocates had five or six hooks. And I took each of those clips and then I tested them each 100 different ways. So from that one interview, I had probably five or 600 variations of content that I was testing. And I was testing in real time against each other using dark posts to see which ones were being shared at the highest velocity. And then I would dwindle down over like eight or nine hours from 500 to three. Now, when you do this, do you normally see, is it normal for you to see like a major outlier or they all kind of the same and then one's a little bit better? Or is it normally like a very obvious like, wow, that was it right there? Typically, in the work that we do, we have a lot of historical data and we have 15 years of experience. So we will see the outliers quick. But if you're just starting out, you may need to have a baseline. So it may take you some time to get it up. But typically, you do see an outlier. But to your point is the reason I tell that story is that's where I see the potential of podcasts. Now, let's talk about the biggest podcast in the world, Joe Rogan. If you look at Joe Rogan's clips channel on YouTube, they are masters of hooks. Now, not all of them succeed. A lot of them fall flat. But where Joe Rogan is a master, and this goes back to the celebrity side of things, he can take somebody that you've never heard of, like a guy that studies dinosaurs, a guy that studies extinction, a guy that studies mindset or diet. Some of you never heard of, and they can take clips and contextualize them in such a way that it'd be like, I want to hear what that has to say. And that indoctrinates you into the Joe Rogan experience. It indoctrinates you into that episode. And I find myself oftentimes going to the clip channel first, because if I see a guy I never heard of, and Joe does not do any introductions if you've seen the show, it's like, he just dives in. And if I see a name I never have heard of, I'm not that. I love the Joe Rogan experience. I love the podcast, but I'm not just going to watch or listen to every single podcast he does. I start with the clip channel, look at what's interesting to me, listen for five or 10 minutes. And if it really sucks me in, then I'm like, I want to hear what the rest of this guy has to say. Would you attribute a lot of his success to that channel? Yes. Oh, wow. I would. That's interesting. So using something like YouTube with clips, a hook, to leverage that, to bring people over to your podcast. We're doing it. We're just not doing it well. We're definitely not doing it right. So right now, and we just started doing this about a year ago. So right now we have the Sling Studio running. There'll be clips from this. We have somebody who edits it. We put the full long form up on the channel. And then we have them break up segments. And we normally choose these three to five segments. But what we don't do well is we don't build a hook with it. So we try and make it compelling. So it's like a statement that you said that was powerful. That's three to five minutes long. But what we're not doing is titling it separately. And I don't know if this is of value, if we should put like a still screen. So it went like a thumbnail for it. That's different. It says something that's compelling. Right now it would be just an image of you. It would be an image of you talking in front of a microphone. And then it would be three to five minutes. And then we think it's a compelling conversation. So we put it out there. Seems to do okay. And it's still early right now and we're still learning. But do you think that there's be better strategies as far as like having a dedicated thumbnail to that that you said? And then maybe even making sure that we title it in a certain way? Well, title is critically important. Thumbnail, there's a lot of art and science to it. So it's different for each person. So the first place that I would start in working with you guys is let's dive into the data. Okay, these clips aren't taking off. What is the click through percentage on the thumbnail headline? What is the retention? What are the length of those clips? What are the outliers, both positive and negative? Again, this is a big thing that people do not do. You don't just look at the positives, you look at the negatives, you make correlations. Why didn't this work? Why did these series of things didn't work? And then we set a new hypothesis going forward and then we rapidly iterate to get it up and running. Now, like Joe Rogan's at a place where I don't think that they dive into the analytics and data as deep as that and I could be misspeaking, but because he's gained so much trust with his brand and so much trust with the algorithms too. Like the algorithms, once you start picking up steam, they'll start giving you more reach automatically versus the opposite. And this is where there's this misconception of more followers, more subscribers automatically equals more reach, more engagement. No, five, 10 years ago, yes. And people, and I get so many crazy comments on my one million followers book ads of engagement rates and looking at engagement and like, you have fake followers and you have unengaged fans and like, no, it's just the algorithms. Like sometimes we kill it. Sometimes with us or our clients, we'll have videos that do millions of views. And then sometimes it generates 10,000 views. There's no free wins. But the better that you get, the more trust you earn with the algorithms, they're going to give you more reach automatically because you've earned that credibility. Well, it's advantageous for them. Yeah. I mean, if you're constantly proving that people love to stay on your platform, you're on their platform. You can sell ads to it that way. And also, I want to talk a little bit about, a little bit about context around content, because going back to what I was saying, and this is where a lot of people struggle with content is they're designing content for themselves. And we use a communication framework in our agency that is all wrapped in psychology and human behavior and how people perceive the world in different ways. It's used by NASA, Pixar, Audi, Bill Clinton to connect at scale. And one of the ways that, and this works for YouTube and clips and just in content and social growth altogether is understanding people perceive the world in different ways. So for example, there's a big percentage that perceive the world through thoughts and logic. They want data and facts. There's a percentage of the population that perceives the world through values and opinions. Do I trust? Do I believe in this piece of content, in this brand, in this person? The biggest percentage is feelings and emotions. How does this make me feel? Then there's people that just, is this fun? Is this exciting? Is this make me laugh? And there's other people that just perceive the world through action. So when we're designing an ad or a piece of content or content strategy, we make sure that it's well rounded because me, I perceive the world through thoughts and logic. If I just speak thoughts and logic, I'm probably alienating 75% of the North American population. So I want to make sure that I have a well rounded approach in creating something. So if we're selling a car, for example, I wouldn't just say, or if I'm selling a car and I want to make it well rounded, I would say something like, this car has the best miles per gallon in its class. The safety, the safety tests show this is the safest car in the class. And when you drive it, you are going to feel so comfortable and so good. And when your friends see you drive it, it's going to be off the chains. You're going to have the funnest car, the funnest experience when you're driving this. And I firmly believe that you should check out this car today. So I made it a well rounded experience where most people, and this goes for YouTube content or any content or ads is making sure that you have a well rounded approach. And that's why with all the clients that we work with, we put, we train them in this model. Because if we deliver a hook, but your story falls flat because you're only speaking one language, then it ultimately doesn't work. So we make sure that A, when we develop hooks for clients, it has this well rounded approach. And then we also train our clients and put them through the assessment so that they can see what their strengths and what their weaknesses are to have a well rounded approach. I literally think you just unpacked our podcast. I think that's really, I do. I think that that was part of the formula. And accidentally, you know, on our part, it wasn't like we went in with that strategy, just there's this fun entertaining factor. We drop a lot of science and knowledge and information in there. We make it fun and playful while we do it. So it just is that's kind of the formula of the podcast, which explains probably why it's had the success. What do you think about like, so a lot of these platforms are competing with each other, right? You know, they're not all on the same team. And so they're all trying to reiterate or create their own version that the other one, for example, IGTV. So it's like a direct competitor to YouTube, right? So what do you think when you see something like that? And I'm listening, you talk about, you know, Instagram and it being short and fast and it being easy with the filters. And that's why it worked. And do you have high expectations for where they'll take IGTV because it is a direct competitor with YouTube? It's a great question. First and foremost, the reason Facebook is not going to die is because of that mindset. We are going to test and test and test and we don't care if we fail. And it was interesting. I was listening to a Jeff Bezos interview, his same mindset. He said, you know, his primary profit over the past few years has been from AWS and other revenue streams, not from Amazon.com. And he said that he's lost billions of dollars testing things with Amazon.com. And he's completely fine with it. And that's the same process that Mark Zuckerberg and Facebook do. As you look in the past, like they tried many different times to take out Snapchat. It wasn't, it's not like IG stories was the first try out the gate. They went through it multiple times and they cracked it and they killed it. Look at Reels right now. What are they doing? They're trying to take out TikTok and they're testing it. Is it going to work? I don't know. We'll see. But you can definitely, one of the fascinating things from a psychology standpoint is whenever they have a new feature, they weighed it higher in the algorithm. So you saw that first with IGTV, now you're seeing it with Reels. And why are they doing that? Because they want to reward. They want to reward that dopamine in your head to say, why go to TikTok when you can do it right here? And we'll give you more reach. Why go to Snapchat when you can do it right here? And we'll give you more reach. So IGTV, I think it's a great idea, a great experiment. I don't think it's panned out in the way that they want. Again, changing human behavior, very difficult to do. I think it's going to be a tough road to make IGTV in long form consumption behavior work on Instagram. But again, I'm never going to put anything by Instagram or Facebook because they will just keep testing until they figure it out. I think that their best shot would probably be building a separate app that is more long form consumption and driving the traffic there. Oh really? Not keeping it all in one place? Because I feel like keeping it in one place, you're hoping to win everyone over. Why do I go to these other platforms when Instagram or Facebook offers all of it? Yeah. Well, again, it's like, why do they acquire Instagram? Why do they acquire WhatsApp? Why do they break out Messenger? Is there is something to say of doing as much in-house as possible? But also, and I'm just making a hypothesis here, I think that they fundamentally understand that consumer behavior is different from platform to platform. And thus, if you train the consumer behavior in a certain way from a platform, the ground up, then it works versus trying to shift consumer behavior. I think IG stories worked really well because it's short form consumption behavior. You have a very analytical mind and what do you see when you look at, because everybody's on these platforms, we're all trying to scale and build, but we're all trying to get attention, what do you see as the most common mistakes that content creators are making? Are there a few that stand out that I always see this, that everyone always tries this method and you know that it's fleeting? There's a few. One is quantity and frequency. Everybody feels like I have to produce and post five, post a day. I would say it's quality over quantity, unless you're really good at the content that you produce. So my creative director was working at a company and they were going up against Buzzfeed. And we looked at the analytics and I think for a month's period, they had produced five videos versus Buzzfeed's 250 videos and they outperformed them engagement off those five videos. And this company was doing like three billion views a month. And why is that? Again, it goes back to the algorithms. The algorithms want people focused on content longer. If people are scrolling past, not spending time, I don't care if you post 100 times a day. You're training the algorithms that you're not a good content creator. Now, if you're a great content creator, talk about Gary Vaynerchuk, for example, he has a team of 30 people, they're really good at it. On Instagram, on other platforms, they're not as good at it, but he preaches quality or quantity, put as much content out there. And I'm not saying it can't work. It can, but I don't think it's the best route for everybody else. The second biggest mistake is really, again, designing the content for yourself. I say that communication is math. You've got to understand people perceive the world in different ways and making sure that you play to the numbers of how people perceive the world. So there's like 30% perceive the world through feelings and emotion, 25% thoughts and logic, 10% values and opinions, 20% humor and fun and excitement. So we play the math and how we construct the message. And if you're just speaking one language, then you ultimately fail. And then I think that, and the reason I wrote the second book, Hookpoint is people fail to really understand the world that we're living in today. Is your biggest asset is can you grab attention? Because if you can't grab attention, you cannot win the next part of the conversation. And that's where people, I think, are trying to dive too quickly into their story, into their product, their service, their value, with not really earning the right to tell that story. And it is a right. It's like, I have to win that opportunity to tell people what I'm about, what my product or services, what is the value, how I can help them in the world. Interesting. You know, I love talking with people who are as well-versed as you are in a particular space. It reminds me of the matrix when you see them looking at the screen with the numbers. And to us, where it just looks like a bunch of numbers. And to them, they're like, I can see what he's doing and I can read everything. And I can do this when I look at someone exercising. I can break things down that the average person can't. You obviously can do this when you look at social media platforms. And I would kill myself if I didn't ask you this. But we're obviously in a political season right now. When you're looking at the ads that now, because now it's a big deal. Social media plays a big deal now in elections. When you look at the ads that they're putting out or the way that they're using social media, are they being effective? Are they figuring this out? Are they starting to figure this out? Well, we'll see what happens in this election. I'll speak to the last election in that the reason I believe that Trump won and I'm not going to get into, I'm not big into politics. I'm not going to say who the right person won or the right person lost is just look at the sophistication of their digital marketing campaigns. So Trump's campaign tested 7 million variations of ad creative versus Clinton's 70,000. In Trump's campaign, and there's a good documentary, The Great Hack on Netflix that breaks this down, but Cambridge Analytica was using psychological profiles of people to understand how to test specific messages to specific audiences. It's a similar psychological profile that we use of the communication as math and breaking down how different people perceive the world. But we're not using a dataset from Facebook. We're using a dataset from a company that has got this data from over a million people in the North American population, not through Facebook. The problem with Cambridge Analytica is they acquire data from another company and they were using it for this purpose, which they weren't supposed to be doing. But from that, and also I think that the smart part of what they did with their campaign, again, I'm not saying that I'm pro Trump or pro Clinton, but they identified two specific goals. There was an audience that was on the fence that they felt that they could win. So they were convincing those people why they should vote for Trump. There was another subset of the audience that they knew they couldn't win but they just wanted to make sure they didn't show up at the polls. So they had those two strategies going. Now, obviously after the whole Cambridge Analytica thing, Facebook has changed a tremendous amount about the way that you can target based on certain aspects. You can't upload the third party data in the same way that they did the first time around. So we'll see kind of what happens with the election. The other fascinating thing from a psychology standpoint is the reason they think the polls were so off the first time around was people didn't want to admit that they were voting for Trump. And that could be this second time around is are the polls actually accurate? Because like or hate Trump, he's a polarizing character and some people just don't want to see that show that they're supporting him and that could be throwing things off. Another thing from the communication standpoint of the last election is Clinton perceives the world through thoughts and logic. Now, 75% of the female population perceives the world through feelings and emotions. So the speculation is she had a very difficult time connecting with female voters because she wasn't speaking from the lens of feelings and emotions versus she was just doing through thoughts and logic. Now, compared to her husband, who studied this model that we use, and he's probably one of the best communicators on the planet, whether you like him or hate him, he did this in a debate against George Bush, where a woman stood up and said, listen, our families lost our jobs. We're really struggling. We don't know what to do. How would you help us? Now, George Bush perceived the world through thoughts and logic and values and opinions. So he shares data and facts and his opinions about things. But Bill Clinton, what he did, and this is the reason he won the election, he saw that this woman perceived the world through feelings and emotions, and he knew the math that the female population was 75% feelings and emotions. So what did he do? He stepped around the podium. He said, I feel your pain. Yeah. Sorry. I remember that. And then he started going into the data and the facts and the logics. With that, he won the election. So it's again, that's where it's like communication is math and Pixar. Why is Pixar so successful? Most successful movies start up of all time. I don't know what their success rate is, but it's got to be at least 90 to 95% of their movies are successful. They make you feel some stories. They have writers trained in this model, and if you go sit down in a Pixar movie, they have a character that speaks to each way that people perceive the world. They have a character that speaks to thoughts and logic. They have a character that is fun and exciting, and they have a character that is all about feelings and emotions. So next time you watch a Pixar movie. I already do that. So I read Storybrand, and I'm fascinated by Pixar, and Steve Jobs is credited that changed Apple. He believes that what he learned through Pixar changed the way he market and advertise in Apple. And so I can't help, but when I watch a Pixar film, I look exactly at that. You can tell that there's somebody in there that you, a character that you identify with, and then I can see my friends, my sister, my brother, and I'm like, oh yeah, that's all of them. They do a brilliant job of that. I can only imagine somebody as good as you at doing what you do at something that is as powerful as it is. You probably get approached by some pretty big people. Have you been approached by, and you don't have to answer who at all, of course, but have you been approached by politicians and big companies because of how effective you are? Yeah. I mean, I was on some political shows early in the year, and there was a presidential candidate that reached out, or that I met in the green room that wanted to hire me, and I just said no simply because there's just too much team involved. And I was like, if you want me to work with you, then I need to know you're going to listen and implement the stuff that I do, otherwise I don't have time for it. There was another, one of the biggest rock stars ever from the 70s. I got introduced to him, and he's like, well, I really hate social media, but I want you to develop a strategy for the next six months so I can get off social media entirely and drive to this private platform I created. I was like, listen, I can't help you if you hate social media. You've got to have some redeeming factor in it. But yeah, I mean, we get approached all the time, and sometimes we have to turn it down because, one, I want to make sure that we can be successful and believe that we can be successful with our client and that the client is really going to listen to us and trust what we have to say. Otherwise, it's like, then maybe it's a better suit to go with somebody else. I thought I heard you say, I think I heard you say you got like 16,000 applications after you did the million followers. Is that right? Yeah, I ran a test with a video that I created with my keynote speaker. We were just doing a workshop and we created like a 90-second video of me talking about the process of how I generated a million followers in 30 days attached to a blog post with, hey, if you're interested, fill out this application to work with me and we got 16,000 applications in like two or three months. But I also want to say something that I think would be really helpful to trainers and something that you said, and it plays into this communication as math, is oftentimes, I think trainers oftentimes will struggle with certain clients or the client will fail because you're not connecting with them in the way they perceive the world. So one of my friends, and I featured him in the Hookpoint book, he trains like three or four billionaires. He's trained Elon Musk, Chris Hemsworth, a major, like Kevin Costner, major people. And he does not use social media at all. He doesn't market himself. It's all purely organic. But one of the things that he said that was so fascinating in a place of the communication is in that first session, he's just trying to understand how this person interacts with the world, how this person perceives the world, what type of exercise is going to make them feel good? What is going to make them feel successful? And I think the stories in the book is when he first started with Kevin Costner, they just was a complete disconnect. And he was just searching for a way to connect. And then all these professional baseball players that he works with, he works with Verlander and Juan Carlos Stanton and all these big players, he started seeing him come into the gym and Kevin Costner's eyes would light up. Because he's a baseball fan. Yeah. And then he's like, oh, so that's my connection in. So then he started, the doors opened and they realized they had all these common interests and everything. And again, that's so important to your success. Even if you've won the attention is to make sure that you're serving your client in the way that they need to be served. So again, you can give them what they need, not necessarily what they want. Thinking back to when I was training clients, I trained almost anybody who wanted to hire me. I love working with people, but I could also sit down and literally create an avatar of the perfect client, like the perfect client that I could work with that I knew would have the highest chance of success. Can you do that for you? What are the characteristics that you look for in the perfect client for you? Let's say someone comes to you and they want to gain a million followers or build their business. What are the characteristics that would make them a phenomenal person? Right. There's got to be tons of people you turn down because you just look at it and go, you don't have it. Well, we also do initial strategy sessions with people to give value to them, but also determine, is this somebody that we want to work with long term? And that also, if they want to work with us long term as well, because it's on both sides of the equation, I would say the number one thing that I look for is what is their mindset? Are they going to put in the work? Do they realize this is a testing process? We have 15 years of experience, but do we get it right every time? No, but we will out test everybody and we will find the answer. That's what makes us successful. Most people will give up, and I'm sure it's the same with training, is people get in there and a client's just like, they want the results, but they're not willing to put in the work. And I'm not saying that you have to bombard them and overwhelm them. Again, that success momentum, incremental steps, but you can see the first time you work with a client, are they really cut out for this? Are they going to do what I say and allow me to help them? And the same thing with us is we can give you the roadmap, we can give you the blueprint, but it's on you to do something with it to make it happen. We can't do everything for you. And I think that's the biggest thing is how resilient is somebody going to be? Because even with our business, it's a challenge, and I'm sure with your business as well is you guys run into challenges, you run into obstacles, it's not always perfect, it's not always successful, there's ups and downs, and is that person have the right foundation to really make sure that they're successful, not just in the short term, but in the long term? Well, one of the things that our marketing team has struggled with us is we hired them on year three, about year three we were in. And at this point, we had so much content. And they always remind me that it was like a blessing and a curse, right? It was like this blessing because we had already created so much, we already had traction, we had a foundation, the podcast was already big. But one of the hardest parts for them is to actually filter through all of our stuff to realize what direction that we should go to continue to generate leads or gain followers. Do you see that as an advantage or a disadvantage? Like let's take our business, for example, we're talking to you about consulting with us, you look at our business, we've got, I don't know, five to 700 YouTube videos out there, we have 1400 podcast episodes. We've got four different Instagram pages that have over quarter million followers. We've got a ton of stuff. What do you see when you see that? Do you see a big headache because of that? Or do you see a huge opportunity when you see that? It depends on how clean the data is. Do you have access to the data? If the data is good, then we dive into the data. YouTube has pretty good data. I don't know what the level granularity is on the podcast side of things. But that's where I would start. And if the data is messy, then we just kind of start almost from scratch in a way. And either way, it doesn't bother me. People sometimes when they're hiring me, they're like, well, I'm not a big celebrity. So I'm not sure, are you really interested in working with me? I don't care. I don't care if you're Taylor Swift or somebody starting from scratch. To me, it's the same. It's fun. It's like I like to help people grow. And we've worked with companies like Mindvalley's similar position. They've been creating content for years and they're great content creators. But we still manage to find ways to look at their process, the way that they perceive content, the way they construct it and dive into the data deconstructed for them and help them go on their way. So there's pros and cons to each way. But I don't think that there's a negative to say, oh, we have a ton of content. So it's going to be difficult to help you. Okay. Speaking to influencers now, people who have businesses built on online platforms, or people are trying to build businesses on online platforms, anything that they should look forward to on the horizon, because it seems like such a fast changing landscape, algorithms change and what's popular and what's working and what's not working. You have so much knowledge on this. Are there any foresight? Can you give us any predictions or things to pay attention to moving forward? It goes back to the same two things. Can you grab attention and can you maintain it? I don't care what platform comes up or what platform you're on. Those are the two guiding principles. And people say it moves fast. And it kind of does when you compare it to what the world was like 20 years ago. But honestly, it doesn't move that fast. I mean, Facebook's been along for a long time. YouTube's been along for a long time. Instagram, they're not going anywhere. TikTok, again, people think that came out of nowhere. It's been around for a while now. It was musically before. I don't know when it started, but it's at least six or seven years. Some people may say six or seven years is quick. To me, I see that as a long period of time, but I wouldn't get so caught up in that aspect of it. I would focus more on the fundamentals of what makes people successful and also what keeps people at the top as well. Excellent. Well, this has been extremely illuminating. Very educational. Yeah. Very, very great time with you, Brendan. I appreciate you coming on the show. And I think you bring a tremendous amount of value for the current landscape of business. It's such a big part of now how people build their business. And so I know from the outside, it can seem like a mystery, but it's great to hear from someone like you kind of breaks it down. Thanks for having me. Yeah, no problem. Great job, man. You were a skinny kid, insecure kid. You didn't read comic books and fantasize being strong. Hey, I was still fucking cool just because I was all those things that made me think I wasn't cool. Did you literally think that as a kid like I'm cool? Of course not, dude. That was not like that. That's what made me cool, right?